Categorisation Quotes

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

Decolonial feminism arrives at a similar conclusion that gender is not an innocent concept. This school of thought points to gender as a colonial introduction. As a concept gender did not exist among indigenous and black people; more fluid categorisations prevailed

So much rubbish; ... from heavy plant machinery, cars, vans, buses to plastic bottles, magazines, papers, tins, boxes, bags, clothes... ... it is how they have been collected here that is odd... everything neat, clean, ordered and possibly even categorised...

Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well—and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also.

...the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’ Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’ ‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’ Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’ In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting.

Acknowledging that my biological imperative may not include the drive to procreate, that I just might be attracted to XX chromosomes instead of XY? That's so stupid-minor in comparison to the fact that I might actually be in love for the first time in my life. It's with a girl...so what? Lesbian, bisexual, whatever! Thus isn't about categorisation or chromosomes. This is about how I feel about another person.

Never underestimate the value of advice from anyone, whether they are younger or older than you. Wisdom is not categorised under age

She paused as she took in Mrs. Bean's monstrously ugly evening bonnet. "What a wonderful bonnet. That quail looks as though it shall take flight at any moment." And perhaps be shot down by hunters. Mrs. Bean's eyes narrowed. "It is a dove." "Oh?" Daisy peered closer. "Yes, it is. My mistake. I'm rather dismal at categorising fowl. Even when it is right before me.

Ah, did he not hate that word ‘gay’? He thought it a strange categoriser of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word ‘faggot’, which had punch, bite, a non-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, ‘American’.

The human compulsion to group people and objects together was ingrained in our being since we evolved. We need to group things, group the dangerous and unknown from the 'safe to eat' or the 'it won't eat you' categories. Without the ability to categorise these threats, our ancestors wouldn't have survived.

The novel had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and compartmentalize living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble. Old, young; black, white; men, women; capitalism, socialism; these dichotomies undo us, force us into unreal categorisation, make us look for what separates us rather than what we have in common. That was the thought, which made the shape or pattern of 'The Golden Notebook'. But the emotions were stronger than the thought. This is why I have always seen TGN as a failure: a failure in my terms, of what I had meant. For has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything - people, ideas, history - into boxes? No, it has not. Yet why should I have such a hubristic thought? But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. I had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and I was appalled.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

Our life was so extraordinary and passionate, so intense if you like, because we were around each other all the time. We socialised together, and we worked together, and we loved together. When we all set off for our first season on the South coast of England - what we were really searching for was our tribe. Something about those years was the bringing together of ‘our tribe.’ These are the people who shaped me. We’re the pranksters, the misfits, the bohemians, the court jesters, the comedians, the crackpots, the Carefree Scamps, the nomads and free spirits. Without people like us the world would be full of humans who are little more than robots I love chaotic human beings, people who don’t follow the rules, who can’t be categorised, but whose loyalty is stronger than blood, and whose integrity is hard as nails.

I have a body, an emotional body and a mental body, but I am none of these. I am nothing and everything. I am an indivisible particle of oneness that can no longer be categorised

There’s no such thing as ‘not enough time’ out here in the woods. I don’t even have a watch. Time is my own, categorised as nothing more than ‘morning, afternoon, evening and night’.

The two men -- Fray and Malkin -- were standing near each other. They were not unarmed. They were quite seriously not unarmed. Both men were carrying -- or at least aiming -- what could only be categorised as small artillery pieces: two bulky gas-powered spinguns, so heavy that they had to be strapped to their bodies via thick leather girdles. Malkin was aiming at the angels, more or less.

In other words, both the descriptive (‘women are gentle’) and the prescriptive (‘women should be gentle’) elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women. Without any intention of bias, once we have categorised someone as male or female, activated gender stereotypes can then colour our perception. When the qualifications for the job include stereotypically male qualities, this

If I was to itemise my loneliness, to categorise its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable.

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one's being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up, or change in social circles.

