Interpretive categories redrew colonial statistics to confirm prior assumptions

Evidence

Interpretative labor tamed the numbers. Cultural assessments of race redrew the proportions of those who were needy, as they likewise refigured racial lines. But it was the distribution of income and its correlation to marital status that, not surprisingly, attracted the commission’s attention. For it was the prevalence of concubinage and its effects that the commission had intended to document in the first place. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 954

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects directly to the reader’s interest in how colonial commissions used interpretive labor to reshape raw numbers — much like how moral panics reinterpret dress or ritual as evidence.
• XREF: Echoes the reading purpose on epistemic anxieties — how colonial commonsense categories pre-shaped what statistics could reveal. — connects to: Pre-existing categorical models shape how both actors and analysts identify complex events — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 948