Birth of a Neologism: Will ‘Biominorities’ Stick?

Thinking about Foucault’s conceptual inventions is always an opportunity to test what language can do.

One of his most resonant concepts is biopower. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as “the power of a political entity to control and regulate the lives of its populace.”

Foucault’s point, though, is that biopower isn’t just any such power at any point in time. It’s a form of political control that arose after we stopped believing in the divine right of kings or acceded to other centralized authority based in a single person.

The OED’s first citation, from the 1978 publication of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, reminds us that “the beginning of an era of ‘bio-power’” was marked by “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” Kings and such could be subtle, but not as subtle as biopower.

Even in 1978, biopower would not have been the first neologism to append bio- to an unanticipated word or concept.

The British Isles have long offered their consumers laundry detergents with bio as a selling point. Bio here means that the product relies on biodegradable enzymes to do the heavy lifting. The OED traces biodegradable back to 1959, when it was deployed to predict the market arrival of detergents that could decompose.

There is an astonishingly long list of words that have absorbed bio as a prefix. Most are scientific, but not all, and increasingly even scientific concepts – like biome – have moved out into discourses beyond the lab.

The most recent entry into the bio lexicon is the term biominorities, put forward by the anthropologist and sociologist Arjun Appadurai, writing in the publication Scroll.in about genocidal practices in the present day.

It’s a trenchant political post. Its subjects — Gaza, the Rohingya region of Myanmar — go well beyond the parameters of this language blog. But we might still use biominorities to consider here how language reconfigures what we mean when we look at the world.

One of our most distinguished global thinkers, Appadurai writes knowing that he’s inventing and investing a term with power. “By biominorities,” he explains, “I mean those whose difference (ethnic, religious, racial) from the national majorities is seen as a form of bodily threat to the national ethnos.”

Much can and surely will be written about Appadurai’s concept, its viability, and what happens if the term is applied to situations beyond those on which he focuses.

Here let me only point out that the neologism biominorities surprises the reader. It asks us to consider minorities within a population 1. “as a body” and 2. as that “body” is perceived as a threat — a “bodily threat” at that — to the imagined, collective “body” of the dominant, self-defining ethnic majority.

Discussions about bodies always seem to be about both something real and something imaginary. The body of the divinely anointed king (cue the concept of the king’s two bodies). The Hobbesian compact in which all social participants join collectively with the king as their head. The Foucauldian understanding of the postmonarchic state as bristling with surveillance — an unseen, distributed system of power with which a government controls our bodies and our lives.

As political theory, critical analysis, and sometimes even efforts at diplomacy continue to move forward, we will see whether the neologism biominorities sticks, and whether it can refract the harsh light of ethnopolitical tension in new and productive ways.

Maybe we can even imagine not imagining bodies as other than what they are.