/* notice: this writer would appreciate hostile comments from readers in
/* the eventuality that, as usually happens in any Normal university, I
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/* Thank you.
I wish to credit Michael Mann, A History of Power, Vol I, 1986, for the
usage "caging." The corresponding anthropological term is "circumscription,"
which is typically mealy-mouthed. (That is, your anthropologist says *complex
society* when *class society* is meant, etc.)
The context was, the human species is the only one wherein the vast
of the specimens are kept as domestic animals by other members of the
same species (class exploitation, racial hierarchies, the generalized
dichotomizing of those small numbers who do the Civilization from the
vast majorities who do the Work). Which condition, as is by now common
knowledge, partly palliated or obfuscated by the wide distribution among
the members of the male gender to keep the members of the other gender,
likewise, as domestic animals (whereunder may be subsumed also the latter's
dependent children, especially female, the latter being destined in principle
for domestic animal status). The organization of subinfedated domestication
is organized by means of gender roles, guaranteed by the means of violence
applied on the spot: Spouse-beating. A surprisingly sophisticated theoretical
analysis of Woman-battering, based on empirical research conducted right here,
in New Haven, Connecticut, is: Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft, Women At Risk,
Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks CA, 1996. It has been found, for example,
that woman-battering is found most commonly in connection with slight
perturbations, often generated by the battered woman herself, of the received,
pre-existing, perfectly-ordinary-people sort of gender-role organization.
So much for real life, back to the past.
It was mentioned yesterday that the depopulated, for-all-practical-purposes
uninhabited character of, say, Australia in 1799, was socially constructed
whereby it had been presupposed that Britain had lost the War of the American
Revolution by the Peace of Paris, 1783, and with it, the previous dumping
ground for convicts sentenced to Transportation (captives, indeed), Georgia.
The uninhabitedness of New Zealand, a figment heroically resisted by Maori
for forty years (till their near-extermination by British arms and smallpox),
was contingent upon the prior declining profitability of industrialized
aquatic mammal slaughter in the Atlantic (Where the House of Melville, having
been prominent in the Connecticut invasion of Dutch Long Island in the 1653
War and established aquatic mammal slaaughter headquarters at Southport, LI,
NY, by this time shifted its capital into shoe factories, leaving their
literary kinsman, Herman Melville, to write a mythic reminiscence of Olden
Days. More recently, the House of Melville shifted its interests into real-
estate speculation and Development of suburbs and shopping malls, notably
on Long Island: In 1955, they donated a rectangular piece of their Vast
Estates on Suffolk County to the State of New York for a university campus
at Stony Brook, which immensely multiplied the property value of the
remainder. Today, sociologists in the Ward Melville Social and Behavioural
Sciences Building, gazing at the Frank Melville Memorial Library, realize
that the dead white male status of Herman ensures the ever-more-unread
character of the classic Moby Dick.). To a lesser degree, the emptiness
of New Zealand presupposed advances in harpoon technology. The human captives
interned upon New Zealand, however, turned out to be a predominance of sheep
shearers and other attendants upon the numerically speaking dominant species
of that nation; tending to be of the Presbyterian persuasion.
The social construction of a society as *conquest-bait* or *invasion-
victimizable* is, however, quite different. Here, it is presupposed, rather,
that the place is pupulated with productive labourers, producing subsistence
for themselves as well, conceivably, and why not, for the predators or, in
J.H. McNeill's usage, *macroparasites*, desirous of being supported in the
style wherein Civilized elites, perhaps, have long been, already. Where, as
we recall, we define Civilized circularly as the minority doing the Civiliza-
tion; the majority doing the Work.
We recall that, given that the incoming Slavs had no prospect of not doing
agricultural labour themselves, their requirements in watching the indigenous
people doing the work were of a largely education character, ie, acquiring
techniques they themselves had not previously possessed, and superior in
adaptation to the current location to techniques practiced in the southern
Ukraine or wherever they originated most recently.
Avars, rather, would be drawn into the Balkans under the presupposition
that the level of productive population was adequate for them to make a living
off it. In odd corners of the Balkans, the Avars found themselves curiously
alone, and may have had to work. Awwwwm, you say. Bulgars would not have, and
made use of Avars as well.
But what in blazes got all these people, Turkic and Iranian speakers,
cramming into the Balkans, herding their Slavs before them, reducing their
Slavs to Slavery, and other things which did not happen, but actually did
in Merovingian Gaul, which seep into our heads from comic opera stereotypes
plus other junk in our minds.
All right, you say, name one of these people.