It is the gulf between the idea of the autonomous individual, and the algorithmic tendency to view the individual as one categorisable node in an aggregate mass that can result in The Formula’s equivalent of a crisis of self.

New Adult is a label that is condescending to readers and authors alike. It implies that the books act as training wheels between Young Adult and Adult. For the New Adult books that are particularly childish, the label implies that they are a step above Young Adult--which is insulting to the Young Adult books that are far superior. For the New Adult books that are particularly sophisticated, the label implies that they are not worthy of being considered "adult." It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. [...] Therefore, the new genre of New Adult is a large step backwards. It increases the system of categories and labels even further, and prevents readers from expanding their horizons and minds. The term is reductive and it is insulting to its own audience.

Next door to the Bensons is Emmet Frag, a retired pacemaker who is credited with inventing the notion of happiness. He’s currently working on a method for categorising ducks based on their singing voice. He’s also the owner of the world’s largest collection of tenor geese.

We all have different experiences, personal histories and gathered knowledge, which forms how we think. Life changes people in ways that derive a certain individuality in their desires. We can only categorise it and evolve our understanding of each other as humans while we learn.

Two literary figures bridge the gap between the mediaeval age and the Renaissance. They are Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D'Arthur, and the first 'poet-laureate', John Skelton. In their entirely separate ways, they made distinctive contributions to the history of literature and to the growth of English as a literary language. ........ Le Morte D'Arthur is, in a way, the climax of a tradition of writing, bringing together myth and history, with an emphasis on chivalry as a kind of moral code of honour. The supernatural and fantastic aspects of the story, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are played down, and the more political aspects, of firm government and virtue, emphasised. It was a book for the times. The Wars of the Roses ended in the same year as Le Morte D'Arthur was published. Its values were to influence a wide readership for many years to come. There is sadness, rather than heroism, in Arthur's final battle.. ...... John Skelton is one of the unjustly neglected figures of literature. His reputation suffered at the hands of one of the earliest critics of poetry, George Puttenham, and he is not easily categorised in terms of historical period, since he falls between clearly identified periods like 'mediaeval' and 'Renaissance'. He does not fit in easily either because of the kinds of poetry he wrote. But he is one of the great experimenters, and one of the funniest poets in English.

The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.

labels say nothing about a person. they say only how the rest of us categorise that person. good literature is always about peeling labels off. and treating real people with dignity is always about peeling the labels off. a diagnosis may lead to practical help. but genuinely understanding another human being involves talking and listening to them and finding out what makes them an individual, not what makes them part of a group.

Yet even that equality within the American middle classes had started to erode. The new models of car, for example, were categorised by rank and status. For those starting out there was the Chevrolet, next came the Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and Buicks, while the seriously rich drove Cadillacs. Not only that; buying and consuming were increasingly a social norm. You had to drive a new Pontiac, and by 1959 anyone still riding around in a 1956 model was

2. The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. For the fact is that the reading we do when young can often be of little value because we are impatient, cannot concentrate, lack expertise in how to read, or because we lack experience of life. This youthful reading can be (perhaps at the same time) literally formative in that it gives a form or shape to our future experiences, providing them with models, ways of dealing with them, terms of comparison, schemes for categorising them, scales of value, paradigms of beauty: all things which continue to operate in us even when we remember little or nothing about the book we read when young. When we reread the book in our maturity, we then rediscover these constants which by now form part of our inner mechanisms though we have forgotten where they came from. There is a particular potency in the work which can be forgotten in itself but which leaves its seed behind in us. The definition which we can now give is

Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer - everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute out being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well - and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also. If this is missing, we become computer-like, as Dr P. was. And, by the same token, if we delete feeling and judging, the personal, from the cognitive sciences, we reduce them to something as defective as Dr P. - and we reduce our apprehension of the concrete and real.

Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorised as poverty-stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high salary. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the UK isn't material poverty, it's spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfilment comes only from the pursuit of material gain.

