SUMMARY:

This is a Russian translation of the seventh chapter, entitled «Imperial Dispositions of Disregard,» of Ann Laura Stoler’s latest book Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). This chapter is about the logos and pathos of empire, the durabilities of imperial dispositions steeped in matter and mind. In different guises, it wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but not wholly subsumed by it. It seeks to broach the cast that imperial formations imposed over people's intimate social ecologies – both the intensities and the diminished qualities of their affective lives. The author closely follows the history of a family whose lives moved in and out of colonial Indonesia in the late-nineteenth century to ask what sorts of personhoods imperial formations called forth and upon. In light of these issues, Stoler interprets letters of the Dutch colonial official Franc Carl Valck to his daughter, friends and supervisors, as well as letters of his family members to him.