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The following text summarizes the British Academy Lecture “Kinds of people: Moving targets”. The lecture is about classifications of people and how they impact the people who are classified as well as how these people themselves impact their classifications. The lecturer has been interested in classifications for many years and he also wrote two books about this topic. Furthermore, he invented two new terms concerning this topic.
First, “making up people” refers to the process of creating a new kind of person based on its classifications. Thus, we create a new kind of person by giving it a name that imposes a certain way of behavior and thinking about it. Doing so, we create kinds of people that have not existed before. How this is done will be clarified in two examples namely multiple personalities and autism. Second, there is the “looping effect” which describes how a classification and its classified target interact with one another. Those who are classified as moving targets since our observations and investigations interact with the targets themselves and change them. These ideas about the classification of people is a form of Nominalism. An exception to the concept of nominalism is that his work as dynamic rather than static, as it looks at how names interact with the named people.
The process of "making up people" consists of five steps:
As you may have noticed, this framework operates in a circular manner. Thus, the process of making up people starts with a classification and works its way up including people, institutions and knowledge until it arrives at experts. From experts on it operates its way back to the start of classification. The framework consists of of the following elements: classification, people, institutions, knowledge and experts, is a positivist list. He argues that all five elements are needed and interact in the process of making up people and the looping effect. Also, identifying historical or earlier manifestations of a certain classification helps to make it appear more legitimate. For example, when people state that homosexuals have always existed, they might refer to paintings of Ancient Greece depicting sexual acts of people of the same sex.
Turning to our example of Multiple personality disorder, which was renamed into Dissociative Identity Disorder, could be termed as a transient disorder. Transient, because it disappeared as soon as its name and expected symptoms disappeared.
A more recent example is the conception of autism. It was introduced in 1908 as abnormal introversion and self-absorption, a definition that was valid until 1992. In 1943, it was termed as infantile autism since it was thought to refer only to children. Today, it is known that autism usually lasts a lifetime. It can be recognized as early as 30 months after birth. So far, it has not been discovered what causes autism, even though there were a lot of correlations drawn, for instance with the length of a mother's fingers. It is assumed that a combination of neurological, biological, and genetic abnormalities lead to autistic disorders. There is no cure identified, yet. However, behavioral therapy and, more specifically, pure operant conditioning can help to compensate for certain deficits. A loving and caring environment helps as well to overcome some of the symptoms.
In 1973, autism was rare and was related to a definite and narrow stereotype. Now, we have developed an entire spectrum of autistic disorders, including Asperger’s syndrome which involves high-functioning people with autism. These are people who have all the symptoms of autism except for the language difficulties. A famous example is Temple Grandin who says that she sees the world rather as an animal than as a human being and used this to help develop more animal-friendly slaughterhouse techniques. An autism liberation front has been founded which argues against aiming to assimilate autists into normal people, as they are better at some things, whereas others may be better at other things. However, the class of high-functioning autists rapidly expanded. This group consists of autists who kind of "recovered" from their disorder, growing out of most of their symptoms. Once these “recovered” autists were established in society more and more adults recognized similar behavioral patterns in themselves. Even though they had never been diagnosed with autism they classified themselves as high-functioning autists, which led to rapid expansion of this classification. You should have noticed that the previous described framework of a) classification, b) people, c) institutions, d) knowledge and e) experts also fits with this example.
These two examples of how the five-element framework can be used, provide us with an idea of how “making up of people” takes place. But, what are the driving forces behind them? Count, quantify, create norms, correlate, medicalize, biologize, geneticize are identified as classical engines of discovery. ''Normalize'' is seen as an engine of practice and ''bureaucratize'' as an engine of administration. ''Reclaim our identity'' is for those who discovered the process of how people are made up and claim their own identity back.
Specific examples with autism and obesity:
As soon as a child is diagnosed with autism it has a mental disorder and also a medical problem. Another prominent example is related to the increasing diagnosis of ADHD in the population. This might also be due to the process of medicalization.
All these ten engines that were just described act and interact in a dynamic manner. They constantly set the limitations and boundaries of the kinds of people we made up new. This is why these kind of people are termed moving targets.
The process of making up people can take place in different ways. For instance, the species mode involves forming a new species, for instance the autistic child. On one hand, this might be problematic since it includes a depersonalization of the people and turn them into objects for scientific inquiry. On the other hand, people could argue that something, like having autism, is more than just a characteristic, and that it is rather part of the nature of a person, and thus essential property. Thus, the term “autistic child” would suit better than the term “child with autism”. A counterargument for this is related to obesity, since being overweight is usually only a characteristic of a person, and not part of his or her enduring identity. It is rather seen as a certain property, much like one’s hair color. This can be further elaborated by thinking of the similarities between people in these two kinds of categories. Autistic children tend to have a lot in common with each other ranging from language problems, social problems, to an obsession with order and literalness. Obese people on the other hand do not have much in common, except for being overweight.
There are more example of how our society has been making up people in the past decades. For example, the introduction of the poverty line in the 1890s, which defined who and what is poor and who and what is not. Now, we use “the poor” in a sense of species. Suicide is another example of how the five-element framework led to a change in concept. Suicide has always existed, but is now tied to depression, and is sometimes seen as cry for help. However, the way in which we define suicide is not a human universal, but rather something that resulted out of Western society.
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