Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Potential of Censuses to Transform Categorization

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
How Everyday Forms of Racial Categorization Survived Imperialist Censuses in Puerto Rico

  • 171 Accesses

Abstract

State-centered approaches, which assign transformative capabilities to state-driven social classification schemes, dominate census scholarship. Simply put, from this perspective, states’ categories shape popular perceptions of social categories, including race. However, the Puerto Rican case challenges these positions. Fluid phenotypical and social characteristics underlie everyday racial categorization there, despite centuries of colonial and imperialist censuses that restricted racial categories to Black, White, and Brown. Thus, the Puerto Rican case exemplifies the need to recast successful official classification as a multidimensional, interactive state-society process. This chapter specifies some features of states and societies, such as a strong imperialist state, the familiarity of census categories, the engagement of social actors and institutions in information gathering, and local power relations that may help explain where and when censuses have these transformative effects. Using this approach, the transformative power of censuses can be evaluated empirically instead of unilaterally assumed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. 1994. Ethnographic representation, statistics and modern power. Social Research 61 (1): 55–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Balogh, Brian. 2009. A government out of sight: The mystery of national authority in nineteenth-century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Balogh, Brian. 2015. The associational state: American governance in the twentieth century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Barnard, Alex V. 2019. Bureaucratically split personalities: (Re)ordering the mentally disordered in the French State. Theory and Society 48 (5): 753–784.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bayly, C.A. 1996. Empire and information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. Rethinking the state: Genesis and structure of the bureaucratic field. Trans. Loïc J. D. Wacquant and Samar Farage. In State/culture: State-formation after the cultural turn, ed. George Steinmetz, 53–75. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. [1997] 2000. Pascalian meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. [1997] . 2012. Sur l’état: Cours au collège de France, 1989–1992. Paris: Raisons d’agir/ Seuil.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. Beyond ‘Identity.’ Theory and Society 29 (1): 1–47.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bruno, Isabelle, and Emmanuel Didier. 2013. Benchmarking: l’État sous pression statistique. Paris: Zones.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, Patrick. 2006. Science, culture, and modern state formation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, Bruce G., and Wendy Nelson Espeland. 1991. Accounting for rationality: Double-entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of economic rationality. American Journal of Sociology 97 (1): 31–69.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Centeno, Miguel Angel. 2002. Blood and debt: War and the nation-state in Latin America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Centeno, Miguel Angel, Atul Kohli, and Deborah J. Yashar. 2017. Unpacking states in the developing world: Capacity, performance, and politics. In States in the developing world, ed. Miguel Centeno, Atul Kohli, and Deborah J. Yashar, with Dinsha Mistree, 1–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clanchy, M.T. [1979] 1993. From memory to written record: England 1066–1307. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clemens, Elisabeth S. 2006. Lineages of the Rube Goldberg state: Building and blurring public programs, 1900–1940. In Rethinking political institutions: The art of the state, ed. Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin, 187–215. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, Patricia Cline. 1982. A calculating people: The spread of numeracy in early America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. The census, social structure and objectification in South Asia. In An anthropologist among the historians and other essays, ed. Bernard S. Cohn, 224–254. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1991. Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Curtis, Bruce. 2001. The politics of population: State formation, statistics, and the census of Canada, 1840–1875. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Curtis, Bruce. 2002. Foucault on governmentality and population: The impossible discovery. The Canadian Journal of Sociology 27 (4): 505–533.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dandeker, Christopher. 1990. Surveillance, power and modernity: Bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Trans. Camille Naish. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dillon, Lisa. 2005. Making a nation. The 1666, 1667, and 1681 censuses of Québec. In Manntalið 1703: þrjú hundruð ára; Greinar í tilefni afmælis, ed. Ólöf Garðarsdóttir and Eiríkur G. Guðmundsson, 39–49. Reykjavik: Hagstofa Íslands.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of minds: Colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duany, Jorge. 2002. The Puerto Rican nation on the move: Identities on the island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emigh, Rebecca Jean. 1997. The power of negative thinking: The use of negative case methodology in the development of sociological theory. Theory and Society 26 (5): 649–684.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Emigh, Rebecca Jean. 2002. Numeracy or enumeration? The uses of numbers by states and societies. Social Science History 26 (4): 653–698.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Dylan Riley, and Patricia Ahmed. 2015. The racialization of legal categories in the first U.S. Census. Social Science History 39 (4): 485–519.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Dylan Riley, and Patricia Ahm. 2016a. How societies and states count. Vol. 1, Antecedents of censuses from medieval to nation states. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Dylan Riley, and Patricia Ahm. 2016b. How societies and states count. Vol. 2, Changes in censuses from imperialist to welfare States. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, Steven. 2007. Inclusion: The politics of difference in medical research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 1998. Commensuration as a social process. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 313–343.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 2008. A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 49 (3): 401–436.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. [1976] 1978. The history of sexuality. Vol. 1, An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. [1976] . [1975] 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. [1976] . [1975] . 1991. Governmentality, ed. Pasquale Pasquino. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. [1976] . [1975] . [2004] 2007. Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. 1963. The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (3): 304–345.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking, Ian. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hannah, Matthew G. 2000. Governmentality and the mastery of territory in nineteenth-century America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haslip-Viera, Gabriel. 2006. The politics of Taíno revivalism: The insignificance of Amerindian mtDNA in the population history of Puerto Ricans. A comment on recent research. Centro Journal 18 (1): 261–275.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higgs, Edward. 2004. The information state in England: The central collection of information on citizens since 1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Higgs, Edward. 2005. Making sense of the census revisited: Census records for England and Wales 1801–1901: A handbook for historical researchers. London: Institute of Historical Research in conjunction with National Archives of the UK.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hirschman, Charles. 1987. The meaning and measurement of ethnicity in Malaysia: An analysis of census classifications. The Journal of Asian Studies 46 (3): 555–582.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joyce, Patrick, and Chandra Mukerji. 2017. The state of things: State history and theory reconfigured. Theory and Society 46 (1): 1–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kalpagam, U. 2000. The colonial state and statistical knowledge. History of the Human Sciences 13 (2): 37–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kertzer, David I., and Dominique Arel. 2002. Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power. In Census and identity: The politics of race, ethnicity, and language in national censuses, ed. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loveman, Mara. 2005. The modern state and the primitive accumulation of symbolic power. American Journal of Sociology 110 (6): 1651–1683.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Loveman, Mara. 2007. The U.S. census and the contested rules of racial classification in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Caribbean Studies 35 (2): 13–47.

