Categories

Abstract

Categories are building blocks in the creation of knowledge and in the application of knowledge to situations. Whether the categories are day and night, self and other, men and women, friends and enemies, or east, west, north, and south, people rely on categories to make a complex world manageable. By paying attention to how people in the past used categories, scholars could better understand historical processes. How do categories come into being and change over time? How do people adapt categories to fit the context? And what kinds of categorizing systems do people in any given society use to comprehend the natural world and to organize the division of labor and the distribution of material goods, rights, obligations, status, honor, respect? I start with two examples from American Indian history that point to the significance of categories in human experience. I then discuss how historians, anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive scientists have dealt with categories as cultural constructions and as universal systems of human thought and how this literature has been used or could be used to provide insights into North American Indian historical studies. I conclude by addressing methodological issues raised by approaching Indian history from this perspective.