Taxonomy, Misclassification, and the Poetics of Error

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Course Description

Taxonomies order the world—and betray it. This course explores classification as both an epistemological device and an ethnographic experiment, examining how systems of naming, sorting, and display reveal the limits of knowledge. Misclassification becomes method: through error, equivocation, and vernacular logics, ethnographers learn to trace the instability of categories and the generative potential of getting it wrong.

Situated within European Ethnology’s traditions of collecting, Alltagskulturforschung, and museum critique, the course approaches taxonomy fragmentographically—as fiction, speculation, and performance. Students engage with historical systems of order while designing their own counter-taxonomies, transforming classification into a practice of care, curiosity, and analytical fabulation.

The semester alternates between conceptual discussions and studio-based experimentation, culminating in The Living Index of Errors—a collective exhibition and analytical reflection on the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of ordering worlds.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, students will:

Analyze how taxonomies shape and govern cultural and material worlds.
Apply misclassification and controlled equivocation as critical and creative techniques.
Compare scientific, bureaucratic, and vernacular systems of naming and ordering.
Design multimodal taxonomies that foreground uncertainty, relation, and care.
Reflect critically on the ethics and aesthetics of classification in ethnographic research.

Guiding Questions

What forms of power and imagination are embedded in classification systems?
How can error, drift, and ambiguity become ethnographic tools?
What does it mean to curate uncertainty within European Ethnology?

Course Structure

Component	Hours	Description
Seminar Sessions	28	Conceptual discussions on the histories, philosophies, and politics of classification. Close readings in anthropology, feminist STS, and aesthetics.
Studio Workshops	28	Practical sessions in speculative labeling, counter-taxonomies, and multimodal display.
Independent Reading & Fieldwork	100	Reading, collecting, and taxonomic experimentation leading toward the Living Index of Errors.
Presentation & Reflection	24	Preparation and curation of final exhibition; peer critique and reflective writing.
Total	180 Hours	6 ECTS credits

Assessment

Each assignment extends from weekly readings and studio experiments. Evaluation emphasizes theoretical synthesis, methodological originality, and curatorial articulation.

Component	Description	Connection to Weekly Practice	Weight
Taxonomic Notebook (6–8 entries)	Short analytical notes (300–500 words each) documenting classification attempts, breakdowns, or misnamings. Each must cite one course reading.	Developed from Weeks 1–6; provides empirical foundation for the Counter-Taxonomy.	25%
Counter-Taxonomy / Misclassification Experiment	A speculative or vernacular taxonomy presented as diagram, table, or visual index, accompanied by an 800–1 000 word commentary on its logic and failures.	Builds on Weeks 3–6 (Aesthetics of Order → Error as Method → Sensory Taxonomies → Vernacular Orders).	25%
Final Portfolio and Reflexive Essay	A curated selection of 3–4 specimens or categories from your project + a 1 000 word essay titled The Poetics of Error: Taxonomic Reflections.	Synthesizes the semester’s work; exhibited in the Living Index of Errors.	30%
Participation	Active, prepared contribution to seminars, studio critique, and peer review.	Continuous	20%

How to Work with the Assessments

Taxonomic Notebook: your laboratory of order and disorder. Each week, record one observation of how things are named, sorted, or misfiled.
Counter-Taxonomy: a mid-semester speculative intervention testing how new criteria (tone, smell, sympathy, rhythm) might re-order the world.
Portfolio & Essay: an analytical and curatorial synthesis presented publicly; reflects on classification as a cultural technology and ethical practice.

Weekly Schedule

Each week includes a Seminar (2 hrs) and a Studio Workshop (2 hrs).

Week 1 – Why Classify? Cabinets, Archives, and Power

Opening note

Before beginning our first discussion and field exercise, we will dedicate part of the session to reviewing the course program together. We will go through its structure, aims, and expectations in detail—clarifying how the seminar, field labs, and assignments connect as well as the process for the final collective exhibition.

