The Uses and Limits of "Social Death" as a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Ancient Slavery

Since Orlando Patterson's monumental work Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study in 1982 (republished with a new Preface in 2018), "social death" has been used variously to define slavery, describe slavery conditions, and analyze mechanisms of enslavement. While the concept has facilitated paradigm shift in the study of slavery across cultures and historical period, a certain circularity has also emerged. Criticism of "social death" as "abstract distillate" (Brown 2009), "a metaphorical concept" rather than "a quantifiable reality" (Bodel 2017), and so on has been visibly on the rise in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the application of the "social death" concept has been significantly broadened: it has been used on eunuchs, criminals, exiles, and so on; in addition, it has been widely used in Psychology and Sociology to refer to a condition caused by social isolation and the loss of social identity and role. The broad use of "social death" has led to the reduction of its effectiveness in helping differentiate slavery from other conditions that involve exclusion, alienation, exploitation, isolation, and degradation. Based on a critical survey of the applications of "social death" in the past 40 years, this paper assesses the viability of "social death" as both a descriptive and an analytical tool for future studies of slavery, especially with respect to Roman slavery.