Colonial ethnic categories failed to describe actual mixed refuge communities

Evidence

When military agents “discovered” jungle encampments on the plantation peripheries, they found refuges that were not limited to ex-Chinese coolies in one place and Gayo resistance fighters in another. Instead they came upon encampments with material traces (utensils, clothing, letters) of hundreds of Gayos, Malays, Chinese, and Javanese hiding out together in makeshift shelters. To account for these, Valck had no ready categories on which he could draw. This “vagabond” population refused to work for the estates, but instead lived off them, carrying out night raids in search of food, weapons, clothing, and cash. “Vagabondage” was an administrative misnomer for an unrecognizable social space—one occupied by a diverse underclass made up of those rejected from the estates, who fled the estates, or who chose to maintain equivocal, temporary, or predatory ties to them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1095

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s existing interest in colonial archival epistemic frameworks (Valck lacking ready categories maps onto how administrative categories fail to capture lived colonial reality). — connects to: Colonial rule’s languages of command failed against India’s regional language masses — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1167
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that colonial administrative categories could not accommodate a mixed, predatory underclass — and that ‘vagabondage’ was a misnomer — is a dense point about how governance categories render certain populations cognitively invisible.