Colonial archives primarily record epistemic uncertainty, not settled accounts of events.

Evidence

As such, these archives are not simply accounts of actions or records of what people thought happened. They are records of uncertainty and doubt in how people imagined they could and might make the rubrics of rule correspond to a changing imperial world. Not least they record anxious efforts to “catch up” with what was emergent and “becoming” in new colonial situations. Ontologies are both productive and responsive, expectant and late. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 47

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges a common instrumentalist reading of colonial archives as pure records of domination — resonates with the reader’s ‘epistemic anxieties’ frame.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression of ontology into ‘productive and responsive, expectant and late’ and the archive as a record of anxious catch-up is a paradigm-shifting reframing of what colonial documentation is.