At the very outset we are introduced to the boy's family as they move southward through their country in a convoy of trucks from an area controlled by "African Arabs" to their own ethnic heartland, inhabited by "pure Africans," in the book's somewhat overly reductive language of ethnicity.
The reductive language the government has used to refer to asylum seekers has often included "boat people" and "illegals".
Nonis' special knack, inherited from those early influences, is for employing a simple tool set, a reductive language capable of infinitely complex possibilities.
Shore's photography is, to use the ever-reductive language of art criticism, an attempt to reconcile the subject matter of the New York school of black-and-white street photography of the fifties — the love of the overlooked, the stray, the strange, the gutter, and the slummy — with the high finish and compositional poise of the Meyerowitz-Eggleston school of color photography.
Still, the division's stylists seem to be struggling with the newly reductive design language.
On its face, talk of grounding human morality in animal behavior is the kind of "lower language" of reductive explanation that might make Charles Taylor shudder.
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It is anti-reductive insofar as the theoretical language of science is claimed to be autonomous in relation to the observational evidence base.
The language can be brutally reductive: pain becomes progress, fat deserves shame, weakness is failure and your self-worth is measured by how your body looks.
Astley writes: "In politics, television, newspapers and advertising, language is often negative, reductive, stripped of full expression to put across a message – it's spun or twisted out of recognition … Instead of being used to communicate, it is used to control thinking, as a tool of power".
In powerfully accessible language, he extended the charge of reductive thinking to the museum itself, and to Western art scholarship and criticism as a whole.
