Colonial authorities dismissed practitioners’ own claims of painlessness as irrelevant to the moral verdict.

Evidence

The fact that the performers themselves declared that they felt no pain was irrelevant. So, too, was the plea that this was a religious rite. Such justifications were not acceptable. It was the offense given by the performance to a particular concept of being human that reduced qualitatively different kinds of behavior to a single standard. And it was the government’s task to realize that standard here and now, not that of divinity to apply it in the afterlife. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 544 (#expands, via linked claim)

Valck was versed in the official vernacular of “unrest” but chose not to abide by its common and proper use. To classify an assault as a private matter was a well-honed convention for dismissing an assailant’s broader claims. Thus, in the Deli Tobacco Company’s 1925 commemorating volume, it could note that in the repeated assaults on Europeans of fifty years earlier, “people were constantly uncertain as to whether an assault should be considered as ‘hostile’ or indeed only as ‘rapacious’ and ‘cut-throat’ though in fact people lost goods and lives in both cases.” Valck, on the contrary, was unwilling to relegate the violence to “only” personal revenge. He saw a pattern to it and his subsequent report told a story of violent retaliation and resentments that extended far beyond the particulars of the Luhmann family murder alone. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1124 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial authority rejected native self-reports of painlessness as morally irrelevant. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 544; Colonial authority pre-emptively silences the colonized’s own testimony; Classifying violence as ‘private’ was a colonial convention for dismissing its political claims — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1124 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial authority rejected native self-reports of painlessness as morally irrelevant. #expands (0.97) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 544
• Classifying violence as ‘private’ was a colonial convention for dismissing its political claims #complicates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1124