Colonial archives require chronological and names-based rather than thematic navigation

Evidence

Because the archives of the Ministry of Colonies (MK) are organized chronologically and not by topic, there is no easy entry by theme. Indices provide some access by subject, but only in a limited sense. It is rather specific names and dates that matter. Knowing what one is after is not always enough. More important is a reckoning with how colonial sense and reason conjoined social kinds with the political order of colonial things. But even then, as I argue throughout this book, that “common sense” was subject to revision and actively changed. Navigating the archives is to map the multiple imaginaries that made breastfeeding benign at one moment and politically charged at another; that made nurseries a tense racial question; that elevated something to the status of an “event”; that animated public concern or clandestine scrutiny, turning it into what the French call an “affaire.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to claims about colonial archival method and how official documentation shapes which social phenomena become legible as events.