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has been less well documented or publicized are the actual techniques used to classify people by race. In chapter 6, we examine in detail some cases of mixed-race people who applied to be reclassified after their initial racial designation by the state. These borderline cases serve to illuminate the underlying architecture of apartheid. This was a mixture of brute power, confused eugenics, and appropriations of anthropological theories of race. The scientific reason given for apartheid by the white supremacist Nationalist party was "separate development"the idea that to develop naturally, the races must develop separately. |
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In pursuing this ideology, of course, people and families that crossed the color barrier were problematic. If a natural scientific explanation was given for apartheid, systematic means should be available to winnow white from black, coloured from black and so on. As the chapter delineates, this attempt was fraught with inconsistencies and local work-arounds, as people never easily fit any categories. Over 100,000 people made formal appeals concerning their race classification; most were denied. |
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Although it lies at a political extreme, these cases form a continuum with the classification of people at different stages of tuberculosis. In both cases, biographies and categories fall along often conflicting trajectories. Lives are twisted, even torn, in the attempt to force the one into the other. These torques may be petty or grand, but they are a way of understanding the coconstruction of lives and their categories. |
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Part III:
Classification and Work Practice |
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In part III, chapters 7 and 8, look at how classification systems organize and are organized by work practice. We examine the effort of a group of nursing scientists based at the University of Iowa, led by Joanne McCloskey and Gloria Bulechek, to produce a classification of nursing interventions. Their Nursing Intervention Classification (NIC) aims at depicting the range of activities that nurses carry out in their daily routines. Their original system consisted of a list of some 336 interventions; each comprised of a label, a definition, a set of activities, and a short list of background readings. Each of those interventions is in turn classified within a taxonomy of six domains and twenty-six classes. For example, one of the tasks nurses commonly perform is preparing and monitoring intravenous medication. The nursing intervention "epidural analgesia administration" is defined as: |
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