Sami Blood &
Social Dominance

PS140O: Projecting Power

Prof Wasow

2026-09-14

Attendance

Quiz 1

Housekeeping

• Syllabus revised
• Texts & Films
  • bcourses \(\rightarrow\) Modules \(\rightarrow\) Week
• Slides: http://projectingpower.org
• Tech policy
  • we encourage taking notes on paper
  • we’ll use devices to take attendance, run poll at start, and sometimes for quizzes but please put away thereafter
  • quiz days are in syllabus

Participation

• Two components:
  • in-class attendance
  • online message board contributions
    • four posts
    • at least two in the first half of the semester
    • two in the second half

Video Essay

• Guidelines on bcourses

• Sign-up complete: all 12 weeks have teams. Thank you!

• Today: our FIRST video essay, on Sami Blood. Thank you to the team for going first.

They Say, I Say

The Move That Makes It Scholarship

• They Say: restate someone’s claim accurately (an author, a position, a common view)

• I Say: respond with your own claim; the best responses have tension: they complicate, extend, or push back

• This is the template of academic argument, and it is the rubric for your essays and the final

• You will write under it three times this semester

They Say, I Say

• The single most important template that we focus on in this book is the “they say _______; I say _______” formula that gives our book its title. If there is any one point that we hope you will take away from this book, it is the importance not only of expressing your ideas (“I say”) but of presenting those ideas as a response to some other person or group (“they say”).

Templates, all the way down

Discussion:
What is Burke saying here?

Let’s hear from: …

Social Science Templates

• Political science theory tested against evidence, including one or more films
  • Example:
    • They say: Patterson & Monroe (1998) argue that political narratives shape how communities understand their past and mobilize for the future.
    • I say _________ drawing on evidence from The Battle of Algiers

You Are Already Halfway

• You wrote 30 posts about The Battle of Algiers, and 20 more about Sami Blood already

• They were full of strong claims: sharp observations about scenes, camera work, power

• In our terms: you wrote excellent I Says

• To turn a post into an essay, we can add a They Say: connecting your observation to what a scholar has argued

• Watch what happens when we add one

From Your Posts: Groups or Individuals?

“Not only did you have subgroups within these groups (the FLN, the police, the civilians…) but individual narratives were equally important… I felt like it emphasized the importance of many individually lived experiences, rather than flattening them out with a simple group analysis.”

— R.

Discussion:
What is this post claiming? Do you buy it?

Let’s hear first from: …

The Reveal

“[We should question] the tendency to take discrete, bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis.”

— Brubaker (2002), “Ethnicity without Groups”

R.’s post anticipated Brubaker, this Friday’s section reading. When you notice something, there is often relevant scholarship.

From Your Posts: Form as Hierarchy

Three of you noticed the same thing from three directions: the film does not just tell you about hierarchy. It builds hierarchy into what you see and hear.

Sound

“The Muslim quarter is depicted as loud, lively, and crowded, with high levels of political and cultural energy. The French neighborhoods… are depicted as almost silent… even the restaurants and dance bars seeming more toned down.”

— M.

Score

“The change in background music when showing Muslim quarters and European quarters also demonstrates how the war is felt differently by different communities: the Algerian people are fighting for their freedom and right to self-determination, while French people appear unbothered and continue with their daily lives.”

— K., building on last week’s lecture

Architecture

“We see the French people literally screaming down upon the Arab man from balconies and windows multiple stories up… you can almost see how the hierarchy is literally baked into the physical makeup of the city.”

— M., on the balcony scene

Practice: Find the They Say

One more post from last week. For the next hour, keep one question in mind: what would a scholar say to this?

• “[The paratroopers’] arrival is portrayed with a parade… how can force be legitimized or normalized to a populace?” (R.)

