But it seems you do not realize, Meneer Pangemanann, that your report is not for the general public. Only a very few people in the Indies and in the world have read and studied it…. You will never know, and indeed do not need to know, who else has read it. Your work of scholarship, as you like to call it, will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives. Once everyone finished reading it, it became dust and smoke, in the safekeeping only of the devils of the night.^[1]

It is 1912. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel, House of Glass, begins in the chill of the Dutch East Indies’ state archives and in the heat of colonial Java’s emergent Indonesian nationalist movement. Dutch authorities call on Jacques Pangemanann, a former Eurasian police officer, newly appointed native commissioner to the elite Indies intelligence service, to defuse the movement’s spread. His mission is to read the classified state archives, spy, report on and then destroy Minke, the movement’s leader. But this complicity undoes Panegamanann and ravages his soul. He hears voices, becomes estranged from his family and falls into alcoholic despair. His descent from colonial officer to “bandit,” and ultimately to archive-bound “terrorist” is rapid. By the book’s end, he will have destroyed his own hero, Minke, and himself.
When the novel opens, Pangemanann has just completed his meticulous report, assessing the strength of the nascent anti-colonial movement and the commitments of its alleged instigators, the mostly Muslim educated elite on Java. Those few architects and agents of empire with privileged access eagerly read it. Leaders of the sugar industry syndicate laud his work. But his words will never enter the “nearly ten miles of closely packed papers,” that make up the sanctified space of the government archive.^[2] He may enter the inner sanctum but leave no trace: as spy he can have no presence, as an “Indo” (a “mixed-blood”) of tainted native, if elevated, origin, he can only have a muffled voice. Too lowly to be acknowledged, his “findings” are too sensitive to be preserved. As his European superior bluntly informs him, “he need not know” who has read it, “[it] will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives.” Burned as soon as it is read, it is reduced to “dust and smoke” – an archive belonging to the “devils of the night.”^[3]
House of Glass is the name Pangemanann gives to his report, but “house of glass” references to a more fundamentally disquieting space in the colonial imaginary – at once the fragile security of the Dutch police state and the false security of Europeans living nestled in it. The quest for affective knowledge – that which moves people to feel and act – was the coveted pursuit of state intelligence, but beyond its grasp. Framed by the deceptions of archival access, House of Glass begins with the state archive only to veer far from it, for Pangemanann hides his most precious document in the safety of his house. In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s vision, disappeared documents and distorted reports are the archive’s paltry truths. The building that houses the state’s records is a “mausoleum” with palatial columns and thick stone walls. It does more than chill and still the air. It keeps out both the tropical heat and the resilient motion of a resistant social world that is Java.
House of Glass reads at once as a condemnation of colonial rule and a fierce parable of the contemporary seductions of power in what was Soeharto-ruled, postcolonial Indonesia. For Pramoedya, whose stories were transmitted orally in prison where he was incarcerated for fourteen years with his writings banned, it is not surprising how sharply his assault is aimed – at the erudite, educated ignorance that Java’s Dutch officialdom cultivated, and that the colonial archives produced and contained.^[4] Pramoedya Ananta Toer mocks those officials (and scholars) who hold tight to their paper documents, who imagine they can know the Indies without setting foot outside the archive and their carefully tended inscriptions in it.
One of his targets is clear: those who “study to become colonial expert[s] by going in and out of these buildings,” of those who believe that “documents are more reliable… than the mouths of their authors.” If the “taste of the archive” is in the heady rush of discovery, in the sensations and desires the archives stir, for Pram, the colonial archives are the bitter after-taste of empire, the morsels left for us, their voracious contemporary readers.^[5] Regimes of official documentation in his account are inert remnants, iconic roadmaps to regimes of domination that warp the integrity of the best of men. Such closed-circuited regimes of impoverished testimony produce their experts who in turn reproduce them.
