A shared colonial logic of blame permitted divergent uses across individual accounts

Evidence

Paradoxically, what they held in common—a loosely standardized logic of blame—only underscored what set them apart, as individual planters and officials appropriated that logic differently to interpret what some had never seen but thought or claimed they knew. A stylized convention of dichotomies ordered their plots. Personal acts of revenge were set in contrast to collective political acts, criminality was set off from subversion, the order of the plantations was contrasted to the disorder of the hinterland, “war” proper in Aceh stood apart from Deli’s so-called labor disturbances. Not least, loyal subjects stood distinct from enemies of the state. But these stories contested each other in their uneven adherence to and suspicion of those very dichotomies on which they drew. Honed categories did not always serve them well. Some dichotomies crumbled in the face of acts that were both personal and political. Some cut across the ethnic distinctions Dutch authorities encouraged and to which they so confidently prescribed—the imagining of primordial loyalties that in other places and other moments had served them well. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1034

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Ann Stoler’s work on colonial knowledge and the reading of discrepant archival genres; also colonial dichotomies of loyal subject vs enemy of state.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that a common idiom enables divergence rather than convergence is a profound point about how shared frameworks actually operate; resists one-sentence summary.