It is difficult, then, to pin gender inequality firmly to the emergence of agriculture or property ownership. If there were changes in the balance of power between people in prehistory because of these factors, they must have been subtle because they left no appreciable trace in the archaeological record. Where we really can start to spot a shift in gender relations, the first shoots of overarching male authority, is with the rise of the first states. The moment gender becomes salient is when it becomes an organising principle, when enormous populations are categorised in ways that deliberately ignore their everyday realities and force them to live in ways they may not otherwise choose.

Far from destroying our most well-loved works of fiction, abandoning assumptions of the whiteness of our characters infinitely expands all of the fictional universes, whether it be the wizarding world or the Star Wars galaxy. As vlogger Rosianna Halse Rojas points out,10 reading Harry Potter’s Hermione as black is a whole different ball game. It brings to light the incredibly racialised language of blood purity used in the wizarding world, of mudbloods and purebloods. This is terminology that could have been easily lifted straight from Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Hermione’s parents were muggles after all, and that is how states and scientists have categorised races and fuelled racism – as though some heritages are contagious and are spread through lineage and blood. A black or mixed-race Hermione enduring spat-out slurs of ‘mudblood’ from her peers, plucked from her parents, told she’s special and part of a different race altogether, might be very keen to assimilate, to be accepted. No wonder she tried so hard. No wonder she did her friends’ homework, and was first to raise her hand in class. She was the model minority. A black or mixed-race Hermione agitating to free house elves, after six or seven years of enduring racial slurs, might not have the courage to challenge her peers, and instead might have hung on to something she felt she really could change.

I would like to say at the outset that I have little or no interest in mindlessly categorising individuals, and certainly not of “reducing” them to mere labels. If I attempt to group together certain individuals’ experiences, it is to better understand them, their distress and motiva- tions, and what underlies their difficulties. As will become clear, in one sense the term borderline becomes redundant, as the individual’s par- ticular early relational experiences are understood to play the central role in their development and life experience. Yet even these do not ultimately “define” the individual, but rather, through understanding and working through their traumatic experience, the individual can be freed to fully develop, use, and manifest themselves in satisfying and fulfilling ways. The term borderline is, for me, left as a signifier of the particular kinds of reasons that the individual’s struggle to reach this position may have been so difficult.

[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘perverse’ passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. (The category ‘homosexual’ was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, ‘heterosexual’ emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male ‘homosexual’ as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell [‘It’s Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed’, in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, ‘prior to that time … there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people … [For] the medieval Catholic Church … homosexuality was not … the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

Often they were arranged according to the whim of the owner, as scientific classification was still in flux, new systems evolving all the time. Categorising a universe that shifted every time a new ship blew into port proved both necessary and a challenge....some classified shells as "knobbed" versus "wrinkled," "the right lip broad" versus,"parallel lips," or listed insects as "naked wings," "sheathed wings" or "creeping.

the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’ Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’ ‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’ Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’ In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting

We love to judge others. We love to categorise. We love to divide. We are the good guys, they are the bad guys. We the hero, they the demon. Why? Because it fits the model. It bolsters the ego. It makes us happy. It has even been demonstrated that depressed people, with their dysfunctionally gloomy predictions about themselves and the world, are more accurate in their outlook than the mentally ‘healthy’. The world, and your life within it, is far bleaker than you have been led to believe.

Bewildered by the sheer amount of information we have devised a way that has made us the most sorted culture we have ever been, categorised by apps and search engines we are no longer hiding from the other, we are blind to it.

The connoisseurs sniff, categorise, rank, price, demote. Celadons, the colour caught between green and blue, get sky after rain, and kingfishers, and iced water, all of which are lyrical.

The process of categorisation is as old as men, yet as old as man alone, for no other animal species categorises itself so neatly. Yet the ultimate, most vulnerable and weakest victim of categorisation is empathy. Categorisation is a process that destroys the very empathy that enlivens communities: the empathy that traditionally binds diverse communities together.

