ABSTRACT

Over fifty years ago, Muriel Horrell observed: ‘How impracticable it is to try to classify human beings, for all time, into definite categories, and how much suffering has resulted from the efforts made to do this’ (1958, p. 77, cited in Bowker and Star (2000, p. 210)). Yet the classification of humans may be as old as human society itself. Scholars have documented the varied perceptions of difference within European thought, especially from the 17th century onwards (see for example McGrane, 1989; Stepan, 1982; Stocking, 1968). When imposed by others, and particularly by colonial powers, classification is a violent act. Muriel Horrell’s observation stemmed from her experience documenting the effects of apartheid on its subjects (Horrell, 1958). The colonisation of the Indigenous 1 peoples of Australia also provides many examples of classificatory violence, from the ‘doomed race theory’ of the 19th century that predicted the extinction of ‘full-blood’ Indigenous people, to the systematic removal of mixed race children from their families and placement in (often abusive) institutions as an attempt to assimilate them, a practice that continued into the 1970s (Anderson, 2002; Attwood, 1989; Chesterman & Galligan, 1997; McGregor, 1997; Read, 1982; Reynolds, 2001).