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they break down or become objects of contention. But what are these categories? Who makes them, and who may change them? When and why do they become visible? How do they spread? What, for instance, is the relationship among locally generated categories, tailored to the particular space of a bathroom cabinet, and the commodified, elaborate, expensive ones generated by medical diagnoses, government regulatory bodies, and pharmaceutical firms? |
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Remarkably for such a central part of our lives, we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities. Their impact is indisputable, and as Foucault reminds us, inescapable. Try the simple experiment of ignoring your gender classification and use instead whichever toilets are the nearest; try to locate a library book shelved under the wrong Library of Congress catalogue number; stand in the immigration queue at a busy foreign airport without the right passport or arrive without the transformer and the adaptor that translates between electrical standards. The material force of categories appears always and instantly. |
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At the level of public policy, classifications such as those of regions, activities, and natural resources play an equally important role. Whether or not a region is classified as ecologically important, whether another is zoned industrial or residential come to bear significantly on future economic decisions. The substrate of decision making in this area, while often hotly argued across political camps, is only intermittently visible. Changing such categories, once designated, is usually a cumbersome, bureaucratically fraught process. |
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For all this importance, classifications and standards occupy a peculiar place in studies of social order. Anthropologists have studied classification as a device for understanding the cultures of otherscategories such as the raw and the cooked have been clues to the core organizing principles for colonial Western understandings of "primitive" culture. Some economists have looked at the effects of adopting a standard in those markets where networks and compatibility are crucial. For example, videotape recorders, refrigerators, and personal computer software embody arguably inferior technical standards, but standards that benefited from the timing of their historical entry into the marketplace. Some historians have examined the explosion of natural history and medical classifications in the late nineteenth century, both as a political force and as an organizing rubric for complex bureaucracies. A few sociologists have done detailed studies of individual categories linked with social movements, such as the |
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