reading Claude Meillassoux’ The Antropology of Slavery. The Womb of Iron and Gold. i am reminded how refreshing it is to read a text so much out of the canon, language, perspective, references and contours of US academy. a book that looks at slavery in Africa, from the perspective of what occured in African societies, and not the Americas. in a macro-sociological and systematic analysis of slavery, Meillassoux at some point turns to the meaning of the opposite of slavery – freedom.
“In a penetrating and masterly work, E. Benveniste (1969) reveals ‘the social origins of the concept “free” on the basis of a semantic analysis. ‘The primary meaning,’ he writes, ‘is not as we might be tempted to imagine, “released from something;” it refers to membership of an ethnic stock described by a metaphor taken from plant growth. This membership confers a privilege which is unknown to the alien and the slave. Free men are those “who were born and have developed together.” […] Benveniste’s discovery conforms to analysis of the development of the domestic agricultural economy in its double process of production and reproduction and of the place which the (male) individual acquires in this society through his double participation in the productive and reproductive cycles. The Maninka, using terms which are nearly identitical to Benveniste, in fact say, when referring to their congeners, those with whom they can identify themselves, ‘ka wolo nyoronka, ka mo nyoronka’: to be born together, to mature together. This does not express ‘consanguinity’ but rather ‘congeneration’: the growing-up of individuals together and in relation to each other.”
raises a whole set of questions about the relationship between the ‘alien’ (with whom one didn’t grow up, has no relationships with) and the free, but as i’m poking into this american idea of freedom i’m struck by the discrepancy – freedom as no attachments vs. freedom as common growth.