This site of safekeeping, a pyre of empire, is one plausible way to describe the deadening weight of colonial archives. But it is not the one I have in mind. Pramoedya’s caricature is a still life, or a pointillist free frame that captures the rigidities and distortions of a colonial optic. In his novel, the archive has no pulse. For Pram it serves effectively to contrast the vibrant political culture of a Java that high and low officials labored to grasp but could barely comprehend.
But colonial state archives are sites of perturbations of other kinds – less monuments to the absence or ubiquity of knowledge than its piecemeal partiality, less documents to the force of reasoned judgment than to both the spasmodic and sustained currents of anxious labor that paper trails could not contain. Nietzsche warns that “the legislation of language” establishes truth.^[6] But here, that legislated lexicon produces a surfeit that spills over and smudges the archive’s policed edges. In these Dutch colonial archives, what could, should, and need not be done or said collude and collide in the corridors of race, and in the constricted political space of a never stable, Dutch-inflected “colonial situation.”
For Pramoedya, the tremors of colonial rule are outside the archives. In this book, I pursue how deeply epistemic anxieties stir affective tremors within them. The pulse of the archive and the forms of governance which it belies are in the finished reports and in the process of their making, in the fine crafts of cribbing and culling on which colonial bureaucracies so relied. In the interstices of sanctioned formulae, these Netherlands Indies archives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mark the distance between recognized and disqualified knowledge, between intelligible accounts and those deemed inappropriate for exchange. Not least, here is what Michel de Certeau might include as a space of “displaced histories,” contrary and subjacent – but not necessarily subaltern – that hover in the archive’s long shadows.^[7] Sometimes these are emergent and awkward, sometimes suspended and unfulfilled narratives within the archive’s dominant mode. And sometimes there are stammers, more “disabled histories,” a few brief words in Malay, seized from a “native informant,” not given the due of a narrative at all.
This book is about such a colonial order of things as seen through the record of archival productions. I ask what insights into the social imaginaries of colonial rule might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s archival content, but to the principles and practices of governance lodged in particular archival forms. By “archival form” I allude to several things: prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape “rational” response, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation. The book’s focus is on archiving as process rather than archives as things. Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources. These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves.
Those on which I draw here are from the official archives of the Dutch colonial state, missives and reports that passed up and down the bureaucratic ladder, or stayed secreted within privileged echelons of it. But the sweep of the archive is not confined to these alone. Filling that archive are those loosely tied to the Indies’ administrative apparatus but not salaried by it. These were doctors, clergymen, private school teachers and orphanage directors whose local knowledge and expertise on specific populations and practices were intermittently sought, those who took these occasions to rehearse common sense or share their views on what it meant to be Dutch, on what they thought of concubinage, or on what they imagined were the attributes of “mixed-blood” children and the nature of their moral character.
Along with the surefooted views on policies by which we have come to identify colonial enterprises are the remnants of writerly practices of a very different kind: those that chronicle failed projects, delusional imaginings, equivocal explanations of unanticipated outbursts of distrust of a state apparatus on which European comforts would so precariously depend. Relegated to archival asides are lowly civil servants gone bankrupt in efforts to pay for their sons’ requisite schooling in Holland. European women go mad in throwaway sentences. In abbreviated asides, impoverished widows of district officials send their servants to beg to their neighbors for them. These are archives peopled with Dutch administrators, German and French planters scrambling to figure out whether their plantation holdings might be attacked by a few workers bent on revenge against an abusive planter – or by phantasmic “hoards of Islamic insurgents” armed to storm their guarded gates. Within the constricted ontologies of rule, understandings of outrage often escaped the reasoned state.
