Racial categories operated through belonging-versus-otherness boundaries already in the early medieval period

Evidence

This suggests that community members had a strong sense of who they were and who, or what, they were not. Ethnogenesis organized social boundaries, offering “categories by which one might assert who belongs and who does not.” Even an act as minor as a haircut could challenge one’s membership in a social community, a unit that suggested racial categories, something that played an instrumental role in the manufacturing of monsters. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 89

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ethnogenesis as the crafting of social boundaries through who belongs and who does not.
• XREF: connects to: Race as a configuration dates only from the late eighteenth century; the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”