Students are expected to have already read the entire syllabus before class and to bring any questions, suggestions, or uncertainties for discussion. The goal is to treat the syllabus as a shared ethnographic artifact —a document we will revisit, modify if needed, and collectively inhabit throughout the semester.

Key Ideas:

Collection · Episteme · Governmentality · Care/Control

Guiding Questions:

What purposes do systems of classification serve in organizing knowledge and social life?
How do museums and archives construct political and epistemic orders?
In what ways can collecting and exhibiting be acts of both care and control?

Readings:

Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon.
Pearce, Susan M. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. London: Leicester University Press.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Introduction to the course structure and aims. Discussion of Foucault’s “classical episteme” and Bennett’s “exhibitionary complex.” Reflection on the museum as a taxonomy of power.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Inventory of Beginnings

Inventory 6–8 fragments from everyday life (objects, materials, digital files).
Sketch a provisional “cabinet map” guided by intuition rather than logic.
Note tensions between order, memory, and affect.

Week 2 – Taxonomy as Device: Nature, Culture, and Cosmopolitics

Key Ideas:

Classification · Ontology · Cosmopolitics · Boundary-work

Guiding Questions:

How do different ontological traditions define the boundaries between nature and culture?
What does it mean to design a taxonomy that accounts for plural cosmologies?
How might classification become a cosmopolitical negotiation rather than a fixed order?

Readings:

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Debate on ontology and the politics of boundary-making. Explore Descola’s and Stengers’ frameworks for thinking with plural cosmologies.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Boundary Logics

Draft a three-tier taxonomy for your collected materials.
Identify where categories collapse or overlap.
Annotate one diagram showing tension between “nature,” “culture,” and “relation.”

Week 3 – The Aesthetics of Order: Myth, Montage, and Sense

Key Ideas:

Mythologies · Aesthetic order · Semiotic instincts

Guiding Questions:

How do aesthetic and poetic logics shape systems of order?
What do myths, metaphors, and fictions reveal about the limits of reason in taxonomy?
Can artistic and sensory criteria generate alternative ways of classifying the world?

Readings:

Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In Other Inquisitions: 1937–1952, 101–105. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Discussion of myth and sense-making as taxonomic processes. Compare Borges’s fictive encyclopedia to anthropological classification.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Poetic Ordering

Rearrange your fragments by tone, texture, or rhythm.
Compose three short micro-labels that describe relational or affective patterns rather than factual categories.

Week 4 – Misclassification as Method: Error, Drift, and Equivocation

Key Ideas:

Error · Fabulation · Controlled equivocation · Pluralism

Guiding Questions:

How can error, mislabeling, or drift become productive forms of ethnographic knowledge?
What does “controlled equivocation” teach us about relational and perspectival thinking?
How might misclassification open new ethical or affective relations to materials?

Readings:

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití 2 (1): 3–22.
Ballestero, Andrea. 2024. Aquifers: A Handbook for Ethnographic Speculation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Myers, Natasha. 2020. “Unclassifiable Life.” Environmental Humanities 12 (2): 321–339.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Examine error and equivocation as modes of knowing in anthropology.
Discuss Myers and Ballestero as examples of ethnographic speculation.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Shadow Taxonomy

Invent a classification that intentionally mislabels your collected items.
Write a 250-word explanation of what these “errors” expose about relational thinking.

Week 5 – Sensing with Categories: Sonic, Affective, and Tonal Orders

Key Ideas:

Sensory taxonomy · Poetic epistemology · Embodied knowledge

Guiding Questions:

What happens when classification is guided by sound, rhythm, or atmosphere rather than vision?
How can sensory perception become a taxonomic principle?
What does an affective or tonal order of things reveal about embodied knowledge?

