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Archival Silences and the Epistemology of Colonial Census-Making
档案沉默与殖民人口普查的认识论
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Colonial censuses in British India, French Indochina, and Dutch Java were not neutral data collections but epistemic interventions designed to fix fluid social identities into governable categories.
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Enumerators imposed rigid racial, religious, and occupational classifications that erased hybrid practices, caste mobility, and gendered economic roles.
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The 1881 Indian census introduced 'criminal tribes' as a legal category—transforming sociological observation into punitive administrative reality.
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In Algeria, French officials reclassified Berber-speaking communities as 'Europeanized' based on land ownership, altering inheritance law and tax obligations overnight.
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Census forms demanded singular affiliations despite widespread multilingualism, syncretic worship, and seasonal labor migration across colonial borders.
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Silences abound: women’s unpaid agricultural labor, informal credit networks, and inter-caste artisan collaborations rarely entered official tallies.
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Yet these omissions were not accidental—they served fiscal efficiency, surveillance scalability, and ideological coherence for settler regimes.
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Postcolonial states inherited these categories, embedding colonial epistemology into citizenship documents and development planning.
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Modern digital ID systems in India and Kenya replicate similar logics, converting biometric data into new forms of inclusionary exclusion.
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Recovering what census logic suppressed requires reading against the grain—cross-referencing missionary reports, court records, and oral histories.
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Such work exposes enumeration not as description but as constitutive violence shaping subjecthood across generations.
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The census thus stands as a key site where statistics, sovereignty, and subjectivity became mutually reinforcing technologies.