Hi Nate, Thanks so much for your good work in getting this going. Just to
note that the chapter is from a book co-authored with Geoffrey Bowker. Leigh
>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.
______________________________________________
Susan Leigh Star, Professor
Department of Communication
9500 Gilman Drive
University of California at San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0503
lstar@ucsd.edu http://weber.ucsd.edu/~lstar/
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