DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES
The Importance of Understanding Categories of
Difference and Identity1
Paul James
University of Western Sydney, Australia
Understanding how the identity of a Hutu person is different from a Tutsi
and why nearly a million people were murdered in the name of this
contradiction
difference is not handled adequately in the current literature. Drawing on
difference parts of the world as different as Rwanda and Sri Lanka, this essay takes up
this theme through three main arguments. Firstly, categorizations about
genocide
identity, even when hardened into ugly typologies by processes of coloniza-
identity tion or state formation, are always full of tensions and contradictions.
Secondly, negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it means
ontology
to be human. We cannot simply hope for the end of such negotiation and
typologies wish away categories of identity such as nation, ethnicity, religion and tribe.
These categories are not the problem, so much as the ways in which
violence
difference is negotiated, instrumentalized and shoved into typologies of
hierarchical status. Negotiating the terms of identity through categories of
1 With thanks to Liz
difference is fundamental to questions of power, meaning, violence and
Conor for her astute creative social practice. Thirdly, while processes of categorization are part of
editing, and to the the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve all too often to
anonymous
reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of identity. This is
reviewers for
Interventions, one of the source of practices as diverse as racism, chauvinism and genocide.
whom developed a Sometimes tensions between ontological formations can be positive, but all
interventions, 2015
Vol. 17, No. 2, 174–195, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2014.993332
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES
Paul James
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heartfelt response
that sent me back
too often instrumental use of these tensions in the contemporary world has
with renewed vigour led to aggressive violence and defensive mayhem. Running beneath all these
to rewriting and arguments is the methodological proposition that, in order to get past either
clarifying concepts.
‘clash of cultures’ descriptions or ‘flows of difference’ analyses, it is useful to
This essay is an
attempt to do what I develop a systemic understanding of ontological formations and their
failed to achieve in difficult intersection.
Globalism,
Nationalism,
Tribalism (James How is a Hutu person different from a Tutsi? What is the cultural basis for
2006) –that is,
systematically define
the difference between the Sinhalese and the Tamils? Why are Bosnians
the differences Muslim and Serbs Orthodox? The implicit and lived categories of identity
between different that lie behind these questions have had alternatively glorious and vexatious,
dominant ontological
and sometimes even terrifying consequences across modern history. Being
formations.
identified as Tutsi or Jew was the basis for intense periods of ethnic genocide.
At the same time, categories of identity are the basis of human life and
crucial to living with others across the complex boundaries of difference.
Who is an Aboriginal person? What does it mean to be black? Identity is
foundational to social life, and it is that which makes it a terrain of
colonization, cultural management and contestation. It also makes it basic to
questions of ontological security. Identities are not simply cultural inventions
– though of course they can be culturally fabricated, managed, distorted and
reduced to simplistic typologies.
The first argument of this essay is that categorizations about identity, even
when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of coloniza-
tion, state formation or general modernizing processes, are always full of
tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these contradictions are destructive,
but they can also be creative and positive. In this essay, while I will elaborate
mostly on the destructive side of such tensions, there are significant cases of
careful translation and positive reconciliation across ontological difference.
From the designation of nineteenth-century Haitian identity – dénomination
générique de noirs – which defined ‘black’ in such a way that it also included
the white mothers of Haitians, to the Yolgnu concept of ganma, which refers
to the estuary merging of the salt waters (modern knowledge) and the fresh
inland waters (Yolgnu customary knowledge), practices of creative engage-
ment across ontological difference have been important to the human
condition. Negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it
means to be human. This is the second argument of this essay. Such
ontological differences go much deeper than the projections of liberal
multicultural pluralism. The problem is that, with the dominance of modern
ways of handling these questions of difference, destructive examples have
come to outweigh the positive.
While this is mostly a theoretical essay, a few key examples – in particular
Sri Lanka and Rwanda – are used to give some sense of the complexity of the
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 176
process that I want to explore. The process of making the Sinhalese version
of Sri Lankan identity occurred in manifold and overlapping ways. This
ranged, on the one hand, from the activities of colonial administrators,
philologists and census-takers to postcolonial activities including rituals of
state or definitions of the right pathway for national development. However,
through, and despite, all of this top-down cultural management, being
Sinhalese became part of the bottom-up life-worlds of people, linking old
traditional religions and modern state-building. It was lived in their everyday
practices and meanings, and contributed to making a contradictory tradi-
tional–modern ethnocratic state. In other words, the typologizing processes
effected by the modern state and the modern national economy, and always
framed in relation to other states and the capitalist globalizing market in
general, became the context, not the singular cause, for local communities to
project their political fate into a contested but common territory. It also
became the basis for a twenty-five-year internal war. It was not the cause of
the war, but it was the basis for the conflict-ridden ideological claims about
difference.
The remarkable thing about Sri Lanka and many other places in the
postcolonial South is how much the connection between modern national
identities and traditional religious cosmologies continues to shift and
shimmer between commonsense understandings and intensely defended
‘truths’. This is at a time when nationalisms in Western Europe and North
America have been slowly losing their cosmological intensity. Despite the
continuing neo-traditional rhetoric of religion in the United States, the
ontological tensions between the modern and traditional are not as abiding
as in Sri Lanka or Rwanda. By the time that the US nation-state had
proclaimed itself One Nation under God, their supreme deity had become a
white melting-pot assimilationist. By comparison, most Sri Lankans or
Rwandans inside the country or in the extended diaspora communities,
overtly religious or not, tend to identify themselves through reference to these
cosmological truths about essential and deep ethnic difference. The contesta-
tion is, for the most part, conducted over the political consequences of these
truths rather than the fact of the different identities themselves.
As an extension of the first two arguments, a parallel methodological
proposition lies at the heart of this essay. It suggests that in order to
understand the complexity of identity formation, we need to rethink how we
understand social life. Instead of great divides such as posited by the classical
(and still current) anthropological distinction between the modern and the
premodern (or ‘traditional’), this essay argues for a levels-in-tension
methodology that takes very careful cognizance of the intersection of
ontological formations in all social formations. Instead of surface-of-
swirling-difference argument associated with the metaphor of rhyzomic
DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES
Paul James
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relations posited by some postmodernist writers, this essay argues for a depth
analysis.
