Social Classifications and Inequalities

Classifications are practical ways of dividing and qualifying the world into ‘parts’ or ‘elements’ with different names and attributes. This often implies inequalities between these ‘parts’ and ‘elements’. Thus, multiple hierarchies are possible according to how their characteristics are linked and qualified. Within this framework, every social categorization articulates links with other portions of the world: with objects (which it includes, mobilizes, distributes, produces or destroys), with bodies (human and animal, which it can divide unequally into supposed ‘races’) and with space-time (geographical and historical environments, which are both social and natural). These categorizations and articulations are always in tension or struggle over their boundaries, attributes, valuations, dominations and emancipations—and even over the necessity or existence—of its ‘relationships’, ‘societies’, ‘individuals’, ‘cultures’, ‘groups’, ‘institutions’, ‘classes’, ‘genders’ and ‘ethnicities’, among others. Thus, this Handbook entry focuses on different currents of social and sociological theories—classical and contemporary—that have debated about how to understand social classifications and their links with inequalities (their modes, dynamics, conflicts and consequences). In order to do so, it shows how they have conceptualized and investigated the classificatory exercises of other social instances (‘groups’, ‘institutions’, ‘regions’, ‘societies’, etc.) and—reflexively—their own, when facing social crisis and transformation. For that purpose, the Colonialism and Social Inequality is divided into three sections: The first focuses on classical debates from the nineteenth century; the second, on the discussions that took place between 1920 and 1980; and the third, on contemporary disputes, from the 1980s to the present.