Slavery and Social Death

Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death is a masterpiece of scholarship and the landmark text on the subject. Though I do tend to be critical of academic speech particularly regarding its inaccessibility and how it makes completion of scholarly materials a chore, the richness of this work given what Patterson uncovers in this study makes the sometimes grinding nature of the reading experience well worth it. In reading this text the realities of what a slave is the functions a slave serves and the diversity of it configurations for one slave holding culture to the next have proven truly enlightening. Given my heritage as a descendant of enslaved peoples I found myself reading this less as a work of comparative history and more as a show more work of genealogy continuing to read and sometimes struggling through the book in an effort to draw closer to an idea of my origins. Another thing i found excellent about this book is the connections to various other discipline of anthropology and economics. I was impressed by his use of Marxism to illuminate power relationships as i was by his use of Mary Douglas' work on purity to discuss the eunuch as the ultimate slave. As a result the reader comes out of the text not only with a deeper understanding of slavery but of how humans organize themselves and interact with each other. To a particularly astute reader Patterson's work also provide clues about the afterlife of slavery and the ways stigma of "slave" can continue past the institution. show less

This is one of those books that forever changes how you view yourself, your society, and your understanding of humankind. Slavery is a worldwide phenomenon and spans the history of our species. But what it means to us on such fundamental levels is what this book is really about.

This is the best piece of historical sociology on slavery as an institution.