Your ID, please? the Henry Gates vs. James Crowley event from an anthropological perspective

In the modern world, ID papers are those indispensable objects without which we cannot prove we are who we say we are. We need material proof to attest to our identification. The central ethnographic event of this paper took place in July 2009 with the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Peirano,Mariza
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:Brasil
Institución:Associação Brasileira de Antropologia
Repositorio:Vibrant
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:scielo:S1809-43412011000200003
Acceso en línea:http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1809-43412011000200003
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:ID papers
ethnography
Henry Louis Gates
Valentin Groebner
Charles S. Peirce
Descripción
Sumario:In the modern world, ID papers are those indispensable objects without which we cannot prove we are who we say we are. We need material proof to attest to our identification. The central ethnographic event of this paper took place in July 2009 with the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by the police of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a passer-by reported that someone was breaking of the entrance door of a house which, it soon transpired, was the professor's own house. From the analysis of this episode three mechanisms of classification and singularization are revealed, namely "recognition," "identification," and "profiling."