Expert Power and the Classification of Human Difference

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses experts’ far-reaching power to classify things—particularly humans—and how that power is strongest when expert categories seem objective and timeless. First, it outlines three pillars for a sociology of classification: (a) seminal work interrogating the social origins of expert classification systems; (b) the “performative” power of categories to remake the world in their image; (c) the dynamic way classifying people actually changes them, but also creates “looping effects” that can transform the categories themselves. It goes on to review existing scholarship on diagnosis, medicalization, and psychiatry, as well as the classification of race, ethnicity, nationalism, status, -etc. Finally, it confronts long-standing efforts to use genetics and biology to classify mental illness and developmental difference, as well as race and ethnicity. By way of conclusion, it argues that biology will never resolve the immense challenges or dangers inherent in human classification, but it will initiate unpredictable new cycles of performativity and looping.