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Introduction: Classification and its Discontents
Abstract
Categorical analysis pervades scholarly research. Yet types, and the typologies that catalogue them, have been unexamined frameworks in cultural histories. Types certainly pervade studies as types, yet the typologies they are nested within, as overarching and conjoined descriptive orders, remain largely unexamined outside the social sciences or histories of ideas. As such social kinds are rarely historicized or theorized beyond documenting their meaning, presence and less often, their recurrence. While it is widely accepted that categories and standards pervade knowledge and language systems, from comparative anatomy to linguistic etymology, colloquial typecasting is yet to be considered as a discursive practice. Yet since the voyages of exploration the arrangement of new botanical specimens into networked zoological categories was accompanied by the designation of racial kinds through typecasting, and these popular types were often transcribed into print, and very often credited with the empiricity of natural history. The purpose of this collection is understanding the operation of types and typologies in colonial thought and inaugurating theories of types that can account for the transferral of categories across knowledge registers. The ideas canvassed seek to account for the material basis of types in print, and their valencies across epochs, and the ways they impact on one another and how they interact with invaded cosmologies. The intention of this collection is to account for the classificatory tendencies, or taxonomic fields, which colonial types can be situated within and query whether the cultural tendency for typologies was intensified within colonial perceptual relations.
Tacit coordination is a pervasive aspect of accounting practice. This paper teases out insights on tacit coordination from existing scholarship, starting with studies of everyday life accounting, then turning to professional practice. It develops an understanding that, in the application of rules and accounting standards, in producing, framing, auditing and using statements, records, apologies or excuses, accounting practitioners tacitly coordinate towards the passing of accounts. This passing can be articulated in terms of structures, agencies and processes of tacit coordination involved in making accounting happen. The implications of this understanding of accounting practice and the importance of the wider domain of enquiry it is indicating are discussed with respect to the stewardship position of accounting professionals and the further development of accounting theory. The passing of accounts charges accounting practitioners with the stewardship of silence and indicates a broader case for accounting theory to address the full continuum of accounting practices. One vital role of such theory is to offer antidotes against the idea that any account, any slice of information, or any amount of ‘big data’ could speak for itself – or that it should.
Archaeologies of “Us” and “Them” explores the concept of indigeneity within the field of archaeology and heritage and in particular examines the shifts in power that occur when ‘we’ define ‘the other’ by categorizing ‘them’ as indigenous. Recognizing the complex and shifting distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous pasts and presents, this volume gives a nuanced analysis of the underlying definitions, concepts and ethics associated with this field in order to explore Indigenous archaeology as a theoretical, ethical and political concept. Indigenous archaeology is an increasingly important topic discussed worldwide, and as such critical analyses must be applied to debates which are often surrounded by political correctness and consensus views. Drawing on an international range of global case studies, this timely and sensitive collection significantly contributes to the development of archaeological critical theory. © 2017 Charlotta Hillerdal, Anna Karlström and Carl-Gösta Ojala.
Crime fiction started early in Australia, emerging out of the experiences of transportation and the convict system at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first Australian (that is, locally published) novel is generally agreed to be Quintus Servinton (1832), written by Henry Savery, a convicted forger who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 and—convicted once more of forging financial documents—died as a prisoner in Port Arthur in 1842. Quintus Servinton is a kind of semi-autobiographical fantasy that imagines its entrepreneurial protagonist’s redemption: surviving his conviction and jail sentence in order to return to England with his beloved wife. We can note here that it does four important things in terms of the future of crime narratives in Australia. Firstly, it presents colonial Australia as a place already defined by an apparatus of policing, legal systems and governance, where ‘justice’ can at least potentially work to restore an individual’s status and liberty: for example, through convict emancipation. Secondly, it insists that the experience of incarceration and punishment is crucial to that character’s reintegration into respectable life: ‘the stains that had marked him’, we are told, ‘were removed by the discipline he had been made to endure’ (Savery, vol. 3, ch. XIII, n.p.). Thirdly, the novel ties the colonial economy to financial investment and growth on the one hand, and fraud or forgery on the other. These apparent opposites are folded together at the moment of settlement to the extent that the phrase ‘forging the colonial economy’ is a kind of potent double entendre. Prominent transported forgers included the colonial artists Thomas Whatling (transported 1791), Joseph Lycett (transported 1814), Thomas Wainewright (transported 1837) and of course Henry Savery himself. In Savery’s novel, Quintus Servinton is ‘thunderstruck’ when someone explains the conventional distinction between legitimate financial deals and forgeries: ‘You surely do not mean, Sir, it can be a forgery, to issue paper bearing the names of persons who never existed….If that be the case…many commercial men innocently issue forgeries every day of their lives’ (vol. 1, ch. III, n.p.). This takes us to the fourth point: that crime fiction in Australia is also about imposture, where characters do indeed adopt ‘the names of persons who never existed’. The mutability of colonial characters—the question of how real (authentic) or fictional (fraudulent) they might be, and the impacts this has socially and fiscally on the colonial scene—soon becomes a tremendous problem for emergent systems of policing and governance in Australia. As Janet C. Myers notes, ‘the linkage between emigration and crime forged through convict transportation continued to evoke anxieties….The atmosphere in which such anxieties were nurtured was one of rapid social mobility and shifting identities in the Antipodes’ (2009, p. 83).
http://nishi.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-85/latrobe-85-022.jpg[21/06/2012 11:38:35 AM]
The use of images of older people in the British advertising media has been under-researched to date. Further, previous research in any country has tended to examine such images from an a priori framework of general impressions and stereotypes of older people. This study addresses these issues with British consumers' (n = 106) impressions, trait ascriptions, and similarity-between-images ratings of a representative sample of U.K. magazine advertisements featuring older characters. After a series of sorting task laboratory sessions, multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses revealed four clearly defined groups representing types of portrayals. These types emerged from the advertisements and from the views of the consumers themselves. These emergent groupings are: (1) Frail and Vulnerable, (2) Happy and Affluent, (3) Mentors, (4) Active and Leisure-oriented older adults. These groupings seem to be a logical context-appropriate derivation from previous findings on generally held stereotypes of older persons. It is argued that the groupings have the potential to contribute to a reliable typology of advertising portrayals of older people, with potential heuristic leverage in social scientific research of intergenerational communication, lifespan concerns, and the aging process.
