This essay shows how logical classifications — such as good-bad, high-low, black-white — become ordered into moral hierarchies that help create and legitimate social hierarchies of domination. It extends labeling theory and discourse analysis to macrosocial and intercivilizational phenomena, focusing on how classifications make what they pretend merely to describe. I examine devices by which cultural representation becomes ideological domination in specific cases: colonial encounters in the Americas, Africa, and India; parallel discourses of slavery in medieval Islam and the early United States; how British colonial ethnography in Afghanistan created an Other appropriate to the needs of exploration, frontier management, and imperial bureaucracy. Discourses of domination also dominate the masters, because the constitution of a colonized Alter requires reconstitution of the colonial Ego. Discourses of domination can also become rhetorics of resistance, inverting the master categories and reclassifying them into more embracing conceptions of the human