Colonial poverty was constituted by ruler-ruled distance, not livelihood

Evidence

Knaap chose his epithets with the social pretensions of the commissioners and colonial European elite carefully in mind. The investigation was not just a “useless concoction,” he claimed. It “lacked savoir faire.” And who, he asked, could possibly imagine that queries about one’s daily prayers, placed in a “question box,” were an effective and enlightened means to investigate social misery! By Knaap’s account, paupers could not be studied “from above” but only by those who “more or less” had grown up with them (or had provided needy young Indos with gratis Dutch lessons, as had he). “Pauperism in the Indies is a more complicated, intricate phenomenon than in Europe. In Europe it is almost exclusively a question of livelihood and housing; in the Indies it is about the distance that separates ruler from ruled.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 938

Categorization

• XREF: Standpoint-of-intimacy critique parallels Knaap claiming one must grow up among the poor — connects to Marcuse/Fromm debates about who can study the oppressed, and to feminist standpoint theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: Knaap’s distinction — European pauperism is economic, colonial pauperism is relational (the ruler-ruled chasm) — reframes what ‘poverty’ means epistemically in empire.