Institutional bureaucratic practices secretly shape which historical events get recorded
Evidence
Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show in finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 153
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Mary Douglas’s work on institutions and memory, invoked later in the chapter.
Related
- Institutional filing practices shape historical memory by highlighting some events and obscuring others (similarity 0.90)
- Historical knowledge gets co-opted for administrative manipulation (similarity 0.90)
- Bureaucratic selective practices shape which historical events become visible. (similarity 0.87)