Latecolonial states treated child-rearing disputes as central to political reproduction

Evidence

The accumulation of affective knowledge was not then a stage out of which colonial states were eventually to pass. Debates on poor whites and child-rearing practices from nearly a century later make that point again and again. Deliberations over the quality of upbringing, of whether abandoned mixed blood children could be placed in the “care of the mother” (moederzorg) or care of the state (staatszorg) put the responsibility for the formative production of sentiment at the heart of political agendas. In deliberations over how best to secure “strong attachments” to the Netherlands among a disaffected and growing European population, “feeling” was the word that cropped up repeatedly. At stake were disquieted reflections on what it took to make someone “moved” by one set of sensory regimes—of sounds, smells, tastes, and touch—and estranged from another. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 597

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Angles toward an essay on how caregiver-versus-state custody debates encode theories of where political loyalty is formed.

Related

• Colonial states continuously staked political security on governing subjects’ feelings (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial child-rearing debates continued long-running European theories of how affect forms (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial metropoles treated heartfelt parental feeling as politically dangerous discontent (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial state refused welfare by delegating early childcare to mothers and private institutions (similarity 0.78)