Because imagining what might be was as important as knowing what was, these archives of the visionary and the improbable should rivet our attention to their erratic movement back and forth in verbal tense: the conditional could powerfully reshape an immediate response as it recursively rewrote the present and refigured events that had long passed. The portent-laden future of revolt and betrayal is always on the imminent and dangerous horizon. Thus when colonial social reformers conceived scrupulously planned utopias made of small-scale farmers drawn from the mixed-blood orphanages, their minute descriptions of those children’s inclinations mirrored visions of what they conceived adults to be and what they feared improperly schooled children might become. Such projections, in turn, made more real the visceral fear of the resentments such subjects in the making were thought to harbor. Plans to school the young for state loyalty and limited aspirations underscored their lack of both. Resplendent in the feared, the unrealized, and the ill-conceived, such visions open, in Chapter Four, to what I call a strategy of “developing historical negatives” to track a microspace of the everyday through what might become and could never be. These “blueprints of distress” trace out agitations of a peculiar kind – not events, but the “negative prints” of what stirred official anxiety, to which colonial agents responded with infeasible policies for implausible arrangements that could neither be carried out nor sustained. If historians “tell of things that have been,” and poets “of things as might be,” as Paul Ricoeur’s parse on the Aristotelian distinction insists, this ethnographic history of these colonial imaginaries slides between the fictive, futuristic and the everyday and concrete to capture something of each.^[8]
Here I treat these colonial archives both as a corpus of writing and as a forcefield that animates political energies and expertise, that pulls on some “social facts” and converts them into qualified knowledge, that attends to some ways of knowing as it repels and refuses others.^[9] Such a field has centripetal and centrifugal force. In no small part, it inscribes the authority of the colonial state and the analytic energies mobilized to make its assertions. But it also registers other reverberations, crosscurrent frictions, attractions and aversions that worked within and against those assertions of imperial rights to property, persons, and profits that colonial regimes claimed as their own.
This is what Roland Barthes might have called a “storeyed” archival field in both senses of the term: layered and crafted from practical and unevenly sedimented deceptions and dispositions that accumulated as acceptable or discarded knowledge. The Pangemananns, whose reports were destroyed as soon as they were read, leave only a faint trace. Rather, these chapters pause at the hands and habits of those charged with the writing, recording, sorting, and proliferation of documents in the unremarkable forms in which they appeared; in the tone and tenor of a reprimand, dismissal or praise, in floridly clear or illegible signatures at the bottom of a neatly copied page. Sometimes their actors appear in the entitled scrawls of an angry query across a report, or in the faceless, careful handwriting of “copy machines” (as Eurasian clerks were disparagingly called) – subjects whose racially marked positions conferred no place for, nor right to a signature at all.

ARCHIVAL CONVENTIONS

When the archive, on the contrary, seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. On has to patiently give up one’s natural “sympathy” for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading.^[10]

La Farge’s warning to proceed with caution, to allow oneself to falter in the face of the archive’s repetitive, formulaic and the most obvious, is one I take to heart. The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases and racial clichйs, one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and dull repetitions. Our readings are blunted by what has been often parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews – of regions, problems or target populations – were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucracies. Sometimes they were impressionistic and distant, elsewhere animated by intimate fear less than intimate knowledge of what multiple colonial civil servants thought they saw, what was reported to them by an unnamed underling, or what they claimed others said.
Wedged within those folds of truth-claims emerges something else: uncensored turns of phrase, loud asides in the imperative tense, hesitant asides in sotto voce. These register confused assessments, parenthetic doubts about what might count as evidence, eye-witnesses with dubious credentials, dismissed rumors laced with pertinent truths, contradictory testimonies called upon and quickly discarded.
These, too, were assessments that implicitly weighed the stature and sensibility of their authors, and the distance that separated their words from the received scenarios of colonial common sense. In Chapter Five, I refer to these as elements that make up a “hierarchy of credibility”: scales of trust that measured what forms of witness, of words and deeds, could be taken as reliably relevant. But these hierarchies are also sometimes inverted. In the brutal immediacy of a murder, in the panic of an impeding attack, in the anxious rush to fulfill a superior’s demand for information (and for proof of one’s vigilance), in the concerted effort to ward off disaster, words could slip from their safe moorings to reappear unauthorized, inappropriate, and unrehearsed. These are not outside the archival field. Nor are they outside the grids of intelligibility in which those documents are lodged, but the subjacent coordinates of, and counterpoints within them. Such confusions and “asides” work in and around prevailing narratives as they push on the archive’s storied edges.
