Colonial administrative virtue required calibrated, selective familiarity with the colonized, not mastery.

Evidence

If colonial archives were nurseries of legal knowledge and official repositories of policy, they were also repositories of good taste and bad faith. Scribes often wrote out the final, clean copy but not always. “Semiofficial” correspondence, and certainly personal letters, could be penned by their authors. Reports to the Governor-General in Batavia and to the Minister of Colonies in The Hague were composed by men of letters whose status was enhanced by reference to Greek heroes and French bons mots. Such proof of competence and good judgment was demonstrated in no small part by configuring events into familiar and recognizable plots. In empire’s “lettered cities” of administrative work, virtue was defined by limited and selective familiarity with the Indies. Those with too much knowledge of things Javanese were penalized, as were those with not enough. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project on colonial archival epistemology — the lettered-city detail about penalizing both too much and too little Javanese knowledge is a concrete, extractable claim.
• STORYSTEM: The idea of a professional administrative elite punished for knowing the colonized culture too well could seed a character or worldbuilding premise.