Readings:

Helmreich, Stefan. 2022. Sounds Like Life: Anthropology, Sound, and Science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2015. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontologies, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Investigate how sound and affect reorder perception and knowledge.
Discuss sonic ethnography as a taxonomic intervention.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Sensory Index

Design a sensory or tonal index for your specimens (sound, density, rhythm).
Compose a legend translating these qualities into symbolic or diagrammatic notation.

Week 6 – Vernacular and Decolonial Orders: Ontological Conflicts

Key Ideas:

Ontological pluralism · Vernacular knowledge · Multispecies classification

Guiding Questions:

How do vernacular or indigenous systems of classification contest dominant epistemologies?
What forms of coexistence or conflict emerge between ontological worlds?
How can ethnographic practice recognize multiplicity without translation or reduction?

Readings:

Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontology and Indigeneity: On the Political Ontology of Culture.” Current Anthropology 54 (5): 547–568.
Tsing, Anna, Jennifer Deger, Alder Kellen, and Feifei Zhou, eds. 2020. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Compare vernacular and decolonial systems of classification.
Examine the ethics of ontological conflict and relational coexistence.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Vernacular Audit

Document a local classification system (market, herbarium, archive).
Map its criteria and relational ethics. Compare its logic to your own taxonomy.

Week 7 – Label Poetics and Display Ethics

Key Ideas:

Label grammar · Display politics · Situated publics

Guiding Questions:

What politics and poetics are embedded in the simple act of labeling?
How can ethnographic display become a reflexive and reparative practice?
In what ways do words and formats of presentation shape what is thinkable or visible?

Readings:

Bennett, Tony, Fiona Cameron, Nicolas Dias, Ben Dibley, and Rodney Harrison. 2017. Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harrison, Rodney, and Esther Breithoff. 2021. Afterlives of the Museum: Ethnographic Perspectives on Museum Transformations. London: Routledge.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Discuss the aesthetics and politics of museum display.
Analyze label writing as an ethnographic and poetic act.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Three Labels

Write three distinct labels for one specimen: factual, poetic, and relational.
Design a two-panel exhibition sketch illustrating how each framing transforms meaning.

Week 8 – The Open Archive: Poetics of Error and Public Afterlives

Key Ideas: Open archive · Reparative curation · Processual publics

Guiding Questions:

What would it mean to curate an archive that remains open, unfinished, and vulnerable?
How do errors, absences, and afterlives shape the ethics of curation?
How can we exhibit the fragmentary without resolving it—turning incompleteness into care?

Readings:

Demos, T. J. 2023. Radical Museology and the Decolonial Turn. London: Sternberg Press.
Stevenson, Alice. 2021. Scattered Finds: Archaeology, Egyptology and Museums. London: UCL Press.
Ferreira, Jorge, and Joana Sarmento. 2024. “Reassembling the Archive: Curatorial Practices in Post-Colonial Museums.” Museum Anthropology Review 18 (2): 201–223.
Lemoine, Bertrand. 2023. “Archival Futures: On Openness and Loss.” Anthropology Today 39 (4): 15–19.
Kohn, Eduardo, and Tomás Sánchez Criado. 2021. “Careful Classifications.” Journal of Material Culture 26 (4): 465–482.

Seminar (2 hrs):

Reflect on open and decolonial archives as forms of care.
Discuss curatorial afterlives and reparative approaches to knowledge.

Studio Workshop (2 hrs): Curating Errors

Select 3–4 specimens or categories for The Living Index of Errors.
Prepare interpretive labels and compose a 1,000-word essay on Error, Care, and What Remains Unclassifiable.

Final Output: The Living Index of Errors

Description

The course concludes with The Living Index of Errors, a living catalog of misclassifications, mistranslations, and methodological detours.

Each entry combines a short analytical text with a label and a 1,000-word essay On the Poetics of Error.

Purpose

The Index reclaims error as generative. It shows how missteps and uncertainty can become productive forces in ethnographic theory and method.

Public Presentation

Realized as a collaboratively annotated website or small printed volume, the Index operates as a reflexive archive—part glossary, part experiment in collective fallibility.