From the philosopher-kings of Plato to the enlightened oligarchies of Aristotle, some of the world's greatest thinkers have strived to categorise society.

you’ll probably have already formed an opinion, a profile, because that’s what humans do. We sort, categorise, and stereotype.

We are a rock ’n’ roll band. We always were. We have heavy-metal hair so you can see why so many people put us in there with that. They’ve got no brains these people who categorise you. They are at these award ceremonies – here is an asshole who is taking your money on false pretences and he’s getting the award on the unanimous decision of all those cunts who never buy records and get into gigs free (laughs).

photography allows for slippages and resistances, forms of double mimesis, disidentification, and double consciousness that resist official, normative strategies of categorisation and containment.

Lewis seems to have seen his move to Cambridge in January 1955 as marking a fresh start. It is striking how few of his writings of this later period of his life deal specifically with apologetic themes, if understood in terms of the explicit rational defence of the Christian faith. In a letter of September 1955, declining the invitation of the American evangelical leader Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003) to write some apologetic pieces, Lewis explained that while he had done what he could “in the way of frontal attacks,” he now felt “quite sure” those days were over. He now preferred more indirect approaches to apologetics, such as those which appealed to “fiction and symbol.”[556] These remarks to Carl Henry—one of the most significant figures in the history of postwar American evangelicalism—are clearly relevant to the creation of Narnia. Many would see this comment about “fiction and symbol” as a reference to his Chronicles of Narnia, which can easily be categorised as works of narrative or imaginative apologetics, representing a move away from the more deductive or inductive argumentative approaches of his wartime broadcast talks.

She loved the calm regularity of librarianship; each book a treasure trove of information or experience that would be categorised, labelled and stored in its rightful place. And she could think of nothing more magical than spending her days surrounded by stories.

Brother-in-law was now seriously cross and I was touched by his crossness. Somebody McSomebody was wrong then. People in this place did give a fuck. But there was something else about brother-in-law, something linked to that strange, communally diagnosed mental aberration that he had around women. For all his idolatry, all his belief in the sanctity of femaleness, of women being the higher beings, the mystery of life and so on, he couldn't grasp any abuse towards them other than what he termed rape. Rape for brother-in-law wasn't categorised. It wasn't equivocations, rhetorical stunts, sly debater tricks or a quarter amount of something or a half amount of something or a three-quarter amount of something. It was not a presentation package. Rape was rape. It was also black eyes. It was guns in breasts. Hands, fists, weapons, feet, used by male people, deliberately or accidentally-on-purpose against female people. "NEVER LIFT A FINGER TO A WOMAN" - if ever it had existed - third brother-in-law's teeshirt, to everyone's embarrassment, would have said. According to his rulebook - mine too, at least before the predations upon me by the community and by Milkman - the physical-contact aspect could be the only aspect. That meant that what was not of that trespass, not that kind of physical - stalking without touch, tracking without touch, hemming-in, taking over, controlling a person with no flesh on flesh, no bone on bone ensuing - could not then be happening. So it came about that of everybody who had heard of the wooing of me by Milkman, third brother-in-law was the only one who, unquestioningly, hadn't considered it to have taken place. Not seeing mental wreckage then, seemed one of his downsides.

Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable, the exact murders that didn't happen here. People had no idea how to gauge them, how to categorise them, how to begin a discussion on them, and that was because only political murders happened in this place.

The author categorises other people as either superior or inferior. He has shown awareness of the impact of his negative behaviours but shows neither remorse nor compassion for his victims. His attitude to others is dominated and controlled by narcissistic needs and goal setting. The narcissistic self tries at all costs to avoid a confrontation with his repressed feelings of inferiority, depression and emptiness.

