Colonial taxonomies were built from uncertain knowledge, not confident mastery

Evidence

Colonial administrations were prolific producers of social categories. This book deals with these categories and their enumeration, but its focus is less on taxonomy than on the unsure and hesitant sorts of documentation and sensibilities that gathered around them. It starts from the observation that producing rules of classification was an unruly and piecemeal venture at best. Nor is there much that is hegemonic about how those taxonomies worked on the ground. Grids of intelligibility were fashioned from uncertain knowledge, disquiet and anxieties registered the uncommon sense of events and things, epistemic uncertainties repeatedly unsettled the imperial conceit that all was in order, because papers classified people, because directives were properly acknowledged, and because colonial civil servants were schooled to assure that records were prepared, circulated, securely stored, and sometimes rendered to ash. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 34

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: What concrete ‘coolie ordinances’ or classification schemes show this piecemeal, non-hegemonic working on the ground?
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in colonial archival study and to Ann Stoler’s work on the ‘archival grain’ and colonial knowledge-making.
• SEED: Potential angle: how the paper trail of colonial classification betrays imperial anxiety rather than confidence — bureaucracy as symptom of doubt.

Related

• Colonial classification was unruly, piecemeal, and epistemically unsettled rather than hegemonic. (similarity 0.95)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial categories formed in the same ambiguous space as scientific objects (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial archives record administrators’ uncertainty about matching rules to reality (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial archives actively shape what counts as legitimate knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives carry anxious labor and partiality, not settled knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives primarily record epistemic uncertainty, not settled accounts of events. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial governance was a constant epistemic reckoning within the colonial world itself (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial archives require chronological and names-based rather than thematic navigation (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial categories and archives co-produce new social objects in epistemic haze. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial archives hold affective hopes, fears, and trained attentions, not just records. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial knowledge was fragmented and confused, not crafted to deceive (similarity 0.83)
• Archival form itself constitutes a technology of colonial governance (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial states reduced and winnowed knowledge rather than always accumulating it (similarity 0.82)