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PARIAH MINORITIES
Volume 70 No. 1 (Spring 2003)
Arien Mack, Editor

Table of Contents   Abstracts and author bios     Ordering information

Editor's Note

At a time in our own history, when those responsible for governing this country have divided the world into those who are
with us and those who are not, into friend or foe, the stage has been all too perfectly set for a virulent campaign of demonizing
the “other” that now is well under way. It is a campaign that is now greatly amplified by our preemptive war against Iraq.
Although the planning for this special issue on Pariah Minorities preceded many of these alarming developments, its relevance
to the historical moment has sadly been enhanced by them.

While I did not initiate this issue with a precise definition of what it means to be a pariah group, I believe such a group probably
has some if not all of the following characteristics: it is an ethnic or racial group that shares a language and a culture; its members
are the objects of persecution and viewed by the dominant population as less than fully human, as dirty, as inferior, or are deemed
impure; it is marginalized by those in power and considered to stand below (outside) the law.

Since it is probably the case that pariah minorities have existed in almost all societies, I wanted the papers in the issue to examine
not only why a particular group is or was considered a pariah and how it became so, but what role this designation played or plays
within the society and, in cases where the situation has changed, what accounted for the change. These questions are addressed by
many of the papers in this issue, which look at a variety of groups—the Roma, the Dalit and Hijra in India, Blacks in America, and
Jews. Some continue to be viewed as pariahs, while others no longer are. Taken together, these papers succeed in deepening our
understanding of the concept and how it is has been historically embodied.

Arien Mack
Editor
 

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Table of Contents
 
 
WENDY DONIGER The Symbolism of Black and White Babies in the Myth of Parental Impression


OZ FRANKEL The Predicament of Racial Knowledge: Government Studies of the Freedmen 
during the U.S. Civil War


SAGARIKA GHOSE The Dalit in India


DIMITRINA PETROVA The Roma: Between a Myth and the Future


GAYATRI REDDY “Men” Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and the Re-Production 
of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics


DAVID NIRENBERG The Birth of the Pariah: Jews, Christian Dualism, and Social Science


EPHRAIM SHOHAM-STEINER An Ultimate Pariah? Jewish Social Attitudes toward Jewish Lepers in Medieval 
Western Europe


IAN NEARY Burakumin at the End of History


MICHAEL RUBIN Are Kurds a Pariah Minority?

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Abstracts and Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
 

  • The Symbolism of Black and White Babies in the Myth of Parental Impression

    • Wendy Doniger
    An ancient and enduring cross-cultural mythology explores what the texts generally perceive as a paradox: the birth of white offspring to black parents, or black offspring to white parents. This mythology in the Hebrew Bible is limited to animal husbandry, but in Indian literature from the third century B.C.E. and
    Greek and Hebrew literature from the third or fourth century C.E. it was transferred to stories about human beings. These stories originally express a fascination with the dark skin of “Ethiopians” (a term that seems to apply to sub-Saharan Africans in general), and a (nonracist) fantasy of white children born to them. But when ideas about human race arise in Europe after the sixteenth century, the stories reverse their color schemes and shift their emphasis to investigations of the (racist) paradox of black children born to white parents. In our day, racism is clearly a strong factor in the media fascination with court cases about in vitro fertilization in which black children are born to white parents. This development suggests that the symbolism of black and white was not originally, nor need be now, racist, but that, once racism is current, it is hard to reclaim the nonjudgmental innocence of the earlier texts. Many of these texts explained the paradox of children who differ from their parents in color by invoking the concept of parental impression (sometimes called maternal imprinting or maternal imagination), which argues that whatever a woman (or, rarely, a man) thinks of or sees at the moment of conception (or, for a woman, sometimes in the course of pregnancy) influences the physical form of the child. This doctrine, which was known in ancient Israel, in Greece, in ancient India, and in Europe well into the twentieth century, primarily addresses an entirely different obsession—the problem of paternal insecurity—and generally draws heavily on sexist and misogynist attitudes toward women. Yet, when it was appropriated into the narratives of off-color offspring, it offered, in place of the more obvious explanation (adultery, and mixed-race adultery, to boot), an alternative fantasy that softened the culpability of women. So, too, when applied to stories of color-contrasting offspring in European narratives, even after the sixteenth century,the idea of parental impression functioned as a force against racism (and hereditarianism in general); the Lamarckian or Lysenkan idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—the privileging of nurture over nature—argues against the belief that one’s racial stock determines who one is. Thus this doctrine, farfetched as it seems to us (and seemed to many people throughout its history), dulled the edge of ancient antagonism toward women and modern European antagonism toward the descendants of the “Ethiopians.”  A study of the variations of this myth across cultures has much to tell us about the ways in which myths about women and myths about people of dark skin color are transformed under the pressure of later tropes of sexism and racism.
    Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions in the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her recent publications include a new translation of the Kamasutra (with Sudhir Kakar, 2002) and The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000).

    Oz Frankel is Assistant Professor of History at the Committee on Historical Studies at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty.
    His book, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations, Explorations, and Print Culture in Nineteenth Century U.S. and Britain, is
    forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Sagarika Ghose, a novelist and journalist, has been closely involved with the movement among Dalit inellectuals of north India to find
    a voice within the cultural mainstream.  Her novel The Gin Drinkers (2000), is based on the manner in which the Indian upper castes
    have monopolized modern education and describes how Dalits have been ghettoized into the "political" and "official" realms.

    Ian Neary has recently published The State and Politics in Japan (2002) and Human Rights in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
    (2002).  He is currently working on a biography of Matsumoto Jiichiro.

    David Nirenberg is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.  He is the author of Communities
    of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996).  His recent publications include: "Enmity and Assimilation: Jews,
    Christians, and Converts in Medieval Spain" (Common Knowledge, 2003).

    Dimitrina Petrova is the Executive Director of the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest and teaches in the human rights program
    of the Central European University in Budapest.

    Gayatri Reddy is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Her paper,
    "Crossing Lines of Subjectivity: The Negotiation of Sexual Identity in Hyderabad, India" appeared in South Asia in 2001.

    Michael Rubin is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  His most recent monograph is Into the Shadows: Radical
    Vigilantes in Khatami’s Iran (2001).  His commentary about Iraq and the Kurds has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall
    Street Journal, and The New Republic.

    Ephraim Shoham-Steiner is a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Deparment, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev at Be'er
    Sheva, Israel.  He is currently working on a book on Jewish social attiudes toward marginal individuals (the physically impaired, lepers
    and madmen) in medieval European Jewish communities.

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