Poor Europeans’ presence destabilized the alignment of race, place, and material signifiers

Evidence

Intrusions into the European enclaves put stress on the law and strain on the administrative apparatus. With a native police force that was considered unsuitable to apprehend (even poor) Europeans, place and race were not in sync, people were displaced and locating themselves across racial lines. With formal sumptuary laws long rescinded, some social categories of people were no longer easily fixed to speech, housing, and dress. Material possessions were becoming unreliable indices these “wavering” classes and of specific social kinds. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 865

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense theoretical nexus: colonial authority’s anxiety stems not just from deviation but from the collapse of the indexical chain (speech, housing, dress -> race) that made classification legible at all. The ‘unreliability’ of material signs destabilizes the epistemological commonsense of the colony.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose on epistemic anxieties — the breakdown of the semiotic system connecting appearance to social kind is a core epistemic anxiety mechanism. Also resonates with article (2)‘s sumptuary law content.
• ADDENDUM: The failure of material signifiers to fix social kinds after sumptuary laws fell extends the thesis of ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — when dress no longer legally encodes rank, racial classification itself becomes anxious.