Imperial commissions treated household intimacies as data critical to state security

Evidence

Those commissions, like the European Pauperism Commission or the South African Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites thirty years later, explicitly linked domestic relationships—between parent and child, nursemaid and infant—to the security of the state. Relations between people and objects—to clothing, furnishings, room arrangements, and window-openings—were invoked, as well. Eyewitness testimonies to intimacies of the home had become data of a particular kind, critical to the state’s audit of its commitment to the public good, to racial differentiation, and to its own viability. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 187

Categorization

• XREF: The domestic realm as state-audited ‘data’ echoes the reader’s work on colonial commonsense and biopolitical assessments; also resonates with feminist analyses of the household as a site of governance.