Using Sri Lanka and Rwanda as diverse examples, the essay will argue that
the intensely defended truths that divide identities and accentuate differences
are exacerbated by the tensions inherent in the uneven coming together of
different ontological formations – the customary (including the tribal), the
traditional, the modern and the postmodern. The essay will define and
elaborate on these terms shortly. The exacerbation of categories of differ-
ence–identity is of course not unique to these places, but those places that
have fought recent wars in the name of difference provide intensified
examples.
Types of identity are both highly contested at the level of detail and
interpretation, and truly believed at their foundations. Nationalism in Sri
Lanka, Bosnia and Rwanda is, as with all nationalisms, very modern. It is
projected through a form of cultural management, which would suggest that
2 The 2010 National it should be open to self-conscious ‘seeing through’. However, it also draws
Festival of Aluth on traditional cosmologies such as the Bosnian Muslim cosmology of
Avurudu was held
identity in Allah, as well as, in some cases, tribal mythologies and animated
under his own
patronage. The presences – particularly relevant to understanding modern Rwanda. This
ceremony was once uneven intersection of the customary tribal, the traditional, the modern and
celebrated in the the postmodern has often been self-consciously managed – even if in very
Kandyan Kingdom
as a festival under the different ways. Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapakse, like many political
patronage of the leaders in South and Southeast Asia, clothes himself in traditional garb with
traditional kings. He living religious meaning while at the same time presiding over an intensifying
had thus taken on the
mantle of a Kandyan
modern (neoliberal) economy. Images on current street posters in Sri Lanka,
king. At the same and online recordings of President Rajapakse circulating the globe, show him
time, intensely wearing a traditional white shirt, sarong and a red sash. He is dressed
modern means of
accordingly when he is anointed in the National Festival of Aluth Avurudu,
communication such
as the World Wide and he dresses that way when he makes pronouncements about rationalizing
Web, YouTube and modern issues such as GDP growth and financial investment.2 His image
Facebook are used by
management even draws on the possibilities of the relativizing of image
semi-official outlets
to promote the politics made possible by postmodern reflexivity, but for the most part it
president’s involves the naturalizing of traditional dress code (as content) through
traditional image. modern signification (as form).
See, for example, the
Orlanka face-book
This is not to imply that culture is something that can be taken on and off
page at http://www. like a sarong or suit. Nor is the question of whether it is a suit or sarong the
facebook.com/pages/ key point of distinction that makes the difference. Rwanda’s unelected
Onlanka/
president Paul Kagame always dresses in a western suit and tie rather than
389026719740.
Onlanka.com is customary dress. However, just as with Mahinda Rajapakse, his is also a
owned by M. T. practice of modern cultural management. Having said that, neither practice
Udaya Arunakantha. is an instance of simple ‘cultural invention’. When Rajapakse and Kagame
The site has been
online since 26 get up in the morning and get dressed for work they are bringing together
January 2004. divergent ontological reference points for similar political purposes. Kagame
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 178
has the problem of being a Tutsi person, leading a country that has around
90 per cent of the population as Bahutu. He is so obviously known as Tutsi
that his discursive emphasis on national unity and official suit-wearing
globalized modernism has to be symbolically foregrounded as central to
Rwanda’s ruling political culture.
Here, for the purpose of our analysis, culture is defined as a social domain
that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions which,
over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a
life held-in-common. In other words culture is ‘how and why we do things
around here’. The ‘how’ is how we practise materially, the ‘why’ emphasizes
the meanings, the ‘we’ refers to the specificity of a life held-in-common, and
‘around here’ specifies the spatial and also, by implication, the temporal
particularity of culture. Questions of power are ever-present in the cultural
domain in relation to contested outcomes over social meaning, and
categorization and the making of typologies are central.
Understanding what happened in Rwanda across the course of the
twentieth century, leading to the period of genocide and beyond, entails, I
suggest, looking at the way in which customary tribal processes of communal
identity were simultaneously remade as neo-traditional sources of political
authority and institutionalized as modern legitimized castes of power. In
short, as part of the global extension of colonialism to Africa in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very nature of tribal difference
in Rwanda was reconstituted. Although in relative terms nineteenth-century
Rwanda was linguistically and culturally interconnected – and this makes the
explanation apparently harder because the region had much in common with
a European traditional kingdom – it was nevertheless divided into three main
sub-tribal groupings: the majority Bahutu, the Batutsi, officially a minority of
9 per cent of the total population before the massacre, and a tiny group
called the Batwa.
Understanding the relevance of this unremarkable constitution of identity
for the future genocide involves understanding how the complex nature of
cultural division was hardened into a modern typological matrix. Herein lies
the third substantive argument of this essay. While processes of categoriza-
tion are part of the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve
all too often to reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of
identity. They harden those older processes of categorization into codified
taxonomies of difference. Differences thus gain a redoubled intensity.
The precolonial polity, or at least one layer of it, was from the end of the
eighteenth century a highly centralized kingdom based upon the semi-
sacredness of its leaders – thus layering the traditional over the tribal–
customary. Only in the nineteenth century, through intensifying colonial
intervention as the identities of pastoralist and Tutsi became taxonomically
synonymous, did this become a double domination: pastoral aristocracy over
DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES
Paul James
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agriculturalists; and ethnic-identified Batutsi over Bahutu (and Twa). Even
then a customary process called kwihutura qualified the boundary between
Batutsi and Bahutu. It allowed the possibility through accrual of pastoral
wealth of leaving behind Hutuness and becoming a Tutsi person. With
formal colonization, identity became both less variable and more vexatious.
Gradually under German, and then Belgian, rule, Tutsi identity, associated
with both customary–tribal and traditional–cosmological power, and Hutu
identity associated with contingent subjection on both these grounds, were
3 On the made into two sides of a strict modern caste-like division.3 Type-confirming
complications of censuses were organized, type-based identification cards were issued, and the
using the
terminology of caste
traditional–customary structures of chiefdom were used by the Belgians as
and class in relation the apparatus of a savage, mediated, modern administration. Expressed in
to the Batutsi, see more general terms, modernization brought about the fixing of separate
LeMarchand (1970).
tribal identities, as both sides, colonial and native, thus called upon the
subjectivity of customary continuity for very different reasons and distorted
the basis of its older meanings.
