Social epistemology’s vocabulary applies to colonial governance as an interpretive community.

Evidence

If epistemology was once the term given to formal theories of knowledge and their formal systematic study, students of social and historical epistemology have since taken it in a very different, worldly direction. Armed with a vocabulary of (epistemic) community, (epistemic) culture, (epistemic) crisis, and (epistemic) practice, more emphasis is now placed on the procedures and activities on which certain ways of knowing rely, not unlike what De Certeau called historiographic “operations.” While such a lexicon is more commonly reserved for the study of scientific communities of experiment and expertise, such an approach offers productive ways of thinking about governing practices that, too, depended on how much conviction, experience, and expertise were shared, and the extent to which architects and agents of rule could count on that common ground. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 269

If epistemology was once the term given to formal theories of knowledge and their formal systematic study, students of social and historical epistemology have since taken it in a very different, worldly direction. Armed with a vocabulary of (epistemic) community, (epistemic) culture, (epistemic) crisis, and (epistemic) practice, more emphasis is now placed on the procedures and activities on which certain ways of knowing rely, not unlike what De Certeau called historiographic “operations.” While such a lexicon is more commonly reserved for the study of scientific communities of experiment and expertise, such an approach offers productive ways of thinking about governing practices that, too, depended on how much conviction, experience, and expertise were shared, and the extent to which architects and agents of rule could count on that common ground. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Bridges science-studies literature (De Certeau, epistemic communities) to colonial governance studies — a useful theoretical bridge for the reader’s archival focus. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• DEFINE: Defines the social/historical epistemology toolkit — community, culture, crisis, practice — being imported from science studies into colonial historiography.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 269