Colonial commissions mapped affect to classify dangerous human kinds

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

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in colonial archival records — these commissions of enquiry are concrete documentary genres to hunt for in archives, tracking habits of the heart in mixed-blood and destitute categories. — connects to: Smithsonian anthropometry manufactured mixed-blood status to legalize land sales — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 609
• SEED: Angles: reading concubinary and mixed-blood ‘moral ecology’ commissions as archives of European anxiety about colonial intimacy.