Ignorance is an achieved and labored effect, not a starting category.

Evidence

But few of these premises are evinced in the historical particulars or borne out by the social facts. “Ignorance” versus “acceptance” fails to capture the more complex psychic space, tacit ambivalences, and implicit ambiguities in which European agents and ancillaries to empire made their lives. Such categories represent not causes but effects. They are neither generative analytic sites nor starting points for analysis. “Ignorance” is an ongoing operation, a cumulative, achieved, and labored effect. Ignorance, then, is only symptomatic. At issue is how it is achieved and sustained, and what institutional, social, and psychic arrangements it responds to, produces, and requires. Both ignorance and acceptance, as labels, are too ready to fix the entangled middle ground that divides prescription from perception and both from practice. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1344

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting analytical move: converts the standard explanatory category ‘ignorance’ from cause into an achieved effect to be explained—inverts the causal story entirely.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Ignorance as Accomplishment’—reframing colonial (and contemporary) epistemic failure as labor, institutionally and psychically produced, rather than a passive absence.