Just because the Maori were once invaders, and then the British were,
doesn't mean that the adjudication or negotiation of names is arbitrary.
Another wise person, Cher'rie Moraga, once said to me, "you can't compare
oppressions." It's wrong, and it doesn't go anywhere.
So: arbitrary. I hear different meanings in our discussion:
-- arbitrary because not guided by essences or first principles
-- arbitrary because of the absence of an omniscient moral order
and adjudicator
-- arbitrary historically because whoever is doing the choosing has
no access to an overview (with implicit accompanying moral high ground).
There's another one, though, and that is arbitrary as an exercise of power
simply because you CAN. The sovereign arbitrarily assigning a task to
someone, or demanding a certain service. That frames the term as a use of
power without accountability to another.
Arbitrary could also mean a lack of real differences in the Peircean sense.
(Psychophysiologists forgive me but take it as an example): The choice of
red to mean stop at stoplights is basically arbitrary -- we could have
learned to stop at purple or puce or black. But having been made, that
once arbitrary decision is deeply, irreversibly entrenched. I think no one
has enough money or power to change that convention now. So its
arbitrariness is in the past, converted into the present *force* of
standardization.
I think the fight about names is not arbitrary at all, in any of the senses
used above, for all of these reasons.
L*
***************************************
Susan Leigh Star
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois 123 LIS Building
501 East Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820 Phone: (217) 244-3280
FAX: (217) 244-3302 email: s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu
____________________________________________________
"Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career....As
a social scientist, you have to...capture what you experience and sort it
out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your
reflection, and in the process shape yourself...but how can you do this?
One answer is: you must set up a file....." -- C. Wright Mills, "On
Intellectual Craftsmanship"