The three triads you have learned so far are   1 3 5 Major 1 b3 5 Minor 1 b3 b5 Diminished or just ‘Dim’ Most chords you come across in music, no matter how complicated can normally be categorised into one of these basic types. Jazz chord progressions however are normally formed from richer sounding ‘7th chords’ which are the focus of this book.   There is, however, one more permutation that crops up occasionally, it is the augmented triad, 1 3 #5.

While binge drinking is a significant issue, it is likely that many members of the public would be surprised by its categorisation as a mental illness, particularly at the milder end." Public confusion caused by differing understandings of the term 'mental illness'. Jorm AF, Reavley NJ. Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 2012 May;46(5):397-9. PMID: 22535288

Sliding through professions and geography, minimizing race and class, the yearning for androgyny and psychological environmentalism are all unsatisfying because they neglect or deny the category-making nature of cognition itself. The fashionable ideal that everyone should be free of imposed definition in order to be whatever he wants, to choose and change identity in spite of the accidents of birth, and to define self according to ideology and personal taste is very appealing, though in some grievously frustrating way appallingly inadequate and wrong. The adolescent, caught between the modern world's chronic shortage of order and the chic psychology of identity by assertion, is on queasy ground. The ideal conflicts with the thrust of his mental development, which is to distinguish, define, and classify. The central task of his first twelve years is to develop his powers of discrimination, linking them to speech, and to master the art of conceptualizing and abstracting by searching out the commonalities and differences among plants and animals—traits given, not chosen.

The human organization and its inner engineering are cornerstoned and based on the indispensable foundation of collected deeds, which invest energies and outfit actions in their psychological nerves, constantly configuring their functioning updates. Placed and compiled in selected agilities and activities through the goal's stages, they perform mandatory feedback on the scale of upshots and are notified for conviction dimensity. If they crop, demonstrate, and abridge their correct updations and pointed efficiencies amid frequent interoception. The purpose of their acquired doings and all the liabilities will not be wrong and misgiving reinvestment but will be energetic, abridged, controlled, and outfitted with categorised methods at the right pace without any base of inalienable sequel to prequel. There will be accurate introspection in tends of apprehension; that's ultra-rigour, exactly following the aspirant aims of the Karmas evolution and its amenableness path. It will announce the rightness root of the widest sense, not a narrow sense, after wanting outgrown confirmations and the arrival of the unabstract from subsided dogma, quandary, and dread.

Somnophilia is an abnormal sexual desire in which an individual becomes aroused by someone who is unconscious. The Dictionary of Psychology has categorised somnophilia within the classification of predatory paraphilias.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

You see, some scholars are inclined to divide and categorise; others, to blend and unit. The splitters and the lumpers.

But why the obsessions? And why these specific subjects? Experts think predictability is a factor. Most autistic people’s hobbies can be categorised or are logical or predictable. Horses or birds belong to animal species and have certain characteristics. Computers do what you tell them to do. (And if they don’t, that’s usually because you – or the software developer – made a mistake. A computer can’t just go and decide to do something wrong because it doesn’t like you, no matter how many people say it can.) Stamps can go into an album, bicycle race results can be compared. And sorting, categorising and calculating simply makes most autistics very happy.

Istanbul has never been the colony of the Westerners who wrote about it, drew it, filmed it, and that is why I am not so perturbed by the use Western travellers have made of my past and my history in their construction of the exotic. Indeed, I find their fears and dreams beguiling – as exotic to me as ours are to them – and I don’t just look to them for entertainment or to see the city through their eyes, but also to enter into the full-formed world they’ve conjured up. Especially when reading the Western travellers of the nineteenth century – perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand – I realise the ‘my’ city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline from the angles most familiar to me – from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines – so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me: it’s at times like these that I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel that I’ve become one with that Western traveller, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorising, judging and in so doing often usurping their dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the Western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery, contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place, and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for the last hundred and fifty

Another type of categorisation some psychologists have come up with is to differentiate the learning styles of individuals as auditory-sequential learning and visual-spatial learning (Silverman, 2002; Webb et al., 2005).

findings that visual-spatial learners, or creative/gifted learners, as they are highly likely to be categorised, are more likely to develop negative images of themselves as well as of society at large, when their requirements/values/ideals and preferences are not met for a prolonged period of time.

visual-spatial learners have a tendency to be categorised as gifted and creative individuals who usually show a very high level of emotional and other sensitivities.

