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2008 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

EPISTEMIC POLITICS: ONTOLOGIES OF COLONIAL


COMMON SENSE
ANN LAURA STOLER

In the study of European imperial formations and the forms of governance on


which they relied, questions of epistemology occupy a capacious and curiously
confined analytic space. On the one hand, the elevation of European categories
and concepts of reason, race, science, and civility to human universals has been
understood to form the backbone of imperial governance and its technologies of
rule. Students of European colonial histories would largely agree that a cluster
of commitments to what constituted qualified knowledgethe sorting of human
kinds into racial taxonomies, science as the measure of man, reason as distinct
from the passions, the sentiments as subservient to rationalityconstituted an
epistemic supremacy that underwrote and guided the institutions that colonialisms produced and the principles of truth production those institutions
served.1
On the other hand, examination of the lived epistemic space in which empires
architects and agents operated, those persons Paul Rabinow has referred to as its
social engineers, has often been occluded by the assumption that their epistemic
commitments were clear and shared.2 In this paper, I argue that they were often
not.3 This is not to suggest that competing agendas among colonial agents have not
been explored: Conflicts between missionaries, medical professionals and bureaucrats, colonial planters and metropolitan policy makers, have provided the richly

For a discussion of the extent to which these epistemic principles inform governing projects in
non-European imperial formations, see Imperial Formations, eds. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole
McGranahan, Peter Perdue (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2007).
Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1989).
This paper draws substantially from my book, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and
Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008).

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ANN LAURA STOLER

documented field and focus of new imperial histories for sometime.4 Nevertheless,
what we might call here, the folk epistemology of governing agents (what I
would prefer to call their vernacular practicing epistemology), what they imagined they could know and more importantly what epistemic habits they developed
to know it, has rarely been treated as a subject of sustained analysis. At issue then
is not what they knew about the colonial worlds in which they lived but what made
up the repertoires of common sense that guided their arts of governance and the
violences of social policy.
If the gross grids of intelligibility were often explicit in colonial governance,
equally commanding forms of knowledge production resided in implicit frames,
namely, in the unstated dogma of what counted as knowledge itself. Over the last
three decades, from Edward Saids Orientalism (1978)that largely launched the
seismic shift in studies of imperial history under the banner of postcolonial
studiesto Dipesh Chakrabartys Provincializing Europe (2002), imperial
power has been seen to rest on a language of reason, on a European regime of truth
endowed with epistemic clarity.5 But what some have called the rule of reason,
and the effective force of its social taxonomies, was sometimes little more than a
fragile web.6 That rule of reason appears far less stable when epistemology is
rendered not as a fixed architecture of knowledge production but as achieved labor
and worldly practice. Richard Rortys pithy statement that time will tell but
epistemology wont now reads as anachronistic.7 One might imagine that
common recourse in colonial studies to Michel Foucaults analytic notion of a
regime of truth should put the emphasis in a more enabling direction, but how
Foucault actually defined that analytic is, not surprisingly, very different than how
it has been called into use. In his Collge de France lectures on the birth of
biopolitics, a regime of truth is marked by the articulation of an ensemble of
practices tied by a bond of intelligibility that legislate these practices and terms
of the true and the false.8 If Foucaults emphasis was on practices, in its current
usage emphasis is more on the implacable and relentless success with which
colonial (un)truths have been produced. But the problem may lie with the
4

See, for example, the essays in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Culture in a Bourgeois World, ed.
Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, l978); Dipesh Chakarbarty, Provincializing Europe
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000).
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1999); Lewis Pyenson, Empire of Reason: Exact Sciences in Indonesia 18401940
(Leiden: Brill, 1989).
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Series (New York:
Cambridge UP, 1991) 89.
Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitque: Cours au Collge de France, 19781979 (Paris:
Gallimard/Seuil, 2004) 20.

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term regime itself that conveys a galvanizing force of truth production far more
than the indecisive and muddled processes that often made it up.9
Rather than treating epistemology as a domain of the foundational, architectural, and fixed, I start from a premise shared by students of historical and social
epistemology that epistemic considerations are neither transcendent nor abstract.
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 it. Central to my concern then is an engagement with this disquiet, with
colonialisms unevenly shared epistemic formations, the varying uneasiness and
differential discomforts about what could be assumed to be communicable and
circulatedor 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.10
In treating epistemology as what people do, as a navigational strategy, focus
turns from the security of a regime to the ongoing pursuit of intelligibilities that,
in the case of colonial agents in the 19th-century Netherlands Indies, took no
precise or given course. 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 and what common sense they used to assess racial belonging or
political desires unavailable to ocular evidence. Not least important to the practice
of governance was their ability to distinguish politically motivated passions from
private ones and to know when they needed to act upon them.
Chakrabarty notes that the task of examining European rationalism in the
history of empire is a matter of documenting how its reason, which was not
always self-evident to everyone, has been made to look obvious far beyond the
ground where it originated.11 My starting point attends to that parenthetical
phrase: reason was more than not self-evident to everyone. Focusing on the
middling epistemic reflections of colonial agents, what constituted reason
emerges as something that was often not obvious at all. Such a focus puts in
question three assumptions: (1) that European epistemic frames were founded
on clarity, (2) that they were shared among Europeans, and (3) that epistemic
prescription adequately captures epistemic practice.

