Colonial knowledge production stripped local knowledge of its localness deliberately

Evidence

Crucial to this understanding was the idea that local knowledge should never be too local and that familial attachments were to be mediated and reworked through concerns of state, filtered through a fine sieve, through the ears of Dutch categories, distilled into European typologies, and reconfigured as sanctioned knowledge in usable form. … Most importantly, local knowledge would be digested through institutions of learning in Europe and only then re-served as qualified knowledge about Indies “customs,” “cultures,” and “peoples” that was ideally shorn of touch and taste and no longer local at all. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 573

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to epistemic anxieties around knowledge decontextualization and the colonial archive’s role in transforming embodied local knowledge into ‘objective’ European categories. — connects to: Urban Western folkbiological thinking is malformed by a poverty of cultural input — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 269; Arctic survival turned on borrowing local cultural knowledge rather than novel invention — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 115