COLONIAL COMMON SENSE AND ITS EPISTEMIC FRAMES

The archive does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of libraries, outside time and place it reveals the rules of practice... its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separate us from what we can no longer say.^[1]

In this book, ethnographic sites emerge in the difference between prescription and practice, but more pointedly elsewhere. I look for the pulse of the archive in the quiescence and quickened pace of its own production, in the steady and feverish rhythms of repeated incantations, formulas and frames. I pursue it through the uneven densities of Dutch archival preoccupations and predicaments: where energies were expended, what conditioned the designation of an event, what visions were generated in the pursuit of prediction, which social groups garnered concern and then did not.
One of those densities, not surprisingly, thickens around social categories themselves. Here I track them through, what I call, their “social etymologies.” “Social etymologies” trace the career of words and the political practices that new categories mark or that new membership in old categories signal. Most importantly, social etymologies attend to the social relationships of power buried and suspended in those terms.^[2] Such etymologies index how social kinds were produced and what kinds of social relations were construed as plausible evidence of membership. Social etymologies then are not just about words; they trace practices gathered into intelligible forms, they seek those histories that have found quiet refuge in them.^[3]
They might also register how new social categories gained relevance as they annulled designations that no longer were sufficient to make the distinctions relevant to current reformist projects. In the successive waves of “European pauperism” commissions, discussed in Chapter Four, state visions sometimes were contested by those persons whose personal histories they rewrote and remade. Persons clustered into an administrative category that joined “pauper” and “white” rejected both the stigma of “pauper,” the state’s assessment of their living conditions, and the government aid designed for them
But the career of categories is also lodged in archival habits and how those change: in the telling titles of commissions, in the requisite subject headings of every administrative report, in what sorts of stories get relegated to the miscellaneous and “misplaced.” Attending to “words in their sites” and the conceptual weight they bear, along with the authority with which they are endowed, I ask how people think and why they seem obliged to think, or suddenly find themselves having difficulty thinking, in certain ways.^[4] It is, then, not just any words that matter; rather those “that revolve around different focal points of power,” that are “set in play by a particular problem” as they gather around them debate and the provisional terms of convention.^[5]
If Foucault’s conception of archaeology joins “the lesson of things, and the lesson of grammar,” as Deleuze claims, it is also an “audiovisual archive” that combines two forms of stratification – a “practical assemblage” of the visual and the verbal in any historical formation. On the terrain of race that “audiovisual” archive is key. It attends to “the lesson of things” to measure the “multisensory complexes” of unseen racial attributes as well.^[6] Throughout these archives, racialized categories are shuffled, reassigned and remade. In Chapter Four, “Developing Historical Negatives,” a category of “inlandsche kinderen” (who were neither “natives” [inlandsche] nor children [kinderen] as a literal translation would suggest,) could mark those of mixed background, could connote those of illegitimate birth, or as easily include those Europeans whose attachments to, and familiarity with, things Javanese were considered dangerously unsuitable for a colonial situation.
Debates on the inlandsche kinderen were driven by implicit notions of racial decorum, and anxious concern over the non-visual criteria of racial membership. If easily distinguished from both well-heeled European, native, or Chinese populations, who they were enjoyed less consensus. Sometimes the inlandsche kinderen was used for those Europeans born in the Indies (as was the term los hijos del pais used in the Philippines for Spaniards born in the colony);^[7] elsewhere it served to designate the impoverished mixed-blood population, but often not. Sometimes those of “mixed race” (gemengd ras) were not included – the term inlandsche kinderen was reserved implicitly not for all Europeans born in the colony but for destitute whites whose circumstances and cultural affiliations marked them as not quite European.
