Commissions of inquiry create the social categories they claim only to describe

Evidence

Secrets may earmark privileged knowledge, or, as with commissions of inquiry, create the categories they purport only to describe. In the Indies colonial archives, they do some of both. Classified documents served as a signal to direct attention and cued for one’s repeated return to what knowledge should be valued and what their readers should know. They also called up and upon technologies of intelligence: secret police, fingerprinting, coded scripts, and men like Pangemanann, whose names were expunged from documents. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 161

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘categories they purport only to describe’ point parallels Ian Hacking’s ‘dynamic nominalism’ and ‘making up people’ thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the archival reading theme of ‘On Sacrifice’ — how colonial institutions produce the very ‘secret’ knowledge they claim to discover.