Book Review

The sociologist Bruce Curtis, whose works on state formation and education in old Ontario are well regarded, has produced an important examination of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian censuses. Non-Canadianists will be interested in Curtis's discussion of the literature surrounding census making and his conclusions that "censuses are made, not taken." Censuses involve artificially constructed categories, such as household head or national origin, which oblige populations to cast themselves into such categories, the better to be governed. Curtis's arguments are bolstered by the insights of many theorists. In the background are those of Antonio Gramsci, as Curtis argues that hegemonic classes or segments of society can use the census to bolster "social imaginaries" simply by casting them into official terminology. On the other hand, he maintains that Michel Foucault's notions of population and its "governmentality" are at once too simple and too confused to illuminate such a modern state-making endeavor as the census.

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