Colonial governors struggled to know their own officials’ sentiments

Evidence

Colonial commissions, incessant reportage in the absence of evidence, and secret missives contained political content in their archival form. Blueprints to reshape what people felt, what language elders should speak to their young, and how they should live in their homes evince visions of social design often inadequate to those tasks. Governing agents reeled uncomfortably between attention to the minutiae of domestic arrangements and generic social kinds, between probabilities and positivistic evidence, between what could be known about the past and what could be predicted for the future, between abstract principles and a keen awareness that what mattered as much to a managed colony was attentiveness to what people did in their everyday lives. In all of these concerns the middling and elite echelons of government stumbled in the face of sentiments that were as hard to assess among their own ranks as among the colonized. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 39

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes James Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ on legibility, but inverts it: the colonial state’s own ranks were illegible to it.
• DEFINE: Shows how ‘epistemological worry’ (citing Daston and Galison) functions concretely in colonial governance.