But the term disappears almost as abruptly as it came into use. Whatever a politics of identification and guardianship might have animated its currency in the late nineteenth century when unpublished commissions on white impoverishment were written, by the time of the published commission in 1902, the term was in decline; and by the 1920s, with racialized distinctions increasingly codified, it was largely abandoned.^[8]
Such discrepancies are neither misrecognitions nor cultural “mistakes” to be set aside. They provide a diacritics of the patent and latent distinctions that marked the colonial epistemology of race.^[9] Actively under scrutiny throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, by the 1920s the term inlandsche kinderen morphed into other designations with newly fashioned taxonomies that more clearly identified the covert attributes of racial membership as the earlier term slipped away. It is precisely those moments of difficulty, the “breach of the self-evident,” by which Foucault designates an “event.” It is such “uncertainty” in the order of things that enlists us to locate such sites for problematization.^[10]
Ethnographic sensibilities guide my forays into the nature of Dutch colonial rule and its archival formations in what I take to be another basic way; namely, in attention to what Peirce calls, the “habit-taking” processes by which people align themselves with forces that are already there. Habit-taking works off colonial conventions and their common sense and is part of their making. These were the “grids of intelligibility” that made certain conventions acceptable, obvious and familiar – or discordant and strange. My concern is with the conditions of epistemic choice and chance, of inculcation and innovation, how people charged with large-scale management and local situations imagined they might identify what they knew they could not see, what common sense they used to assess racial belonging or political desires that were not available to ocular senses, and how they distinguished politically motivated passions from private ones.
Anthropology has no privileged claim on the study of common sense or the epistemologies that underwrite it. But as Michael Herzfeld argues, anthropology may have special purchase on how we go about the comparative study of what constitutes common sense and how people know it.^[11] Michael Polyani refers to a “tacit dimension,” Mary Douglas to “implicit meaning,” Pierre Bourdieu to “habitus,” Charles Taylor to an “implicit understanding,” – the distilled dispositions and trained capacities that work through bodies and on them.^[12] Each, with different emphasis, identify those habits of heart, mind and comportment that derive from unstated understandings of how things work in the world, the categories to which people belong, and what one needs to know to hold unarticulated but well-rehearsed convictions and credulities.
What constitutes common sense is at once historical and political; colonial contexts teach us clearly that dispositions are trained and disciplined, and not without deliberation. Like habitus, they are neither uniform nor uncontested. Dispositions emerge out of a habitus that is rejected, accepted or uneasily accommodated. Dispositions are not given, they are interpretations, discerned and made.^[13] Nor were they always below the threshold of reflective surveillance.^[14] To my mind, this shaping of common sense, and how it is taken up, is the substance of colonial governance and its working epistemologies. By Bourdieu’s account “habitus is that presence of the past in the present.”^[15] What I call “epistemic habits” are steeped in history and historical practices, ways of knowing that are available and “easy to think,” called upon, temporarily settled dispositions that can be challenged and that change.
Rather than treating epistemology as a domain of the foundational, architectural, and fixed (I think here against Rorty’s claim that “time will tell but epistemology won’t”) – I start from a premise shared by students of historical and social epistemology: that epistemic considerations are neither transcendent nor abstract.^[16] They are of the colonial world and squarely in it. Colonial governance entailed a constant assessing and recapping of what colonial agents could know and how they could know it. Central to all the chapters then is an engagement with this disquiet; with colonialism’s unevenly shared epistemic formations, the varying uneasiness and differential discomforts about what could be assumed to be communicable and circulated – or unrepeatable and not subject to the economy of official exchange. Epistemic formations “provide us with the possible, with the thinkable, with the constellations of concepts that are in question, what people assume to know about their worlds and how they disagree over them.”^[17]