As Mahmood Mamdani subtly argues, the colonial state depended on this
meshing of the modern and traditional: ‘these powers were justified as
“customary”, and “custom” was proclaimed by the very authority sanctioned
by the colonial power as “customary”. This tautology was crystallized in the
legal institutions’ (Mamdani 1996, 12). Here, however, Mamdani is treating
the customary and traditional as the same thing, counterposed to the
modern. I want to avoid this usual anthropological dualism between the
modern and premodern – present even in an author who is otherwise so
sophisticated – and say that nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
colonial power depended upon a contradictory overlaying of at least three
layers of social relations: modern, traditional and customary–tribal.
The point remains a parallel one to that made by Mamdani, at least in
principle, but it has different explanatory power when it comes to
understanding the genocide period. With the coming of democracy, the
Bahutu, now a modern tribe–caste–class, looked at the same time to
embodied expressions of their ‘essential’ difference – smaller stature, shorter
noses and so on (Louis 1963) –as if they were still embedded in tribal
relations lifted into a traditional cosmology. Potentially countermanding
traditional overlays, such as through Christianity with its different sense of
cosmological universalism from Rwandan cosmologies, qualified this pro-
cess, but also gave it a self-conscious poignancy. In the context of competing
ontologies, Catholic training that ‘we are all equal in the site of God’ was
translated by Hutu youths into a very different conception: ‘they, the Batutsi,
must not be human.’ Thus, when we came to the genocidal period, at one
level the Batutsi and the Bahutu continued to treat themselves as part of an
unstable tribal formation in the old way, with identifiable pathways for
crossing genealogical differences, and at the same time as utterly different
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 180
ethnic groups (in the modern sense). Modern democracy, underscored by
Catholic Hutu-directed egalitarianism, meant a decreasing capacity to
proclaim this ‘essential’ embodied difference, but it also held the life-blood
of its alternative. The contradiction between these levels, and the tension
between two forms of traditionalism, I would argue, intensified the need to
distinguish difference by other means, including brutal assault upon the
bodies of the other. Why, for example, would a Hutu killer push a sharpened
bamboo stick through the anus of a slain Batutsi and up into his or her brain.
Arjun Appadurai provides a thought-provoking attempt to answer this
question:
The question is, how can forms of identity and identification of such a scope –
ethnic labels that are abstract containers for the identities of thousands, often
millions of people – become transformed into instruments of the most brutally
intimate forms of violence? One clue to the way in which these large numerical
abstractions inspire grotesque forms of bodily violence is that these forms of
violence – forms that I have called vivisectionist – offer temporary ways to render
these abstractions graspable, to make these large numbers sensuous, to make labels
that are potentially overwhelming, for a moment, personal. To put it in a sanitized
manner, the most horrible forms of ethnocidal violence are mechanisms for
producing persons out of what are otherwise diffuse large-scale labels that have
effects but no locations. (Appadurai 1999, 318–319)
The argument being presented in this essay encompasses both this inter-
pretation and the opposite. Labels, taxonomies and modes of categorization
are not so simple. It was not a simple process of attempting to humanize
modern abstractions that fuelled the violence. More saliently, it was a messy,
contradictory and uneven attempt symbolically to dehumanize those who are
not so simply and stably different as the modern taxonomies would suggest.
The Tutsi became crafty anus–brain connected crossers of boundaries. They
could never simply be cockroaches or non-humans. They had to be produced
as such.
What Appadurai’s analysis misses are the different levels of analysis
necessary to understanding such a complex process as modern genocide.
Abstract maps of embodied difference are ways of generalizing from the
particularities of persons, but that does not mean that sharpened bamboo
sticks serve to produce persons out of these generalized maps. To the
contrary, at least in my argument, the bamboo sticks served symbolically as a
means of carrying through the process of dehumanizing and objectifying
others. This was not despite, but rather because of, the contradictions
involved in actually killing persons face to face. These contradictions
DESPITE THE TERRORS OF TYPOLOGIES
Paul James
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intensify as murderers are confronted by the repeated flesh-and-blood
concreteness of particular deaths. Sometimes the deaths were based on
dislike and opportunism, sometimes rage, sometimes fear, but the ontological
context was much bigger than this. They bleed like us; they die like us.
Having killed them, how then can we truly show the ugliness and evil of their
Otherness?
To understand this complexity, we need systematic categories of analysis
as well as generalizing concepts of identity and difference (hence, the parallel
methodological argument developed in this essay). The issues are not
straightforward. Typologies have long been a problematic part of modern
categorizing processes, but such categories, including simple typologies, are
crucial in doing deep social research as long as their explanatory limits are
recognized. The key problem is what typological analysis tends to claim for
itself. To be blunt, categorical research cannot be reduced to typographical
description or even typology critique. The worthwhile task of identifying
dominant social formations, categories of identity and difference, and
historical instances of attributing types to complex differences between
people, breaks down into reproducing cultural stereotypes if all it achieves is
a descriptive resonance.
4 Here it is important Typology critique becomes effectively useless if all it does is say that the
to note that the
types are constructed. It even becomes dangerous when it makes a normative
critique is directed at
postmodern claim that we should flatten out the terms of difference into ‘cultural
understandings of inventions’, suggesting that the people who identify as Hutu, Tutsi,
difference and not
Sinhalese, Tamil, Bosnian Muslim or Serbian Orthodox could simply leave
necessarily at all
poststructuralist behind their given types to become liberal cosmopolitans like the ‘rest of us’.
methods of Thus, for all its problems, unless we want to move to a modern liberal or
deconstruction. It is
directed firmly at
postmodern plural flattening of difference,4 we need to work through the
understandings of complexity of categorization and social typologies. And to do this, analytical
identity as plural categories of difference are required.
when this is simply
understood as
This essay, while acknowledging the various problems associated with
rhyzomic and describing dominant typologies, explores one approach to categorical
surface-based. analysis that attempts to get past these problems. Without understanding
Certainly, all identity
is contingent and
fundamental categories of difference and identity, we arguably flatten the
plural, but once this is world into a modern set of types or a postmodern swirl of competing
said, the nature of pluralized differences. The people who live those categorical differences
that contingency
needs to be will continue to act upon them and social critics will continue ineffectively
investigated carefully to ask ‘Why?’ Attributing one-dimensional answers to a multidimensional
across the different process will never answer that question. It is not even enough to say that
layers of social
embedding. Identity we are experiencing intensifying hybridity. Hybridity has always been part
is not all on the of the human condition. The question returns: what forms does hybrid-
surface. ity take?