• The authors we meet today have been thinking about exactly these questions since the 1990s

Felicia Pratto

Jim Sidanius
(1945-2021)

Sidanius & Pratto Ch 2

• Combining aspects of multiple theories and constructing “social dominance theory” (SDT)

• All complex human societies tend to be structured as systems of group-based social hierarchies

• At the very minimum, this hierarchical social structure consists of one or a small number of dominant and hegemonic groups at the top and one or a number of subordinate groups at the bottom

Positive and Negative Social Value

• Dominant group is characterized by its possession of a disproportionately large share of positive social value

• Subordinate groups possess a disproportionately large share of negative social value

Group- vs Individual-Based Hierarchies

• Individual-based social hierarchy:
  • individuals might enjoy great power, prestige, or wealth by virtue of their own highly-valued individual characteristics
• Group-based social hierarchy:
  • one’s social status, influence, and power are also a function of one’s group membership and not simply of one’s individual abilities or characteristics

Imagine Two Children

• Two children with the same level of native talent, individual drive, and personal ambition
• However, if one child is of the upper class, has ambitious and well-connected parents, and attends the “right” schools, the chances are that this child will do quite well in life
• For the other child growing up in an impoverished, dangerous, and sociogenic neighborhood and afflicted with inferior schools, chances are that that child will not do quite as well in life

Trimorphic Structure

• Age system
• Gender system
  • males have disproportionate social and political power compared with females (patriarchy)
• Arbitrary-set system
  • socially constructed and highly salient groups based on characteristics such as clan, ethnicity, estate, nation, race, caste, social class, religious sect, regional grouping…

Discussion:
Can we really reduce such deep divisions to just arbitrary-set?

Let’s hear from: …

Arbitrary-set Emerges with Surplus

• Hunter-gatherer societies much more egalitarian

• Hunter-gatherer societies lack sufficient economic surplus for specialization and wealth accumulation

• Societies producing substantial and stable economic surplus are also those that have arbitrary-set systems of social hierarchy

Ancient, Modern, Every Continent

• Partial list would include nations and societies such as Mexico, Japan, Sumeria, Nigeria, Germany, Israel, France, Canada, the United States, Taiwan, Zaire, Korea, Israel, the Zulu empire, the former USSR, South Africa, ancient Rome, ancient and modern Egypt, Greece, China, Scandinavia, Benin, Persia, and the pre-Colombian societies of the Inca, Aztec, and Maya

• Every attempt to abolish arbitrary- set, group-based hierarchy within societies of economic surplus have, without exception, failed

Arbitrary-set Most Violent

• Arbitrary-set system is also, by far, associated with the greatest degree of violence, brutality, and oppression

• While the age and gender systems are certainly no strangers to very brutal forms of social control, the brutality associated with arbitrary-set systems very often far exceeds that of the other two systems in terms of intensity and scope

• Besides Holocaust, twentieth century alone has witnessed at least seven major episodes of genocidal, arbitrary-set violence

Three Basic Assumptions

1. Age- and gender-based hierarchies will tend to exist within all social systems. Arbitrary-set systems of social hierarchy will inevitably emerge within social systems producing sustainable economic surplus

2. Most forms of group conflict and oppression (eg, racism, sexism, nationalism, classism) can be regarded as different manifestations of the same basic human predisposition to form group-based social hierarchies

3. Human social systems are subject to the counterbalancing influences of hierarchy-enhancing (HE) and hierarchy attenuating (HA) forces

Schematic Overview of SDT

Individual-level SDT

Ideological-level SDT

Institutional-level SDT

Aggregated Individual Discrimination

• Simple, daily, and sometimes quite inconspicuous individual acts of discrimination by one individual against another

• Example: decision of a boss not to hire or promote a person from a given minority group

• Cumulative effect of individual acts of discrimination are aggregated over days, weeks, years, decades, and centuries

Aggregated Institutional Discrimination

• Rules, procedures, and actions of social institutions

• Institutions may be public or private, including courts, lending institutions, hospitals, retail outlets, and schools

• Sometimes conscious, deliberate, and overt, and sometimes it is unconscious, unintended, and covert

Behavioral Asymmetry

• There will be differences in the behavioral repertoires of individuals belonging to groups at different levels of the social power continuum

• Behavioral asymmetry will also be affected by socialization patterns, stereotypes, legitimizing ideologies, psychological biases, and the operation of systematic terror

“Oppression is a Cooperative Game”

• Within SDT, we do not regard subordinates merely as objects of oppression, but also as people who usually retain some agency and actively participate in the oppressive exercise

• In other words, within SDT, group oppression is very much a cooperative game

• Subordinates do resist their own oppression but…

• Successful social revolution is a rare event and most group-based systems of social hierarchy remain relatively stable over long swaths of time

