The survey mixed elite racial stereotypes with testimonies of actual material need

Evidence

What the commission, in the end, collected were starkly different forms of knowledge: on the one hand, a compendium of elite beliefs about racial types, and received common sense about Indos and lower-class whites; on the other hand, details of survival and material need that pierced the conventions of the prescribed narratives. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 912

Categorization

• SEED: The tension between prescribed narrative and unruly testimonial detail could seed an essay on how official colonial archives contain their own counternarratives embedded in irregular, hard-to-classify data.