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Categorical Analysis: Defining Different Ontological Formations
Categorical analysis, as used here, turns on defining different ontological
formations, defined through the ways in which basic categories of existence
are lived spatially, temporally, corporeally, performatively and epistemolo-
gically. Each of these terms is important. They are the categories of human
life. They summarize the very different ways in which we live in time and
space as embodied persons, performing sociality and knowing in different
ways what it means to do so. As used in this essay, ontological formations or
‘ways of being’ are not treated as ideal types. Neither are they understood as
standalone formations, at least not across the period since humans first
encountered each other as culturally bounded groups and began to
interconnect their mythological explanations. Ontological formations are
treated as formations-in-dominance. In the contemporary world they are
coexistent and therefore co-temporal (James 2006).
Secondly, the names that I will use for these formations – the customary,
the traditional, the modern and the postmodern – are well-used conventional
concepts. Certainly, these are terms that sometimes cause discomfort,
particularly for some theorists who dislike any kind of categorizing because
of its usual modern inflections. These critics are right that it is important to
avoid the deeply problematic and uncomfortably lazy ‘Great Divide’
between modern and premodern ways of life, a problem that anthropology
as a discipline is largely yet to escape. However, rather than inventing
neologisms, the approach reworks well-worn concepts, seeking to redefine
them in terms of their ontological bases and their lived relations.
Thirdly, rather than defining such a formation in temporal distinction to
other formations – that is, rather than reductively using an epochal term such
as premodern to designate all that has come before the modern, thus treating
the modern as the master category to define all others – ontological
formations are defined both comparatively and for themselves. In other
words, a particular formation is defined in terms of its own valences rather
than what is conventionally said to come before or after. This approach
attempts in this way to leave behind the usual problematic uses of the
prefixes pre, proto and post. Ontological formations cannot in these terms be
simply treated as four great epochs fading into each other. Epochs can only
be provisionally designated as the time and space of an ontological
dominant; not as homogenizing singularities. In the world today, even as
that world is dominated globally by the modern – sometimes called ‘late
modernity’ – these formations coexist in many different ways across different
global–local spaces.
Fourthly, the approach suggests that the dominance of different ontolo-
gical formations gives rise to different ways of making typologies. For
example, the form of typology inherent in the traditional Great Chain of
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Being is very different from the early modern cataloguing of nature in
Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century Systema Naturae, even though both included
angels. The Great Chain of Being took God to be the basis of taxonomic
difference and interconnection. The Linnaean taxonomy, while still embed-
ded in its traditional roots, took systematic natural difference to be
fundamental to being. In turn, both of these are very different from the
late-modern mapping of the human genome, which treats abstracted entities
called DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid molecules inferred from shadow pictures
in electron microscopes, as the basis of living difference. In one sense, they
are all abstract taxonomies of nature, distant cousins in common purpose
across the centuries, attempting to organize our understanding of the
relationship between things. However, their commanding orientations are
very different.
This leads to a fifth proposition. In order to distinguish between different
formations we need a notion of valences or orientations – ways in which
different categories of being are lived. This last point will become clearer in a
moment, but first a little contextualization.
How Do Other Writers Talk about Formations of Being?
Most writers who address the question of ontological formations begin with
the question of ‘the modern’ and they tend to turn it into the name for a
historically demarcated epoch – ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernity’. Fredric
Jameson and David Harvey, for example, provide beautiful book-length
evocations of the phenomena, but give us no direct or ontologically
grounded definitions. A bevy of other relevant books either define the terms
loosely and phenomenally – for example, sometimes the modern is equated
to increased speed and expansion, begging questions about how fast or
extended social life has to be to be modern. And sometimes writers defer the
task with sophisticated self-consciousness. It is amazing how, for all the
centrality and common use of the concept of ‘the modern’, how little and
how badly it is defined.
The most direct definition of the classical discussions is Jean-François
Lyotard’s. ‘I will use the term modern’, he says, ‘to designate any science
that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making
an explicit appeal to some grand narrative’ (1986, xxiii). Hence, he says, ‘I
define the postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives’ (1986, xxiv).
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth (2011) does something of the same thing when she
calls the emergent postmodern condition ‘the discursive condition’. For all of
the force of these two writers, chosen here because they are evocative
theorists, their interconnected definitions of the modern/postmodern, reduce
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 184
the difference between the formations to the means of enquiry – one mode of
practice. By comparison, this essay works across a range of modes of practice
– specifically, production, exchange, communication, organization and
enquiry.
Lyotard’s definition goes deeper into the black hole of troubled theory and
doubly reduces the meaning of the modern, implicitly suggesting that meta-
narratives are confined to the modern. To the contrary, it is easy to show
that other kinds of enquiry, including traditional science, otherwise known
as the ‘premodern’ sciences and sometimes called magic, alchemy or sorcery,
also appeal to meta-narratives about the order of things. In the same way, we
can say that all cultures develop typologies, but at different levels of
abstraction. In terms of the engaged theory presented here, these typologies
can be described as ontologically different kinds of meta-narratives. But they
are meta-narratives nevertheless. The difference is that traditional sciences
are drawn together as sacred cosmologies and the modern sciences drawn
together as immanent universalities. A further problem with Lyotard’s
definitions is that they limit the defining of a complex formation to a single
ontological category. He is only interested in the nature of knowledge –
epistemology. What about other ontologies such as differences in how
temporality or embodiment are lived? As our examples of Rwanda and Sri
Lanka have already indicated, when it comes to producing typologies of
different kinds of person, the category of embodiment is crucial. Equally,
performativity – the performing of the meaning of those bodies – is, as we
have seen, devastatingly critical. Whether it is through bamboo sticks or
white sarongs, performing ontological difference is done for the living as
much as for the dead.
To summarize the discussion thus far, ontological formations are under-
stood in terms of socially specific categories of being: temporality, spatiality,
corporeality, performativity and epistemology. These lived categories inter-
sect unevenly across various modes of practice and integration. In other
words, rather than defining formations in terms of each other or beginning
with the modern as the starting point or master epoch – with the past
relegated wanly to a singular ‘premodern’ and the future projected as an
end-of-the-modern ‘postmodern’ –the levels method defines each of these
life-forms in terms of their orientation to a changing and unevenly combining
set of categories. These categories are lived in foundationally different ways
across different settings of the human condition. In this kind of engaged
theory, when such ontological categories come together as patterned,
sustained relations, they are provisionally called ontological formations.
