Colonial race classification broke down when clothing and housing no longer signaled rank

Evidence

With a native police force that was considered unsuitable to apprehend (even poor) Europeans, place and race were not in sync, people were displaced and locating themselves across racial lines. With formal sumptuary laws long rescinded, some social categories of people were no longer easily fixed to speech, housing, and dress. Material possessions were becoming unreliable indices these “wavering” classes and of specific social kinds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 865

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the sumptuary-law and dress-signaling themes from the reader’s own article ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — colonial Java as another case of dress/class fixing.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s article on sumptuary laws and immodesty panics: here formal sumptuary laws were already rescinded, and their absence made race legibility unreliable.