Colonial concern with ‘upbringing’ targeted mixed-blood children’s domestic environments

Evidence

Subject headings of such verbalen could conceal and reveal both what they contained and what constituted the political rationalities that produced them. For example, reference to “Upbringing” (opvoeding) as well as “education”(onderwijs) in the subject title for the unpublished commission signaled a new urgency (though not a new phenomenon) in addressing child-rearing practices as a potential threat to the state. Political dangers resided in the domestic milieus in which “mixed blood” children lived and the misguided affections those environments provided. In this context “upbringing” (opvoeding) turned attention less to the provision of artisan schools for adolescents (as had been the case in preceding decades) than to the need for earlier intervention with the very young, with their bodily “physical development” and their habits “of heart.” The reference to the “European population” raises an issue at the center of this book, for most of those children discussed in these reports were not legally acknowledged as European, could not speak Dutch, and were living outside the European quarters. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 95

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s epistemic focus — how subject headings encode political rationalities; parallels Foucault’s governmentality and the state’s concern with the domestic as a site of political danger. — connects to: Mono-racial parents struggle to socialize children into racial worlds they never inhabited. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 130
• SEED: Essay angle: the word ‘upbringing’ as an administrative technology — how a subject heading shift from schools to homes signaled a new interventionism in the colonial domestic sphere.