Post 10_Do you work here?

Since I came to Indiana University Bloomington and registered myself as a student, I have often been asked questions like these: “Do you work here?” “Are you a visiting scholar here?” The other day I went to the Social Security Administration to apply for my SSN and I was asked: “So, do you have a J-1 or J-2 visa? J-1 is for visiting scholars and J-2 for their spouses. A Chinese girl at our department orientation even asked me directly how old I was after she learnt I was a PhD student here. Yes, I am on the wrong side of forty and I look too old to be a student. I was always thinking of challenging those askers by asking them what made them ask me in this way and if it is because I looked too old to learn. But I always checked myself for fear the disclosure would embarrass the party who was unknowingly and therefore innocently engaged in their practice of categorization, even though I felt hurt every time by their insinuation of my mortality.

How often are we betrayed by our hidden bias while causing hurt feelings to others despite the fact that we tell ourselves that we shall not discriminate against people on the basis of their age, gender, race, nationality, culture, and so on? Very often. But most of the time we are innocent because biases and inferences are readily capsuled into categories that allow us to make sense of the world around us. According to Sacks (1992), categories are “inference-rich”, which means “a great deal of the knowledge that members of society have about the society is stored in terms of these categories.” It is this inference-rich character of categories that warrants for their occurrence in early parts of first conversations. That is to say, if we know much about a certain category, say, students, or teachers, and we know that certain person belongs to that category, it seems that we can infer much about that person. This is why I was often asked about my business here so that people would be able to start a conversation right away based on their knowledge stored in terms of the category in which I was supposedly placed. However, problem arises if the person is put into a wrong category based on a failed membership categorization device (Stokoe, 2012), as in my case. Why would it be wrong?

I am trying to figure out how categories are formed. This is fuzzy and certainly, this small piece of post can never be expected to do justice to such a large project. But one thing is for sure. As Stokoe (2012) observes that categories are endogenous orientations of participants, there is no corresponding relation between one of our categories and an external reality category. Roughly, we construct a category by giving a little personal flavor to something we believe existing in the world. Our language helps us a lot in this respect by offering us a diverse range of readily fabricated categories so that what we need to do is to choose the right one. For example, in commenting on Athenian democracy and politicians, historian J. M. Roberts says (reference omitted for convenience’s sake): “The effective political leaders of Athens were those who could sway their fellow citizens by their words. Whether we call them demagogues or orators does not matter; they were the first politicians seeking power by persuasion.” Here we can see at least three categories are constituted and preserved in our language: politician, demagogue and orator. All of them have the same objective essence (roughly someone who deals with state affairs) but each is added an ounce or two of our own flavor, showing either our frown or acclamation, or indifference. As these categories are ready-made in the form of words, the very action of using a particular word can be very tricky because the word we choose to use will reveal our unconscious categorization. So I cannot agree more with Stokoe (2012) in that category selection can actually serve two purposes: for ensuring that the ‘right’ resonances and inferences are made relevant for the object of description, and for the ‘subject-side’ inferences that can be made about the speaker (p.291).

Here I would also like to have a little fun with unpacking the mechanism behind the questions directed at me when people saw me for the first time, as Stokoe (2012) points out that “the appeal (and danger) of MCA is to try to unpack what is apparently unsaid by members and produce an analysis of their subtle categorization work (p.282).” With respect to people’s category of student, one of the category-tied predicates is age-related, ranging from 6 to 30 at most depending on which subcategory of students it is. Apparently, a forty-something is excluded from the category of student. The category I supposedly belong to judged by age should be employee, by virtue of which I am either a staff member or a visiting scholar (who also works). Such is the categorization implied in the category-bound activity of inquiry: “Do you work here?”