10

11

For one of many places Foucault refers to a regime of truth, see Michel Foucault, Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writing 19721977 ed. and trans. Colin S. Gordon (New
York: Pantheon, 1980) 134145.
Margaret Somers, Where is Sociology after the Historic Turn? In The Historic Turn in the Human
Sciences (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996) 71.
Chakrabarty, 2000, 43.

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ANN LAURA STOLER

What Ian Hacking calls, the making up of people was a principal preoccupation of those who ruled colonial territories in the late 19th-century Dutch East
Indies.12 It pervaded the tenor of administrative archives, the Dutch-language
press, a century worth of colonial fiction, and defined the epistemic anxieties that
eddied around them. The production of social kinds entailed the codification of
self-evident measures to distinguish racial categories, colonizer from colonized,
and not least, the proper classification of those multiple generations legitimately
and illegitimately born of Javanese mothers and European fathers who straddled
and confused that neat divide.
If racial thinking was a founding principle throughout the colonial world and a
received category of social classification, its specific coordinates took others ways
of knowing to assess. For in the Netherlands Indies, where tens of thousands of
Europeans were born in the colonies over nearly 300 years of Dutch rule, social
taxonomies could rarely capture the distinctions between poor whites and those of
lowly (Indo) mixed parentage, nor those that distinguished between the true,
echte Europeans and those many who had never seen the Netherlands and for
whom Dutch language expression came less easily to their tongues and those of
their children than Javanese and Malay. In a colony where even the legal stipulation for being granted European equivalent status entailed evidence of being at
home in a European milieu, what counted as adequate knowledge went beyond
the preparatory courses for a civil service career.13 In distinguishing race, upbringing could be given more weight than paternity, comportment more credence than
color, and cultural competence more weight than birth. If science and law were
called on to make those distinctions, the resounding anxiety of colonial rule was
that this knowledge about knowledge was often inadequate.
In this strained social space, colonial agents relied on ways of knowing that
depended on a reading of sensibilities more than science, on a measure of affective
statesof affiliations and attachmentsmore than origins and on assessments of
moral civilities that were poorly secured by chromatic indices and not by colorbased taxonomies or visual markers.14
At issue were two epistemic truths about race that unevenly meshed: one
grounded in somatically observable, dependable differences, the other not visually
secured at all. Surface perceptions were deemed unreliable, producing what the
Dutch called fabricated and fictive Europeans, Europeans in disguise,

12

13

14

Ian Hacking, Making Up People, In Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002)
99114.
For more on their changing criteria of racial membership, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge
and Imperial Power (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002).
On colonialisms affective states see Ann Laura Stoler, Habits of a Colonial Heart, In Along the
Archival Grain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008).

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and what French officials in Indochina most feared, natives and mtis who
fraudulently were recognized and passed as European.15 These categorical
errors could only be accessed by another kind of common sense knowledge of
hidden properties of human kinds, interior dispositions, of those secreted in
their depths.
This ambiguous space of making up people produced another form of knowledge
that shaped the preoccupations of those assigned to craft policy, police privileges,
and diffuse resentments to rule. Here was a concern of a related but different kind,
a more subjacent thread that runs throughout decades of government papers.
Epistemic practice focused not what had occurred but on what could be in the
future. This epistemic of expectation sought to anticipate the potentials for subversion, betrayal, and revolt among Europeans born in the Indies, among those who
were mixed as well as the colonized. The epistemic tasks that colonial institutions
faced were contingent on forms of knowledge that bureaucratic machines like those
of the Dutch civil service uneasily embraced: probabilistic predictions about the
political consequences of peoples affective and moral states.
This I would argue 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. Whether mixed-blood children would turn into patricides,
literally of their fathers by whom they were not legally recognized, and figuratively of a state that denied them access to higher education, elite civil service
jobs and thus full membership rights, required intimate knowledge of a nonquantifiable and qualitatively different kind than reason alone could offer and that
statisticsthe moral science of statecould not address. The Dutch colonial
archives are, in many ways, the record of these anxious epistemic labors, their
social imaginaries, and the short- and long-term visions of how empires practitioners could know what they could only poorly assess.
Both science culture and colonial governance did have something particular
in common, what Ian Hacking famously has called, a preoccupation with the
taming of chance.16 Much as classical probability theory was to measure the
incertitudes of a modernizing world, colonial civil servants were charged to do so
the same. As interpretive communities both depended on rules of reliability and
trust, on a shared common sense about what was likely, allowing prediction and
directing the political projects it served. If the sciences participate in what historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheniberger calls a permanent process of [. . .] reshuffling of the boundary between what is thought to be known and what is beyond
15

