Colonial officials’ categorical dichotomies blinded them to a spectrum of labor resistance

Evidence

The categories available to most colonial officials constrained what they could envision as a possible plot. Bracketing these dichotomies suggests the possibility that rumor, arson, murder, and theft made up a gradient of responses that subverted the simpler logic on which planter assumptions were based. These responses most often made little dent, nor was this necessarily their “real” intent. Suspending these dichotomies makes room for more complex and tense social and labor relations that better reflects how people were likely to have lived: not a world divided neatly between plantation and hinterland, personal and political acts, or between criminal and revolutionary motives. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1199

Categorization

• SEED: The idea that rumor, arson, and theft form an unlabeled gradient of resistance that slips past the criminal/revolutionary dichotomy is a hook for an essay on how classification schemes blind authorities to actually-occurring action.