Willing departures from European milieu undid the racial categories colonial officials deployed

Evidence

But there were also remarks and notations that had no fixed association with one social group. Adjectives slipped from poor white to mixed blood and confused the commission’s efforts to distinguish among them. Much of the confusion rested on the issue of “choice”: how to account for a young woman who had converted to Islam, or a “European” family living in a native quarter in ways that indicated not distress but a willing departure from the European milieu? How to make sense of European exsoldiers whose domestic lives were more stable and less precarious precisely because they cohabited with their native companions, while their unattached comrades were being described as wallowing in drink and sloth? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 958

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reading purpose — epistemic anxiety breaks down when lived choice cannot be mapped onto racial-commonsense categories. — connects to: Colonial domination operated by casting Europeans as normative and Africans as other. — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 35
• DEEPTHINKING: The case where cohabitation made former soldiers more stable inverts both the moral and statistical logic of the survey — a dense paradox of colonial classification.