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Lene Auestad Karnac Books, London, 2015, 310 pp., $53.95 paper, ISBN-13: 978-1-782-20139-7
Prejudice, discrimination and varied forms of social exclusion exact immeasurable human cost and suffering seemingly everywhere in the modern world. The broad manifestation of prejudice adheres to categorical reifications congealed around fixed, fixated, and substantialist forms of contempt as witnessed across many cultures. But essentialist categories arise and gain traction in ways calibrated to the specific power formations and social dynamics of any national society and traditional community. The consequences include social subordination, political domination and economic exploitation, but these too operate differently within contrasting historical formations. Discriminatory practices, exclusivist doctrines, and forms of prejudicial justification are thus universally similar but culturally different in their origins, causes and reinforcements.
Categorical assumptions embedded within prejudicial or exclusivist social or communal value systems foment particular kinds of effects including political extremism, xenophobia, majority nationalism, ethno-centrism, paternalism, classism, racism, kinship, blood or tribal nativism, caste honor exclusivism, clientism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, misogynist or gender essentialism, ageism, and ableism, etc. How and why cultural mores and predispositions do so differ from place to place and in ways that reveal intergenerational influences that speak to time and continuity and thus to collective ways of life. Such ways of life, grounded by inter-subjective meanings and patterns of social interaction, reflect material distributions of social, economic and political power, as well as concrete and cognized value structures. But they also reveal the embedded but elusive crustaceans of unconscious and/or preconscious prejudice – so often expressed non-verbally, but conveyed viscerally or implicitly, and all the more powerful in their hurtf