XCMA,
The collective reading for January is now up at
http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/.
PS: We still need vollunteers. There have been some interesting papers
floating around - hint hint :)
Nate
Susan Leigh Star
The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid
http://communication.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Star/starbowker.html
This chapter examines the torqued group of filiations between people and
classifications, that which tied racial categories to persons under
apartheid in South Africa. Here, race classification and reclassification
provided the bureaucratic underpinnings for a vicious racism. Here too, the
attempt to create a normalized, systemic bookkeeping system was embedded in
a larger program of human destruction. There are enduring lessons to be
drawn about moral accountability in the face of modern bureaucracy. The
ethical concerns are clearly basic questions of social justice and equity;
at the same time, their very extremity can teach us about the quieter, less
visible aspects of the politics of classification. We walk here a line
similar to that of Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil (1963). The quiet bureaucrat "just following orders" is
in a way more chilling than the expected monster dripping grue. Eichmann
explained what he was doing in routine, almost clerical terms; this was
fully embedded in the systematic genocide of the Holocaust.
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