Colonial classificatory language displaced violence onto natives and absolved Europeans

Evidence

In this quixotic and unquiet space, colonial authorities often found their policy statements unrealized in practice. Their efforts to maintain controlled mobility and sharp ethnic divides between captive workers and other subjects only had marginal success. The clandestine settlements of Gayos, Javanese, Bataks, Chinese, and Malays alert us to movements of other sorts, of large numbers of people in motion, moving in and out of the estate economy—some refusing as long as they could, some folding their fates into the enclosed enclaves for which Deli’s estates were later so well known. A sorting system that placed people in the categories of “vengeful natives,” “Aceh rebels,” or “robber gangs” located violence back where authorities knew it “belonged”: that is, distant from those Europeans who were its architects, agents, and perpetrators. No wonder Valck’s narratives were no good for the telling, were difficult to repeat or even hear. They repeatedly repositioned violence at the core of empire and in European hearts and minds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader reading purpose on epistemic anxieties and colonial commonsense; the sorting/taxonomy move echoes Said’s Orientalism and work on colonial categorization as epistemic violence. — connects to: Labeling a settler conflict ‘tribal’ displaces its causes onto the colonized — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2113; Colonial development rhetoric masked systematic resource extraction from native lands. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 78; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”