AFFECTIVE STRAINS

But even these terms of “debatability” may be up for grabs.^[18] Chapter Two, “Habits of a Colonial Heart” explores the messy space between reason and sentiment, the sort of elusive knowledge on which political assessments were dependent and often had to be made. One is reminded of Max Weber’s contention that bureaucracies excise those domains they cannot measure, that “bureaucracy develops… the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.”^[19] By Weber’s criteria, the Dutch colonial bureaucracy was at best an imperfect success. “Emotional elements,” personal grudges, long-harbored resentments, whether assaults should be taken as acts of personal affront or political subversion, may have escaped calculation but they were deeply part of what Douglas Holmes has called the “para-ethnography” of the lay world – queries and details of the everyday that had to be sensed and could not be measured by enumeration.^[20]
Managed hearts were critical to colonialism’s political grammar. Imperial projects called upon specific sentiments, and assessed racial membership, in part, by how feelings were channeled and who were appropriate carriers and recipients of them. To whom one expressed attachment versus pity, contempt, indifference or disdain provided both cultural and legal “proof” of who one was, where one ranked in the colonial order of things, and thus where one racially belonged.
Colonial statecraft required the calibration of sympathies and attachments, managing different degrees of subjugation both among its agents and those colonized. Being a taxonomic state meant more than setting out categories; it meant producing and harnessing those sentiments that would make sense of those ascriptions and make them work. Reason may be the “public touchstone of truth,” but it is anchored in sensibilities as Kant insisted – in affective states as well.^[21]
Sentiments are not opposed to political reason but are at once modalities and tracers of it. Here I treat sentiments as judgments, assessments and interpretations of the social and political world.^[22] They are also incisive markers of rank and the unstated rules of exemption. How and to whom sentiments of remorse or rage, compassion or contempt were conveyed and displayed measured degrees of social license that colonial relations so inequitably conferred.^[23] To underscore this crucial point: expressions of sentiment depended on situated knowledge and thus relational know-how about rank – where and to whom one displayed one’s range of feelings within it. Archival documents participate in this emotional economy in some obvious ways: in the measured tone of official texts, in the biting critique reserved for marginalia, and in footnotes to official reports where moral assessments of cultural practice were often relegated and local knowledge was stored.^[24] Not unlike Steven Shapin’s tracking of the seventeenth century social history of truth, I ask who and what was granted epistemological virtue, with what cultural competencies, and by what social criteria.^[25]
If colonial archives were nurseries of legal knowledge and official repositories of policy, they were also repositories of good taste and bad faith. Scribes often wrote out the final, clean copy but not always. “Semi-official” correspondence might be penned by their authors. Reports to the Governor-General in Batavia and to the Minister of Colonies in The Hague were composed by men of letters whose status was enhanced by reference to Greek heroes and French bons mots. Such proof of competence and good judgment was demonstrated in no small part by configuring events into familiar and recognizable plots. In this empire’s “lettered cities” of administrative work, virtue was defined by limited and selective familiarity with the Indies.^[26] Those with too much knowledge of things Javanese were penalized as were those with not enough.^[27]
But administrative anxiety was also rightly riveted on those affective states of European colonials which could not be easily gauged, on those neither within the state’s reach to manage or assess. The public demonstration by European and creole whites in Batavia in May 1848, the subject of Chapter Two – when family attachments threatened to crash against the demands for state loyalty – underscored that those in charge of the city and the colony knew how much habits of the heart could not be contained as the “private,” they could as easily spiral into the political and were not in the state’s control. At issue was the contagious, transient quality of sentiment and its portability. Whether certain sentiments were political dangerous because they were local, or smuggled on the last mail boat via Paris newspapers and by word of mouth, they really did not know.
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 direction. Armed with a vocabulary of (epistemic) community, (epistemic) culture, (epistemic) crisis and (epistemic) practice, emphasis is on the procedures and activities on which certain ways of knowing rely, not unlike what de Certeau called historiographic “operations.”^[28] While such a lexicon is more commonly reserved for the study of scientific communities of experiment and expertise, such an approach to knowledge production 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 the fact that they were so.
Science culture and colonial governance had, what Ian Hacking famously has called, “the taming of chance” in common as well.^[29] Much as classical probability theory was to measure the incertitudes of a modernizing world, colonial civil servants were charged to do the same.^[30] Both ventures treated the conventions and categories of analysis as neither innocuous nor benign. As interpretive communities both depend on rules of reliability and trust, on a shared common sense about what was likely, that allowed prediction and directed the political projects it served.
They are also communities of expectation. If the sciences participate in “a permanent process of… reshuffling of the boundary between what is thought to be known and what is beyond imagination,” colonial governance did much the same.^[31] Sound conjecture and expectation can make governing strategies work, or as anti-colonial movements have amply demonstrated, make them violently fail. And like scientific communities, new objects emerge between what one does “not quite yet know” and that for which there is not yet a name. Such epistemic objects are produced in the haze of, what historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheniberger, calls “a mixture of hard and soft,” as Michel Serres put it, “object, still, sign, already; sign still, object already.”^[32] The making of colonial categories shares this ambiguous epistemic space. New social objects were the archives’ product as much as subjects of them.
Foucault’s insistence that “to grant epistemic warrant is a covert way of distributing power,” echoes throughout colonial studies in some of its most productive sites that trace both its embedded forms and more blatantly coercive ways.^[33] But just how that warrant was granted, how firmly entrenched, and how much dissent and debate accompanied that process is not always clear.^[34] Some of the problem may be with an over commitment to Foucault’s vocabulary. An “episteme” has come to index a scale, longevity, and hardening of thought formation that may set us astray. A “regime of truth” suggests a durability of distinctions, a finite field of truth claims that colonial knowledge production would never attain. As I argue in Chapter Two, understanding “what happened” in May 1848 calls on different vectors of intelligibility, alternate causalities and attributions of affect that crossed and met. I use the terms “grids of intelligibility” and “regimes of truth,” cautiously, with the caveat that both mark epistemic habits and ways of knowing cut through with competing investments and claims. As these archives of the Indies’ colonial agents and architects evince, it was not epistemic clarity but epistemic uncertainties that generated the densest debates and the longest paper trails that winded their way through such a range of seemingly unrelated subjects. Like imperial formations themselves, colonial truth-claims were provisional, in solution, and subject to change.

