Making up people. On some looping effects of the human sciences: social control or institutional reflexivity?

This paper is an account of the co-construction of categorical identity and personal identity among human beings. As people recognize themselves within a socially sanctioned categorical scheme, they reproduce that scheme, and hence institutional and personal reflexivity occur as a joint movement. The inspiration for this account are Ian Hacking’s view about the distinctiveness of social kinds from natural kinds, and Dan Sperber’s idea about cultural communication as a form of social epidemiology.