From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow (from its footnotes)
In a brilliant and under-appreciated book called Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), James Scott makes the point that whenever one group has overwhelming power over another, as when a community is divided between lords and serfs, masters and slaves, high-caste and untouchable, both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will always be an 'official version' of reality--say, that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only have the best interest of their slaves at heart--which no one, neither masters nor slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when 'offstage' and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insists subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event. In a way, this is the purest expression of power: the ability to force the dominated to pretend, effectively, that two plus two is five. Or that the pharaoh is a god. As a result, the version of reality that tends to be preserved for history and posterity is precisely that 'official transcript.'
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
Here's a detailed explanation by a Modern Monetary Theory founder, Stephanie Kelton. The bottom line: Social Security's enabling l...
-
© by Mark Dempsey Since before the Renaissance, businesses have used double-entry bookkeeping to track their finances. This means financial ...
-
From John Ganz "...assassinating Julius Caesar could never work: the world itself was changed; this one particular individual cold be ...
No comments:
Post a Comment
One of the objects if this blog is to elevate civil discourse. Please do your part by presenting arguments rather than attacks or unfounded accusations.