TRACING THE ARCHIVAL TURN

If “the transformation of archival activity is the point of departure and the condition of a new history,” as de Certeau has argued, we are clearly in a new moment.^[35] The warning of Evans-Pritchard in 1951 that anthropologists tended to be “uncritical in their use of documentary sources” had little resonance then.^[36] So too did Maitland’s earlier dictum that anthropology had “the choice between being history or being nothing.”^[37] Both pronouncements read as fairly quaint today.^[38] Among historians, literary critics and anthropologists, archives have been elevated to new analytic status with distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny on their own. One might be tempted to see this as a Derridian effect of the last decade, following the publication of Archive Fever.^[39] But the archival turn has a wider arc and a longer durйe. Archive Fever compelling captured that impulse by giving it theoretical stature, but Jacques Derrida’s intervention came only after the “archival turn” was already being made.
This move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject gained its currency across the richly undisciplined space of critical history and in a range of fields energized by that reformulation.^[40] The sheer number of volumes devoted to “the archive” is staggering: in film and literary studies, in analyses of truth commissions or the human genome project, from rereadings of histories of colonialism to those of gay rights.^[41] “Reading” here is an agentive act, one squarely focused on what we know and how we know it. Focus on the politics of knowledge is a methodological commitment to how history’s exclusions are secured and made.
One could argue that “the archive” for historians and “the Archive” for cultural theorists have been wholly different analytic objects: for the former, a body of documents and the institutions that house them, for the latter a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and untouched entail.^[42] Those differences may suggest sharply defined domains, but the blurring which is so common today is hardly a recent intervention.^[43]
For indeed, something resembling the broader social life of an archive, what might be called ethnography in an archival mode, has been around for sometime. Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory of a sixteenth-century miller, like Natalie Davis’s use of pardon tales, drew on “hostile” documents to reveal “the gap between the image underlying the interrogations of judges and the actual testimony of the accused.”^[44] Both questioned “how people told stories, what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive.” In Davis’ notion of “fiction in the archives,” she worked through pardon tales to reveal both the “constraints of the law” and its popular manipulations, and both the terms of argumentation and the broader set of literary forms invoked to support or undermine those claims.^[45] Still, these were not ethnographies of the archive, but in it.
Archivists obviously have been thinking about the politics and history of archives for sometime.^[46] What marks the past decade are the new conversations between archivists and historians about documentary evidence, record-keeping, what features of archival form and content can be retrieved, and how decisions should be made about historical significance and preservation.^[47] As storage technology revamps, both question what information matters, what tacit narratives inform contemporary archival practices, and what should be retained as physical form is changed.^[48] All are asking what new accessibilities and connections are gained – and what is lost – when parchment and paper gave way to digital recordings.

COLONIALISM’S ARCHIVAL GRAINS

Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.^[49]

