Colonial commissions actively produced racial social categories rather than describing them.

Evidence

Such commissions, as we shall see in chapter 5, were also consummate producers of social kinds. The European Pauperism Commission of 1901 reassigned clusters of people for state scrutiny and in so doing wrote, revised, and overwrote what was to count in ascribing race. Ways of living were congealed into “problems,” subject persons were condensed into ontological categories, innocuous practices were made into subjects of analysis and rendered political things. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes ‘producers of social kinds’ — the definitional mechanism by which inquiry creates rather than records its categories.
• XREF: Connects to the classic social-construction literature: Hacking’s ‘making up people,’ Latour on inscription devices, and how bureaucratic classification crafts its subjects. — connects to: Apartheid intensified inherited colonial categories rather than inventing them anew.