Derrida’s evocative image of the archive as a site of “house arrest,” one that “gathers together signs,” suggests no entry for the wayward, no access to intruders.^[11] But the paper trails left by European colonial projects could never be sealed that tightly. And not in the Indies where magazines, pamphlets, journals, dailies both pilfered from the official record and were made an evidentiary part of it. Here an image of house-breaking might better be joined with house-arrest to more vividly capture what those in command feared (as much as native insurgence) – that their houses of glass might be shattered by “inside” jobs: by civil servants improperly schooled in what not to see or say (as was Assistant-Resident of Deli, Frans Carl Valck, in Chapters Five and Six), by recalcitrant Indo-Europeans who refused to answer a state commission on their domestic and sexual affairs (as in Chapter Four), and by the unseemly action of the colony’s most respected city-fathers, European high officials (as in Chapter Two) who in protesting government policy, circulated documents and directives meant only for their rarified readings and well-trained ears.
This is the ethnographic space of the colonial archives, where truth claims compete, impervious or fragile, crushed by the weight of convention or resilient in the immediate threat of the everyday; where trust is put to the test and credibility wavers. Here I linger over unspoken orders of rubric and reference that did more than define plausible evidence. Specific if not unique to the shape of these colonial archives is a racialized common sense about people and places – about Javanese coolies and Acehnese insurgents, about the sensibilities of the Indisch, Indies-born and bred Dutch versus imported, transient and echte Europeans. Such implicit commonsense figured centrally when reporting preceded inquiry, when evidence was spare – or absent.
Conventions suggest consensus, but it is not clear what colonial practitioners actually shared. District reports were built upon changing beliefs about what mattered to state security and what sorts of people were deemed a present or possible threat. It was also shaped by how skillfully or poorly seasoned bureaucrats and fledgling practitioners knew the tacit changing rules of decorum and protocol, and what rhetorical devices were deemed persuasive and currently active in the game.
Conventions also suggest familiarity and durability. I take them instead as moving targets. Stock phrases take on different political import depending on where they are placed. Contexts of relevance rapidly changed. References to the need for European nurseries might seem unremarkable in lengthy reports on education, but offer striking openings to political thinking when colonial administrators obsessed over them in classified documents elsewhere: in a commission on European pauperism, in recommendations to quell creole discontent, in debates over mixed-bloods “too proud” to learn manual labor. As I have argued elsewhere, this was not “information out of place.”^[12] In these contexts, they mark implicit anxieties about subject-formation, about the psychic space of empire, about what went without saying, and about the common sense that made these reasoned pairings with “obvious” connection.

THE SEDUCTIONS OF STATE SECRETS

Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds.^[13]

Archivists are the first to note that to understand an archive one needs to understand the institutions that it served. “State secrets” are one of those key conventions of concealment that produce the “shadowed places” to which Mary Douglas refers: such shadow places are cast by persons with opaque titles, bureaus with non-descript names, pieces of paper that become “lost,” inaccessible, “miscataloged,” and are thus rendered unusable and irrelevant. “Shadowed places” are what states create, emblematic conventions of the archival form. States do more than traffic in the production of secrets and their selective dissemination. State sovereignty resides in the power to designate arbitrary social facts of the world as matters of security and concerns of state. Once so assigned, these social facts – Indo children breastfed by native servants (who were sometimes their mothers,) poor whites who went by non-Christian names, Indos “disguised” in the dress of native traders, language use at home – are dismembered from their contexts, flung into the orbit of a political world that is often not their own. These otherwise innocuous practices become iconic indices of a colonial world perceived at risk, signs of alert that accrue political deliberations, that sanction the rush in of more evidence, that confirm causal connections that warrant more secreted documentation.
Weber claimed that the “official secret” was a “specific invention of bureaucracy,” its “fanatically defended” prize possession.^[14] In the Netherlands Indies, documents marked with an “x” as “secret,” “very secret” and “highly confidential” were elevated to sacred status, to be guarded and then later revealed. As in the European Pauperism Commission of 1901, the stature of its recommendations derived in part from an earlier secreted commission that it exposed. And as with Pangemanann, both honored and ashamed by the secrets to which he was privy, to gather information was not necessarily to know who would read it, or the narratives which it would fortify before being shredded or stored.
