Categories and the moral order
Categories act as inference-rich filing systems (Stokoe and Attenborough, 2015). The deployment of categories not only invites us to pair certain members or categories, it also brings category expectations into play. It is precisely a concern with ‘what we know’ about categories, and indeed ‘what we expect’, of and from category members, that MCA can alert us to. The concept of category predicates (Hester, 1998), points to a host of rights, obligations and knowledge that become mundanely bound up with membership categories (see also Sharrock, 1974; Watson, 1978, 1983). As Jayyusi (1984, 1991) makes plain, MCA invites consideration of how mundane morality is cemented within common sense understandings of how category incumbents should behave. Thus, in Sacks’ example, the Mommy, picking up the Baby is an unremarkable matter. Jayyusi (1991, p. 240) notes that it is “mundane reasoners” who tie common-sense knowledge to moral praxis: expectations are locked into place by everyday use of category labels. Normative practices are maintained through the most routine interactions (Stokoe, 2003b) and, as Baker (2000; p.111) points out, “the more natural, taken-for-granted and therefore invisible the categorisation work, the more powerful it is”.