Colonial authority rejected native self-reports of painlessness as morally irrelevant.

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the actors’ own experience of pain is legally/morally irrelevant — what counts as evidence of suffering is itself a political determination — is genuinely paradigm-shifting.
• XREF: Connects to Asad’s broader secularism project and to the social construction of pain in medical anthropology (Scarry, The Body in Pain).
• SEED: Article angle: who gets to testify to their own suffering — how regimes of evidence about pain (colonial, medical, legal) silence the sufferer’s own account.