The Avars, it is said, were originally a Turkic-speaking tribe called
the Ruan-ruan, or variants, which was expelled from North China by military
action. What was going on in North China was extremely confusing and will
be considered when I get to tell the story about why the year 555 was the
best possible year for Byzantine spies to smuggle silkworm eggs out of
Sri Lanka or Central Asia, either way (in that this all bears upon the
question of Persian silver exports from South Arabia).
In 612, an entity known to us as Avars, with folk memories of having
crossed Asia end to end, appeared around the environs of Constantinople,
with major effort against Thessaloniki. I have read a sufficiency of boring
history books to give St Demetrius the benefit of the doubt; and there was
another occasion, I believe, when the Saint chastised the Avars with Bubonic
Plague, as a result whereof the epidemic in question was found worthy of
mention. (Disclaimer: This does not extend to any other imaginary beings.
Jews of the time liked Demetrius, too.)
Almost from the start, the Avars, cavalry warriors, were dependent upon the
local Slav population for their weight of numbers in infantry. Which is
curious.
In any case, the possibility that the same gene pool arrived, intact, from
North China to the Balkans was equal to or less than that of my books having
all arrived from Chicago to New Haven, which is nil. The bounds of Peoples and
societies are always at best porous to the extent of qualifying as "figmenta-
tional." When these entities are on the move, it's even more a mixed up mess
than that. Consider that, for the Ostrogoths prior to their invasion of Italy,
according to Peter Heather, Goths and Romans: 332-489, 1991, fully one quarter
of the purebloodGermanicAryans were recent runaway slaves. Ultimately,
perhaps, there was nobody in the whole horde of Goths lacking an ancestor and
more likely a plurality of ancestors who had not run away from
someone/something/somewhere where the ascendant would rather strongly have
desired not to have been. Compare, in the sedentary situation the Nuer, proud
of their "pure" ethnicity when observed by E.R. Evans-Prichard (The Nuer,
1940). Fully one-half of the Nuer males, whose agnatic connections constituted
the very structure of Nuer society, they told him, he found to have been
captive Dinka themselves or sons of captive Dinka, all of whom had been
ritually incorporated into fictive agnatic relation with existing Nuer agnatic
lineages. (Did the Dinka capture Nuer? Certainly, but the latter never
mentioned it; were they not invincible. Today, Nuer and Dinka are rather more
coherently racist, practicing ethnic cleansing against one another with the
AK-47, more suitable for the purpose than the spear of 1940. They are on the
same side, however, in the Sudan civil war. That's another story.)
not necessarily and single organism whereof. *Why did they go west*? The
answer I propose is that the soggy, Plague-rotted state structures of Europe,
to the West and to the South, impelled them, *faute de mieux*, via easywayout,
westwards and southwards. West was trendy, that is. Anyone who was anyone,
anyone Known to Know by anyone, ie, reputed wise, would say, West is waytogo.
The Bulgars, in particular, brought with them technologically advanced
siegecraft, presumably learned, acquired, or developed in Central Asia, not
uncentral for this purpose; which the Byzantines could only construe, racist
to a degree as they were, could only construe as the outcome of desertion
from themselves and treason.
The prior movement of the Slavs, however, precluded any further development
of basic food production, for, as the Slavs entered the region adjoining the
Mediterranean, they settled upon cultivable areas whereto the Mediterranean
scratch plow was highly and longstandingly adapted, with the associated
rectangular-plot cultivation which, as we know, would be ousted by manorial
collective cultivation in Northern Europe by the high middle ages.
The thinly populated area inhabited by the German tribes fought by the
Romans (increasingly with Germans) as well as Northern Gaul itself and, of
course, what was to become the Midlands of Britain, was to become the most
fertile and productive soil in Western Europe. The problem was, the Romans
had no way of knowing how to cultivate it, and their technical innovations
were singularly bereft of innovations in basic food production and food
processing. The exception which proves the rule was the elaborate contraption
comprising dozens of waterwheels installed for the purpose of milling the
grain eaten by the personnel at the great legionary base at Vienne. Water
mills were used for milling the grain supply of the City of Rome, naturally
enough, as it arrived, 135,000 tons of it a year (N. Lewis, Roman Egypt,
1986), at Ostia. For the City, the Romans invented, eg, the apartment house,
ie, *insula*, elsewise, their contributions to Human Progress were in the
realm of warfare, military transport, and infrastructure supportive of centres
of elite consumption (aqueducts, arenas). Unlike the Chinese, at the other end
of the landmass, they hadn't bothered even inventing the *wheelbarrow*. The
Great Cathedrals of mediaeval times were built without it till the twelfth
century. (Compare the third century invention date in China.) The necessity
for the diffusion of a contraption like the wheelbarrow is a ridiculous
proposition. It is a device which is inevitably invented given even the most
minimal consideration for the economical expenditure of labour-power and,
along with this, consideration for the horrors endured in the lives of the
human organisms attached to that labour-power.