16

On this issue of fictive Europeans, see my Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers In Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power, 79111.
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990).

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imagination, colonial governance did as well.17 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
Rheniberger calls on Michel Serres to identify as a mixture of hard and soft,
object, still, sign, already; sign still, object already. The making of colonial
categories occupies this epistemic space. New social objects were the archives
product as much as subjects of them.
I refer to these actors as middling epistemic practitioners to reflect the sorts of
hybrid and hesitant activities of knowledge production in which they were
engaged. They maneuvered between unarticulated sensibilities and formal statistics, between attentions to sentiments as much as rational choice. Their projects
and policies were based at once on patent visual proof and latent intuitions when
they sought, for example, to specify how to know who was a true European and
who was not. Not least, this span of ways of knowing informed what concerned
them mostwho might become recalcitrant and subversive and what clusters of
comportments, cultural competencies, and affective allegiances might adequately
index and, most critically, anticipate inchoate threats.
Much of the literature on folk epistemology seems to assume that folk epistemology exists without explicit method in a non-reflective register, as embodied in
the fuzzy space of common sense.18 Expert scientific and philosophical knowledge
on the other is often assumed to be robust because it is explicit and reflective in
ways that produce recognized canons of credibility and proof. But these colonial
actors occupy a messier middle ground. If we take seriously Pierre Bourdieus
insistence that ethnography is fieldwork in philosophy, then tracing how these
local and distant purveyors of empire folded sentiment and sensibility into their
more explicit knowledge about knowledge may provide a rich new analytic space
to examine practical epistemic framesways of knowing that are provisional and
mobile, that do specific labor, and are subject to incremental and nuanced
change.19
17

18

19

Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997),
11.
See, for example, Robert B. Talisse, A Folk Epistemic Justification of Democracy, ms. August
2005, online; Folk Psychology and Folk Epistemics, Statement of Culture and the Mind Project,
http://www.philosophy. http://Dept.shef.ac.uk/culture&mind/folk; Paul Egre, Knowledge,
Reliability, and Margin for Error Principles, New Waves in Epistemology, ed. Vincent Hendricks
and Duncan Pritchard (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 21550; R. F. Kitchner, Folk epistemology: An
introduction In New Ideas in Psychology 20 (2) August (2002): 89105.
Pierre Bourdieu, Fieldwork in Philosophy, In In Other Worlds: Essays toward a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990) 28.

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In the interstices of sanctioned formulae, these colonial documents mark the


distance between recognized and subjugated knowledge, between intelligible
accounts and those with knowledge that could not be bent into prevailing
frames. Vernacular ways of knowing are lodged in those forms, disregarded, and
then sometimes repossessed. These are missives and reports that passed up and
down the bureaucratic ladder or stayed secreted within its privileged ranks. But
their sweep is not confined to these alone. They are also peopled by 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
between Asian women and European men, 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 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 an archival aside is the anguish of a lowly civil servant gone bankrupt
in efforts to pay for his sons requisite schooling in Holland. A European mother
about to be estranged for 10 years from her young son leaving for requisite
schooling in Holland, goes mad in a throw-away sentence. Such sentiments
might be relegated as marginalia but do not always remain so. Sometimes, they
erupt from the archives shadows to reappear as searing testimonies to what
colonial officials knew they did not know. Such documents are also peopled
with Dutch administrators, German and French planters scrambling to figure out
whether their planted profits might be attacked by a few workers bent on
revenge against an abusive manageror by phantasmic hoards of Islamic
insurgents armed to storm their guarded gates. Conventional stereotypes did not
always serve them well. Understandings of outrage often escaped the reasoned
state.
Among those who work on folk epistemics is a concern to account for how we
predict, explain, or understand actions in terms of the mental states behind them,
the theories of mind on which they are based.20 Histories of imperial governance
and cognitive theories of mind rarely share a common ground. But perhaps they
should: predicting and accounting for the minds of empires Others is a competence on which governance depends. The chilling rubric for the Department of
Homeland Securitys most recent program to avert terrorist action takes as its

20

Kitchener, Folk Epistemology, 89.

