First posted on January 29th 2014 as Pigeon-holing Isn’t Even Fair to Pigeons on my previous blog dibsonthat.wordpress.com
My previous blog, ‘Science Fiction, Science Feminine’, got me thinking about the phenomenon of perception and oversimplification in general. Having failed to conform to the expected on multiple occasions myself, the term pigeonhole sat up, begging to be taken seriously. I obliged.
It’s originally a noun, describing (literally), ‘a small recess for a domestic pigeon to nest in’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Pigeons who, between the first and second world wars, were honoured with the Dickens Medal for their steadfast contribution to the delivery of top secret messages and plans a total of 32 times. Pigeons, who have had whole careers in homing and racing, as couriers, in ceremonies, as food (albeit a necessarily shortened career), as pets, sacrifices, symbols of peace, assistant to some of the biggest names in religion – the Prophet Muhammed, Noah – and as the representative of no less than 4 goddesses, including Venus!
I hear the screeching of mental wheels… ceremonies? Pets?? Symbols of peace??? Noah???? No!
Yes! The pigeon, I discovered, belongs to the bird clade, Columbidae, along with the dove! I was stunned, owing to the fact that I had owned 4 pet doves as a pre-teen – Snowy and Fairy, then Snowy II and Fairy II. What? I was a pre-teen!!
Between them, doves and pigeons represent around 310 species, and are actually known to be fairly difficult to categorise:
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They are found everywhere on earth (a bit like humans);
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They vary considerably in size (a bit like humans);
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Their diet varies across food groups – frugiforous (fruit/tree feeders), granivorous (seeds/ground feeders), insects, worms, snails, moths, reptiles (in principle, a bit like humans), and
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10 species are known to be extinct, including the dodo (a bit like the decimated or extinct human civilisations of South America, Canada, etc.).
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They are not all ASBO-flouting feral pigeons.
I had to admit that I had never equated the serene white releasing dove, popular at ceremonies such as weddings and funerals, with the grey-black permanent residents of Trafalgar or Times Square? Colombia livia, city dove, city pigeon, street pigeon, is the urbanite progeny of originally sea-cliff and mountain-dwelling rock doves. Rock doves were domesticated in the 1600s to domestic pigeons (of course!), who then subsequently returned to the urban wild!
The social adoption of the term, inspired by the small recess for pigeons, developed into use to describe a recess or compartment for documents, and then as a partition for groups of people. This later application has increased since the 1850s – slowly at first, picking up speed at the dawn of the 1900s, then peaking just before the 1950s, to more or less plateau since then. Dictionaries, diligently following colloquialisms, incorporated the evolution of meaning;
– Oxford English Dictionary: a category, typically an overly restrictive one, to which someone or something is assigned;
– Google search: assign to a particular category, typically an overly restrictive one
– Cambridge Dictionary: usually disapproving, to have an often unfair idea of what type someone or something is.
– Macmillan Dictionary: to decide that someone or something belongs to a particular type or group, especially without knowing much about them.
– Thefreedictionary.com: A specific, often oversimplified category.
By this time, it was beginning to feel a lot like a contradiction of the term with the object, because pigeonhole, the verb, has evolved in meaning to brand, categorize, characterise, classify, codify, compartmentalise, designate, grade, label, rank, rate, sort or tag (OED).
Like the inclusions of overly restrictive, disapproving, unfair, without knowing much about them and oversimplified in the above definitions, many of the synonyms swing toward a degree of negativity, rather than positivity, depending on the context. It is, for example, reassuring when categorising, codifying or designating an animal, mineral or vegetable. On the other hand, labelling, branding or tagging people becomes very troubling, even sinister – consider labelling a personality (flirt, slut, commitment-phobe); branding of slaves; categorising or compartmentalising ethnic groups (apartheid); ranking of social worth (upper and lower classes), and electronic tagging of offenders. This last has sparked recent debate on the proposed fitting of psychiatric patients with a similar device. Mental health advocates argue that it is demeaning. And so it is, certainly inappropriate, along with all of the above.
Wow!
For the 310 pigeon species, how disappointing! For any member of a minority group, how disturbing!
Pigeon-holing places the ‘power to decide’ firmly in someone else’s hands, leaving the objectified almost powerless to change it. In the case of the pigeon, the disadvantage is not mastering human speech. Their entire existence is due to an outside force modifying one species and inadvertently creating 2 more! However, pigeons still fare better than humans in this respect. The job of classifying the animal kingdom falls to highly trained and scientifically rational zoologists or taxonomists in the study of phylogenetics, cladistics, systematics (and botanists for the plant kingdom). Humans are pigeonholed by judgements which lack rationality. Early ‘scientific’ experiments to prove racial supremacy (white, Aryan) have, rightly, been thoroughly discredited – their starting hypotheses, conduct and data interpretation fundamentally biased.
But wait! We are members of western civilisation and emerging democracies, benefitting from the pursuit of knowledge. One side effect of that process is that we are raised to expect order, to create order, to live and conduct ourselves in an orderly fashion.
