Singular Classification
Singular Classification
It is almost impossible to go through life without being classified as one type or another. In fact the concept of identity is a classification of sorts yet it is the one thing that makes a person be who he or she is besides being, obviously, a human being. Personal identity classifies one into many labels like gender, race, ethnicity, and professionalism among others. The two essays by Sen and Ehreneich discuss how people in every part of the world are labeled and put into different categories. These labels are often informal and interpreted differently by people in different places. This cross culture classification has its positive attributes but in the eventual analysis it makes us lose the important ties that bind us together as human beings.
We often like to believe that we are uniquely different and set apart from those we do not share cultural attributes with but the lines of classification overlap each other so much that we all seem to have many crisscrossing ties with others in other countries. In most instances we are not even aware of how much our cultures have borrowed and become interrelated with other people’s cultures. Sen gives very good examples of the diversity that exists within the classifications we put others into. The diversity is so wide that one wonders why there are classifications in the first place. Why would India be classified as a “Hindu Civilization” when the population of Muslims and people of other faiths greatly surpass that of Hindu adherents? This error in classification is also reflected in many areas that we have so wrongly, or ignorantly, stuck divisive labels.
I agree to an extent with Barbara Ehrenreich in her article “Cultural Baggage” about the fact that we all have a past and inescapably carry a cultural baggage. There are advantages to having a past or a background. This includes the ability to understand other people’s point of views as it is differentiated from ours. Having a past means that you have a heritage that you can pass to your children for positive reasons. One needs not to be a cultural fanatic to derive meaning from their past. There are people who consider themselves to be Catholics but go for years without attending mass. To them Catholicism is simply a tradition handed from one generation to another and a form of religious identity. However, lack of a background, for example religion, should not be considered to be weird because as Ehrenreich states even the “none” culture is has its own worth.
In “A World Not Neatly Divided” Amartya Sen shows why cultural labeling is wrongly used in trying to understand the various conflicts that plague the world today in relation to past causes. The ‘civilization approach’ has even become a favorite approach of seeking solutions and decision making process for many academicians and politicians. Solutions to world problems like insecurity are sought for and analyzed by dividing people into categories. For example labeling people on religious backgrounds has led to categories like ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ which have negative ramifications for some on national security matters. Labeling and categorizing people according their ancestral origins, beliefs, and personal histories does not increase cohesiveness and unity but only adds up to the potential for conflict riddled world.