When, in a particular time and place, an ontological formation becomes a
social dominant, then that time and place can tentatively, and only
provisionally, be characterized as an epoch in terms of such a dominant set
of orientations or valences.
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The next sections of the essay seek to elaborate a method for understand-
ing four different ontological formations: tribal–customary relations, tradi-
tional relations, modern relations and postmodern relations. The essay is
structured by elaborating each concept in turn, although, as will soon
become obvious, the examples used will require all of the concepts to do
some work before all of them are defined in detail.
The Customary as an Ontological Formation
The customary tribal as a formation is defined by the way that analogical,
genealogical and mythological valences come to constitute different social
practices – production, exchange, communication, organization and enquiry
– in relation to basic categories of existence: time, space, embodiment,
performance and knowledge. Here the term ‘valence’ comes from the Latin
valentia, meaning strength or capacity. It comes via the field of chemistry, in
which from the nineteenth century it has been used to refer to the ‘combining
power of an element’. More recently it has been used in psychology to
express an orientation. Here it is used to suggest a social orientation. The
three defining valences have been chosen because they arguably give a
minimal sense of the complexity of tribal formations. They have overlapping
consequences, but they can be analytically distinguished.
An orientation to an analogical valence has its primary embedding in the
relation between the natural and the social, or what is more poetically
known in the literature as the ‘nature–culture’ contradiction. Here the social
and the natural are treated as analogical to each other. There is no sense that
the social has been lifted out as a separate sphere of life. A genealogical
valence is primarily grounded in the relation between birth, becoming and
mortality. It emphasizes embodied relations and their consequences for
ongoing connection even after death. The third customary valence, the
mythological, is primarily expressed in the relation between social practice
and oral expressions of what that practice means – stories and images.
Stories become mythologies that create and reproduce meaning. Speaking
broadly, these valences are foundational for the human condition, even
today – albeit overlaid and reconstituted by more abstracted valences.
Configured tightly together as socially dominant, these three valences are the
basis for an ontological formation, provisionally called ‘the customary’ or
‘the tribal’.
Expressed the other way around, having sets of social practices being
oriented in terms of just one or other valence does not necessarily make for a
customary way of life. Thinking or acting analogously about persons as
linked to animals for a specific purpose, for example, even if it qualifies
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 186
andropocentric modernism, does not necessarily make one tribal. But when
analogical, genealogical and mythological relations come together as a
dominant formation constituting the way in which people live, they
constitute a powerful framing of customary tribal life.
Within a tribally constituted way of life understood in terms of the
primacy of such valences, time, for example, moves analogically with nature
linked to diurnal patterns, seasons, years, but it is also embodied in life-
stages and life-times through genealogical rituals and cycles, and it is
expressed in mythological sequences, severally connecting past and present,
though without those connections expressing something singular beyond
themselves. In such a setting the transcendental and immanent are not
phenomenonally distinguishable, though at times of intensified meaning and
rites of passage a sense of the sacred is lifted into relief. In one often-cited
Rwandan myth of origin, milk provides an analogical basis for understand-
ing embodied identity and difference. Kigwa, who had descended from
heaven to become the first king of the Rwandans, had three sons, a
genealogically understood set of relations, from whom to choose his
successor: Gatwa, Gahutu and Gatutsi. One night he gave them each a
container of milk to protect. When dawn came it was clear that only Gatutsi
had stayed awake. Gahutu had fallen asleep and spilt his milk – he was thus
destined to be always a serf. Gatwa, having drunk his milk, was naturally to
be a pariah (LeMarchand 1970, 33).
Thus we have a mythological story, expressed through analogy and
5 The qualification genealogy, explaining the reality of a tribal–traditional community–polity.5
to this analysis is that These are persons and categories-of-persons, not types. This hierarchy was to
we are already seeing
a traditional
last until Rwandan independence, when the traditional metaphor and
reframing of the modern reality of spilt blood became much more important than that of
story in the spilt milk – and the categories were abstracted as types.6 The power of the
understanding of
Tutsi, once a royal category within an integrated tribal–traditional forma-
Kigwa, the first king.
We thus need the tion, and Hutu, once persons of the land in that same formation, were lifted
other categories of out and reversed by the coming of modern democratic majority rule. Gatwa,
analysis before we Gahutu and Gatutsi became the names applied to three ‘tribes’ in Rwanda –
have been able to
instance the first set. and tension filled the land. Then, in 1994, the terror of typologies reached its
6 On the
culmination after a period of linking the Batutsi to cockroaches – that is,
performative through modern racism using tribal analogy, objectifying the Batutsi as ‘the
importance of milk in cockroaches that have to be crushed’.
Rwandan tribal
There is one paradox in this process that bears careful repeating. Modern
society, including gift
exchange and processes of colonial invasion, administration and typologizing separated out
marriage ceremonies, these three ‘tribes’ from a previously integrated customary formation.
see Maquet (1961). Colonial life turned customary tribal relations into (modernized) tribes.
Prior to the colonial takeover, Tutsi and Hutu were part of one integrated
tribal formation with named processes for moving between the identity of
being Tutsi or being Hutu. After colonialization, a modern constructivist
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valence overlayed older formations and fundamentally changed the meaning
of these identities.
The Traditional as an Ontological Formation
The traditional is defined by the way in which analogical, genealogical and
mythological valences are drawn into a cosmological and metaphorical
reframing of different social practices – production, exchange, communica-
tion, organization and enquiry – in relation to the basic categories of
existence: time, space and so on. In societies dominated by traditional ways
of life, the secondary valences of the cosmological and metaphorical tended
(and tend) to be lived in conjunction with each other. It is only possible
philosophically to separate out or define the terms of these valences of social
life; and it is to this end that traditional and early modern philosophers have
been devoted for centuries.
