Netta’s Reviews > White: The History of a Color > Status Update

The Bible is not a text in which color notations abound, far from it. There are whole books lacking a single color term (Deuteronomy, for example); others limit their use to the area of textiles; throughout, light (light, dark, bright, brilliant, dim) and material (gold, silver, ivory, ebony, precious stones, flax, murex, kermes) take precedence over color strictly speaking.

Indeed red was the first color to be made and then mastered in Europe, first in painting, as early as the Paleolithic period, later in dyeing, in the Neolithic period. It was also the first color to be linked to stable, recurrent ideas that played an essential role in social life: strength, power, violence, love, beauty.

To associate, oppose, distinguish, hierarchize: the first function of color is to classify. In order to do this, contrary to what is generally assumed, most societies have relied on a limited palette. For a long time in Europe,3 colors seemed to matter more than all the others, at least on the social and symbolic levels: white, black and red, which is to say, from the historical perspective, white and its 2 opposites

The colors of the physicist, chemist, or neurologist are not those of the historian, sociologist, or anthropologist. For all the human sciences color is defined and studied first as a social phenomenon. More than nature, the eye, or the brain, it is society that “makes” color, that gives it its definitions and meanings, that articulates its codes and values, that controls its uses and determines its stake.