    Google Scholar 

  • Loveman, Mara. 2014. National colors: Racial classification and the state in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Loveman, Mara, and Jeronimo O. Muniz. 2007. How Puerto Rico became White: Boundary dynamics and intercensus racial reclassification. American Sociological Review 72 (6): 915–939.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luft, Aliza, and Susan Thomson. 2021. Race, nation, and resistance to state symbolic power in Rwanda since the 1994 genocide. Political Power and Social Theory 38: 103–132.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mann, Michael. 1993. The sources of social power. Vol. 2, The rise of classes and nation states, 1760–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mayrl, Damon, and Sarah Quinn. 2016. Defining the state from within: Boundaries, schemas, and associational policymaking. Sociological Theory 34 (1): 1–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Meadow, Tey. 2010. ‘A rose is a rose’: On producing legal gender classifications. Gender and Society 24 (6): 814–837.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mettler, Suzanne. 2011. The submerged state: How invisible government policies undermine American democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Peter, and Nikolas Rose. 1990. Governing economic life. Economy and Society 19 (1): 1–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. The limits of the state: Beyond statist approaches and their critics. The American Political Science Review 85 (1): 77–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, Timothy. 1999. Society, economy, and the state effect. In State/culture: State formation after the cultural turn, ed. George Steinmetz, 76–97. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Mora, G. Cristina. 2014a. Cross-field effects and ethnic classification: The institutionalization of Hispanic panethnicity, 1965 to 1990. American Sociological Review 79 (2): 183–210.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mora, G. Cristina. 2014a. Cross-field effects and ethnic classification: The institutionalization of Hispanic panethnicity, 1965 to . 2014b. Making Hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats, and media constructed a new American. Chicago: University of Chicago.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Murdoch, Jonathan, and Neil Ward. 1997. Governmentality and territoriality: The statistical manufacture of Britain’s ‘national farm.’ Political Geography 16 (4): 307–324.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of citizenship: Race and the census in modern politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ostler, Jeffrey. 2002. Review of Matthew G. Hannah, Governmentality and the mastery of territory in nineteenth-century America. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33 (2): 312–313.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Patriarca, Silvana. 1996. Numbers and nationhood: Writing statistics in nineteenth-century Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Peabody, Norbert. 2001. Cents, sense, census: Human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (4): 819–850.