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primary goal what it calls the assessment of violent intenta predictive apparatus to ascertain unseen and hostile mental states.21 Hostile mental states are
what imperial formations have long tracked. Strategic cultural knowledge and
intimate knowledge are key to that apparatus.22 In the Dutch Indies, colonial
agents spent inordinate time in risk management as a political and epistemological
endeavor, monitoring which intimacies of the everyday, childrearing, domestic,
and sexual arrangements, places of play might in time produce political disaffection and eventual threat.
What is so striking is how far and wide they sought to measure desires in adults
and to educate desire in the young. Because imagining what might be was as
important as knowing what was, these archives of the visionary and the probable
should command our attention. Marked by erratic movement 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 dangerous horizon. Resplendent in
the feared, the unrealized, and the ill conceived, such visions provide traces of
agitations of a peculiar kindnot events but the anticipation of them that in turn
prompted 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, the history of colonial imaginaries and the violence of their
effects should encompass both.
French historian Artlette Farge warns that the archive is a piece of knowledge
that isnt to annex but disrupt.23 To allow oneself to falter in the face of the archives
uncertainties is where vernacular ways of knowing emerge in striking form. The
Indies colonial bureaucracy was so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases and
racial clichs, one is easily dulled by their very repetitions. Our readings are blunted
by what has been often parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a stylized official
gaze. But here the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews indexed
assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviewsof
regions, problems, or target populationswere rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied
ineloquence of bureaucratize. Sometimes they were impressionistic and distant,
elsewhere animated by intimate fear more than intimate knowledge of what

21

22

23

See Ian Sample, Security Firms Working on Devices to Spot Would-Be Terrorists in Crowd, The
Guardian, 9 August 2007; Comments on Project Hostile Intent plans non-invasive DHS brainscan http://www.thereister.co.uk/2007/08/09/no_not_the_mind_probe_.
On strategic culture and intimate knowledge see Ann Laura Stoler with David Bond, Refractions off Empire: Untimely Comparisons in Harsh Times, Radical History Review 95 (Spring
2006): 93107.
Arlette Farge, Le gout de larchive (Paris: Seuil, 1989) 9.

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multiple colonial civil servants thought they saw, what was reported by an underling, or what it was claimed that others saw, heard, or said.
Wedged within those folds of truth-claims emerge 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. Too, they
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. 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.24 But these hierarchies too could be
quickly inverted. In the brutal immediacy of a murder, in the panic of an impeding
attack, in the anxious rush to fulfill a superiors demand for information (and for
proof of ones 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 epistemic politics of empire but the subjacent
coordinates of it.
Unspoken orders of rubric and reference did more than define plausible evidence. Such implicit conventions figured centrally when reporting preceded
inquiry, when evidence was spareor 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 the decorum and protocol, what rhetorical devices were deemed
persuasive and active in the game.
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 what colonial administrators imagined they could know and
how they could know it when obsessed over elsewhere: in secret documents on
European pauperism, in recommendations to quell creole dissent, in debates over
mixed-bloods too haughty to do manual labor. This was not information out of
place. In these contexts, they mark administrative anxieties about mixed populations where racial categories offered no easy access to dispositions, inclinations,
and interior states. What they resorted to were conversant notions of who
belonged where, how people spoke to their young, sat, ate, and dressed.

24

See Ann Laura Stoler, In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial
Narratives Representations 37 (Winter 1992) 15189.

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One site in which epistemic uncertainties emerge in bold relief were in one of
the favored forms of archival productionthe state commission. These were
consummate producers of social kinds. The European Pauperism Commission 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. 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 19th-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 with them. They explicitly linked domestic
relationshipsbetween parent and child, nursemaid and infantto the security of
the state. Relations between people and objectsto clothing, furnishings, room
arrangements, and window openingswere invoked as well. Eye-witness testimonies to intimacies of the home had become data of a particular kindcritical
to the states audit of its commitment to the public good, to racial differentiation,
and to its own viability.
But even what Arjun Appadurai calls these terms of debatability were up for
grabs.25 One of the most striking arenas in which epistemic uncertainty emerged
was in the confounded 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 Webers contention that bureaucracies excise those
domains they cannot measure by eliminating from official business love, hatred
and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.26 But in the Dutch colonial bureaucracy such emotional elements, personal
grudges, long-harbored resentments, whether assaults should be taken as acts of
personal affront or political subversion were deeply part of what Douglas Holmes

25
26

Arjun Appadurai, The Past as a Scarce Resource, Man 16: 20119.


