Savaging the Rural: The Origins of Race in the Pagan-Bourgeois Conflict

• In Event: 4461 - Space and Place Across the Urban-Rural Axis

Abstract

Although typically today race is thought of largely in terms of skin color and blood, its origins lie in in part in a deep place- and space-based conflict over economic and political control of ecological resources, the conflict between the bourgeois peoples of the city and the pagan peoples of the countryside. Here I sketch out the intersectional implications of pagan-bourgeois conflict for the rise of the idea of race – what might be termed an environmental sociology of race. I use etymological and historical evidence to trace the connection of racial hierarchy to the construction of savagery, and the construction of savagery to some three thousand years of urban exploitation of the rural. The terms pagan, heathen, and savage all etymologically stem from rural metonyms – all forms of savaging the rural. Upon this phantasm, an economics of savage exploitation runs through the history of bourgeois religion, which we detail using examples from Leviticus. Race began as a colorized extension of the kind of logic we see in the Old Testament, in which European urban elites criticized non-European rural peoples for their backward ways in order to justify milking their productive capacity, especially through the institution of chattel slavery. I also trace how colonialists used techniques of ruralizing the savage in situations of exploiting local pagan peoples, such as apartheid in South Africa, where the relative ease of escape made chattel slavery impractical. I conclude by considering how the pagan could be incorporated into accounts of intersectionality.

Author

• Michael M. Bell, University of Wisconsin-Madison