Varieties of Behavioral Asymmetry

• Asymmetrical ingroup bias: Dominant groups will tend to display higher levels of ingroup favoritism

• Outgroup favoritism or deference: asymmetrical ingroup favoritism is so strong that subordinates actually favor dominants over their own ingroups

• Self-debilitation: subordinates show higher levels of self-destructive behaviors than dominants

• Ideological asymmetry: HE and HA social ideologies and social policies will systematically vary as a function of one’s position

Legitimizing Myths

• Two functional types: HE and HA

• Hierarchy Enhancing Legitimizing Myths (HE-LMs)

• “What all these ideas and doctrines have in common is the notion that each individual occupies that position along the social status continuum that he or she has earned and therefore deserves. From these perspectives then, particular configurations of the hierarchical social system are fair, legitimate, natural, and perhaps even inevitable.”

Legitimizing Myths

• Hierarchy Attenuating Legitimizing Myths (HA-LMs)

• HE-LMs serve to exacerbate and maintain group-based social inequality

• HA-LMs serve to promote greater levels of group-based social egalitarianism

Callback: R.’s Parade

“Their arrival is portrayed with a parade and lots of French citizens praising their arrival… how can force be legitimized or normalized to a populace?”

— R., on The Battle of Algiers

Sidanius & Pratto have a name for that parade: a legitimizing myth. That is a They Say meeting an I Say.

Let’s hear from: …

Resiliency

• Group-based social hierarchies tend to be highly stable over time but stability is not absolute

• “Regime smashing” social revolutions are rare but do occur

• “There is not a single case in which an egalitarian transformation has actually succeeded”

• Even in cases in which the ancien regime was overthrown, like the myth of the phoenix, some new arbitrary-set order soon rose up to take its place

Social Organization with Primates

• All primates within hominoid clade (ie, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and baboons) have systems of social dominance

• Further, there is a group-based nature to these systems

• Trimorphic structure similar to humans with social status a function of:

  • age (older animals dominating younger animals)
  • sex (males dominating females, with major exception)
  • position in kinship and friendship groups, eg, rudimentary arbitrary-set systems

Revisiting Schematic of SDT

Summary

• SDT attempts to take elements from the individual, group, institutional, and structural levels of analysis

• Ubiquitousness of social hierarchy and ethnocentrism are most parsimoniously understood in terms of survival strategies adopted by hominoids, including Homo sapiens

Summary

• While age- and gender-based hierarchies tend to exist within all social systems, arbitrary-set systems of social hierarchy invariably emerge within social systems producing sustainable economic surplus

• Most forms of group conflict and oppression (eg, racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, nationalism) are different manifestations of same basic human predisposition toward group-based social hierarchy

• Human social systems are subject to influences of Hierarchy Enhancing (HE) forces and are partly counterbalanced by opposing Hierarchy Attenuating forces (HA)

Questions?

Break

Video Essay:
Sami Blood

Our first video essay of the semester. Thank you to the team for going first:

D., A., J., S., and M.

Feedback for the Team

Phones out. Sixty seconds. Two questions. Phones away.

Discussion:
Where do we see ‘two children’ in Sami Blood?

Let’s hear from: …

From Your Posts: The Ear

“Elle Marja cuts the reindeer’s ear and claims ownership, and when the boys hurt her ear, to me it showed a power hierarchy… a clear power hierarchy between the natives and the Swedish throughout the entire film.”

— J.

Discussion: What were examples of individual discrimination in Sami Blood?

Let’s hear from: …

From Your Posts: Shame Is Taught

“Njenna embodies innocence and finds comfort in her Sami customs, while Elle-Marja feels shame about her culture… Njenna shows how this shame and desire to conform are taught, and how hate is passed on and creates cycles.”

— A.

Discussion: What were examples of institutional discrimination in Sami Blood?

Let’s hear from: …

From Your Posts: From Myth to Measurement

“For most of recorded Scandinavian history, the Sami have been… mythologized as magical or otherworldly beings, a framing that evolved over time into a more modern, clinical language of racial difference.”

— G.

Institutional Discrimination: Science

Institutional Discrimination: Language

Language fights today

Discussion: What are examples of legitimizing myths in Sami Blood?

Let’s hear from: …

Questions?