I’ve been using Bell’s thoughts on ritual to describe manumission. Bell’s thoughts on ritual are in turn very much influenced by Bourdieu’s work on practice. Prior to reading Bell, I’d only ever read either summaries of Bourdieu’s theories or people who like his stuff (such as David Graeber). His importance to Bell has forced me to turn to his own work, which I’ve found quite rewarding, both as an antidote to the unstated theories and assumptions about slavery and manumission in the scholars that I read but also because Bourdieu’s writing has an excellent flair, something that rings out about his clarity of the role of the academic in the contemporary university.
Anyway, back to why Bourdieu’s thoughts on practice have implications for how we think about ancient manumission. A good question to ask about manumission is why did slave-owners do it? Why did slaves seek it? In my previous post I noted how scholars such as Hopkins sometimes offer up economic explanations. Bourdieu gives us some important tools for questioning the assumption that the economic explanation should always attract the most prestige. Indeed, Bourdieu takes issue with the larger project of assigning an unconscious telos to human action. In the essay “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?”, based off a talk, Bourdieu states unequivocally that he believes that humans are quite possible of doing things for no reason.
“Does a human behavior really always have as an end, that is, as a goal, the result which is the end, in the sense of conclusion, or term, of that behavior? I think not.” (1998: 80)
He then takes up the example of an academic career to show how the agent has different interests at different stages, even if when viewed from the end it appears that she had been directing all her work at becoming a tenured professor:
“If my analysis is correct, one can, for example, be adjusted to the necessities of a game – one can have a magnificent academic career- without ever needing to give oneself an objective. Very often researchers, because they are inspired by a will demystify, tend to act as if agents always had as an end, in the sense of a goal, the end, in the sense of conclusion, of their trajectory. Transforming the journey into a project, they act as if the consecrated university professor, whose career they study, had in mind the ambition of becoming a professor at the Collège de France from the moment when he chose a discipline, a thesis director, a topic of research. They give a more or less cynical calculating consciousness as the principle of agents’ behaviors in a field…” (1998: 82)
Bourdieu challenges Hopkins’ description of slave-owners only ever having in mind the economic return of freeing slaves. Is that not a transformation of the relationship between the slave and the slave-owner into a project of capital production? In other words, it is a mistake only to view slavery as occupying the economic field. Slaves were important not only for status reasons, but could provide vital support in fields such as literature (recall the post about slaves as living books).
The question about economics gets more complex when consider how wealthy Greeks and Romans felt about the appearance of doing something strictly for the money.
Anyway, back to why Bourdieu’s thoughts on practice have implications for how we think about ancient manumission. A good question to ask about manumission is why did slave-owners do it? Why did slaves seek it? In my previous post I noted how scholars such as Hopkins sometimes offer up economic explanations. Bourdieu gives us some important tools for questioning the assumption that the economic explanation should always attract the most prestige. Indeed, Bourdieu takes issue with the larger project of assigning an unconscious telos to human action. In the essay “Is a Disinterested Act Possible?”, based off a talk, Bourdieu states unequivocally that he believes that humans are quite possible of doing things for no reason.
“Does a human behavior really always have as an end, that is, as a goal, the result which is the end, in the sense of conclusion, or term, of that behavior? I think not.” (1998: 80)
He then takes up the example of an academic career to show how the agent has different interests at different stages, even if when viewed from the end it appears that she had been directing all her work at becoming a tenured professor:
“If my analysis is correct, one can, for example, be adjusted to the necessities of a game – one can have a magnificent academic career- without ever needing to give oneself an objective. Very often researchers, because they are inspired by a will demystify, tend to act as if agents always had as an end, in the sense of a goal, the end, in the sense of conclusion, of their trajectory. Transforming the journey into a project, they act as if the consecrated university professor, whose career they study, had in mind the ambition of becoming a professor at the Collège de France from the moment when he chose a discipline, a thesis director, a topic of research. They give a more or less cynical calculating consciousness as the principle of agents’ behaviors in a field…” (1998: 82)
Bourdieu challenges Hopkins’ description of slave-owners only ever having in mind the economic return of freeing slaves. Is that not a transformation of the relationship between the slave and the slave-owner into a project of capital production? In other words, it is a mistake only to view slavery as occupying the economic field. Slaves were important not only for status reasons, but could provide vital support in fields such as literature (recall the post about slaves as living books).
The question about economics gets more complex when consider how wealthy Greeks and Romans felt about the appearance of doing something strictly for the money.