Category careers are lodged in archival habits and administrative convention

Evidence

But the career of categories is also lodged in archival habits and how those change: in the telling titles of commissions, in the requisite subject headings of administrative reports, in what sorts of stories get relegated to the miscellaneous and “misplaced.” Attending to “words in their sites” and the conceptual weight they bear, the authority with which they are endowed, I ask how people think and why they seem obliged to think, or suddenly find themselves having difficulty thinking, in certain ways. It is, then, not just any words that matter, but rather those “that revolve around different focal points of power,” that are “set in play by a particular problem” as they gather around them debate and the provisional terms of convention. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 227

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s stated interest in colonial archival practice and the material sites of bureaucratic knowledge.
• SEED: Suggest an article angle on how the ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘misplaced’ file headings in archives record what an administration could not classify.