The traditional, as I am using the concept, is quite different from what
modernists appropriate as ‘tradition’. Only modernists invent traditions. In
the modern sense, a ‘tradition’ is a regularized event that gains its power
through intense regularized calendrical repetition. By contrast, traditionalism
as described here is embracing and more broadly constitutive. Traditional
events, as opposed to modern traditions, are meaningful in relation to the
world around. They are repeated for themselves; they do not gain meaning
simply because they are repeated. In nineteenth-century Rwanda, King
Rujugira institutionalized the integrating cosmology of Ryang’ombe, Lord
of the Spirits, into the royal court and set up army corporations with
enduring institutional identity based around this myth. However, it is
important to note how creatively this was originally conceived. The Bahutu
control the original myth of Ryang’ombe about a small man who eats whole
oxen. To push the point home, those persons with little or no modern power
until the coming of democracy in twentieth-century Rwanda ‘owned’ the
myth of the dominant Tutsi king. Certainly, the king – Tutsi by traditional
identity not modern ethnicity – draws the ritual into the fuller cosmology.
But in keeping with the earlier discussion of the tribal–traditional meaning of
the connections across Tutsi–Hutu difference, the king is not allowed to take
part in the ritual or even know its full meaning (Newbury 1991). This is not
so dissimilar to the way in which traditional Jews in Jerusalem sometimes
depended on Arabs to open their synagogues on the Shabbat because they
were not allowed by Jewish law to do so themselves.
With an orientation towards the cosmological, the basic categories of the
human condition were and are abstracted in relation to a something else,
both immanent and beyond (with the emphasis on the beyond): God,
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 188
Nature, Form or Being, etc. With an orientation towards the metaphorical,
foundational relations were and are abstracted in relation to something
enclosing and beyond (with the emphasis on the enclosing): the City of Man,
the body politic, the civitas or the res publica Christiana. Through these
processes, human relations to Being are often given metaphoric social
resonance: Ryang’ombe, Lord of the Spirits, the singular King on the day
of judgement; the threefold person of Father, Son and Holy Ghost; or in Sri
Lankan Hinduism, the threefold Lords (Trimurti), their wives (Tridevi) and
their avatars. This is living metaphor. It is not a process of type-making as
we moderns know it. Though there is a strong traditional tendency to order,
codify, list and make taxonomies, these cannot be given one-to-one
correspondence with modern taxonomies. The difference is that traditional
typologies bring together identity and difference in social frames that are
evidence of the Something Else, both beyond and in the world. Modern
taxonomies are things in order, ordered in relation to their codified selves,
based on a rational constructed epistemology.
In settings of colonial and other encounters, prior valences are often
reconstituted over time. The reconstitution of analogical valences through
more abstract metaphorical modes of relating, for example, is not a
straightforward process to describe. It is most readily understood through
examining the change in the dominant mode of communication from orality
to writing that characterizes one aspect of the shift from tribalism to
traditionalism, mythology to cosmology. Writing potentially carries forward
all the sounds and performativity of orality through written emphasis and
rhythm, and through subsequent translation – reading aloud, theatre and
mimesis – but it leaves something unfulfilled. It adds an abstract layer of
increasingly codified language, lifting meaning out of its immediate embod-
ied context and opening it to wider connections, but it leaves an indeterm-
inate space (Ong 1982). In particular, it opens up a spreading space between
voice and text.
The more one enters that space to structure the possible spreading
meanings, the more it requires ontological work – and so generations upon
generations of philosophers, political theorists, literary interpreters and
theologians have been at work. Stories, once meaningful because they were
told in the presence of others by animating storytellers, now have to be
narrated in projected times, just as they give meaning to time (Ricoeur 1984).
Just as crucially, because written texts are available for transporting across
time, abstracted from their human scribes, they take on new possibilities.
And it is this lifting out of meaning from embodied, analogical time and
space that gives writing its magical, sometimes sacred, power. In the
beginning of narrating the Jews and Christians was the Word. Logos. Or
from a different tradition, at the beginning of the narration of ‘Sri Lanka’
was the Mahavamsa, the Great Genealogy.
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The continuing relevance of cosmological frames, even as they are
reconstituted in modern settings, helps explain the intensity of violence and
counter-violence. In the case of Sri Lanka there are two contested
cosmologies. Just as Rwanda where two cosmologies meet – a local creed
and a colonizing Christian creed – the Sinhalese and Tamil in Sri Lanka have
foundationally different understandings of the social–sacred whole. For the
Sinhalese Sri Lankans, perhaps the most important written text used to
explain themselves to themselves is a manuscript called the Mahavamsa.
Theravada Buddhist monks compiled it in the sixth century. Like all
cosmologies, it links various oral mythologies into a single sweeping
chronicle. There is one particular story from Mahavamsa still told to
Sinhalese children across the world about the origins of Sri Lanka – the
story of Vijaya, the heroic colonizer of the island. The story is well known by
Sinhalese people, and, while it now resides as a background feature of their
sense of their history rather than as an explicit argument, it has a natural fit
with the Sinhalese right to rule and their claim to be the first sovereign people
7 See, for example, of the island.7
http://www. One day, Prince Vijaya, son of an Indo-Aryan king in North India,
thelankainfo.com/sri-
lanka/46-history-of- carelessly ran over a calf with his carriage and killed it. He was exiled to an
sri-lanka.html uncivilized island below south India – Sri Lanka. He arrived with a retinue
(accessed 10 on the day of the Buddha’s nirvana. They settled the island, faced by two
April 2013).
tribes: the Yaksha tribe, deformed fierce cannibals; and the Naga tribe,
serpent worshippers. Vijaya fell in love with the Yaksha leader’s daughter,
Kuveni, a demon worshipper, and she helped him defeat the tribes. However,
in order for him to become a king his father ordered that he marry an Indo-
Aryan princess. Prince Vijaya banished Kuveni and their two children, a boy
and a girl. (After that the cannibals and idol worshippers disappear from the
story and that boy and girl commit incest to became the Indigenous people of
Sri Lanka.) Prince Vijaya prospered and he united the island.
At this point in the narrative, the modern narrator usually digresses to
bring in some scratchy nineteenth-century philology. The Sinhalese language
is said to be derived from the Indo-Aryan language of Sanskrit, one of the
oldest languages in history. In the middle of the nineteenth century, around
the time that anthropologists started to measure the size of people’s brains,
the linguistic process was connected to racial types. Sinhalese was linked to
the associated claim that an ethnic community carried the language south to
Sri Lanka. Sinhalese today is thus seen as a dialect of Sanskrit. Sinha means
Lion, Le means blood (royal blood). This is why, says our narrator, the
Sinhalese people are a very proud race; they carry a royal blood-line with a
rich history.
