Categories, borders and boundaries

TLDR

Categories have been a major focus in social sciences and humanities, yet many problematic categories such as culture, gender, and scale remain difficult to move beyond. The study attributes this difficulty to a paradox of categories, arguing that key problems arise from contradictory intellectual and cognitive understandings of category boundaries. By combining poststructural insights on societal ordering with cognitive science on categories as cognitive containers, the authors argue that category boundaries are always inchoate, partially formed and incomplete. The authors conclude that category and boundary research is fragmented across disciplines and recommend that geography’s boundary studies become the central field to investigate the processes that generate all categories.

Abstract

In recent years, categories have been a topic of substantial research in the social sciences and humanities. Although many problematic categories such as culture, gender and scale have been criticized, moving beyond them has proved to be surprisingly difficult. This paper attributes this difficulty to what is termed the paradox of categories and argues that the key problems with categories emerge from the contradictory ways their boundaries are intellectually and cognitively understood. By integrating poststructural insights into the role categories play in ordering modern society with research from cognitive science on the role categories play as containers in cognitive processes, this paper argues that the boundaries of categories should be understood as always inchoate — only partially formed and incomplete. The paper concludes that research into categories and boundaries is unnecessarily fragmented across a wide range of disciplines and proposes expanding boundary studies in geography to be the field that investigates the bounding processes that result in all types of categories.