Taxonomies
Abstract
This chapter describes how Herman Melville recognized the existence of what he had once called not “ordinarily human”: the chattels that gave new meaning to persons, the human anomaly constituted by law as property. Melville is obsessed with the making and unmaking of human materials as well as humans and animals. The chapter then assesses what it means in times of torture and dissembling to be like an animal. It all began with chattels. Their treatment helps one to understand the limits of cruelty. They are used as examples when humans need most to categorize, to dominate, and to justify slavery, genocide, and incarceration. The proximity between humans and animals is sometimes tenuous. Boundaries are permeable, and taxonomies are necessary to ensure the order of things. However, when the pressure is on to construct—legally and socially—degradation and inferiority, categories and terminologies get muddled. The hierarchies no longer hold.
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- Authors
- Dayan, C.
- Corresponding author
- Dayan, Colin
- ORCID
- Dayan, Colin
- Venue
- The Law Is a White Dog
- Publisher
- Princeton University Press
- Published
- 2011-02-27
- OpenAlex
- W4250414964
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Princeton University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Animal Law and Welfare
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › American and British Literature Analysis
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Literature: history, themes, analysis
- Keywords
- Herman Melville, movable property, property, slavery, human-animal distinction, taxonomy (general classification scheme), torture, dissembling, degradation, inferiority, categorization, domination, genocide, incarceration, human material
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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