Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them

Evidence

Those epistemic practices were not just recorded in the colonial archive, but developed and worked through the genres of documentation that civil servants were required to make. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Aligns with Ann Stoler and the ‘colonial archive’ literature; also dovetails with how bureaucratic genres shape knowledge in other colonial contexts.