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Notes on video lecture:
Unjust and Imagined Hierarchies
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on October 9, 2013 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
arbitrary, natural, castes, inevitable, Hindu, imagined, justification, dubious, cooperation, foragers, discrimination, suits, fair, respecting, require, weighted, instinctive, strangers, aristocrats
history after the agriculture revolution can largely be understood by answering this question: how did humans organize themselves into large cooperative networks when they lack the ability necessary to sustain such networks?
the short answer to this question is that humans created orders and invented writing which filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance
what were the impacts of these mass networks on the lives and relations of humans
for many, the appearance of these mass networks were a blessings
these imagined orders were neither neutral nor
they often divided people into groups and arranged these groups in hierarchies
upper level groups enjoyed privileges and power
lower ranking groups suffered from discrimination and oppression
e.g. the code of Hammurabi established a clear hierarchy of superiors, commoners, and slaves
groups are divided by , race, religion, or wealth
they divide people into categories, then treat people according to that category without their true abilities
society: if you want to marry, you want to know to which caste your potential spouse belongs to, much more important than their personality
cultures with these obvious separations into categories will claim that this is natural and , Hindus believe that a cosmic force and not human imagination is responsible for the division of the castes (from the story of the Purusha), they believe the differences are as rooted in the world as, say, differences between the sun and the moon
Chinese believed that goddess created humans from earth, but that were created from good soil whereas commoners were formed from brown mud
however, these don't reflect any natural order, but are created by people who create laws
as far as we can tell, most the different methods by which societies in history have classified people into groups, most of them have been based on imaginary stories and lack evidence for their beyond the stories themselves
unfortunately complex human societies seem to imagined hierarchies and unjust , some more than others, but scholars do not know of any complex society in history that was able to organize and maintain itself without some kind of imagined hierarchy and some kind of discrimination
this is because all of these imagined hierarchies serve an important social function: they enable to know how to treat one another without spending the time needed to become personally acquainted
even to walk down the street, we need the help of these imagined hierarchies, because, unlike ancient , we live in cities of millions of people, not in bands of dozens of people, and we have to have some reference to know how to treat all the strangers that we meet so we have various cues that we use to know how to treat them without getting to know each person individually, we treat people who are dressed in differently than people who are dressed in rags, we treat women differently than men, we treat a priest different than a shopkeeper and rabbi differently than a gay man
all societies are based on these imagined hierarchies and social differences but not necessarily on the same set of differences
e.g. when British ruled India in 19th century, and you had an (1) untouchable, (2) Brahmin, (3) Protestant Englishman, (4) Catholic Irishman, if each of these people have the same propensity for doing business, they will not have the same opportunity to become rich since the economic hierarchy in 19th English society was with legal restrictions in favor of Hindu Brahmins and Protestant Englishmen
Indian society classified people according to caste, Ottoman society classified people according to religion, and modern American society gives importance to race and wealth