Going back to the original story, when Vijaya’s royal clan needed more
princes they brought them down from the South of India, the Chola
Kingdom. These were the Dravidians, the first Tamils in Sri Lanka. And
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 190
there you have it in the modern interpretation. For modern nationalist
interpreters, the Sinhalese are thus first people, and they invited the first
Tamils down to Sri Lanka when they needed them. That is, the colonizing
Sinhalese are so important to Sri Lanka that they even begin the genealogy of
the indigenous people, leaving beyond the demons and cannibals. For the
original Theravada monks who wrote down the genealogies, however,
ethnicity is never mentioned. They are connecting a genealogy, a lineage of
persons, through metaphorical duration. Sinha does mean Lion and Le does
mean blood, and as such the kings were Sinhala because they were royalty;
not because they were ethnically Sinhalese. This parallels the process, a
continent away, where the Batutsi were royal Batutsi because they were
connected to cows; not because a Tutsi person was ethnically superior to a
Hutu person.
Using the nature of ‘time’ as our example again, we can see how the
process of traditionally framing meaning and practice is broad and
encompassing. For Theravada Buddhist scribes, time would have had no
independent or separate reality; it exists only relationally (Prasad 1996). For
traditional Christians and Muslims alike, the times of the past, present and
future become cosmologically interrelated though an Omni-temporal Being,
with the past becoming a foretelling of what is to come, mediated through
the present. Linking this to writing in the biblical tradition, the centrepoint of
time is God’s word. Ecclesiastes 3.1 provides a classic rendition: ‘To
everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a
time to be born and a time to die.’
The older analogical sense of seasonal time features in the first phrase, but
immediately it is reframed by the cosmological understanding of ‘under
heaven’. This is close to what different lineages of writers, including Benedict
Anderson and Giorgio Agamben, both via Walter Benjamin and all steeped
in the Jewish/Christian traditions, too narrowly call ‘Messianic time’. This
concept does not work for our purposes for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is
only one aspect of traditional Christian/Jewish time. As, for example,
Agamben writes that Paul’s term for ‘Messianic time’ in the first century is
ho nym kairos, the time of what is now remaining: as one type of time
distinguished from chronological time (ordinary time) and eschatological or
apocalyptic time, the time of the anticipated sacred end (2005, 61). The
nearly self-evident point here is that all of these types of time are for Paul
created by God. The definition of the traditional used in this essay rests on
this more embracing sense of time as the given immanent/transcendental
location of all being, including all times, ordinary and revelatory.
Secondly, the concept needs to be relevant to other traditions beyond the
Abrahamic religions and their proclamation of an actual or possible
Messiah. Tamil Hinduism is culturally different in a multitude of ways
from Christianity and Judaism, but at the level of discussing basic categories
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of existence we find fundamental convergences. Redolent of the way in
which the Christian God is present ‘in the beginning’, so also Krishna is time:
‘I am time, bringing about the destruction of the world.’ Hindu time, linked
to creation, preservation and destruction, moves through unfolding cycles –
ages – both repeating themselves and open to change through the play (lilãì)
of multiple deities and the activities of humans (Lipner 1994; Kloetzli and
Hiltebeitel 2004). In traditional Islamic theology there are numerous
writings, charts and diagrams linking days of the week with letters of the
alphabet and divine names of Allah (Yousef 2008). Traditional life is full of
taxonomies that order different types of things, but it is always done in
relation to each being part of a larger whole. These taxonomies are not just
contingent ways of ordering the world where the order exists in the things
themselves. That is the modern way.
The Modern as an Ontological Formation
The modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life –
analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological and metaphorical rela-
tions – are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices
in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans, including
temporality and performativity. In constructivist terms, these basic categories
of human existence become the terrain of different projects to be made and
remade, to be thought and rethought anew. Bodies, landscapes, genome
systems, aesthetic principles and political systems become projects for
construction, including taxonomy-making, stereotyping and reconstruction.
From the rise of the divided public self in eighteenth-century Europe (Sennett
1996) to the globalized autonomous self of the twenty-first century, even the
self became an object of projected construction.
Other writers have suggested related themes for the basis of their
definitions of the modern. In one of his takes on a definition, Zygmunt
Bauman makes order and reflexivity central to its meaning: ‘We can think of
modernity as of a time when order – of the world, of the human habitat, of
the human self, and of the connection between all three – is reflected upon …
conscious of being a conscious practice’ (1991, 5). In another take he says it
is ordering in itself: ‘We can say that the existence is modern in as far as it
forks into order and chaos. The existence is modern in as far as it contains
the alternative of order and chaos. Indeed: order and chaos, full stop’ (1991,
6). This approach has the same problems that we found for Lyotard:
ordering, like the telling of meta-narratives, is not especially more important
to the modern condition than to prior formations. In another definition,
Bauman says that it is the process of designing-of-itself that distinguishes the
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 192
modern: ‘The existence is modern insofar as it is guided by the urge of
designing what otherwise would not be there: designing of itself’ (1991, 7).
Each of these partial and cross-cutting definitions is within a couple of
pages of each other in a single book, and he is not playing a game or
forgetting what he wrote in the previous pages. It illustrates the difficulty of
defining something so basic. Of Bauman’s many attempts the last definition
is the one that comes closest to working. Given that, as we have already
shown, ordering and classification have been part of the human condition
since long before the dominance of the modern, they cannot be made the
basis of a definition of this new way of seeing and encountering in the world.
But confining designing-of-itself to the modern is also questionable
(Fry 2012).
To find a way around this problem the (tertiary) valence of constructivism
has been chosen to give a sense of the ontological shift that occurs with the
coming of modern practices and ideas. It is not perfect – Elizabeth Deeds
Ermarth (2011) alternatively suggests that neutrality is the basic valence of
the modern. But the concept of ‘constructivism’ avoids the impression of a
‘neutral’ stripping of modern ontologies of their many ideological con-
sequences. In this sense the modern involves a relatively reflexive, restless
drive to construct and remake the world, nature and ourselves because we
feel we have no choice but to act upon what we, and the world, should
look like.
