Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially minority groups. The failure of the 2011 German census to produce reliable numbers on the country’s largest religious minority, Muslims, could be viewed as a case in point. However, this ignores the fact that in the late 1980s officials successfully counted Muslims. This article traces how officials changed their approach to Muslim enumeration over the course of designing the 2011 census. Drawing on internal ministerial documents and interviews, I show that the reversal of statistical visibility was the result of a recoupling process. Through this process, old state-religion laws that officials had previously ignored now became rigorously applied to the census. An extra-statistical debate on religious education triggered this recoupling by reviving narrow, legal categories of religion and alerting church representatives and legal experts to imprecise census terms. Using the German case and other empirical examples, I describe a more uneven influence of historical legacies than commonly suggested by research on categorization. Rather than viewing legacies as having a stable, or even growing, influence on categorization, I argue that they only take effect when they become politicized and enforced by powerful actors. I call for a more nuanced analysis of the role historical factors play in determining trajectories of census categorization, especially those that are invoked to explain the reluctance of European states to collect ethno-cultural data.

中文翻译：

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使穆斯林难以辨认：重新结合是德国宗教调查的障碍

关于分类的文献经常引用历史遗产来解释为什么国家坚持不能充分捕捉其人口，尤其是少数群体的统计类别。2011 年德国人口普查未能提供该国最大的宗教少数群体穆斯林的可靠数字，可以被视为一个很好的例子。然而，这忽略了一个事实，即在 1980 年代后期，官员们成功地统计了穆斯林。本文追溯了官员在 2011 年人口普查的设计过程中如何改变他们对穆斯林人口普查的方法。利用内部部长文件和访谈，我表明统计可见性的逆转是重新耦合过程的结果。通过这个过程，官员们以前忽视的旧的国家宗教法律现在被严格地应用于人口普查。一场关于宗教教育的超统计辩论通过恢复狭隘的合法宗教类别并提醒教会代表和法律专家注意不精确的人口普查术语，引发了这种重新耦合。使用德国案例和其他实证例子，我描述了历史遗产的影响比通常的分类研究建议的影响更大。与其将遗产视为对分类具有稳定甚至不断增长的影响，我认为它们只有在被强大的参与者政治化和强制执行时才会生效。我呼吁对历史因素在确定人口普查分类轨迹中所起的作用进行更细致的分析，尤其是那些被用来解释欧洲国家不愿收集民族文化数据的因素。