Primitive Classification and Categorical Violence

Durkheim and Mauss's 1903 essay 'De quelques formes primitives de classification' demonstrated that classification systems of different societies are not arbitrary impositions on a neutral world but reflections of social organization projected onto nature. The Zuñi divided the world into seven regions corresponding to seven clans. Australian societies organized nature into the same moieties that organized kinship. The categories were not discovered — they were projected from social structure onto the world, and the projection created the appearance of a natural order that was in fact a social construction. This framework becomes devastating when applied to the AI transition, which is imposing a new taxonomy on the landscape of professional capability: a taxonomy that divides skills into the amplifiable (what AI can process) and the unrecognizable (what AI cannot parse). This classification is not neutral. Like all classification systems, it carries an implicit theory of value.