Colonial reports filtered by anticipated audience and cribbing chains

Evidence

Gaps in their knowledge were filled with culturally reasonable conjectures that made their reports persuasive, relevant, and racially plausible to immediate superiors and high officials, whom they knew or imagined would be their readers in Batavia and The Hague. Plantation “unrest” had a hydraulic lexicon of its own: “coolie outbursts” were “instinctual responses” of revenge or orchestrated actions by “outside agitators” imposed on a duped and otherwise passive population. As such, not all accounts made their way to the top. Some dropped out as reports were consolidated, summarized, and pared down. Others were embellished with detail as they were cribbed and sifted as they made their way up the administrative ladder. It was this “cribbing” process that determined which readings of events became part of the evidential package. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1042

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s law-merchant work on how institutional reporting/screening shapes which information survives
• QUESTION: How does the ‘cribbing’ sifting process compare across colonial bureaucracies — is this a general feature of hierarchical administration?