|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Authors in this tradition warn against the dangers of anachronism. Hacking (1995) on child abuse is a sophisticated version that we discuss in chapter 7. If a category did not exist contemporaneously, it should not be retroactively applied. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The other school of thought holds that we should use the real classifications that progress in the arts and sciences has uncovered. Often history informed by current sociology will take this path. For example, Tort's (1989) work on "genetic" classification systems (which were not so called at the time, but which are of vital interest to the Foucaldian problematic) imposes a post hoc order on nineteenth-century classification schemes in a variety of sciences. Even though those schemes were perceived by their creators as responding solely to the specific needs of the discipline they were dealing with (etymology, say, or mineralogy), Tort demonstrates that there was a link between many different schemes (both direct in people shifting disciplines and conceptual in their organization) that allows us to perceive an order nowhere apparent to contemporaries. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From a pragmatist point of view, both aspects are important in analyzing the consequences of modern systems of classification and standardization. We seek to understand classification systems according to the work that they are doing and the networks within which they are embedded. That entails both an understanding of the categories of those designing and using the systems, and a set of analytic questions derived from our own concerns as analysts. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archaeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent. An institutional memory about an epidemic, for example, can be held simultaneously and with internal contradictions (sometimes piecemeal or distributed and sometimes with entirely different stories at different locations) across a given institutional space. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the case of AIDS, classifications have shifted significantly over the last twenty years, including the invention of the category in the 1980sfrom gay-related immune disorder (GRID) through a chain of other monikers to the now accepted acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). It is now to some extent possible to look back at cases that might previously have been AIDS (Grmek 1990) before we had |
|
|
|
|
|