Social Research articles from June 1998

Social Research archives from June 1998

Normal people.
June 22, 1998... The idea that there are normal and abnormal ways for people to be and to behave is a very familiar one. So also is the idea that abnormality--or deviance--is something regrettable, deplorable, and even, in some cases, punishable. Here,...

Culture, sexual lifeways, and developmental subjectivities: rethinking sexual taxonomies.
June 22, 1998... Introduction In the twenty years since the first English translation of Foucault's (1980[1978]) History of Sexuality, Volume 1, sexual categories have become conceptually and ideologically suspect. Building on Foucault's post-structural...

Natural kinds, human kinds, and essentialism.
June 22, 1998... No one who surveys the landscape of social science can fail to notice the recent outcroppings of "essentialism." The term has quickly found a place in the vocabulary of critical social theory, although it has eluded a clear definition across...

Language and memory: "pre-columbian" America and the social logic of periodization.
June 22, 1998... Much of our remembering we do not only as individuals but also as members of particular "mnemonic communities" such as families, religious groups, and nations. Such memories are typically organized in accordance with certain "mnemonic traditions"...

natural assumptions: race, essence, and taxonomies of human kinds.
June 22, 1998... Everyday life would be unmanageable if we were not able to filter our attention away from the superfluous and toward the relevant. Categories do much of this work. Imagine how difficult it would be to find someone to fix a leaky sink if we...

Species, subspecies, and races.
June 22, 1998... The human species can be looked at from two quite different perspectives. The first perspective is that we are unique--fundamentally different from all other species. How do we protect ourselves from such antigens as viruses? Advocates of the...

Exporting U.S. concepts of race: are there limits to the U.S. model?
June 22, 1998... In the fall of 1993, I found a gem at the Bishop Museum Archives in Honolulu. There, in the middle of the Kalanianole Collection, was a priceless letter to Hawaiian King Kalakaua, dated January 26, 1885, from Dr. E. Arning, an English-speaking...

Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews".
June 22, 1998... How does one organize the categories that we call "deviance"? To examine the nosology of the deviant in modern (post-Enlightenment) culture one is constrained to use categories of analysis that arise in the spheres of law, medicine, and the...

Extremism and deviance: beyond taxonomy and bias.
June 22, 1998... What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause but what they say about their opponents. Robert F. Kennedy The...

The quiet return of categories.
June 22, 1998... Every object or event in nature can be assigned a value on one or more continuous dimensions or membership in one or more qualitative categories. The preference for a quantitative or a qualitative assignment depends on the theoretical...