In the sixth century, about 590, we find Gregory of Tours whining, in his
preface to *Liber historiarum, commonly known as History of the Franks, that
he is hastening the present work to completion in that there remain perhaps
one hundred people in all Merovingian Gaul remaining who are capable of
reading it (not bothering to add, grammatical errors and all; but Latinists
are vastly more numerous now, it irks them, and that's what they say). As in
South Arabia, a failure of documentation. Perhaps the elite's efforts were
directed elsewhere. As it happens, yes they were. Gregory, obsessed with
Arians the way oldtimers feared Communists, mentioned only the bizarre-
seeming, to him, aspects of this.
On the Isere river, there was the curious spectacle of manastic landowners
squabbling with secular magnates over choice sites for watermills. As we would
expect in a condition of generalized labour shortage, something which does not
interest the Truly Religious Christian of this period, in Gaul or in Britain.
(In the latter, the monk Gildas was obsessed with the sins, meaning sexual
behaviour, of Maelgwynn of Powys, military hegemon of Briton resistance to
Saxons. Telling Gildas to maintain a sense of proportion was of course
fruitless. The deathnell of the Briton cause was, however, the death of
Maelgwynn of Powys from Bubonic Plague in 549, soon whereafter the Severb
Valley was conquered, the Celts were penned in Wales, "Enemy Country," and
this is being written in English.) The six thousand water mills found in
Domesday Book, 1086, were likewise installed during the Dark AGes.
Thirty years after this, a Frankish "merchant" named Samo, who should I
believe, be a household word for everybody, became King of Great Moravia.
Which some people place in Bohemia (Czech Republic), others in Pannonia
(Hungary). Samo's kingdom was, actually, more of a business enterprise
dealing in captive human beings, the aggregate whereof, that is, dealings
in captive human beings of the period, explains why you, if you were a non-
francophone, were confused as a little kiddie by some album cover that said,
Tschaikovsky, Marche Slave. if your were the least bit a knowledgeable kiddie,
you flashed on the Volga Boatmen or something obvious like that.
Howsomever, Slav, -e, and its derivatives ousted *servus* as the common
name for chattel slave in a bunch of languages.
As Lynne White once pointed out, the word for the contraption ancestral
to the medieval heavy plow was of balto-slavic derivation. There is a
"percentage," in basic production, in being a Barbarian. You get to keep,
in the absence of an exploiting class, the increases in production or
productivity acrruing to the technical innovations you've made. The generali-
zability of this, to other agricultural societies and historical periods, is
not systematically known.
The ruling class of the Kingdom of the Franks, a messy coalescence of
descendants of the roman senatorial class, the more numerous element who
faked such descent or after a time came to believe their own fictitious
origins; Germans of German or Romance speech of varied ethnicity, likewise
landowners; some of each of the latter two secular or episcopal/monastic
owners; and odds and ends whose wealth was acquired by trade or stolen,
had, whatever the origins the expectation of watching someone else do the
work. I do believe that, however, the imported Slavs became highly successful
Austrasian Franks, as the productivity of the Austrasian region was rising in
the seventh century. There was, according to the economic histories of the
eighth century by Duby or Latouche (The Birth of Western Economy), no end
to the labour shourtage in the Carolingian period to, say, 800-850. The fields
remained full of *tempestarii* making it rain so they could get stoned out on
ergot alkoloids in ruined barley fields (Cf. the story of Agobard of Lyons, in
Daily Life in the Age of Charlemagne, from the year 819).
Why did not some conqueror conquer Gaul, or Western Europe in general,
the way the Turkish tribes conquered Balkan slavs to constitute what became
Slavic states? Well, just look at the dump: *In order to generate cupidity
in remote howbeit somehow *potential* conqueror-candidates, it is necessary
to generate the apperances of supporting the existing and indigenous ruling
class in something approximating to World Class International High Style,
however this is defined. Tell you what:
It's the year 800. Go up to some Intelligent-looking Byzantine. (As the
rules for controlling the definition of the cognitive in any particular
civilization are under very tight control of the ruling class as one of
its politically most important strategic resources, "knowing how to look
intelligent" is one of the social skills most highly-diffused among its
members.) Say the two words "Western Civilization."
What happened?
Daniel A. Foss