If one were to characterize what has informed a critical approach to the colonial archives, it would be a commitment to the notion of reading colonial archives “against their grain” of imperial history, empire builders, and the priorities and perceptions of those who wrote them. Schooled to think “from the bottom up,” students of colonialism located “structure” with colonizers and the colonial state, and “human agency” with subalterns, in small gestures of refusal and silence among the colonized.
In reading “upper class sources upside down,” we sought to read against the languages of rule and statist perceptions. “Un-State-d” histories were to demonstrate more than the warped reality of official knowledge, but its textual properties and the violences condoned by such political distortions. In Ranajit Guha’s influential formulations, colonial documents were rhetorical slights of hand that erased the facts of subjugation, reclassified petty crime as political subversion or located violence and unreason as inherent to the colonized.^[50] The analytic tactics pursued have been those of inversion and recuperation, efforts to recast colonial subjects as agents who made and make choices and critiques of their own.
Insistence on the link between what counts as knowledge and who is in power to record their versions of it has since become a founding principle of colonial ethnography. But it may also be taking us somewhere else. In treating archival documents not as the historical ballast to ethnography, but as a charged site of it, is the call for a methodological shift: to move away from treatment of the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one. That call has been taken up differently: sometimes hotly pursued, other times a nod in that analytic direction. For some, it represented a turn back to the powerful “poetics of detail.”^[51] To others, the archival turn provided a way to cut through the distorted optics of colonial historiography and the distinctions that cordoned off fiction from authorized truths.^[52]
Michel-Rolph Trouillot said it with consummate clarity, that “historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.” More importantly, he offered neophytes to archival work a way to tackle what de Certeau meant by “historiographic operations,” by distinguishing the archival power lodged in moments of creation from practices of assembly, retrieval and disciplinary legitimation.^[53] If Trouillot urged students to distinguish among these different operations, Nicholas Dirk’s call for “a biography of the archive,” insisted on who was performing that labor by showing how much early colonial officials cum historians in British India were dependent on native informants who did the work of collection and cultural translation for them.^[54] But “mining” for treasures rather than immersement is still a prevalent and all too expedient mode.
Feminist historians have long sought out creative ways of demonstrating how, what Bonnie Smith aptly dubbed “male prowess,” shaped archival production, the initiation rites of historiography and the absence of agentive histories of women excised from documents and excluded from subsequent texts.^[55] On colonial terrain, the challenge to locate women as subjects continues to critically stretch the scope of the archive in ways that redefine what kinds of reading and writing are historically germane.^[56]
My own first sense of what I call here “the pulse of the archive” was decades ago when I found myself confronted with reports on the horrific mutilation and murder of a European planter’s wife and children in 1876 on Sumatra’s East Coast. Multiple reports were collected on the murder, preceding attacks, and speculation on both the most immediate affronts and distant uprisings to which the murder might be linked. Nor were accounts always fettered by knowledge of the assault. In an earlier version of Chapter Five, I explored how rumor ricocheted between planters and the workers they feared and the insurgents they ignored, undoing facile distinctions between reliable and conjured information, between fact and fantasy, between mad paranoia and political reality.^[57] The contrast between neat copy and hurried hand, an impatient and uneven pace of query and response, enraged and tempered narrative, fine-grained knowledge and unabashed ignorance, all struck me as startling testimonies to how empire worked and to what we still did not know about it.^[58] Those challenges remain at the heart of this book and with me today.
Most students of the colonial who now work with archives in a reflective mode, treat “the archive” as something in between a set of documents, their institutions, and a repository of memory – both a place and a cultural space that encompasses official documents but not confined to them. Some of the most creative work branches out to the range of scripted and performed practices that bear the psychic and material stamp of colonial relations.
Here I explicitly do something else: several chapters stay largely within the state’s purview with documents viewed by state officials but not always produced by them. As I use the term, the Dutch colonial archives were both a corpus of statements and a depot of documents, both sites of the imaginary and institutions that fashioned histories as they concealed, revealed and contradicted the investments of the state.^[59]Power and control, as students of archiving are quick to point out, is fundamental to the etymology of the term and should need no iteration.^[60] Moralizing stories mapped the scope of state vision, the restricted limits of government responsibility and what were defined as its philanthropic missions.
Nor were they to be read in any which way. Issues were rendered important by where they appeared, how they were cross-referenced, where they were catalogued, and thus how they were framed. Official exchanges between Governor-Generals and their subordinates, between a Governor-General and a Minister of Colonies, and between the latter and the King, served as reference guides to administrative thinking, abbreviated cheat sheets of what counted as precedent and what properly fell under “concerns of state.” Some reports were meticulously scrutinized, others were carelessly read and set aside. Archival convention, however, dictated that all were abundantly cross-referenced in ways that produced paths of precedent and mapped relevance. Citation also served, not unlike footnotes, to affirm the import of one’s observations, choice of historical context, and implicitly the legitimacy of one’s selected narrative.^[61]
Some would argue that the grand narratives of colonialism have been amply and excessively told. On that assumption, students of colonialisms often turn quickly and confidently to read “against the grain” of colonial conventions. One fundamental premise of this book is a call for a less assured and perhaps more humble stance – that we explore the grain with care and read along it first. Assuming we know those scripts rests too comfortably on predictable stories with familiar plots. It leaves intact the assumption that colonial statecraft was always intent on accumulating more knowledge rather than on a selective winnowing and reduction of it. It takes as a given the equation of knowledge to power, and that colonial states sought more of both.^[62] Not least, it leaves unaddressed how often colonial categories reappear in the analytic vocabulary of historians rather than as transient, provisional objects of historical inquiry that themselves need to be analyzed if not explained.^[63]
Colonial archives were sote only a site of command, but of countermand as well. “Factual storytellings” – what Hayden White ascribes to what counts as history – did not always prevail.^[64] Perturbations in the form of discrepant accounts, dissenting voices and extraneous detail could disable action, unhinge the “facts,” and forestall response. Archival power was no more monolithic than the governing practices which it enabled and on which it was based. Subjugated knowledge erupts in contested ontologies of peoples and things. Countervailing interpretations of what compromised danger and threat could send ripples through imperious states and the polished surface of their writerly modes.
As such, I am drawn to think about archival events with and against Foucault’s compelling invitation to treat them as “reversals of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.”^[65] Such an approach undoes the certainty that they are stable “things” with ready-made and neatly drawn boundaries. But the search for dramatic “reversal,” “usurpation,” and successful “appropriation” may hide “events” that are more muted in their consequences, less bellicose in their seizures, less spectacular in how and what they reframe. Here I treat archival events more as moments that disrupt (if only provisionally) a field of force, that challenge (if only slightly) what can be said and done, that question (if only softly) “epistemic warrant,” that realign the certainties of the probable more than they mark wholesale reversals of direction.

