Leigh--
Thanks for your message on the relationship between larger-scale social
classification systems and particular implementations of them. Your two
types of relationship -- legitimation and "torque" -- are interesting,
and your work on them has been useful to me in thinking about the issue.
I wonder if there's also a third type of relationship, one that involves
feedback from the level of particular implementations to the larger
classification systems. My model for this is linguistic anthropological
work on language change and honorific systems (eg, Errington, STRUCTURE
& STYLE IN JAVANESE). Javanese has complex speech levels, where many
linguistic forms come in sets that are denotationally synonymous but
signal different sorts of social identities and relationships between
speaker and addressee/referent. This is not a system for classifying
individuals, exactly, but it is a system used to classify individuals in
practice -- as higher or lower status than the speaker (eg), or as
more/less refined.
Errington shows how, over time, forms that are associated with the
highest status speakers come to be appropriated by lower status
speakers. So a form that once indexed high refinement now comes to seem
a bit coarser, because "everyone" is using it. What happens is that,
over a generation or so, the elite shift to using another form in that
slot. So the formerly refined form is given up to the linguistically
"nouveau riche", and a new refined form is adopted. Then the process
starts over again.
This is a coarse summary, but I hope the point is clear. Here's a case
in which the larger linguistic system gets "torqued" and ultimately
changed, because of systematic pragmatic facts about language use in
particular situations. I wonder if the same sort of phenomenon happens
outside of language systems, with the sorts of classifications you
study?
Stanton
-- Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 (215) 898-6307 http://www.upenn.edu/gse/fac/wortham/
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