Colonial adat scholarship functioned as ready-made government policy

Evidence

We tend to take it for granted that a scholar is free to make the distinctions he or she sees fit about any topic of study, and to some extent this is wholly justifiable. But this is not the case with the Dutch van Vollenhoven, Snouck, and their peers. Theirs was not scholarship in the common sense of the term, something akin, say, to studying the history of American elections with a view to understanding their pattern, structure, and variables or to predicting future results. Rather, the overall impact of these scholars’ “contributions” is tantamount to a policy report, all too readily adoptable by government, to the effect that both parties cannot run together in elections, that Americans can vote only for one party, the other being less congruent with the “nature” of Americans. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism thesis about the entanglement of scholarship and colonial power, and to the broader ‘policy report’ critique of area studies.
• DEFINE: Recharacterizes what counts as scholarship by distinguishing knowledge-for-understanding from policy-oriented knowledge.