Judging intentions is a culturally specific instrument of social control

Evidence

Michelle Rosaldo (1982), Marilyn Strathern (1988), and other anthropologists have suggested that perceiving action as the externalization of intentions by active human agents is a key facet of the Western imagination. We might add that the right to discover, classify, and judge intentions, as invested in many legal systems, is a crucial means of exerting social and political control. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 264

Categorization

• XREF: This racializes the very practice of intent-attribution, echoing the vault’s critiques of Western universalism in legal-scientific categories. — connects to: Culture functions as a control mechanism governing behavior through approval — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 141
• QUESTION: If intent-attribution is a site of control, how does this bear on the vault’s treatment of legal categorizations of race and crime?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 264