Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- Part II Wittgenstein
- 10 The loneliness of the long-distance empiricist
- 11 The poem to solitude, or: confessions of a transcendental ego who is also a Viennese Jew
- 12 Ego and language
- 13 The world as solitary vice
- 14 The mystical
- 15 The central proposition of the Tractatus: world without culture
- 16 Wittgenstein mark 2
- 17 Tertium non datur
- 18 Joint escape
- 19 Janik and Toulmin: a critique
- 20 The case of the disappearing self
- 21 Pariah communalism
- 22 Iron cage Kafka-style
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
21 - Pariah communalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- Part II Wittgenstein
- 10 The loneliness of the long-distance empiricist
- 11 The poem to solitude, or: confessions of a transcendental ego who is also a Viennese Jew
- 12 Ego and language
- 13 The world as solitary vice
- 14 The mystical
- 15 The central proposition of the Tractatus: world without culture
- 16 Wittgenstein mark 2
- 17 Tertium non datur
- 18 Joint escape
- 19 Janik and Toulmin: a critique
- 20 The case of the disappearing self
- 21 Pariah communalism
- 22 Iron cage Kafka-style
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
Summary
When a minority is an object of discrimination and contempt, this is most frequently explained and justified by attributing some moral inferiority to the group in question. Its members are lazy, feckless, addicted to thieving, generally endowed with criminal tendencies, dirty, given to unsavoury sexual habits, drunkenness, and so forth. The attribution may of course be totally unfair and unjustified. Alternatively, it may be, as it were, enforced or imposed, by a kind of circular selfconfirming procedure. An easily identifiable sub-population credited with strong criminal proclivities may find it difficult to secure ordinary employment and may in fact be forced into criminal activities. It is difficult to escape the consequences of social stereotyping, and determined attempts to do so quite often lead only to a strengthened imposition of the initial attribution.
But, leaving aside the fairness or otherwise of the attribution, this ‘normal’ condition of discrimination has a certain manifest logic. The minority in question is bad in terms of the recognised values of the dominant ‘host’ or majority society; if the attribution of the said inferiority is justified – and who knows, in some cases, it may be – discrimination does thereby acquire a kind of justification. That kind of situation – without prejudice to the question concerning whether the ascription of the relevant deficiency is in fact justified – constitutes what may be called the standard or simplest version of discrimination.
There is however a rather more interesting and complicated variant of minority persecution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and SolitudeWittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, pp. 100 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998