Essay Slavery Negated Familial Ties - 1635 Words

Even though slavery is a state of bondage, it has to do with relations between people. Most scholarly discourses that exist surrounding slavery recognize that bondage leads to a loss of identity as it curtails the ties of the slaves to their heritage. Sociologist Orlando Patterson’s definition of Slavery is applicable here, as he delineates slavery as †¦a permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons. Thus, Slavery banned slaves from all formal, legally enforceable ties of â€Å"blood,† and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for them by the master. Slavery at the rudimentary level erased basic factors that defined one’s identities. The slave was always at the mercy of†¦show more content†¦Buyers moved slaves from the area in which they captured them for fear of escape. Bradley states that slave captives often suffered from â€Å"shock of cultural disorientation as they journ eyed from a familiar to an alien environment.† The African slaves in the Ottoman Empire were uprooted from their homes in Ethiopia, Sudan etc, which meant that they were disconnected from their lineage and traditions geographically inhibited any chances of access to their birth place. Furthermore, even within the slave society familial relations hardly existed as members of were sold to different buyers to ensure complete loyalty to the master alone. The Circassian agricultural slaves in the Ottoman Empire are a good example of this because their masters split them from their families to ensure the slave girls’ undivided loyalty. Furthermore, the slaves’ interactions within one another even within one home were extremely surveilled and reprimanded to hinder interactions between them, often through threats and violence (such as flogging). Naming: A slave’s new generated name also functioned as another aspect that stripped his or her identity. As Martin Klein mentions, a master or a buyer instantly renamed the slave after purchase: â€Å"A slave could regain a previous name only by escaping and returning to an area where his or her family lived.† By losing his or her inherited name, the slave lost a fundamental marker of a human’s