One official gave shifting accounts of a colonial murder, exposing evidence’s mutability.

Evidence

Valck’s letter, as it turned out, was the stray in a dense corpus of correspondence and official missives about the Luhmann family murder that circulated in 1876 and 1877 between Valck, his immediate superior, Locker de Bruijne, military commanders, and high officials in Batavia and The Hague. It also represented one variation in a series of accounts he gave of the murder. Three were composed in late October, one in December 1876. In each he provided an altered sense of what he knew and how he could know about the outrageous conditions into which he was plunged. Read against one another, his accounts open to the mutable terms in which evidence was construed, to what kinds of stories could be told about violence, the sorts of cultural knowledge on which those stories were based, and the “storeyed” levels through which those accounts were written and could be read. His narratives trace a compressed time of successive reassessment, in which his understanding rapidly shifted as Deli’s subject population exploited European confusions about the attacks and what their violences meant. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1028

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reading purpose on epistemic anxieties in colonial archives and the storeyed construction of colonial knowledge.
• DEFINE: Introduces the methodological lens of reading official accounts against one another to expose mutable terms of evidence construction.