Although today race is generally thought of largely in terms of skin color and blood, its origins lie in part in an ancient conflict that we often overlook: the urban-rural conflict between the bourgeois peoples of the city and the pagan peoples of the countryside. Starting with a close analysis of a work of colonial bigotry, Sir Harry Johnston’s 1920 The Backward Peoples and Our Relations with Them, I sketch out the intersectional implications of pagan-bourgeois conflict for the rise of the idea of race – what might be termed a rural sociology of race. I also use etymological evidence to connect the history of racial hierarchy to the construction of savagery, and the construction of savagery to some three thousand years of urban exploitation of the rural, closely associated with imperialism and rise of urban-centered structures of power. The English words pagan, heathen, savage, rude, villain, and backward (and their equivalents in many other European languages) all etymologically stem from rural metonyms; they are all forms of savaging the rural. Upon this phantasm, an economics of savage exploitation runs through the history of bourgeois exploitation. I also briefly sketch how colonialists used techniques of ruralizing the savage to exploit pagan peoples. I conclude by considering how pagan exploitation could be incorporated into accounts of intersectionality, and how we can interrogate attempts to justify such exploitation through critique of what I have elsewhere termed the natural conscience. to the event.

Professor Michael M. Bell is an accomplished agroecologist, environmental sociologist, and community scholar at the esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison. He boasts an impressive collection of eleven published books, three of which have been granted prestigious national awards. Among his recent works are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Bell is also a gifted composer and performer of grassroots and classical music.