Interesting, then, that coinciding with that 1950s peak use of pigeonholing were many social changes occurring in (certainly British) society, shrinking the gaps between social groups: Women and ethnic minorities had risen in prominence after the death toll of 2 world wars (aided by pigeons); in 1919, women received the right to enter the professions, gained the right of equal property inheritance in 1922 and the vote in 1928; in 1944, the Education Act ensured free secondary education was available to all, regardless of class; in 1949 the British Nationality Act granted British citizenship and the right to work in Britain to the people of the Commonwealth (following the creation of the NHS in 1948); and the 1960s brought access to the contraceptive pill and contraceptive advice to all women, freeing them to take advantage of the pre-war rights they had gained.
In a remarkable flash of insight, the Cambridge dictionary actually included a third definition of pigeonholing – classifying and creating order.
It sounds reasonable. It is reasonable when ornithologists tackle the challenge of the Columbidae clade. You can take it as read that they took their sweet, evolutionary time in classifying those 310(+10) species. Humans, again, not so lucky. Humans tend to resort to pigeonholing when faced with the unfamiliar. To the human who embraces the chaos and the uncertainty, the unfamiliar can be exhilarating, educational, exciting, surprising, invigorating – many positive things! For the human to whom creating order and the need to predict and control is paramount, the unfamiliar is more likely to be seen as a threat. Writer, Julian Fellowes, has made the cast of Downton Abbey almost too knowing of the profound social changes that society edured through the middle of the last century, and they hadn’t even peaked at that time.
Pigeon-holing a pigeon is a disservice to the hours of study expended by scientists and the hard evolutionary work of Mother Nature (or Elemental Force of your choice) in creating such dazzling diversity.
Pigeon-holing a person may be the start of something darker, like Fascism – mainly political, but also ‘intolerant views or practices’; Stereotype – ‘a widely held, but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type’, ‘… especially an idea that is wrong’; Bigotry – ‘intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself‘; and the Big Daddy of them all, the vice of which the wonderful Elizabeth Bennett was guilty (Mr. Darcy’s was pride)…
Prejudice:–
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‘Prejudgment, or forming an opinion before becoming aware of the relevant facts…. […] …preconceived, usually unfavorable, judgments’
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‘Any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence’
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‘A preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience; dislike, hostility, or unjust behaviour deriving from preconceived and unfounded opinions’
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An unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially when formed without enough thought or knowledge’
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‘An unreasonable opinion or feeling, especially the feeling of not liking a particular group of people’
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‘Feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience’.
I will accept nominations for any of the above as a validated field of science.
On a postcard.
Please.
In fact, sociologists have tried to construct theories explaining prejudice. I think the y resonates best for me: ‘competition for limited resources leads to increased negative prejudices and discrimination’, and the Integrated Threat Theory, where the four threats are;
The Threat Theory
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Realistic threats – tangible, threats for resources/assets, to income
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Symbolic threats – perceived difference in cultural values
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Intergroup anxiety – belief that interactions with other groups cause negative feelings like uneasiness
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Negative stereotypes – anticipated negative behaviour in line with the perceived stereotype.
Pigeons know the Integrated Threat Theory all too well. They are swatted away when they realistically attempt to peck at your fast food lunch or picnic, symbolically they are indiscriminate about their droppings, they cause angst as they are perceived to spread disease, thereby fitting into a negative stereotype because of all of the above. They are also familiar with the Social Dominance Theory in city life, where they occupy the lower rungs of the societal group hierarchies, coming below their clade-mates the doves. The dominant forge their right of superiority by creating credible myths (morally and intellectually) to justify the pigeon’s inferior position and the denial of their claim over limited resources.
If pigeons have it so bad, just consider that for pigeon-holed humans, things can only be even more intolerable – inequalities in the workplace for appointments, salary and senior promotions; hailing a black cab in Brixton; applying for membership of a posh golf club or private members club; walking through certain neighbourhoods, driving certain cars, street violence and the pursuit of justice, owning a high street business other than a corner shop, post office or restaurant.
But, I am thinking by now, there must be something good about pigeon-holing.