Raj Bhopal re-examines the role of perhaps the most important contributor to the scientific concept of race, Blumenbach, whose insights and errors provide important lessons for us today.
How the "modern appearing woman" inaugurated a new relation between female identity and visual culture.
King Plates describes and illustrates a large collection of Aboriginal gorgets, also called king or brass plates. These were presented to perceived 'chiefs', faithful servants and to the specially courageous by governors and land holders. In other words, they were given to anyone who helped in some way to ease the white settlers' progress in the new colonies.
They had already been used in North America for the same purpose.
Troy provides a comprehensive history of king plates, describes other gorgets not in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. The book serves as an encouragement to other scholars to research in this area but also to Aboriginal people seeking information about their forebears.
In Taming Cannibals, Patrick Brantlinger unravels contradictions embedded in the racist and imperialist ideology of the British Empire. For many Victorians, the idea of taming cannibals or civilizing savages was oxymoronic: civilization was a goal that the nonwhite peoples of the world could not attain or, at best, could only approximate, yet the "civilizing mission" was viewed as the ultimate justification for imperialism. Similarly, the supposedly unshakeable certainty of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was routinely undercut by widespread fears about racial degeneration through contact with "lesser" races or concerns that Anglo-Saxons might be superseded by something superior-an even "fitter" or "higher" race or species. Brantlinger traces the development of those fears through close readings of a wide range of texts-including Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams, Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians by James Bonwick, The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, She by H. Rider Haggard, and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. Throughout the wide-ranging, capacious, and rich Taming Cannibals, Brantlinger combines the study of literature with sociopolitical history and postcolonial theory in novel ways.
In 1826 the British set up a garrison on the edges of an Aboriginal world at King George’s Sound, the site of present day Albany, Western Australia, with the aim of deterring the French from occupying the area.
The British newcomers and the area’s Indigenous inhabitants, the King Ya-nup, came to share a small space, forcing both cultures to adapt in order to communicate and interact with one another. Within this sphere associations and friendships were formed that were as surprising as they were unique.
This ethnographic history narrates several intimate cross-cultural stories of the developing relationships between British and Aboriginal individuals at King George’s Sound. The episodes recounted go beyond the common ‘friendly’ or ‘violent’ encounters, unearthing instead how and why particular King Ya-nup engaged with the British world, utilising the new presence to seeming advantage.
Shaking Hands on the Fringe presents innovative history writing and beautifully crafted prose in the tradition of Greg Dening and other writers of ethnographic history.
Despite the limited scope of the subject, the first two points liberate this book into a national (and international) interest: it is not a local book.<br /
In 1900 W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the colour line would be the key problem of the twentieth-century and he later identified one of its key dynamics: the new religion of whiteness that was sweeping the world. Whereas most historians have confined their studies of race-relations to a national framework, this book studies the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century these countries worked in solidarity to exclude those they defined as not-white, actions that provoked a long international struggle for racial equality. Their findings make clear the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of both race and human rights.
The study of gender in rural spaces is still in its infancy. Thus far, there has been little exploration of the constitution of the varied and differing ways that gender is constituted in rural settings. This book will place the question of gender, rurality and difference at its center.
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This is a review of John Fitzgerald's important book.
Through an intensive examination of photographs and engravings from European, Peruvian and US archives, this text explores the role visual images and technologies have played in shaping modern understandings of race. The book traces the subtle shifts that occurred in European and South American depictions of Andean Indians from the late-18th to the early-20th century and explains how these shifts led to the modern concept of "racial difference". Whilst Andean peoples were always thought of as different by their European describers, it was not until the early-19th century that European artists and scientists became interested in developing a unique visual and typological language for describing their physical features. The author suggests that this "scientific" or "biological" discourse of race cannot be understood outside a modern visual economy.
In considering a period of national anxiety about falling marriage rates and rising numbers of single women, this article looks at the ways different groups used the figure of the spinster to argue about the ways white women should live their lives. For some feminists, the spinster was an example of what life for a free, economically independent white woman could be. For masculinists, the single woman was a threatening figure, suggesting women's independence from men. These debates, however, also suggest broader anxieties about marriage and women's position within it.
Retraction: The article, published online on 24 December 2009 on Early View and 20 March 2010 in issue 50:2 on Wiley Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/) has been retracted by agreement between the journal Editor, Henry Buller, Blackwell Publishing Ltd and University of Melbourne following a plagiarism investigation. The retraction has been agreed due to what has been considered unacceptable overlap between this article and material previously published elsewhere by a different author.
A revealing and surprising look at how classification systems can shape both worldviews and social interactions.
What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures.
In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.
The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.
Estudio introductorio a los estereotipos, en el que el autor ofrece un panorama conciso y crítico de las principales aproximaciones teóricas, así como formulaciones sobre el papel del lenguaje y la cultura en la formación de estereotipos.
Typologies and Taxonomies: An Introduction to Classification Techniques
- Kenneth D Bailey
Bailey, Kenneth D. 2005. Typologies and Taxonomies:
An Introduction to Classification Techniques. London: Sage.