Heterogeneity precedes and even prompts claims to purity, not merely negates them.

Evidence

Heterogeneities lie beneath all claims to purity, order, refinement, and restriction, not just as their negation but even as their prompt. (I obviously have ethnoracial heterogeneities principally in mind here, but the argument reaches more broadly across cultural articulation.) To engage heterogeneities is to shift attention from populations – their statistics, their state management, their constrained formation and social control. The emphasis on heterogeneities, by contrast, stresses and seeks to sustain more or less unconstrained relationalities, activities, inter-actions. It undertakes to conjure, craft, and coordinate collaborations. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1893

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of racial formation theory and Foucault’s analytics of power; also resonates with the clean/dirty body policing theme from the sacrifice article.