Colonial racial classification broke down when ‘choice’ explained living arrangements.

Evidence

But there were also remarks and notations that had no fixed association with one social group. Adjectives slipped from poor white to mixed blood and confused the commission’s efforts to distinguish among them. Much of the confusion rested on the issue of “choice”: how to account for a young woman who had converted to Islam, or a “European” family living in a native quarter in ways that indicated not distress but a willing departure from the European milieu? How to make sense of European exsoldiers whose domestic lives were more stable and less precarious precisely because they cohabited with their native companions, while their unattached comrades were being described as wallowing in drink and sloth? Nor was the moral landscape of choice clear. Was an Indo widow forced to beg for food from her better-off neighbors at a higher moral standard than an educated young Indo woman who chose to live with a Javanese man and their children in a native kampong? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 958

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the clean racial categories in Stoler’s work on racial formation and intimate domains in the Dutch East Indies.
• QUESTION: Could choice-based exceptions undercut the entire colonial epistemic grid, beyond just this commission?