Colonial officials’ disjointed accounts shared vocabulary but not sources of knowledge.

Evidence

The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases, and racial clichés that one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and numbing dullness. Our readings are blunted by what often has been parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews—of regions, problems, or target populations— were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucratese. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties.; Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation; Colonial survey data collection was uneven and often fabricated by officials (+11 more)

Related

• Colonial administrative documents exceeded the demands for proof and causation (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial administrative overviews index assumed mastery more than actual comprehension. (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial survey data collection was uneven and often fabricated by officials (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity (similarity 0.87)
• Historians often over-assume the dispositions colonial officials’ positions encouraged (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial authority rested on incomplete knowledge and hierarchies of rumor, not omniscience (similarity 0.86)
• Pramoedya saw colonial archives as a mausoleum of paltry truths rather than knowledge (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions (similarity 0.84)
• Secrecy requirements prevented colonial commissions from actually investigating the poor they studied (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Colonial authority rested on incomplete knowledge and hierarchies of rumor, not omniscience #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge #corroborates (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 143
• Colonial facts were constituted out of rumor as often as the reverse #corroborates (0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1274
• Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation #corroborates (0.65)
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions #corroborates (0.60)
• Many Dutch colonial classified documents were not actual secrets. #expands (0.55)