Colonial ignorance actually generated more formulaic, conjectural reporting

Evidence

The confused and incomplete knowledge of Valck and his comrades in the civil service did not deter them from telling stories. Rather, it enhanced the formulaic quality of their accounts, their dependence on shared refrains and on what they presumed to know. Gaps in their knowledge were filled with culturally reasonable conjectures that made their reports persuasive, relevant, and racially plausible to immediate superiors and high officials, whom they knew or imagined would be their readers in Batavia and The Hague. Plantation “unrest” had a hydraulic lexicon of its own: “coolie outbursts” were “instinctual responses” of revenge or orchestrated actions by “outside agitators” imposed on a duped and otherwise passive population. As such, not all accounts made their way to the top. Some dropped out as reports were consolidated, summarized, and pared down. Others were embellished with detail as they were cribbed and sifted as they made their way up the administrative ladder. It was this “cribbing” process that determined which readings of events became part of the evidential package. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1042

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to work on colonial knowledge production and ‘seeing like a state’ — the cribbing/sifting of reports up an administrative chain parallels James Scott and Bruno Latour’s immutable mobiles.
• SEED: The ‘cribbing process’ as an epistemic filter is a strong angle for an essay on how information loss upward in hierarchies shapes what becomes historical evidence.