Legends invented after the fact shaped the British bureaucrat and secret agent
Evidence
This chapter wrestles with both the reading strategies we bring to such texts and the rhetorical strategies of these sources. To stay within the allusive, muddy register of what colonial agents thought they knew is to retain and remain with their incoherencies—not to overwrite them with a neater story that might read more smoothly and work more persuasively in the telling. Sorting through multiple motives and effects is an opening of sorts: to the dim clarity of conditions in which events were investigated, recorded, and constituted as evidence. These were the “historiographic operations” that set the terms for new repressions, subsequent violences, and renewed commitment to retaliating against what were perceived as counterinsurgent acts. Here, rumor is a key form of cultural knowledge. In Deli, it shaped what people thought they knew, blurring the boundaries between events that could be claimed to have been “witnessed” and those envisioned, between performed brutality and the potential for it. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Prester John legend shaped how Europeans interpreted all foreign evidence for 300 years; Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047
Related
- Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know (similarity 0.80)
- Rumor blurred the boundary between witnessed and envisioned events in colonial knowledge. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Prester John legend shaped how Europeans interpreted all foreign evidence for 300 years
#expands(0.80) - Rumor blurred witness and imagination in what colonial agents claimed to know
#corroborates(0.72) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1047