I am reading SM Stirling's Emberverse series while rereading Poul Anderson's Technic History. I am not a fan of military fiction in general but can enjoy this genre when written well. The Emberverse series contains many accounts of arrows penetrating human bodies. I wanted a rest from non-stop warfare and now we have it because the pace has slowed down to detailed descriptive passages and character-defining conversations although we know that the protagonists are Questing into territory where they will again be obliged to fight major battles in which some of them might die.
Moishe Feldman knows that, before the Change, skin color sometimes mattered in the way that tribe, clan, realm, religion, home city or loyalty to a lord do now. My understanding is that prejudice of skin color did not exist in the ancient world and was introduced only by the trans-Atlantic slave trade so it not only seems odd after the Change but had not been thought of for most of the time before that.
Feldman reflects that people will always pick sides about something even if it is only which side to cut a boiled egg and here Stirling references a major work of English literature, satire and imaginative fiction.
13 comments:
The modern concept of "race" is a product of the post-1492 world, and jelled slowly.
As late as the 19th or early 20th centuries it had more meanings than it does now; it could refer to what we'd consider a nation or an ethnic group as well -- people spoke of the "Irish race" and so forth. It originally mean more or less "breed" or "family".
Europeans began applying it in the sense most common today when they broke out into the world ocean and started sailing to other continents.
People had always been aware that physical appearance varied regionally and had had some prejudices about it -- the ancient Greeks were the source of the "dumb blond" stereotype, for example. (They considered northern Europeans to be brave, strong and stupid, just as they considered Persians to be intelligent but effeminate.)
But it generally wasn't considered very important, compared to say your language or your religion or your political alliegence.
A large part of this is because "race" is an optical illusion which isn't very apparent unless you can travel long distances by sea (or air, but that wasn't relevant then).
Elements of physical appearance like skin color or eye shape change very gradually as you travel, in a "cline" as biologists put it, village by village.
If you walk from central Sweden to Korea or the Sudan, avoiding areas of recent immigration, at no point will you come to a place where there's white people on one side and Asian or black people on the other. Looks just change a little at a time.
But if you skip all the intervening steps and sail from Amsterdam to say the Congo or Java, you'll get a very different impression. People will look different all of a sudden.
Hence the concept of distinct "races" arose during the Age of Exploration, when such voyages became common.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you very much!
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
That does make sense, European explorers after 1492 SUDDENLY coming into contact with people who looked VERY different from them would develop the modern sense of "race."
And I seen in older works of history "race" being used in the pre-1492 meaning. Such as the "race" of Hugh Capet, referring to the ancient ruling house of France.
Sean
Yup, that's the original sense of the word -- more or less like "bloodline". It was also used to refer to breeds of animal, like horses and dogs.
If Swift had been writing today, he might have taken football fans as an example rather than the "Bigenders" and "Littleenders". It's not the first time that's happened, either; riots between fans of various chariot-racing teams were common in Rome and Byzantium.
Humans will always form tribal loyalties about -something-. The ostensible cause (eg., minute theological differences over the nature of Christ) are often rather transparently an excuse, rather than a cause.
Croats and Serbs speak identical languages; but Croats were Christianized as Catholics and Serbs as Orthodox. These days, most of both groups don't practice the religion... but it still matters.
Or in Ulster, it's perfectly logical to ask someone whether they're a -Protestant_ atheist or a -Catholic- atheist.
Mr Stirling,
Or, in one joke: "A Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thought so! I have heard of "race" being used of families and nations, but not so much of animals.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Aha! The riotous soccer/football fans I've read about in England (and other nations?) ARE analogous to the Roman and Byzantine chariot factions. Some, like the Blues and Greens of Constantinople might try to dignify their thuggish behavior by proclaiming varying theological views, but I doubt that was more than a fig leaf for most.
And the racing factions could be political powerful in the state. Many Emperors found it prudent to woo the support of the Blues or Greens. And if they both united against an Emperor, then he was in dire danger, as happened with the Nika Riots of 532 when the Blues and the Greens allied against Justinian I.
Sean
Sean,
There is currently a racist Football Lads' Alliance.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
The closest analogy I can think of for the Nika Riots in British history would be the Gordon Riots of 1780, provoked by the recently enacted Catholic Relief Act, easing or abolishing some of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. The riots were so violent and widespread that George III and his PM Lord North had to cal1 out the army to restore order. Charles Dickens novel BARNABY RUDGE gives a good description of the "riots of '80."
Sean
As you go south from the Mediterranean Sea, the cline gets interrupted by the dearth of inhabitants in the Sahara. I wonder if that contributed to the post 1500 development of the idea of 'race'.
Kaor, Jim!
Only indirectly at most. I don't think the inhabitants of the N. African coast west of Egypt looks all that different from the people living on the coasts of Spain, Italy, or on Sicily, Sardinia, etc
ad astra! Sean
But the people living south of the Sahara are substantially darker skinned than the people living on the south coast of the Mediterranean just north of the Sahara.
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