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Proyecto Visión 21

The constant struggle to be recognized as humans

Francisco Miraval

In my daily activities I frequently meet people who, because of their presence or their absence, their achievements or their failures, struggled to be recognized as humans, something that it seems it is more difficult than ever to achieve.

In her book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler says that, “We are not simply struggling for rights that attach to my person, but we are struggling to be conceived as persons.” (Italics in the original.)

This constant struggle to define who is human, who is not human, and who is less than human began, perhaps, in prehistorical times when the Homo Sapiens first met the Neanderthals. Closer in time, the Greeks and, as a consequence, also the Romans, had some clear ideas about this issue: they were truly humans (civilized) and everybody else was just barbarian (uncivilized.)

Some people, including the Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD), understood that “humans” and “barbarians” could exchange places at any time. “Here I am the barbarian because no one understands me,” lamented Ovid, in Trista, writing from his place of exile in the Pontus.

Even closer in time, the arrival of the first modern Europeans came to the Americas caused a long debate (more than 50 years) to decide if those living in the Americas were truly human. They needed to know to subsequently decide what kind of laws they would establish and if they would preach (and how) to the natives.

The highest point of that debate occurred in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550 and 1551, when

Bartolome De las Casas argued in favor of the humanness of the natives and Juan de Sepulveda argued in favor of the slavery of the natives.

Many of the arguments presented by both De las Casas and Sepulveda were based in arguments presented by the Greek philosopher Aristotle two thousand years earlier and on their particular understanding of the Biblical text. And many of those same arguments were used again during the debate about the continuation or abolition of slavery in the United States and, more recently, during the debates about the need for an immigration reform in this country and what kind of immigration reform is needed.

This very short historical review is enough to show that the definition of who is human and who is not always happens in a certain historical context, that is, the definition changes from one era to the next one. As Butler (following Foucault) says, this is never a question about a knowledge issue. This is always a question about power.

So, the answer to the question about who is truly human, who is more or less human, and who is not human at all (and, therefore, about how human should express their humanness in their everyday life) is always provisional and historically situated.

I wonder if the time has arrived for us to rethink the almost simplistic approach about humanness being used by Western culture to define humans. Perhaps it is time to prepare ourselves for a drastic change in that definition. 

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