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Categorization is a fundamental human activity, which rarely becomes controversial until it turns on us and takes people as its objects. The troublesome consequences make up some of the central preoccupations of the social sciences: deviance, stereotyping, prejudice, stigma, discrimination, exclusion. All the same, the legacy of social categorization is hardly unambivalent. Classifications of people are indispensable in everyday social life, and the formal recognition and celebration of human differences underpins the modern values of diversity and identity. One task for social scientists is to make sense of this mixed legacy, to ask what it is about some categories and acts of classification, and about the theories and passions in which they are embedded, that generates so much hostility and suffering.
The papers collected in this issue of Social Research all address themselves to this task. Their focus ranges widely from general discussions of taxonomy to detailed investigations of racial, ethnic and sexual categories, and they variously appeal to literary, historical, philosophical and experimental evidence. Their disciplinary provenance is equally broad. However, despite differences in their theoretical commitments, assumptions and styles of argument, the papers all illuminate issues of common concern to the dispersed and often isolated communities of social scientists. We hope and trust that the reader will find new ideas--and new supports and challenges for old ones--about how human categories are established, contested, represented (and misrepresented) by laypeople and intellectuals alike, invested with explanatory powers and ontological attributes, and used to justify and motivate harmful beliefs and practices. Nick Haslam
Virginia R. Dominguez is Co-Director of the International Forum for US Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her most recent published works include From Beijing to Port Moresby: The Policies of National Identity in Cultural Policies (Gordon and Breach: 1998), and "The Racialist Politics of Concepts, Or is it the Racialist Concepts of Politics?" published in Ethos (Spring/Summer 1997)
John Dupré is a Professor of Philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. His most recent published work is "Metaphysical Disorder and Scientific Disunity," which appeared in The Disunity of Science (Stanford University Press, 1996) He is currently working on a book critiquing reductive explanations of human behavior.
Sander L. Gilman is a Henry Rice Luce Professor of Liberal Arts in Human Biology, and Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He authored Smart Jews (University of Nebraska Press) and co-authored The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought and German Culture, 1096-1996 (Yale University Press). He is currently writing Aesthetic Surgery: A Cultural History.
Nick O. Haslam is Assistant Professor of Psychology at The Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the New School for Social Research. He has published articles on classification in psychopathology, personality and emotion.
S. Alexander Haslam is Senior Lecturer Australian National University, specializing in organizational and social psychology. Among numerous books and articles, he co-authored Doing Psychology: An Introduction to Research, Methodology and Statistics (Sage, 1998).
Gilbert H. Herdt is Professor of Sexuality and Anthropology, and Director of Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. His most recent work is Same Sex, Different Cultures (Westview), and was editor of Sexual Cultures, Migration and AIDS/STDs (Oxford University Press).
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld is an associate professor of Anthropology and of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (MIT, 1996) and is currently working on a book titled Color Lies: Thinking about Thinking about Race.
David L. Hull is a Dressler Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. His recent works include "The Ideal Species Concept and Why We Can't Get Rid of It," which appears in Species: The Units of Biodiversity (Chapman & Hall). His current project is a general analysis of selection: biology, immunology and behavior.
Jerome Kagan is a Professor at Harvard University. His works include Galen's Prophecy (Basic Books, 1994) and The Nature of the Child (Basic Books, 1997). His current work is Three Pleasing Ideas (Harvard University Press, Fall 1998).
John C. Turner is a Professor of Psychology at the Australian National University. He most recently co-authored "Social Identity, Personality and Self-Concept: A Self-Categorization Perspective," in The Social Psychology of Self (in press).
Eviatar Zerubaval is a Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He has published Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Harvard University Press, 1997), and The Clockwork Muse: The Temporal mechanics of Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Harvard University Press, in press). He is currently working on a book on the social structure of the past.