State secrets excite expectations, not least among students of empire.
For we often covet that which the state conceals, regarding their secrets as accurate measures of their most nefarious intents: unmasking their magic and deceptive opacities is our calling. But we also know that codes of concealment are the fetishes of the state itself. Within colonial bureaucracies, such “secrets” sometimes have strange biographies. Secrets may earmark privileged knowledge; or, as with commissions of inquiry, create the categories they purport only to describe. In the Indies colonial archives, they do some of both. Classified documents served as a signal to direct attention and cued for one’s repeated return to what knowledge should be valued and what their readers should know. They also called up and upon technologies of intelligence: secret police, fingerprinting, coded scripts, and men like Pangemanann whose names were expunged from documents. Secret documents could have as their source, vertrouwensmannen (“trustworthy men”) who were native paid informants, Eurasians who were cultural translators, and not least purveyors of culture, anthropologists and others deemed Java experts.
Secrets do more than limit access. They promise confidences and confidence in limited circulation about something others do not and should not know. Items about clandestine police maneuvers, military preparations, and deliberations about an impending revolt are what we expect to be marked as geheim with an “X.” But sometimes promises of access to the unknown were bizarre fictions at best. Confidential documents both secret and secrete what becomes elevated to “vital” information. Throughout the official archives of the Dutch colonial state are documents earmarked for confidentiality that were not secrets at all.
If one could argue that the presence of European beggars and homeless Dutchmen in the streets of Batavia in the 1870s were “secrets” to those in the Netherlands, they certainly were not to European post office clerks, Javanese construction workers, or Chinese storekeepers who lived on the sprawling low lying peripheries inhabited by the impoverished of Java’s urban centers.^[15] Similarly, why was the letter written by a Dutch lawyer to the Resident of Batavia, announcing his attendance at a demonstration, a “highly secret” document? Was it because he signed it “I remain like our King, a liberal Dutchmen” at a time when to be “vrijzinnige” (liberal and modern) in the colonies bordered on a subversive act?^[16] Was it because it was “unseemly” for a high official to so brazenly declare his similarity to the modern King and refrain from deference? Or was it that he boldly declared his intent to participate in the colonies in a European demonstration?
Both instances suggest that what were secret in such documents was not their subject-matter but their timing and the anxieties of the state’s response that gathered around them. Classified missives on European beggars were less about what to do with the destitute than measures of disagreement and disquiet about how to racially classify those who fell into such straits. Reports on vagabond whites were “secret” in 1874 and not twenty-five years later when the public Pauper Commission appeared because officials could not agree on whether there were thirty-nine white paupers living among natives in the urban slums of Batavia, or thousands.^[17]
Documents were sometimes marked geheim because of the magnitude of a problem; at other times because officials could not agree on a shared sense of what the problems were. Rather than secreted truths about the state, they point to sites of unease, anticipatory warnings of emergent movement among subject populations (what Raymond Williams might even include as “structures of feeling”) of resentments that may not yet have had a name.^[18] As Frederick Barth once observed, secrets do more than sanctify: they invoke deeper secrets of their own.^[19]
Not least they invite disclosure. Critique emerges in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said: sometimes documents referred to those who parodied common sense conventions. As we shall see, the “dirty secrets” of Sumatra’s planters were in classified missives not because the planters’ abuses of their laboring populations were not known, but precisely because they were not to be acknowledged and aired by an “inept” civil servant like Frans Carl Valck – and they were.

