Epistemic confusion itself characterized colonial governance across the Indies

Evidence

This chapter wrestles with both the reading strategies we bring to such texts and the rhetorical strategies of these sources. To stay within the allusive, muddy register of what colonial agents thought they knew is to retain and remain with their incoherencies—not to overwrite them with a neater story that might read more smoothly and work more persuasively in the telling. Sorting through multiple motives and effects is an opening of sorts: to the dim clarity of conditions in which events were investigated, recorded, and constituted as evidence. These were the “historiographic operations” that set the terms for new repressions, subsequent violences, and renewed commitment to retaliating against what were perceived as counterinsurgent acts. Here, rumor is a key form of cultural knowledge. In Deli, it shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events that could be claimed to have been “witnessed” and those envisioned, between performed brutality and the potential for it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dutch officials blamed Javanese wet-nursing for corrupting European children raised in the Indies — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 571; Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages; Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation (+19 more)

Related

• Colonial knowledge production was driven by uncertainty, not clarity (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial commissions relied on hearsay and common knowledge rather than investigation (similarity 0.93)
• Colonial authority rested on incomplete knowledge and hierarchies of rumor, not omniscience (similarity 0.92)
• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know (similarity 0.90)
• Colonial officials ritualistically framed rumor-derived reports as verified facts (similarity 0.88)
• Rumor blurred the boundary between witnessed and envisioned events in colonial knowledge. (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial administrative decision-making consolidated conflicting local knowledge into packages (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial secrets signaled official unease about unrest without a name (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial bureaucracies collected information largely irrelevant to actual decisions (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial intelligence could not distinguish rumor from verified threats among native informants. (similarity 0.84)
• Colonial knowing relied on inattention and adverted gazes more than surveillance (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial officials’ disjointed accounts shared vocabulary but not sources of knowledge. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial classification was piecemeal and routinely unsettled by epistemic uncertainties. (similarity 0.83)
• Colonial knowledge was fragmented and confused, not crafted to deceive (similarity 0.83)
• Rumors from plantations reshaped official colonial policy from Deli to The Hague (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know #qualifies (0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047
• Colonial ‘secrets’ were often public knowledge to those living alongside them #exemplifies (0.55)