In scriptwriting, there is some distinction between character and characterisation, and ‘characterise’ is probably the only term I recognise as positive. It fundamentally cannot be a function of a superficial assessment, because it has so little to do with first impressions or outward appearance. It has to do with qualities, actions, thoughts, speech, peculiarities – traits which make a pigeon or person unique and interesting, rather than an outsider or a threat (true psychopaths or sociopaths notwithstanding). Characterisation cannot lump individuals into an oversimplified group. It is the fundamental opposite of the prejudicialisms. Peristerophobism, for example, is strictly speaking a fear of pigeons, but I am taking the liberty of using it here as homophobism usually is – hate. The truth of this state of mind is not one easily put into words. It is learned probably subliminally, occasionally from first-hand negative experience. A true peristerophobe will see a feral pigeon, immediately experience a sub-conscious cognitive dissonance (negative feelings) and attach it to every thought and deed in relation to that pigeon. Subsequently, it won’t matter if that pigeon begins to talk, dance, parade character witnesses on its behalf, present you with a typed, perfumed CV (à la Elle Woods, Legally Blonde) or save your life, it won’t change that feeling. Everything that pigeon does will be within the context of that entrenched negative belief, or doxa – the unspoken and taken-for-granted ‘way it is’. Pigeon positives will be dismissed as false or demeaned as not good enough, because it is groundlessly being held to a higher standard than the ‘norm’. I’ll wager that even if you informed that same peristerophobe of the Pigeonhole Principle, they would still treat the bird as vermin. In fact, the Pigeonhole Principle is well known as a counting argument in mathematics, which can be used to demonstrate unexpected results!
For humans, of course, there is racism, apartheid (yes, it still happens), sexism, homophobia (really? A fear of…?), religious fascism and oppression of every stripe. In the presence of such belief systems, the histories of the admirable past and present contributions made by oppressed are forgotten or re-written, requiring huge efforts of sacrifice to re-tell their stories* (see some examples below).
Finally, the poor pigeonholed pigeon can be subject to depression, as can the pigeon-holer. The pigeon might see itself as an amalgamation of 2 or more categories which, in ignorance are usually poorly defined anyway, or not be a perfect fit in any; it will change over time through parenthood, injury, age or experience (it might even attempt communication and reconciliation!) and it will have to deal with the stressof not conforming and being considered an outsider, contrary to it’s own self-image. The pigeon-holer, on the other hand, must eventually reap the reward for perpetuating constant negativity, angst and anger, and generally sucking genuine curiosity and the joy of the unfamiliar out of the world.
If it’s that bad for pigeons, I am truly saddened to think of what it might mean for a human. Of course, humans, being the mass of surprising contradictions that we are, are capable of trying to allay and counter-act the harm of it:
There are genuine attempts at the international recognition of minorities:
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International Women’s Day every February/March since 1908;
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Gay Pride (LGBT) Day/Parades every July since 1965;
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Black History Month every October, formally since 1976 in the USA (derived from Negro History Month since 1926 and changed to BHM informally in 1970), since 1982 in the UK and since 1995 in Canada.
This wouldn’t be a DescantDeb blog without some film and TV references, and, of course, there are multiple examples of film and TV dealing with minority groups and their struggle:
Human Rights
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Hedda Gabler 1963,
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King (TV) 1978,
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Ghandi 1982,
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Cry Freedom 1987,
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Malcolm X 1992,
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Schindler’s List 1993,
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Lincoln 1988 (also 1992 and 2012),
- Hotel Rwanda 2004
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Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom 2013;
Race
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Blazing Saddles 1974,
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Roots (TV) 1977,
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Glory 1989,
- A Time To Kill 1998
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Amistad 1997,
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Amazing Grace 2006,
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The Great Debaters 2008, T
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he Secret Life of Bees 2008,
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Small Island 2009,
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12 Years a Slave 2013;
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- Blazing Saddles
Sexuality
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The Naked Civil Servant (TV) 1975,
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Peter’s Friends 1992,
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The Crying Game 1992,
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Philadelphia 1993,
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The Birdcage 1996 (La Cages Aux Folles 1978)
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TransAmerica 2005,
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Milk 2008,
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Dallas Buyers Club 2013;
Female Empowerment
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Norma Rae 1979,
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The Colour Purple 1985,
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The Josephine Baker Story 1991,
- Bandit Queen 1994
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Tea with Mussolini 1999,
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Erin Brockovitch 2000,
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Legally Blonde 2001,
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Made in Dagenham 2010,
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Mrs Mandela (TV) 2010,
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The Help 2011.
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- The Naked Civil Servant
Mental Illness
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Sybil (TV) 1976,
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Shine 1996,
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A Beautiful Mind 2001,
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Monk (TV) 2002,
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Lars and the Real Girl 2007,
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Reign Over Me 2007,
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The Soloist 2009,
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Perception (TV) 2012,
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Silver Linings Playbook 2012.
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- Sybil
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- Lars and The Real Girl
Finally, this clip is one of the best courtroom closing arguments period. I haven’t read John Grisham’s book, so I don’t know if it was the work of the author or the scriptwriter (Akiva Goldsman). But, from around 2 minutes 5 seconds, Jake Brigance is given the words to fully convey the power of perception and it is powerfully done by recent Oscar winner, Matthew McConaughey.
Apply it to the plight of any minority. You can’t understand the words and not cry for humanity. And pigeons.
With thanks to
1. The author of Wikipedia ‘Pigeons’, ‘Pigeonholing’ and ‘Pigeonhole Principle’
3. www.ganfyd.org/index.php?title=The_Creation_and_Evolution_of_Medical _Equality_within_the_Profession
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