COLONIAL COMMISSIONS

If it is obvious that colonial archives are products of state machines, it is only now we are seeing them, in their own right, as technologies that reproduced those states themselves.^[20] Andrew Ashforth may have strongly stated the case in his study of South Africa’s Native Affairs Commission, when he noted that “the real seat of power” in modern states is “the bureau, the locus of writing,” but it is an insight that Weber shared and that many students of colonialisms would subscribe to as well.^[21] Systems of written accountability called for elaborate infrastructures. Paper trails of weekly reports to superiors, summaries of reports of reports, recommendations based on reports all called for systematic coding systems by which they could be tracked. Colonial statecraft was an administrative apparatus to gather, draw together, and connect – and disconnect – events, to make them legible, insignificant, or unintelligible as information. Particularly striking in this accumulation process is how much of what was collected was made irrelevant to what state officials decided, both to what they acknowledged they could do in practice and what about the Indies they claimed to know.^[22]
Nowhere was this process more evident than in the form of state-sponsored commissions of inquiry. Colonial commissions reorganized knowledge, devising new ways of knowing while setting aside others. One implicit task was to reconstruct historical narratives, decreeing which past events were pertinent to current issues and how they should be framed. Sometimes commissions were responses to catastrophic events and extended periods of crisis.^[23] As responses, they generated increased anxiety, substantiating the reality of “crisis,” the wisdom of pre-emptive response, foreshadowing that new directives were demanded, as were their often coercive effects. By the time most commissions had run their course, political sign posts were set in place: “turning points” were identified, precedents established, causalities certified, arrows directed with vectors of blame – if not action – sharply aimed.
As often, they attested to what a commission had set out to show in the first place.^[24] That is, if the commission knew what it was after. As the Dutch anthropologist, Frans Husken, notes of colonial commissions in Java, “when nothing else works and no decision can be reached, ‘appoint a commission’ was a favorite response of colonial authorities.”^[25] Commissions could reactivate knowledge but also stop it in its tracks. As technologies of delay, they could effectively mobilize interest and satisfy it and arrest decision. They were primed to distract. Pathos and statistics may seem a strange pairing, but both were at the political heart of state inquiries. Some were searingly detailed. Some were impressionistic and abstract. Vignettes about the unnamed and anecdotes of the everyday established the truth-claims of local officials, their local knowledge and ethnographic authority.
Such commissions, as we shall see in Chapter Four, were also consummate producers of social kinds. The European Pauperism commissions of 1901 reassigned clusters of people for state scrutiny and in so doing wrote, revised and overwrote what was to count in ascribing race. Ways of living were congealed into “problems,” subject persons were condensed into categories, innocuous practices made into subjects of analysis and political things. Statistics, historical narrative, and anecdote were culled and made ready at hand as mutually corroborating evidence for commission-making projects. Proof of the difference between destitute whites and Indo-European paupers were construed by identifying distinct sorts of persons, with specific dispositions, and states of mind. Details of the everyday were elevated to reliable proof of character. Neglect of children, indifference to work, succumbing to native standards were affective states not captured in numbers; condemnations of the sensory world in which poor whites lived shed more palpable and convincing evidence of what colonial agents already thought they knew about sorts of people and how race shaped their habits and inclinations.
Like statistics, commissions were common tools of statecraft forged by social reform-conscience nineteenth century states. As instruments of moral science, statistics used deviations from the mean to identify deviations from the norm. Commissions joined those numbers with prototypic cases to measure gradations of morality and the gradations of unfreedom that went along with them.^[26] That so many commissions were mounted in the late nineteenth century was part of a technology of state practice that spanned the imperial globe.^[27] In metropole and colony, these were high profile promises of public accountability that in turn fostered the commensurabilities on which international colonial conferences thrived. In the Indies, they garnered moral authority both through the specific comparisons they sought to make between their “mixed-blood problem” or their “poor white problem,” and those in South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere in the imperial world.
This was a politics of comparison in which biopolitical assessments of differential racial capabilities and character were key features of social technology.^[28] Those commissions like the European pauperism commission or the South African Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites thirty years later explicitly linked domestic relationships – between parent and child, nursemaid and infant – to the security of the state. Relations between people and objects – to clothing, furnishings, room arrangements and window-openings – were invoked as well. Eye-witness testimonies to intimacies of the home had become data of a particular kind – critical to the state’s audit of its commitment to the public good, to racial differentiation, and to its own viability.
