Colonial commissions invested in cataloguing affective dispositions like resentment and rancor

Evidence

Indies authorities embraced these measures of the moral in their efforts to distinguish human kinds. Commissions of enquiry on European destitution in the colonies, on the moral ecologies that produced concubinary arrangements between native women and European men, mixed blood orphans and their “inclination” to crime—all plotted a politically dangerous set of affective microenvironments. Authorities sought to identify habits of the heart, to assess the presence of resentment, rancor, impudence, and disdain, the degrees of and potential for affective intensity, amidst those categories of people whose dispositions were thought to incline toward danger. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 608

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The affective ‘microenvironments’ framing could seed an essay on how modern risk-assessment bureaucracies similarly scan for dispositions and emotional contagion.
• XREF: The ‘habits of the heart’ cataloguing resonates with Stoler’s other work and with Foucault’s biopolitics — also echoes recent scholarship on affect and empire.

Related

• Colonial commissions mapped affect to classify dangerous human kinds (similarity 0.91)
• Affective criteria silently indexed social origins within racialized colonial hierarchies. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial authorities feared steady sensibilities more than emotional outbursts (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial moral vocabularies disguised race and class anxieties as affective character flaws (similarity 0.81)
• Dutch colonial authorities feared misplaced affective attachments as political dangers. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial archive density was driven by emotional standards for agents. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial authorities aimed to manage subjects’ aspirations as a political necessity (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial regimes deliberately cultivated habits and redirected sentiments, a neglected topic. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial authorities understood sentiment’s governance role before scholars did (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial states continuously staked political security on governing subjects’ feelings (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial fears centered durable resentments rather than momentary passions (similarity 0.79)
• Dutch colonial rule was preoccupied with sentiment and affect, not reason alone. (similarity 0.78)