Archival inaccessibility stems from governance principles, not cataloging failures
Evidence
But the question of “accessibility” to the workings of the Dutch colonial administration in the nineteenth-century Indies is a real one that eludes the contemporary inventory numbers by which documents are requested and searched. Inaccessibility has more to do with the principles that organized colonial governance and the “common sense” that underwrote what were deemed political issues and how those issues traveled by paper through the bureaucratic pathways of the colonial administration. Not least, “access” rests on knowledge of the history of colonial Indonesia, on changing perceptions of danger as much as the structures of command. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 77
Categorization
- XREF: Develops the thesis that archival ‘common sense’ and bureaucratic pathways, not classification stamps, gate the colonial past. — connects to: Archives that erase marginalized lives require a critical fabulation method rather than empirical recovery — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1022; Trouillot distinguishes archival power of creation from practices of assembly and retrieval; Bureaucratic practices hinder effective management of information secrecy.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 77
Broader Connections
- Trouillot distinguishes archival power of creation from practices of assembly and retrieval
#expands(0.55) - Bureaucratic practices hinder effective management of information secrecy.
#qualifies(0.50)