Normal expectations were contested, not shared, at empire’s colonial periphery.

Evidence

It does not suffice to call “social imaginary” in which “implicit and common understanding” and “normal expectations” (which Charles Taylor attributes so problematically to the term) were effortlessly and equally shared. The “sense of how things usually go,” what constituted “foul play,” and “how things ought to go” was precisely what confronted Valck in Deli, in the belly of the beast, and on the northern Bali coast, on the outer reefs of empire. It is in the potent political and psychological registers in which he lived that his personhood was forged—and his possibilities foreclosed. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1332

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Uses the colonist’s lived refusal of shared norms to unsettle Taylor’s social imaginary; core move of the chapter.