Max Weber, Bureaucracy In Essays in Sociology, ed and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(New York: Oxford UP, 1946) 975.

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has called the para-ethnography of the lay worldqueries and details of the
everyday that had to be sensed and could not be measured by enumeration.27
Managing the hearts of colonialisms agents and subjects was critical to colonialisms viability. 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, 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. Sentiments are not opposed to political reason but
modalities and tracers of it. I treat them as judgments, assessments, and interpretations of the social and political world. They served as 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. To underscore this
crucial point: Expressions of sentiment depended on situated knowledge and thus
relational know-howwhere and to whom one displayed ones feelings was part
of the epistemology of race.
The Dutch colonial archives were also repositories of good taste and bad faith.
Not unlike Steven Shapins tracking of the 17th-century social history of truth, I
ask who and what was granted epistemological virtue, with what cultural competencies, and by what social criteria.28 Proof of competence and good judgment was
demonstrated in no small part by configuring events into familiar and recognizable
plots. In empires lettered cities of administrative work, virtue was defined by
limited and selective familiarity with the Indies. Those with too much knowledge
of things Javanese were penalized as were those with not enough. Administrative
anxiety was also rightly riveted on those affective states of European colonials,
which could not be easily gauged, on those neither within the states reach to
manage or assess. An extraordinary public demonstration by European and creole
whites in Batavia in May l848when family attachments threatened to crash
against the demands for state loyaltyunderscored that those in charge of the city
and the colony knew how much habits of the heart could not be contained as the
27

28

Douglas R. Homes and Geroge E. Marcus, Fast Capitalism: Paraethnography and the Rise of the
Symbolic Analyst, In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Perspectives on the New Economy,
Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006) 3457.
Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994).

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private, they could as easily spiral into the political and were not in the states
control. As Hume has taught us, at issue was the contagious, transient quality of
sentiment and its portability. At issue were the epistemic frames in which the
situation could be known. Whether certain sentiments were politically 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.
Attending to words in their sites as Ian Hacking urges, and the conceptual
weight they bear, allows us to ask not only how people think and why they seem
obliged to think but when they suddenly find themselves having difficulty thinking
in certain ways. Throughout these documents of colonial rule, racialized categories were shuffled, reassigned, and remade based on multisensory knowledge that
exceeded the science of race as it held to a tactile register. 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 Europeans and the native and Chinese
population, who they were, enjoyed less consensus. Sometimes Inlandsche kinderen was used for those Europeans born in the Indies, elsewhere it served to
designate the impoverished mixed-blood population but often not. Sometimes the
term was implicitly reserved not for all Europeans born in the colony but for
destitute whites whose circumstances and cultural affiliations marked them as not
quite European. Such discrepancies are neither misrecognitions nor cultural mistakes to be set aside. These deliberations and their movement had profound
effect. They provided the gradated criteria of who was eligible for what kind of
government aid, health care, and education. They provided the groundwork for the
distribution of welfare and social rights.
French historian Robert Darnton once identified history in the ethnographic
grain as a cultural history that makes sense of the world and attends to thought
about how they thought.29 Epistemic anxieties are precisely about that reflection.
Ethnography as fieldwork in philosophy is about the graphic, detailed production of social kinds and ways of knowing that mutated and could morph as
political interests changed. As Steven Fuller has noted, Foucault insisted that to
grant epistemic warrant is a covert way of distributing power.30 That insight
29

30

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New
York: Vintage, 1984) 3.
Steven Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2002) 10.

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EPISTEMIC POLITICS

echoes throughout colonial studies in some of its most productive sites that trace
both its embedded forms and more blatantly coercive ways. But just how that
warrant was granted, how firmly entrenched, and how much dissent and debate
accompanied that process is not always clear. One thing is certain: Science and
reason were never enough. Those who ruled understoodif unevenlythat
their political rationalities were dependent on crafting sensory attunements and
affective affiliations that made up colonial common sense. Their racialized
regimes indeed thrived on the schooling of dispositions and sensibilities that were
unwritten and went unsaid. What Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison similarly
refer to as epistemological worries were fueled by the political exigencies of
empire. It was vernacular epistemic practice rather than transcendental epistemology on which imperial agents depended to grapple with what they could not know
and therefore could not change.31 We are still left to map those mute modalities of
anticipatory, pre-emptive imperial violence in the anxious practical epistemics of
race that remain vivid and dangerously at work today.
New School for Social Research

31

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (NewYork: Zone Books, 2007) 35.

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