Pierce brought up the point that if we accept that gender is a social construct and begin to include myriad gender titles then so much of our daily life will be rendered incomprehensible. From my point of view, it seemed like Pierce's existential crisis was stemming from the idea that everything that our gender-related structures touch (which is a lot) might be torn down, leaving our identifiers shrunken and useless. If he was explaining it differently... whoops. This is what I took away.
Regardless, during the ensuing classroom discussion a question popped into my mind; the question seemed too broad (and possibly off-topic) to pose to the class; therefore, I will ask it here:
Do we, as humans, ever bother categorizing anything if we are not planning on or already making value judgments about the contents of those categories?
I have been considering this question mainly within the boundaries of characteristics about human beings themselves, for as Frye said in her essay on oppression,
"One is marked for application of oppressive pressures by one’s membership in some group or category. Much of one’s suffering and frustration
befalls one partly or largely because one is a
member of that category."
However, this idea seems to apply to almost everything in our daily lives. We sort things into groups so we can make value judgments about those groups, and vice versa. At this point, the question that immediately comes to my mind is whether or not we need those categories in order to live our lives in a manner that is substantially efficient. My guess is that, yes, we do; however, the hierarchical structure that those judgments often seem to form, especially as the judging is related to human qualities, are what seem to be the most dangerous and objectionable offsets of this habit.
I would love to know about what any of you think about this idea- I am sure of the possibility that I may be trapped in a circle of thought that is making me incapable of thinking of exceptions to this connection between categorization and value judgment. Also, to clarify, because categorization obviously entails some sort of judgment, here I have been referring to "value judgment" as judgment focused on the aspects of some thing or quality that make them better or worse than their counterparts. Hopefully that is clear.
Henry,
ReplyDeleteYour post raises an excellent question: Does social differentiation necessitate social inequality? Answering this begets first how social differentiation occurs and secondly how social differentiation leads to social inequality.
First, I would mention Piaget’s research on infant development (what’s up Psych 101), where he posited that infants learn to categorize information to create building blocks of knowledge that he called schemata. These schemata provide a framework to understand one aspect of the world and allow humans to quickly comprehend familiar situations. For example, our cognitive schemata provide us a script that explains what we will experience when we eat at a restaurant: we will wait in the lobby before someone shows us to our seats, where we order from menus, and after eating will be presented with a corresponding check to pay. If we were presented a check before we ate, we would find this strange due to its interrupting our cognitive schema of how restaurants operate. These building blocks of knowledge are what allow humans to comprehend the vast amounts of information we experience daily so that we can focus on new tasks.
Understanding psychological schemata influenced how some cultural sociologists explain social differentiation, as they refer to different categories we create (race, gender, sexuality, class) as collective representations. These representations consist of boundary markers that offer cognitive shortcuts to comprehend information relatively effortlessly. Without these cognitive categories, we would struggle to comprehend the vast amount of rushing information that our senses present daily (thus it's a type of schema). We tend to learn the collective representations/cognitive schema relevant to our own social worlds, and then we assimilate our own perceptions of reality to them because we do not want to expend much thought. Furthermore, this social differentiation is unavoidable as it is inherent in language. Representing a world without distinctions is impossible as the tools of representation, like language, are systems of differences.
Nevertheless, this differentiation does not necessitate domination. Seeing different characteristics among groups does not automatically create a hierarchy between them. We could create categories like “blue eyes” and “green eyes” and associate a variety of characteristics without creating an asymmetrical, oppressive power structure.
It is important to distinguish symbolic boundaries and social boundaries here. Symbolic boundaries introduce difference into what otherwise might be experienced as similarity. (e.g., racial categories of the single biological species homo sapien according to specific morphologies are symbolic boundaries.) Social boundaries, materialized and embodied in our collective practices, shared activities, and our social institutions, provide authority and disguise the divisions created as natural. (e.g., the institutionalization of racism and historical segregation.) Social boundaries occur when social power enforces symbolic boundaries. Not all symbolic boundaries must be social boundaries, however; therefore, social differentiation does not necessitate social dominance.
Very cool response! I did not know about that study on infant development.
ReplyDeleteIts interesting that you mention eye color... I seem to recall a mid 20th century racist structure that, in fact, did use that characteristic as part of its hierarchy. Even today, blue/green eyes seem to be prioritized over brown in terms of their aesthetic qualities.