Colonial common sense is reproduced through habitual alignment with existing forces

Evidence

Ethnographic sensibilities guide my forays into the nature of Dutch colonial rule and its archival formations in what I take to be another basic way; namely, in attention to what the philosopher C. S. Peirce calls the “habit-taking” processes by which people align themselves with forces that are already there. Habit-taking works off colonial conventions and their common sense and is part of their making. These were the “grids of intelligibility” that made certain conventions acceptable, obvious, and 49 See Paul Willem Johan van der Veur, “The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History,” in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9 (2) (1968): 191-207. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 235

Categorization

• DEFINE: Peirce’s ‘habit-taking’ is introduced as an explanatory mechanism for how colonial epistemic conventions become self-evident.
• QUESTION: The paragraph cuts off mid-sentence (‘acceptable, obvious, and’), leaving the full characterization of ‘grids of intelligibility’ incomplete.