On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death

A critical reexamination of Orlando Patterson s groundbreaking Slavery and Social Death, On Human Bondage assesses how his theories have stood the test of time and applies them to new case studies. More than 35 years after the publication of Patterson s landmark work, these essays discuss his ideas of social death and natal alienation, as he first presented them and as they have come to be understood today.

The essays bring together exciting new work by a group of esteemed historians of slavery, based on two conferences devoted to understanding the impact of Patterson s cross–cultural work. They provide insights into slave societies around the world and across time, from classical Greece and Rome to modern Brazil and the Caribbean, and from Han China and pre–colonial South Asia to early modern Europe and the New World. The essays delve into a wide range of topics, including the reformation of social identity after slavery, the new historicist approach to slavery, rituals of enslavement and servitude, questions of honor and dishonor, and symbolic imagery of slavery. In addition, a final chapter by Patterson himself responds to the other contributions and advances his own thinking on concepts of property as they relate to slavery; the special connections between women and slavery; and the metaphors of social death and rebirth as dynamic conceptions of slavery and manumission. This collection not only celebrates but also critiques and extends Orlando Patterson s work, a landmark study of slavery that continues to inspire and provoke debate.

List of figures

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Introduction
John Bodel and Walter Scheidel

1 Slavery and Personhood in the Neo–Assyrian Empire
Heather D. Baker

2 Orlando Patterson, Property, and Ancient Slavery: the Definitional Problem Revisited
David M. Lewis

3 Slaves or Serfs?: Patterson on the Thetes and Helots of Ancient Greece
Peter Hunt

4 Death and Social Death in Ancient Rome
John Bodel

5 Freedom, Slavery, and Female Sexual Honor in Antiquity
Kyle Harper

6 Becoming Almost Somebody: Manumission and its Complications in the Early Han Empire
Anthony Barbieri–Low

7 Ottoman Elite Enslavement and Social Death
Ehud R. Toledano

8 The Locked Box in Slavery and Social Death
Indrani Chatterjee

9 Black Women and Slavery in Colonial Brazil
Junia Ferreira Furtado

10 (Child) Slavery in Africa as Social Death? Responses Past and Present
Sandra E. Greene

11 Slavery and Freedom in Small Scale Societies
Catherine M. Cameron

12 Rituals of Enslavement and Markers of Servitude: Orlando Patterson in the American Tropics
Fernando Santos–Granero

13 Slavery from Rome to Medieval Europe and Beyond: Words, Things and Genomes
Michael McCormick

14 Revisiting Slavery, Property and Social Death
Orlando Patterson

Index

John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University, USA. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin literature and has special interests in epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion, funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel. His books include two other co edited volumes in Wiley s Comparative History series: Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (with S. Olyan, 2008) and Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre Modern World (with S. E. Alcock and R. J. Talbert, 2012). Since 1995, he has directed the US Epigraphy Project, which gathers and shares information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States (http://usepigraphy.brown.edu).

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University, USA. He has published widely on ancient social and economic history, premodern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.