The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

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The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


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in view of those who have ignorantly claimed that I have neglected the life, real death and agency of the enslaved – and this was in many ways its most important substantive contribution, especially the search for the tribal origins of the Jamaicans (now updated in Table 1, above) and the African roots of their religious, witchcraft and obeah beliefs, their celebratory death rituals, their music, dances, seasonal festivals, and their Afro-Jamaican dietary and agricultural practices. The work, as indicated earlier, also examined sex and family life under conditions of pervasive physical terror, the spectre of starvation, and extreme sexual violence from both the whites and more privileged enslaved lackeys. The book, in fact, initiated the study of Afro-Jamaican social and cultural creolization, drawing on the work of earlier historical ethnography of the broader Caribbean,146 and of Africa, such as those by Herskovits, Mintz and Murdock, a process that I theorized in later works building on this baseline study.147

      In the final analysis, the simplest explanation is, as Hobbes pointed out, that most people ‘shun death’. And death was everywhere in Jamaican slave society as I was among the first to show both in The Sociology of Slavery and its literary sequel, Die the Long Day148 – the physical death they tried to shun, the social death that they could not. I have repeatedly used the term protracted or slow-moving genocide to explain the demographic and social situation of the Black population of Jamaica during the period of slavery. This is not a metaphor. With the data from the Atlantic Slave trade database now available, it is possible to calculate more precisely the real death toll of Jamaican slavery by using a simple counterfactual strategy.


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