Colonial census categories were ambiguous enough to stymie officials in the field.

Evidence

As the commission itself acknowledged, for a variety of reasons the inquiries were stymied at every step. The number of Europeans in question was more than the commissioners had expected, and regional of- fices complained of insufficient manpower and sometimes reluctant help from church, medical, and other local authorities. Despite the extensive instructions, local officials were confused about what “line of action” to take, and who they should be counting: whether to focus more broadly on disadvantaged (minvermogenden) inhabitants or, more specifically, on paupers. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 917

Categorization

• XREF: The gap between metropolitan instruction and field-level confusion parallels the reader’s work on colonial commonsense and how archival design fails at the ground; also evokes Latour’s actor-network distance problem.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing why ‘minvermogen’ (disadvantaged) versus ‘pauper’ ambiguity mattered — what political stakes rode on which count was produced?