On the Classification of Sapient Peoples and the History of Its Abuses

The classification of sapient peoples has suffered from the habit of asking one name to perform the work of several inquiries. An anatomist wishes to distinguish bodies, a historian to distinguish societies, and a magistrate to determine whose complaint he is obliged to hear. Much of the confusion in our literature arises when the magistrate’s answer is copied into the anatomist’s table, from which a later historian extracts it as an established fact about nature; by the time the error returns to the magistrate, it possesses a bibliography. A mistaken name for a bone may inconvenience a student, whereas a mistaken classification of a people may determine whether its members can own the ground beneath their houses or give evidence concerning their injuries. Precision here is a practical obligation, although those who object to it generally prefer to discuss my manner.

The history cannot honestly be arranged as a steady ascent from ignorance to enlightenment. Most of the Principal Peoples have at different times recognised the Drau, Ogres, Kobolds, and Gorillas as people, denied that recognition, and later restored some portion of it, frequently without any corresponding discovery concerning anatomy or intelligence. A history of official terms therefore resembles a history of scientific progress only until one compares it with the records of land acquisition and employment, and even those records are uneven. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Aesir, and Gremlins bear most of the weight in the written accounts from which our histories are assembled. The scarcity of other peoples in those accounts cannot show that their lives were empty of events, since a boundary agreement preserved orally escapes an archive whose clerks collect written deeds.

The conventional grouping of the four owes much to Human and Dwarven scholarship and has never been shown to correspond to a natural division. The Drau resemble Elves in bodily construction; Ogres invite comparison with Aesir; certain Kobold proportions recall those of Dwarves; Gorillas resemble Humans. From these pairings the classifier has repeatedly arranged each pair in succession, assigning the institutions he admires to the later stage and the bodies he finds unfamiliar to the earlier. Resemblance becomes ancestry without the inconvenience of intermediate evidence, and ancestry becomes advancement, although even a demonstrated descent would tell us nothing about whether a descendant is wiser or better governed.

Within a single century the Drau have been treated as sovereign tribes, vermin, military auxiliaries, protected peoples, and poachers. These cannot all be answers to the same question, and presented as successive discoveries about the Drau they make changes in the position of a government look like changes in the nature of its neighbours. An auxiliary is defined by service, a protected people by a political arrangement, and a poacher by an alleged offence against someone’s claim to land. Calling a resident population poachers at least requires an account of how its hunting grounds came under another authority, an account which calling it vermin avoids by denying that its previous arrangements merit examination.

Kobold personhood has been conceded or withdrawn according to whether governments found Kobold tunnels profitable or inconvenient, although ventilation shafts, drainage gradients, and channels altered after flooding remain evidence of organised construction and instruction whatever legal standing is assigned to their builders. Gorillas were declared animals when their territories were wanted, then “natural dependents” when their labour became useful, a phrase that sounds protective while turning a circumstance into a constitution requiring permanent direction by somebody else. Ogres have received the harshest treatment, and the prejudice has real support, since violence is common in many documented Ogre populations. That violence justifies precaution but cannot serve as evidence against reason: coordinated movement, concealed provisions, and delayed attack all require attention to future consequences.

The vocabulary of rank survives because it compresses these histories into something which can be printed at the head of a column. An official may write “the Lesser Races” with no wish to injure anybody, having found the expression in every report upon which his own is modelled, but his intention does not supply the missing measurement. Lesser in population, stature, or access to printing? Left unspecified, the comparison implies a general inferiority the document never attempts to demonstrate. The speaker who says “the Beast Races” intends the denial of personhood which the official may scarcely have considered, and gains no anatomical support by it, since Human bodies possess appetites and intestines and any natural history exempting its author from animal life will encounter difficulty during dissection.

The flattering counterpart, “the Civilised Races”, fails for a related reason. A writer who reserves it for the five, whilst treating the societies of the four as beneath consideration, has built his judgement into both halves of the arrangement. If civilisation means settled institutions, he must examine Drau agreements and Kobold communal works. If it means literacy, predominantly oral Elven communities need explaining, and a writer who retreats to the territorial nation finds the Gremlins, who have never possessed a country, a considerable embarrassment. It is usually at this point that the standard changes, which shows what it was meant to preserve.

Professor Ardell has attempted to give these habits a scientific account, placing the four in a “sub-rational” category and describing them as “arrested”, “failed”, or “debased”. Each word requires a history he has not established: arrest implies a process which should have continued, and degradation a condition from which something declined. An unfamiliar living population supplies no such history merely by standing before the observer. Primitive fails the same way, because a simple tool does not place its maker at an earlier stage of existence, and Kobolds with simple implements undertake elaborate excavations. I have myself been lost in a Kobold tunnel system while my guide remained quite certain of our position, which gave me reason to revise my route notes but none to revise his classification.

Scholars who have seriously examined the question now call Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Aesir, and Gremlins the Principal Races, or the Principal Peoples, and the Drau, Ogres, Kobolds, and Gorillas the Other Sapient Races, or the Other Sapient Peoples, the paired expressions being interchangeable within each group. The convention belongs to scholarship, and many governments, newspapers, and gentlemen whose acquaintance with a people consists chiefly of disliking its proximity have not accepted it. Principal records prominence in the institutions and records from which the arrangement arose and claims no general excellence. Other is the weakest of the three words, since it gives the first group a precedence on the page that is easily mistaken for precedence elsewhere. Sapient concedes in advance the capacity whose denial has done the inquiry so much damage, though it promises neither equal skill at every task nor identical forms of reasoning.

I retain the conventional expressions only when discussing the history of that division, because readers must be able to identify the populations whose treatment is at issue; in a particular investigation the actual name serves better, narrowed to the community or district wherever the evidence permits. For law, history, and education peoples keeps collective life in view without implying a shared government. Races belongs to comparative physiology, with the biological distinction stated, since a physician who ignores real differences out of politeness may injure his patient with excellent intentions. Observed habits call for community or population, because rates of lethal aggression differ between Ogre communities and a race is too large a subject for most sentences written about it. I also avoid Dark Elves, which makes an Elven identity the starting point and obliges every sentence about the Drau to carry an unproven theory of their descent.

In the western Drau territory I watched children learn local history, boundary agreements, and neighbouring languages, writing upon treated bark while their instructor asked them to explain the failure of a peace. A government report denied that the population possessed formal educational institutions or historical records, and no more courteous collective noun could have repaired that discrepancy. I therefore ask more of a scholar than an improved heading: he should distinguish the government’s description from his own finding, and where he quotes an older classification, set its source and purpose beside it. In the account of that school, the instructor’s lesson deserves at least as much authority as the report of an office which declined to recognise him, and my preference is to begin with his work and make the report answer to it.