Going back to our example of temporality, time in traditional senses was
(is) often described metaphorically – it travels like an arrow, it is spaced like
knots on a long string, and it flows like a river, all understood in terms of
something beyond itself, God, Nature and the Cosmos. But in modernity
(that is, in places and times when the modern is dominant) time becomes ‘its
own’ construction. The emergence of such a level of temporality leads us in
two simultaneous directions: the first is subjectivism, for example, as
expressed by Immanuel Kant, for whom time was the foundation of all
experience. The second is objectivism, expressed by Isaac Newton in 1687 as
giving the possibility of ‘Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and
from its own nature, [flowing] equally without relation to anything external’
(Kern 1983, 11). Both converged on the notion of time as time-in-itself,
natural with a small ‘n’, and unable to be defined beyond itself. This broad
process affects all ontological categories and dethrones both of the dominant
entities that once gave them meaning: God and Nature, Being and
Nothingness. Time becomes the medium of passing or lost moments, mapped
day by day onto empty calendrical grids.
This is the form of temporality that allows for creative historicity. It
sensitizes politics. It is the history that becomes contested. It is the process
that leaves the space for reflection upon ‘historical time’ as it is measured
(tautologously) across time and space. However, it is also the kind of empty
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time that sees dictators, authoritarians, democrats and machete-wielders
trying to construct history in their image, filling the grid-spaces in the
calendar of empty history with their visions of self-splendour. Constructing
the modern world takes on some of its most destructive and violent
characteristics when it intersects in a distorted and unreflexive way with
traditional ontologies of embodiment emphasizing transcendental purity
(lifted out of the traditional connection to immanence) and traditional
epistemologies emphasizing Truth with a capital ‘T’ (leaving behind
traditional awe of the unknown). This provides meaningful background to
Michael Mann’s discussion of genocide as a modern phenomenon, but it
takes it one step further. Instead of Mann’s lament – ‘Thus, unfortunately for
us, murderous ethnic cleansing is not primitive or alien. It belongs to our
civilization and to us’ (Mann 2005, 3) –it has been argued here that it is
more the unreflexive impact of modern practices and subjectivities in ugly
conjunction with forms of neo-traditionalization that brought us the worst
instances of ethnic cleansing.
Modern/traditional ontologies of temporality and embodiment can be
handled creatively or destructively. In the case of the successful slave
rebellion in postcolonial Haiti in the late eighteenth century, being black
was creatively defined as the basis of a new nation. The constitution of 1801
had designated all citizens of Haiti as French, but by the time of
independence being black was singled out, from this time on, as the
overriding designation of Haitian identity: dénomination générique de noirs.
Into this definition of ‘black’ were also added white mothers of Haitians, as
well as German and Polish soldiers who defected from Napoleon’s troops
(Gulick 2006). At the other extreme of that possible range is how Adolf
Hitler handled the question of being a Jew. Jews were for him more than an
identifiable type. The identity of the Jew changed across history and
insidiously sought domination through its various devious projections.
What was consistent was the way in which the blood of the Jews thinned
that of the Germans:
The adulteration of the blood and racial deterioration conditioned thereby are the
only causes that account for the decline of ancient civilizations: for it is never by
war that nations are ruined, but by the loss of their powers of resistance, which are
exclusively a characteristic of pure racial blood. (Hitler 2010, 254)
Here blood is given the metaphorical power of an enclosing cosmology
(reversing the usual form of traditional cosmologies) and in the holocaust
that followed a modern railway system, a modern bureaucratic apparatus,
and a modern military machine combined with a subjective neo-traditiona-
lization to clear their blood-lines from history. In Rwanda, leaving aside the
additional complicating layer of customary tribalism, something similar
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i n t e r v e nt i o n s – 1 7: 2 194
happened. The 1994 genocide began in the city of Kigali, not with machetes,
but with machine guns and systematic killings. Garbage trucks organized by
local officials were used to clear bodies from the street. It was part of what
Linda Melvern (2004) calls a ‘genocide bureaucracy’. The leader of this
bureaucracy was Jean Kambanda, a man who was educated by Christian
missionaries, studied economics in Brussels, and worked in insurance and
banking.
The Postmodern as an Ontological Formation
The postmodern is not an escape from the modern. It is not a temporal stage
in history that one enters to leave Hitler and Kambanda behind. Postmodern
ways of life take all the wonders and horrors of the human condition into
itself, even as it reframes social relations in terms of contested relative
standpoints. This is, on the one hand, the kind of relativism that avoids
singular standpoints. It provides a critique of the modern that is crucial. But
on the other hand it fragments the possibility of politically projecting other
worlds – and this is what gives it no purchase on long-term politics. The
postmodern is thus defined by the way in which prior valences of social life –
analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological, metaphorical and
constructivist valences – are reconstituted through a relativist reframing of
social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all
humans. In these terms, basic categories of the human are all open for
deconstruction. In postmodern politics, for example, projections of alter-
natives are constantly relativized and displaced in favour of constant
deconstruction. It is no coincidence that the genre of modern utopia is now
treated as anachronistic in all but a couple of discrete fields. Thus the
strength of the postmodern – that it relativizes the certainties of the modern –
is not so absolute. In any case, it should be added that modern construct-
ivism continually undermines its own certainties, albeit in favour of new
ones. Instead of developing an extended treatment of the postmodern, there
is sufficient in that brief definition now to proceed to a simple conclusion
about the consequences of all of the foregoing discussion for the politics of
types and typologies.
Conclusion
Against those who suggest that even talking about typologies is dangerous,
this essay has argued that it is politically important to explore different
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dominant typologies. We need to know the uses to which they are put and it
is important to understand the power that inheres in their reproduction.
There are profound political consequences in the ways in which types and
typologies act to simplify identity and difference. However, that is not
enough. My argument about this exploration is that without some kind of
categorical analysis we are destined to stay on the surface of things and
meanings. Complex and thick descriptions will be developed, but power will
seem to inhere in the manipulation of identity rather than in the more
complex social layering of identity and difference. Exposing the implications
of dominant typologies, and developing ideal-type analyses as both meth-
odologies and ideologically projected realities, requires something much
more. And part of that ‘much more’ is recognizing the part played by the
way in which we as humans constantly enact patterns of intersecting,
entangling, and uneven ontological formations.
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