Captives

This deceptively slim volume aims to reconceptualize scholarly approaches to slavery and captivity across the globe. It succeeds admirably, making a convincing case that captives influence their host societies in ways that leave only subtle traces in the historical and archaeological record, but which were nonetheless quite powerful.Cameron's method is broadly comparative, drawing from secondary sources in archaeology, anthropology, and history. She acknowledges the pitfalls of such an approach, especially the problem that researchers looking for commonalities across cultures invariably find them, but at the price of obscuring important local contexts. Nonetheless, Cameron makes a persuasive case that it is worthwhile to open this new space for inquiry despite the distortions that her method is likely to produce.She builds her case methodically. The first chapter presents a survey of the small-scale societies from which the book's evidence is drawn. All these societies, she demonstrates in chapter 2, engaged in widespread captive taking, to the point that scholars must recognize "the almost universal nature of the practice" (41). The third chapter explores the processes by which kinless captives, famously defined as "socially dead" by Orlando Patterson, become resocialized into the captor society along a continuum of belonging ranging from kin by marriage to exploited labor. The fourth chapter argues that captives were crucial to the creation of power, facilitating the emergence of elites in otherwise egalitarian societies.Cameron's most compelling insights come in a pair of chapters toward the end of the book, exploring the implications of these practices. She emphasizes the role of captives in creating ethnic boundaries by serving as "social opposites" (111). Captives, in the eyes of their captors, were degraded and inferior persons. Through daily and often intimate interactions, captives thus allowed the captor society to delineate the behavioral markers defining their superiority. She insightfully points out that captives played an important role in this process by emulating the culture of their captors, usually in the hopes of better treatment or social advancement, paradoxically reinforcing the ethnic boundaries originally drawn to exclude them. On the other hand, as laborers captives had an opportunity to introduce elements from their natal culture into the captor culture, especially through foodways, crafts like pottery, and magical or religious practices. "Contrary to our assumptions that cultural innovation occurs in major centers," she concludes, often "the direction of innovation went the other way" (155). Such innovations were most pronounced in the ways that captives shaped ethnogenesis-the process of creating new collectivities. In the case of coalescent societies that incorporated large numbers of refugees as social subordinates-for example, in the American Southeast or among Caribbean maroon societies-captives could therefore play central roles in defining peoples.One of Cameron's signal contributions is her focus on gender. Cultures across the world, she shows, nearly always preferred female captives to male, often targeting artisans and craft workers for their skills. Her arguments about the influence of captives on captor societies, therefore, are above all arguments about the power of women, exercised in subtle and surprising ways. Cameron shows that historians should consider the female slave-that most subaltern figure, so often silent and absent from the record-as one the important movers in the process of cultural change.Cameron accomplishes exactly what she set out to do: opening up a new space for investigation and laying out an agenda for further research. Her work persuasively shows that scholars must consider "captives as invisible agents of culture change" (164). She makes it clear that Captives is intended not to be the final word but, rather, the opening salvo. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and ethnohistorians should heed her call

Genealogy · Globe · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Psychology

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