Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 114

GRIPLA114
When the Romans inherited the word barbarian from the Greeks, the
shift of emphasis from language to culture was explicit (Lund 1993, 16). In
the first century BC, Cicero wrote his treatise The Republic, in which he
answers the question of whether Romulus’ subjects were barbarians in the
following manner: “If, as the Greeks say, all people other than Greeks are
barbarians, I’m afraid his subjects were barbarians. But if the name should
be applied to character rather than language, then the Romans, in my view,
were no more barbarous than the Greeks” (Cicero 1998, 26). In contrast to
the notion of Hellenes as an exclusive ethnic category, the notion of
Romans was inclusive and comprised different groups within the empire.
Gradually, some became more Roman than others, and the classification of
the (ideal) Romans as barbarians that had been accepted by way of the
Greek gaze subsided to a new alignment between Greeks and Romans as
equally civilised – they were humans of the same kind in contrast to the
Germanic tribes on the northern frontier, for instance (Lund 1993, 18ff).
these preliminary observations serve to highlight the so­called proto­
type effect inherent in classification which greatly complicates the view­
point held by semanticists that all members of a particular category are
equal (Rosch 1978; see also Hastrup 1995: 26ff). In practice, including lin­
guistic practice, some members are always ‘better’ examples of the category
than others; when ‘birds’ are mentioned, for Danes, little songbirds spring
to mind more easily than ostriches, for instance. Prototypes reflect clusters
of experience and socially embedded semantic densities that incorporate
experience into the category system (Ardener 1989, 169).
this insight into the nature of categories has important implications
for our understanding of social stereotypes, where the prototype effect
often results in a metonymic replacement of the entire category by only
parts of it (Lakoff 1987, 79ff). It seems to be particularly pertinent in rela­
tion to identity categories – such as Hellenes or Icelanders – where all
members are not equally good examples; slaves for instance cannot be said
to represent the category in either case. When it comes to the identity of
civilised or even human, clearly ‘we’ are always a more likely prototype
than the ‘others’; the others are less representative of the category to which
we ourselves belong. In this way, the eccentric nature of words intervenes
in the experience of worlds. When the perspective chosen is from within a
self­declared civilisation, the others are by definition less human than us;