>No archive is entirely stable or fixed (Dekker 2017: 12)
What
Why
Archives are not neutral but have loaded histories and embody power imbalances still at work today. The seemingly simple categories and oppositions have a long history of being used to demarcate levels of civilization in the context of colonialism. Structuralist anthropologist Claude Levy-Strauss's *The Raw and The Cooked* for example (1964) described classifications as a device for understanding the cultures of others – categories such as the raw and the cooked have been clues to the core organizing principles for colonial Western understandings of "primitive" culture (Bowker & Star 1995: 3), as he discussed in his seminal study of Amerindian mythologies.
Who
When
How
## References
Bowker, G. and Star, S. L., *Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences*, Cambridge/London, MIT Press: 2000 (1999).
