Colonial rule operated through habit-taking into existing conventions and commonsense

Evidence

Ethnographic sensibilities guide my forays into the nature of Dutch colonial rule and its archival formations in what I take to be another basic way; namely, in attention to what the philosopher C. S. Peirce calls the “habit-taking” processes by which people align themselves with forces that are already there. Habit-taking works off colonial conventions and their common sense and is part of their making. These were the “grids of intelligibility” that made certain conventions acceptable, obvious, and 49 See Paul Willem Johan van der Veur, “The Eurasians of Indonesia: A Problem and Challenge in Colonial History,” in Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9 (2) (1968): 191-207. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 235

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces Peirce’s ‘habit-taking’ as the analytic lens for how colonial commonsense is formed and reproduced.
• XREF: Could connect to Milgrom’s account of how trading institutions align self-interest with existing conventions — the same alignment mechanism in a different domain.

Related

• Colonial common sense is reproduced through habitual alignment with existing forces (similarity 0.94)
• Colonial governance operated by deliberately shaping common sense and suppressing uncommon sense. (similarity 0.78)