Colonial classification was unruly, piecemeal, and epistemically unsettled rather than hegemonic.

Evidence

Colonial administrations were prolific producers of social categories. This book deals with these categories and their enumeration, but its focus is less on taxonomy than on the unsure and hesitant sorts of documentation and sensibilities that gathered around them. It starts from the observation that producing rules of classification was an unruly and piecemeal venture at best. Nor is there much that is hegemonic about how those taxonomies worked on the ground. Grids of intelligibility were fashioned from uncertain knowledge, disquiet and anxieties registered the uncommon sense of events and things, epistemic uncertainties repeatedly unsettled the imperial conceit that all was in order, because papers classified people, because directives were properly acknowledged, and because colonial civil servants were schooled to assure that records were prepared, circulated, securely stored, and sometimes rendered to ash. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 34

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the book’s central claim that taxonomy production in colonies was itself disorderly — directly counters tidy-scheme readings of colonial categories.