The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

Читать онлайн книгу.

The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


Скачать книгу
value, freedom, originated in those intense discussions on the crisis of the left, and the problem of where in the world was Europe going, which preoccupied us in our fortnightly evening sessions. Interestingly, only one member of the circle of intellectuals we cultivated ever expressed any interest in the archival work I was doing on slavery in Jamaica at the time and that was the existential psychologist R. D. Laing, then the rising star of the anti-psychiatry movement who, after one of our meetings when I had vainly raised the subject of the real enslaved of 18th-century Jamaica in contrast to the abstraction of the slave mode of production, pulled me aside and asked what I had learned from my studies about the existential reality of slavery. My answer intrigued him, and I was both surprised and flattered when, a few days later, he invited me to address his experimental group of residential schizophrenic patients and their therapists at Kingsley Hall in Bromley, East London. It was my very first public lecture on slavery, drawing on my dissertation research, my audience, apart from Laing and the other resident psychotherapist, Joseph Berke, being a deeply attentive group of English psychotics, among whom was the then unknown English painter, Mary Barnes who, after the talk, led me by the hand on a guided tour of her grease crayon paintings. Their questions, and the fact that they found the subject so personally engaging, led me to focus more on the problem of the social psychology of slavery that appears in Chapter 6 of The Sociology of Slavery.

      The Sociology of Slavery was the first book-length study of Jamaican slavery and slave society. It is also among the first studies in English to focus in its entirety on the culture, social organization, cultural life and attitudes and modes of resistance of the enslaved, in the New World. There were, of course, many book-length and other studies on Jamaica before, but they were focused mainly on other aspects of the society – its politics, economy, demography, flora and fauna, climate, the white ruling class and so on, or general studies with a chapter on slavery in general. Oddly, even the more recent scholars of Jamaican history who immediately preceded me seemed to have deliberately avoided any direct treatment of the subject. Douglas Hall, for many years chair of history at UWI, wrote his dissertation and most important work, Free Jamaica,6 on the immediate post-emancipation period, the same relatively brief period covered by Philip Curtin7 in his published dissertation, Two Jamaicas. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins (first published in 1938), Eric Williams’ The Negro in the Caribbean (1942)8 and Capitalism and Slavery (1944),9 and Elsa Goveia’s Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,10 which appeared two years before The Sociology of Slavery, this avoidance of slaving and the enslaved as the focus of research, was true of all the English-speaking historians writing on the West Indies. Reference was, of course, made to the enslaved in many of these earlier studies, but rarely to their way of life, and no one had written a book-length study. I drew on the most important of these studies, especially Lowell Joseph Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833,11 Frank W. Pitman’s The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763,12 George Roberts’13 Population of Jamaica, and M. G. Smith’s paper on the early 19th-century British Caribbean.14 The authors of the latter two were my undergraduate teachers, and Smith’s paper was of special importance in pointing the way towards how a sociologist would approach the study of slavery. Although he wrote nothing on slavery in Jamaica, another of my teachers, the British anthropologist, Raymond Smith, was important in my study of the enslaved family, since I adapted his theory of the developmental cycle of the household, which he had derived for the anthropologist, Meyer Fortes, in writing about the subject.


Скачать книгу