Not least, these commissions were quintessential “quasi-state” technologies of the state but authored and authorized with persons of stature outside it. If modern states gain force in part by creating and maintaining an elusive boundary to civil society, such commissions exemplified that process.^[29] “Outside” experts verified both the state’s right to assess the public interest and its commitment to objectivity. Commissions, in short, demonstrated the state’s right to power through its will to the production of truth.

ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE ARCHIVES

[Ethnographic work] is neither a matter of piling on theoretical antecedents nor a matter of going where no one has been before. I would put it rather that we need to go precisely where we have already been, back to the immediate here and now out of which we have created our present knowledge of the world. That means constructing a mode of enquiry which will enable a return to fields of knowledge and activity in the hindsight of unpredicted outcomes, and which will thus enable recovering of material that investigators not aware they were collecting. The ethnographic method… with its insistent demands of immersement, begins to look extremely promising.”^[30]

A convention in the study of colonial governance is to treat their state bureaucracies as information hungry machines, ambitiously taxonomic, bent on categorical claims about those social differences that mattered and those that did not. Scholars of the colonial have become deft at identifying the distance between those normative, imposed categories of social difference that so contrast with the more mobile social, and intimate relations in which people lived. If one no longer needs to argue, as Sally Falk-Moore did twenty years ago, that fieldwork should be treated as “current history,” the case may still need to be made that archival productions should be treated in more registers as ethnography.^[31]
Students often ask what and where is ethnography in the colonial archives. Is it in what, where or how we approach these gatherings of documents? Is it in the issues addressed or their treatment? What would and should what Marilyn Strathern calls “immersement” look like for the ethnographer on historical colonial ground? One could respond that the ethnographic space of the archive resides in the disjuncture between prescription and practice, between state mandates and the maneuvers people made in response to them, between normative rules and how people actually lived their lives.
But, as the last decade of historical ethnography suggests, no single answer will do. Ethnography in and of the colonial archives attends to processes of production, relations of power in which archives are produced, sequestered, and rearranged.^[32] If ethnographies could be treated as texts, students of the colonial have turned the tables; to reflect on colonial documents as “rituals of possession,” on relics and ruins as sites of contested cultural knowledge. Here I treat archives not as repositories of state power, but as unquiet movements in a field of force, as restless realignments and readjustments of people and the beliefs to which they were tethered, as spaces in which the senses and the affective course through the seeming abstractions of political rationalities.^[33] I take sentiments expressed and ascribed as interpretations, as indices of relations of power and tracers of them.
No longer does the case need to be made that “sources” are not “springs” of colonial truths.^[34] Distinguishing fiction from fact has given way to efforts to track the production and consumption of facticities as the contingent coordinates of particular times and temperaments, places and purposes^[35]As some of the best of this work now recognizes, filing systems and disciplined writing produce assemblages of control and specific methods of domination.^[36] More than ever, new studies of archival production tackle the politics of colonial knowledge and the “arrested histories” – those histories suspended from received historiography – that are its effects.^[37] How states shape and efface personal memories also places emphasis on how those alternative accounts are retained as preserved possibilities for future claims and political projects.^[38] Ethnographic sensibilities have led us to ask how oral and vernacular histories cut across the strictures of archival production and refigure what makes up the archival terrain. They prime us to look for arrogant assertions of know-how couched in unacknowledged native expertise.^[39] Such sensibilities have opened to a broadening array of genres of documentation, to representational practices that impinge on received canons of inscription, to collages of memory that at once deface official writing as they provide new forms of historical evidence.^[40] Methodologically, they pose a challenge to conventional historical narrative, inviting students of the colonial to take critical license with “sources,” with what counts as context, and creative license with form.^[41]
If every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment, the issue of official “bias” opens to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetition, what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could not be said. Such queries have invited a turn back to documentation itself, to the “teaching” task that the Latin root docere implies, to what and who was being educated in the bureaucratic shuffle of rote formulas, generic plots and prescriptive asides.