Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation

Evidence

This chapter wrestles with both the reading strategies we bring to such texts and the rhetorical strategies of these sources. To stay within the allusive, muddy register of what colonial agents thought they knew is to retain and remain with their incoherencies—not to overwrite them with a neater story that might read more smoothly and work more persuasively in the telling. Sorting through multiple motives and effects is an opening of sorts: to the dim clarity of conditions in which events were investigated, recorded, and constituted as evidence. These were the “historiographic operations” that set the terms for new repressions, subsequent violences, and renewed commitment to retaliating against what were perceived as counterinsurgent acts. Here, rumor is a key form of cultural knowledge. In Deli, it shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events that could be claimed to have been “witnessed” and those envisioned, between performed brutality and the potential for it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases, and racial clichés that one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and numbing dullness. Our readings are blunted by what often has been parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews—of regions, problems, or target populations— were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucratese. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial lobby propaganda created unrealistic expectations about African wealth; Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages; Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047 (+29 more)

Related

• Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial authority rested on incomplete knowledge and hierarchies of rumor, not omniscience (similarity 0.92)
• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial lobby propaganda created unrealistic expectations about African wealth (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial officials ritualistically framed rumor-derived reports as verified facts (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages (similarity 0.89)
• Rumor blurred the boundary between witnessed and envisioned events in colonial knowledge. (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial officials’ disjointed accounts shared vocabulary but not sources of knowledge. (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial facts were constituted out of rumor as often as the reverse (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial administrative overviews index assumed mastery more than actual comprehension. (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know #corroborates (0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047
• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #corroborates (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions #corroborates (0.65)
• Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies #expands (0.60)
• Colonial ‘secrets’ were often public knowledge to those living alongside them #expands (0.55)
• Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name #expands (0.50)