Colonial categories formed in the same ambiguous space as scientific objects

Evidence

Sound conjecture and expectation can make governing strategies work, or as anticolonial movements have amply demonstrated, make them violently fail. And like scientific communities, new objects emerge between what one does “not quite yet know” and that for which there is not yet a name. Such epistemic objects are produced in the haze of what historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheniberger calls “a mix- ture of hard and soft,” or, as Michel Serres puts it, “object, still, sign, al- ready; sign still, object already.” The making of colonial categories shares this ambiguous epistemic space. New social objects were the archives’ product as much as subjects of them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 274

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: Bridges history of science (Rheinberger’s epistemic things, Serres’ object/sign oscillation) to colonial governance — parallels the reader’s own work bridging epistemic disciplines and colonial archival studies.
• QUESTION: The claim that archives both produced and were subject to new social objects begs asking: which specific colonial categories entered the archive as products, and which entered as subjects?

Related

• Colonial categories and archives co-produce new social objects in epistemic haze. (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial taxonomies were built from uncertain knowledge, not confident mastery (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial classification was unruly, piecemeal, and epistemically unsettled rather than hegemonic. (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial governance was a constant epistemic reckoning within the colonial world itself (similarity 0.85)
• Competing colonial visions differed in how they cropped relevant knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Archived document bundles reveal contested epistemic habits under colonial conditions. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archives actively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archives primarily record epistemic uncertainty, not settled accounts of events. (similarity 0.83)
• Competing colonial projects diverged over which past, risks, and futures counted as relevant knowledge. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity (similarity 0.82)
• Current colonial scholars read archives as places and cultural spaces (similarity 0.82)
• Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial officials generated transnational social categories through anxious analogies among colonies (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies #corroborates (0.75)
• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity #corroborates (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 275
• Colonial historiography inherited administrative map distinctions its practice violated #exemplifies (0.60)