You’re right,” I muttered, Calder’s eyes flashing to mine. “I won’t be manipulated. Not anymore.” I turned back to the Warmaster, forcing my gaze up to his, categorising the freckle of gold in his translucent brown eyes, a thick white scar cutting into the right side of his temple, a shadow of stubble hiding further nicks and cuts, his neck mottled dark with a healed burn.

We simply believe that the self is an "I" with a body and a mind, and we further classify, categorise, and label it based on name, creed, religion, nationality, and so on. However, when we expand our knowledge and minds, we tend to overlook these stratifications beyond our narrow perspicacity and realise that we are all mere minute parts of the universe's baryonic matter. In an absolute sense, we are nothing more than "one" energy. When we say we are one, it is not only a philosophical statement but also a scientific fact.

The defence shall cross-examine Zara Hanson,” he beckons her forward. “Would you tell the court how long we have known each other?” “Well…” taken aback, she ponders how best to answer, “you could say days, but then again you could say several lifetimes. It feels like I’ve known you my whole life.” “And in this time, would you say you trust my judgement?” Unsure where this is going, she gives a terse reply. “I’ve no reason not to.” “I ask that you trust my defence and do not draw any forgone conclusions.” “Okay?” Zara nods, her brow knits together with a look of curiosity. What’s he up to? “Zara Hanson, what is love?” “Well, you won’t find it anywhere near these jelly-beans,” she looks at the Elb. “Please, tell us what love is—not that which it is not.” “What is love?” Zara raises an eyebrow and smiles, “It is something indescribable, to categorise it would do its power a disservice.” “And yet categorise it we must.” Ansebe’s skin changes its tone, pigments diversify a hypnotic effect, influencing her emotions, “Please—what is love?

Pain and pleasure. Sickness and sanity. Love and obsession. Nothing about our union is so easily categorised. We are made of extremes, testing the boundaries no normal person would dare cross.

categorisation of animals.

Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.

Who is formally categorised as a "skilled worker" and who gets to define what work is "skilled" - together, these are two crucial gears in the machinery of any patriarchal workplace.

Old age homes are, sadly, a pre-coffin portal, with stays of varied duration – often wheel-chaired in and usually gurneyed out to a discreetly parked black van. Long-term residents could quickly categorise the newbies in terms of the three M’s – mobility, marbles, and months left.

All the arguments for multiculturalism — that people feel safer, more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity — are arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same. If people categorised as “white Britons” are not afforded that indulgence because they are a majority, do they attain it when they become a minority?

Let’s start (at the very beginning) with the Absolute. This is what is beyond thought, beyond definition. It is what never changes, that has no limit or edge, that cannot be compared or judged or categorised. As Michael Neill once said to me, it is like pointing to a fire with an icicle. The closer we get to it, the less we have to point with. Nevertheless, the Absolute exists, (indeed is the only thing that is) and is what gives rise to and creates the experience of life in form. This is Home. The Absolute. Ultimately it is what we are.

We tend to categorise people the way we categorise books: if they don’t fit neatly into a genre, we’re not sure what to make of them. I’ve always had problems fitting in, but the older I get, the less I care. Personally, I think being the same as everybody else is overrated.

Children do kill, and they do kill other children. Experts have categorised them into three types. You have the ones that kill for the thrill. They enjoy the hands-on kill, torture beforehand and sometimes mutilation afterwards. Our very own Jon Venables and Robert Thompson fell into that category when they abducted two-year-old Jamie Bulger from that shopping centre.