THE WATERMARKS OF EMPIRE

Most of this book’s chapters treat specific government archives of the nineteenth century Netherlands Indies and the circumscribed problems their authors and collators sought to avoid or address. The final chapter is punctuated by work that slips in and out of the official colonial archives and in and out of their time frames.
In Chapter Six, “Imperial Dispositions: The Politics of Dis-regard,” I question how much we who study the work of empire know about the dispositions of those it empowered. It wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but never wholly subsumed by it. More directly, it identifies a “politics of dis-regard,” what psychological and political machinations it takes to look away for those who live off and in empire, as Valck did, and as many of us may find ourselves doing now. Here I take the story of Frans Carl Valck told through government archives in Chapter Five, from a private archive of a very different sort, from the family papers housed in a genealogical bureau established decades after Valck’s death by one of his scholarly descendants.
The story of his failed career appears here as a palimpsest, erupting at the tender and fraught center of his relationship with his only child, a daughter from whom he remained estranged for most of their lives. Sometimes the course of his Indies career as a colonial civil servant is centrally framed; sometimes it is irrelevant and only partially visible, elsewhere it is utterly absent, delicately unacknowledged, discretely erased. Viewed from these differences of time, tone and place, I imagine what it might take to write a history of empire “in a minor key,” through another vantage on the confused sensibilities that cut across Valck’s official record – in the collision and collusion between his personal and public lives. It is this chapter that opens most directly to one way of thinking a colonial history of the present.
When historical ethnography was just coming into its own, John and Jean Comaroff urged us to “create new colonial archives of our own.”^[66] Some students of empire have sought new kinds of sources. Others have looked to different ways of approaching familiar archives with questions we have never asked and readings we have not yet done. In this book, it is unexplored fault lines, ragged edges and unremarked disruptions to the seamless and smooth surface of colonialism’s archival genres over which I linger and then attempt to track. My attention is on the field of entangled documents that have been “scratched over” and crossed-out many times. But it is as much on repetitions, what Edward Said reminds us is always about “filiations” pursued or abandoned. “Repetition cannot long escape the ironies its bears within it,” nor the histories upon which it calls.^[67] In these colonial archives, these repetitions join the disparate, enlist the counterintuitive, and provide the vectors of recuperations and ruptures by making familiar what they hoped to know.
De Certeau defined the science of history as a redistribution in space, the act of changing something into something else. Archival labor, he warned, must do more than “simply adopt former classifications,” it must break away from the constraints of “series H in the National Archives,” and be replaced with new “codes of recognition” and “systems of expectation.”^[68] But such a strategy depends on what we think we already know. For students of empire, colonial codes of recognition and systems of expectation remain at the elusive center of imperial rule, its implicit plots and its deflecting and resilient narratives.
When Robert Darnton some twenty years ago identified “history in the ethnographic grain” as what cultural history should be about, he had in mind how people make sense of the world and “thought about how they thought.”^[69] Epistemic anxieties are precisely about that reflection. Here the ethno-graphic is about the graphic, detailed production of social kinds, the archival power that allowed its political deployment, and the grafting of affective states to those inventions. Reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form. Working along the grain is not to follow a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power, to attend to both the sound and sense therein and their rival and reciprocal energies. It calls on us to understand how unintelligibilities are sustained and why empires remain so uneasily invested in them.