Colonial archives record administrators’ uncertainty about matching rules to reality

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Reverses or complicates the common image of archives as confident records; connects to anthropology of state paperwork.

Related

• Colonial archives primarily record epistemic uncertainty, not settled accounts of events. (similarity 0.92)
• Colonial taxonomies were built from uncertain knowledge, not confident mastery (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives hold affective hopes, fears, and trained attentions, not just records. (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives carry anxious labor and partiality, not settled knowledge (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.84)
• Unrealized colonial plans function as diagnostics of official political knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Conditional and future-tense archival writing shaped colonial administrative responses (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives could be reactivated to serve new governing strategies. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives functioned as active technologies of rule, not passive records (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archives were sites of expectation and conjured futures, not mere records. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial state documents exceed and resist the state’s own epistemic demands (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.83)
• Archival density itself gave the state evidence to justify policy inaction (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archives actively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archive density was driven by emotional standards for agents. (similarity 0.82)