    Google Scholar 

  • Porter, Theodore M. 1995. Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science in public life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rodríguez-Muñiz, Michael. 2017. Cultivating consent: Nonstate leaders and the orchestration of state legibility. American Journal of Sociology 123 (2): 385–425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Nikolas, Pat O’Malley, and Marianna Valverde. 2006. Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2: 83–104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saiani, Paolo Parra. 2012. Democracy and public knowledge: An issue for social indicators. In Quality of life in Italy: Research and reflections, ed. Filomena Maggino and Giampaolo Nuvolati, 225–242. Dordrecht: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Sánchez-Matamoros, Juan Baños, Fernando Gutiérrez Hidalgo, Concha Álvarez-Dardet Espejo, and Francisco Carrasco Fenech. 2005. Govern (mentality) and accounting: The influence of different enlightenment discourses in two Spanish cases (1761–1777). Abacus—A Journal of Accounting, Finance and Business Studies 41 (2): 181–210.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sauder, Michael, and Wendy Nelson Espeland. 2009. The discipline of rankings: Tight coupling and organizational change. American Sociological Review 74 (1): 63–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schware, Robert. 1981. Quantification in the history of political thought: Toward a qualitative approach. Westport: Greenwood.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schweber, Libby. 2006. Disciplining statistics: Demography and vital statistics in France and England, 1830–1885. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shaw, Martin, and Ian Miles. 1979. The social roots of statistical knowledge. In Demystifying social statistics, ed. John Irvine, Ian Miles, and Jeff Evans, 27–38. London: Pluto.

    Google Scholar 

  • Singer, Brian C.J., and Lorna Weir. 2008. Sovereignty, governance and the political: The problematic of Foucault. Thesis Eleven 94 (1): 49–71.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Soifer, Hillel. 2008. State infrastructural power: Approaches to conceptualization and measurement. Studies in Comparative International Development 43 (3–4): 231–251.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Soifer, Hillel, and Matthias vom Hau. 2008. Unpacking the strength of the state: The utility of state infrastructural power. Studies in Comparative International Development 43 (3): 219–230.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stapleford, Thomas A. 2009. The cost of living in America: A political history of economic statistics, 1880–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Starr, Paul. 1987. The sociology of official statistics. In The politics of numbers, ed. William Alonso and Paul Starr, 7–57. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoler, Ann Laura. 1989. Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1): 134–161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sussman, Charlotte. 2004. The colonial afterlife of political arithmetic: Swift, demography, and mobile populations. Cultural Critique 56 (Winter): 96–126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff, et al. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Rebecca Jean Emigh

  2. Department of Sociology, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, USA

    Patricia Ahmed

  3. Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Dylan Riley

Authors
  1. Rebecca Jean Emigh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Patricia Ahmed
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dylan Riley
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rebecca Jean Emigh .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Emigh, R.J., Ahmed, P., Riley, D. (2021). The Potential of Censuses to Transform Categorization. In: How Everyday Forms of Racial Categorization Survived Imperialist Censuses in Puerto Rico. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82518-8_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82518-8_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-82517-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-82518-8

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation