Epistemic anxieties concern archives manufacturing social kinds with attached affect

Evidence

When Robert Darnton some twenty years ago identified “history in the ethnographic grain” as what cultural history should be about, he had in mind how people make sense of the world and “thought about how they thought.” Epistemic anxieties are precisely about that reflection. Here the ethno-graphic is about the graphic, detailed production of social kinds, the archival power that allowed its political deployment and the grafting of affective states to those inventions. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 341

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the book’s ‘epistemic anxieties’ as the detailed graphic production of social kinds in archives.