Colonial officials alternated between acute perception and scripted caricature of subjects

Evidence

If Frans Carl Valck attended to some of the space in which he dwelled, he did not always do so. His assessments of those Indies people that lived around him were subject to caricature more than insight, both attenuated attention and studied disregard. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1391

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete archival case exemplifying the theoretical claim about ‘conditions of disregard’ — the example grounds the abstraction.