A review by schomj
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey C. Bowker

4.0

Assigning things, people, or their actions to categories is a ubiquitous part of work in the modern, bureaucratic world. Categories in this sense arise from work and from other kinds of organized activity, including the conflicts over meaning that occur when multiple groups fight over the nature of a classification systems and its categories.

The authors focus on classification of diseases for much of the book, also touching on race, work practices, and boundaries within and surrounding classification schemes. Underneath that is an exploration of the technology, bureaucracy, archives, daily and historical practices that determine classification systems and are determined by classification systems. You want access to the birth control pill in 20th century Spain? Better hope your doctor will classify you as hypotensive because prophylactics were illegal, but hypotensive medication (a side use of the pill) is a-ok. You want money to research the tropical diseases that are killing your neighbors? Sorry, Western researchers aren't interested so that's not listed as a category in the ICD, which means you don't get grant funding. Visiting apartheid South Africa as an African American woman? Hope you don't need to use the airport restroom, because there isn't one available to people in your category.

It's like they took Kafka's The Trial and split the structure open to have a look inside: the spoken, the unspoken, the visible, the forgotten, everything that makes up the thousands of little rules we live by, fight against, work around, create anew. It is - no surprise - a little dense in places, but totally worth the effort. And now that the idea of borderlands is fresh in my memory, I think it's time for me to check out [a: Gloria Anzaldua].

the sciences are very good at what they do: the task of the philosopher is to keep open and explore the spaces that otherwise would be left dark and unvisited because of their very success, since new forms of knowledge might arise out of these spaces.