On a slightly lower level of abstraction, we can propose the following theorem: time-space appropriation plus time-space compression equals high risk of zoonotic pandemics. Capital grows by dilating its material throughput. The more biophysical resources that can be processed into commodities and sold, the greater the profits; the greater the profits, the more resources can be acquired and so on. Capital takes hold of land where the resources sprout - a law of a tendency with few countervailing forces that can be read off from aggregate data: in the year 1700, 95 percent of the planet's ice-free land was either wild or modified and used so lightly as to be categorised as 'semi-natural.' By 2000, the proportions has been reversed.

Children who were researched in the study had their eyes examined and their noses measured, with their facial features categorised as either ‘Negroid’ or ‘English’.

Of course, the brain is a machine and a computer—everything in classical neurology is correct. But our mental processes, which constitute our being and life, are not just abstract and mechanical, but personal, as well—and, as such, involve not just classifying and categorising, but continual judging and feeling also. If this is missing, we become computer-like, as Dr P. was. And, by the same token, if we delete feeling and judging, the personal, from the cognitive sciences, we reduce them to something as defective as Dr P.—and we reduce our apprehension of the concrete and real.

Had supposed India was essentially unfathomable: it was too fast, too swiftly changing to yield to any categorisation. In Varanasi, however, I found a city whose spirit seemed to denote the whole.

It was Vivi who’d worked out the code that the triangles represented, through talking to the other women in the barracks. Yellow ones were worn by Jews, and sometimes a red inverted triangle was overlain by a yellow one the opposite way up, indicating a dual categorisation. Green triangles were worn by convicted criminals, who were often put in charge of work parties as they were prison-toughened which made them ruthless overseers, or kapos as they were known in the camp, prepared to mete out punishments to their fellow inmates. Black was for those classed as mentally

It was Vivi who’d worked out the code that the triangles represented, through talking to the other women in the barracks. Yellow ones were worn by Jews, and sometimes a red inverted triangle was overlain by a yellow one the opposite way up, indicating a dual categorisation. Green triangles were worn by convicted criminals, who were often put in charge of work parties as they were prison-toughened which made them ruthless overseers, or kapos as they were known in the camp, prepared to mete out punishments to their fellow inmates. Black was for those classed as mentally ill, or as gypsies, vagrants and addicts.

When expressing sympathy for the family of a deceased person is also categorised as hate speech, there is clearly something wrong with the arbitrary censorship by multimedia giants such as Facebook, It is therefore urgent that national legislation puts a stop to the silencing of right-wing and nationalist politicians. Because when you can be removed from Facebook simply for expressing sympathy for someone, this has nothing to do with ‘hate speech’ or ‘protecting democracy’ anymore, but everything with pure dictatorial arbitrariness.

One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options. The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people. Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.

The principle behind tags as a whole is speed - speed of categorisation and speed to find things. So it should also be quick to manage what tags are attached a note.

Categorising one another into predefined cultural boxes is limiting at best and damaging at worst.

Indeed his methodology is exactly that of an ethnographer, listening first of all to the language, to the actual practical speech which people use, to the ways they sustain relationships through language, and to the ways they categorise things.

The great project of Empire was to categorise: owned and owner, coloniser and colonised, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours.

Many people regard ‘trance’ as a sign of madness, just as they presume that ‘madmen’ must be easy to hypnotise. The truth is that if madmen were capable of being under ‘social control’ they would never have revealed the behaviour that categorised them as insane. It’s a tautology to say that normal people are the most suggestible, since it’s because they’re the most suggestible that they’re the most normal! There are exceptions, but in most cases the very best Masks start off knowing the least.

The great project of Empire was to categorise: owned and owner, coloniser and colonised, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited these taxonomies.

Refined sugar, one of the worst things you can eat, which basically strips your body of vitality and health and has been famously categorised as a poison by the scientist Robert Lustig, is also less abundant in Japan – it is not typical to ritually finish each meal with a dessert like in the west. At the Ritsumeikan training camp, sugar is not on the menu at all.