Classifying to Kill - 9780857451248

From the late 19th through the 20th century, scientists, legislators, and other policy makers in “modernizing” societies increasingly turned to formal classification schemes to define and devise solutions for complex social problems. In her exploration of a specific classificatory system - the death penalty in the United States - the author offers a rich ethnographic study of how the parties involved in making, administering, and responding to the forty death penalty classification schemes form such concepts and how they learn and use the resulting categories. When practices are devised by relying on formal classification schemes to define and solve problems, the results are controlling processes that Bruce Lincoln terms “taxonomic tyranny,” and Pierre Bourdieu identifies as the stake in all political, economic, and social games. This study contributes to an understanding of why that stake is all too often driven into the heart of targets for reasons that mystify both those that drive the stake and those it kills.

“This is a scintillating read that goes to the heart of some central and quite shocking dimensions of United States society. The study presents a sustained ethnographic account of the moral and micro-political contests that make and remake classifications that define a crime and a perpetrator as deserving death. The book is a searing critique of the death penalty.” · Diane Austin-Broos, University of Sydney

“This is an important book, which extends the meaning of ethnography and participant observation because it makes us consider what, not merely who participatesin the actions observed...The book's view of ritualized thought in classification-controlled decisions should encourage students of ritual to rethink the limits currently placed on identifying and understanding ritual in modern society.” · Carol A. Smith, University of California, Davis