Destruction of documents and clerk anonymity are themselves archival features worth studying.

Evidence

This is what Roland Barthes might have called a “storeyed” archival field in both senses of the term: layered and crafted from practical and unevenly sedimented deceptions and dispositions that accumulated as acceptable or discarded knowledge. The Pangemananns, whose reports were destroyed as soon as they were read, leave only a faint trace. Rather, these chapters pause at the hands and habits of those charged with the writing, recording, sorting, and proliferation of documents, in the unremarkable forms in which writerly practices appeared; in the tone and tenor of a reprimand, a dismissal, or praise, in floridly clear or illegible signatures at the bottom of a neatly copied page. Sometimes persons become visible in the entitled scrawls of an angry query across a report, or remain invisible in the faceless, careful handwriting of “copy machines” (as Eurasian clerks were disparagingly called)—subjects whose racially marked positions conferred no place for, nor right to, a signature at all. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose of epistemic anxieties in colonial archival work. The ‘faceless handwriting’ of Eurasian clerks connects to questions of racialized labor in knowledge production.
• DEFINE: Barthes’ ‘storeyed’ as a double pun (layered + crafted) offers a useful conceptual lens for reading archives as constructed, uneven sedimentations.
• SEED: The trace of the Pangemanann worker whose reports were destroyed upon reading suggests an essay angle on erased knowledge workers in colonial bureaucracies — the signatures that are never permitted to appear.