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Problematizes the relationship between demographers, the content of their science and the contexts in which this knowledge is consumed. Demography as a social science has been historically shaped by the needs of its community of users. The hunger for population knowledge has been a hunger for measurement. Demography is a science that has provided policy with both its ends and its priorities, with its targets and tools. Such pragmatism has not been without cost. Dwelling on measurement and quantification has left less space for the contemplation of what it is that demographers measure.

The authors point to existing trends in the social sciences, which take issue with the vocabulary of demographic measurement and challenge the facility with which concepts and categories are defined and used. Provides a rationale for the volume in terms of the needs of demography as a changing social science rather than the demands that persist for demographic knowledge. Considers the interdisciplinarity and the dialogue that is a current feature of critical demography and carefully reviews the contributions of history and anthropology. Both history and anthropology provide demography with the potential for critical reflection and innovation. The philosophical and epistemological heritage, tools, methods, and audiences of both disciplines have critiqued, enriched, and challenged population studies in ways that are considered and documented in this introduction. Reviews the state of the art suggested by this nexus of disciplines, methods, and methodologies to place the chapters included in the whole volume within a theoretical and innovative framework.

This introductory chapter explains the evolution of current historical thinking about the ‘middle sort of people’. It charts a shift in historical definitions away from the application of prescriptive economic or social categories, towards those involving status terms with which contemporaries identified. The discussion acknowledges current emphasis on the formative power of culture and language in shaping social identity, but eschews linguistic determinism. Instead, it utilizes recent sociological theory to demonstrate how simultaneous processes of external ‘classification’ (division and naming) and internal ‘identification’ (identifying and grouping) operated to forge social identity in this period. The introduction emphasizes the importance of the civil parish in structuring and containing these formative processes, and suggests that ‘middling’ identity remained tied to and fragmented by parochial loyalties and social perspectives.

State‐created, bureaucratically elaborated social categories are so normalized a feature of modern life that we usually ignore them—at our peril. Shows how the bureaucratic categories of state programmes often work to ‘make up’ persons, in Ian Hacking's felicitous phrase, who then come to fit their categories. Focusing on China, home to the world's largest population, it shows how, through the deployment of its central category, the planned/unplanned birth, China's programme of state birth planning, designed to modernize the populace, inadvertently created a huge ‘black population’ of persons deprived of the benefits of citizenship and modern life. The China material shows how state categorizing practices quietly participate in the construction of social reality by producing new forms of personhood, new kinds of politics, and new lines of social and political exclusion.

This chapter sheds light on how the once-clear distinctions between the visual and social approaches to social categorization of the human body have begun to blur. First, it reviews findings from classic studies of biological motion perception that bear directly on domains that social psychologists care deeply about—the perception of social categories, identities, and psychological states. It then describes two ways in which these basic patterns are constrained by social psychological processes. It reviews evidence that social category knowledge constrains the interpretation and evaluation of dynamic body motion for evaluative social judgments. Then, it presents data highlighting how knowledge structures(i.e., stereotypes)can bias one's basic perception of the human body in motion.

Highlights the ways in which marital ideologies are socially constructed and historically variable and suggests how transformations in these marital ideologies and their social categories can contribute to an understanding of fertility decline. The ethnographic material presented here comes from a multi‐generational study of gender, sexuality, and reproductive health among women and men in a community of transnational migrants in western Mexico and Atlanta, Georgia. Older couples in this community spoke about marriage in terms of ‘respeto’: mutual respect, gendered work obligations, and bonds of marriage, which are reinforced through reproduction. Younger couples, in contrast, presented an ideal of ‘confianza’: companionate marriage marked by a significant amount of ‘helping’ with previously gendered tasks, increased heterosociality, and greater emphasis on trust, emotional warmth, and communication than on obligation and respect.

Does ethnicity determine the formation of groups in immigrant societies? Multiculturalism and radical constructivism give opposing answers to this question. This chapter provides an empirical contribution to the debate by looking at patterns of group formation on the level of social categories and personal networks in the immigrant neighbourhoods of Basel, Berne, and Zurich. The chapter finds that ethno-national or racial categories are secondary principles of classification only and that the main boundaries are drawn between old-established residents of the neighbourhood (of different ethnic backgrounds) and newcomers, mostly recently arrived immigrant cohorts from the Balkans or the developing world. The social boundaries in the friendship networks of neighbourhood residents largely conform to this mode of classification. The chapter concludes by hinting at how this world view prepared the ground for the rise of a xenophobic, populist party in Switzerland.

This chapter argues that the object categories and social categories that children carve out, and the inductive power with which they are imbued, are shaped not only by the diversity of objects and people that they observe but by how these are marked in their language. This finding, coupled with other work reported in this volume, begins to connect decades of work in cognitive and social development. But the bridge that we are now building is precarious: It rests on far too narrow an empirical base. To advance theories of development and to promote positive social and educational outcomes for children growing up in the diverse kinds of social environments that constitute the human experience, the blueprint must be revised to rest upon a broader set of footings.

This chapter provides a discussion on the purpose of the book and its main arguments. It briefly discusses the cultural angle of the rule of law, as introduced and developed by colonial discourse, and looks at how ‘the rule of law’ brought with it a new language of the social and the institutional. It then presents the three themes running through this study. The first theme sets out the parameters of colonial discourse which posits that the colonial government created the spaces for the bhadralok's understanding of the good legal subject. The second theme argues that the bhadralok evolved a counter discourse that spun out the self-identity of good legal subjects in the public space. The third theme, the exclusion of other social categories, is based on three hidden premises that were fundamental to the educated Bengali's understanding of law and order, security, and criminality in the late nineteenth century.

