Partial understandings, epistemic confusion, and undigested bits of cultural “information” made up the modus vivendi of high and low civil servants across the Indies—of those traipsing through Deli planta- tions, isolated in Bali outposts, cloistered in the bowels of the state’s archives in Batavia, or even sheltered in its most iconic “house of glass,” the Governor-General’s palatial dwelling in Buitenzorg, encased in botani- cal grounds. Here I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-informed and inept responses that knowl- edge engendered. Coherence is seductive for narrative form but disparities are, from an ethnographic perspective, more compelling.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 1037