That Dynamic Spectrum

Abstract

That Dynamic Spectrum Johanna S. Ransmeier Keywords comparative slavery, freedom, manumission, status hierarchy, gender, kinship, historiography, East Asia, China European philosophers, from ancients like Aristotle to Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, no matter how radically different their attitudes toward slaveholding, articulated a mutually constitutive relationship between “freedom” and “slavery.” Each recognizes the character of the other in its negative reflection; resulting, according to Hegel, in a (life-or-death) negotiation between extremes.1 For the slave societies of Ancient Rome or the Atlantic world, a theoretical bifurcation of the population reigned. The line between free and unfree proved politically useful not just to those who sought to preserve the institution of slavery but to later abolitionists as well. It demarcated the lines of struggle and the wrongs of slavery. By highlighting how the proposed dichotomy fails to capture the multiplicity of forms slavery takes around the world—and in the East, Inner, and Southeast Asian contexts described in this special issue—I do not wish to undercut this politics of liberation or to minimize the absolute degradation enacted by slave traders and slaveholders. Close examination of global practices of enslavement, however, tests the proposition that these two concepts need each other. The supposedly tidy binary between free and unfree has become a kind of zombie idea, one that scholars of slavery must always and repeatedly dispatch, before proceeding to describe the evidence of exploitation they find in the archive at hand. And, it is not so much that the two terms are not opposites—for in many ways, they are—but rather that, as we encounter freedom or slavery in the world, the concepts operate in radically diverging ways. [End Page 267] Freedom is an abstraction, at best an aspiration, at worst a slogan—a perhaps unattainable event horizon. As a practice, it can only be imperfect, something to move toward.2 Slavery, on the other hand, is blood, sweat, pain, stolen lives, deaths. It is a system, a set of processes hard at work in the world. It is not abstract. Turning to the archives of Asia, scholars immediately confront flaws in any proposed dichotomy of freedom and slavery. Across this vast terrain, diverse ideas and justifications collide and mingle. Drawing upon “notes of certification” from Qing-era Mongolia, Sam H. Bass describes how lay people from all walks of life sought merit, spiritual freedom, and transcendence through their donation of slaves to Buddhist monasteries, demonstrating that “liberation was a release from slaveholding rather than from slavery.”3 Claude Chevaleyre explains how lineage regulations and admonitions in the Ming and Qing period prescribed the proper treatment of domestic slaves, prevailing upon elites to be modest in their slaveholding and to defer to the lineage with regard to discipline.4 Sun Joo Kim finds enslaved people in Chosŏn Korea acting as legal subjects, with the capacity to mobilize against yangban 兩班, the social elites, through petitions.5 Meanwhile, Japanese troops invading Chosŏn in the Imjin War (1592–1598) took Koreans as war captives. From memoirs from the battlefield and local records from Japan, Nam-lin Hur writes that abducted men and women faced increasingly brutal treatment as that conflict dragged on and were integrated into Japan’s domestic slave market and traded along the archipelago.6 If these Korean captives were fortunate, they might be valued by daimyo owners for their skills. Few were repatriated. Dating to around the same time period, the world that Tina Lu uncovers in the novel Jinpingmei 金瓶梅 (The plum in the golden vase) shows how trafficked women abused and manipulated each other, [End Page 268] exercising circumscribed power within nested layers of domination within the late Ming Chinese household.7 Documentation of these layered systems of enslavement brings us to a new problem. Rather than embrace an oversimplified dichotomy, scholars of Asia must now grapple with the specter of “the status spectrum.” This short-hand representation of genuine hierarchies, while more inclusive than the zombie binary alluded to above, risks minimizing the extent of exploitation that can hide behind a veil of cultural relativism. No matter how bewildering the range of statuses we see represented in the archives of slavery across eastern Asia seem...