This chapter reviews recent studies on how infants' face processing is tuned by experience with different classes of faces early in development. The research reveals that different degrees of exposure to gender and race categories impact how infants organize faces into different social groupings; and attend to and recognize individual faces within these general classes. In particular, early in development, infants may process a broad range of faces from different races and genders with equal facility. As infants develop and are selectively exposed to a limited number of face categories (i.e., one's own race and the gender of the primary caregiver), they come to demonstrate certain processing differences for those predominantly experienced categories relative to categories of lesser experience (i.e., increased visual attention, superior recognition, and categorization as opposed to categorical perception0.

This chapter reviews studies on how prejudice and discrimination related to one another in childhood. Children show strong prejudice at both the explicit and implicit level, but these attitudes do not reliably manifest themselves in behavior. How can this “attitude-behavior gap” be closed? It is argued that attitude toward a group is not the same thing as an attitude toward an individual who happens to be a member of that group. To equate those two is to presume an additional cognitive step, the step from category possession to category application. This step is believed to be a later developmental attainment, and its absence in early childhood may explain the apparent disconnect between attitudes and behavior in young children.

This chapter proposes that gender is a social category whose development and prominence might be supported by a special cognitive system. Unlike many other human category distinctions (e.g., Catholics and Protestants; Packers and Vikings fans; Blacks and Whites), males and females exist in nearly every society. Moreover, being able to classify others according to gender is relevant to at least one important activity of our species: namely, reproduction. For these reasons, evolutionary psychologists have suggested that humans evolved cognitive machinery dedicated to gender categorization. As evidence in favor of this proposal, researchers point to experiments showing that gender encoding—unlike, race encoding—is automatic and difficult to suppress in adults.

This chapter analyses which categories are mobilised by residents to describe the social groups in their area and which normative assessments are attached to those descriptions. This intersectionality approach allows one to see social stratification at work in how inhabitants of diverse neighbourhoods in Leipzig, Paris, and Athens perceive, describe, and judge their social environment. The three cities that are analysed represent different histories of diversification, and all three of them have experienced societal disruptions and change. The residents' own positionality shapes how they categorise other residents and judge their social environment. Moreover, the construction of social groups in diverse neighbourhoods in these cities draws on a variety of rather classic social categories and is influenced by national discourses. Stigmatisation often occurs at the intersections of these categories. Also, neighbourhood change is an important factor in the construction of social groups.

This chapter describes the broad structural features of the political culture of San Francisco, California during the period from 1849 to 1859. It discusses the intersections between state and society in the antebellum public sphere and suggests that contemporary understanding of social categories requires a framework that is ethical and characterological. The chapter also explains the agony of organization, participation, and authority on a neoclassical, masculine, and deadly public stage.

Drawing on literatures from gender, race, disability and queer theory, this chapter identifies shared themes and aims to develop a generic understanding of discrimination. Discrimination can be understood as misrecognition, raising questions about where identity comes from – whether characteristics originate in biological make-up or are externally created and attributed - how it is conveyed and what could be done to increase accuracy. Negative attitudes create distortions; diminishing (Thompson 1998) or demonizing. Oppression can be understood as enforced identity distortion; a cause of exclusion or requirement for inclusion. Identity may be understood via indicators of having, being and doing as well as contextual factors. The case for and against social categorization is explored, along with scope for cross-group alliances offered by multiple characteristics. Using different discourses, the literatures argue that inequalities arise consequent on the structure and culture of society as defined by dominant groups (social model). They refute biological/genetic explanations (individual/medical model). An interactive model draws attention to the process through which individuals interact with their environment. This suggests 3 sites for ‘adjustment’ to maximize social inclusion: the removal of social barriers, increasing individuals’ resources and reducing scope for misrecognition within distributive processes.

This chapter begins by arguing that the old-style componential analysis of words like men, women, boys, and girls in terms of ±male and ±adult is profoundly misguided, despite remaining to this day a staple part of the linguistics curriculum. It then develops richer semantic explications for these, and a suite of related, social category words, showing that this approach provides much improved descriptive adequacy and cognitive plausibility. Taking a cross-linguistic perspective, it argues that although many social category meanings are language-specific (including English boys and girls), a small number – including meanings comparable to English men, women and children – are lexical universals. The chapter includes a comparison with prototype analysis in cognitive linguistics, as well as demonstrating the new NSM theory of semantic molecules.

This chapter explicates how the affect of disgust relates to violence by focusing on a case study of an upwardly mobile member of what is generally conceived of as a “lower” social category, a proponent of Hindu nationalism who was complicit in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in the city of Ahmedabad. It sheds light on the unique communicative aspect of meat, which can pose a threat to central Gujarat. It focuses on the role disgust plays in creating new forms of identification by enabling a successful externalization of those aspects of the self that have to be denied. Furthermore, it extends the current paradigms by focusing on processes of identification found to be prevalent in Gujarat during the events of 2002. These processes are, in the literature, insufficiently understood and inadequately taken into account. Finally, it attempts to open up new approaches by shifting the focus onto different intellectual and theoretical grounds.

A rapidly growing population of multiracial Japanese Americans are often portrayed either as a visual symbol of the disappearing of race or the romanticized “Happy Hapa.” Are there alternative ways that individuals are transcending binary options and resisting stereotypes? In what context, the collective categories of “Japanese American,” “Asian American,” and “hapa” can be mobilized for what purposes? Based on anthropological in-depth interviews, this chapter addresses these questions by examining the works and narratives of three artists with Japanese American background, two of whom have mixed roots: Roger Shimomura, Laura Kina, and Shizu Saldamando. This chapter will illuminate these artists’ individual ways of struggles expressed in artworks to fight against “stereotypes”, including one of rejecting social categories while at the same time resisting racism and white-centered norms.