Colonial commissions discarded their own statistics in favor of what elites already believed

Evidence

In the end the commission set aside many of the very statistics it had so sought to collect, in part because the terms in which race was assessed were better proved by what people in power already knew. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 982

Categorization

• QUESTION: What does it mean that exhaustive statistical labor was set aside as redundant to prior knowledge? This suggests the archive’s gathering was itself performative.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense point about how colonial epistemic authority validated prior knowledge over its own data collection — the archive produces evidence to confirm what power already ‘knew’.