Despite the terrors of typologies : the importance of understanding categories of difference and identity

Understanding how the identity of a Hutu person is different from a Tutsi and why nearly a million people were murdered in the name of this difference is not handled adequately in the current literature. Drawing on parts of the world as different as Rwanda and Sri Lanka, this essay takes up this theme through three main arguments. Firstly, categorizations about identity, even when hardened into ugly typologies by processes of colonization or state formation, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Secondly, negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it means to be human. We cannot simply hope for the end of such negotiation and wish away categories of identity such as nation, ethnicity, religion and tribe. These categories are not the problem, so much as the ways in which difference is negotiated, instrumentalized and shoved into typologies of hierarchical status. Negotiating the terms of identity through categories of difference is fundamental to questions of power, meaning, violence and creative social practice. Thirdly, while processes of categorization are part of the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve all too often to reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of identity. This is the source of practices as diverse as racism, chauvinism and genocide. Sometimes tensions between ontological formations can be positive, but all too often instrumental use of these tensions in the contemporary world has led to aggressive violence and defensive mayhem. Running beneath all these arguments is the methodological proposition that, in order to get past either clash of cultures descriptions or flows of difference analyses, it is useful to develop a systemic understanding of ontological formations and their difficult intersection.