Introduction.

Berrebi-Hoffmann, Isabelle; Giraud, Olivier; Renard, Léa; Wobbe, Theresa

doi:10.2307/j.ctv12pns7v.5

Categories in Context 2019

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv12pns7v.5

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Introduction.

Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann¹,

Olivier Giraud²,

Léa Renard³

et al.

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2021

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“…Counting and quantification have been shown to have considerable influence on the social fabric of the people living in a land or a colony. In particular, the capacity of statistics to define “people” via categories was described mainly for European cases (Hacking 1985, Zerubavel 1996, Igo 2011, Berrebi-Hoffmann 2019). Classification can be considered well explored for colonial India, where the caste system was made more rigid by its incorporation as a category in the census (Cohn 1987; Dirks 2001; Bhagat 2006).…”

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Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

Echterhölter

2021

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Argument Data collections are a hallmark of nineteenth-century administrative knowledge making, and they were by no means confined to Europe. All colonial empires transferred and translated these techniques of serialised and quantified information gathering to their dominions overseas. The colonial situation affected the encounters underlying vital statistics, enquête methods and land surveying. In this paper, two of those data collections will be investigated—a survey on land and a survey on indigenous law, both conducted around 1910 on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which had fallen under German colonial influence a decade earlier. Strikingly, there are no enumerators or envoys of the state visiting the doorsteps of Pohnpei. To facilitate the data collection on homesteads, the whole population of the island was called upon to measure their respective plots of land themselves, without resorting to certified land surveyors. The preserved cadastral lists and spreadsheets testify to a rather peculiar contact between the colonizing administration and the colonized peoples. I argue that the production of data made encounters necessary, which are best observed though a methodological focus on data practices. I argue, furthermore, that the Pohnpeians were prompted during the surveys to define their homestead in new terms. This did not only entail new two-dimensional plots but also a new regime of private property. The change in the legal concept can be seen as a continuation of colonial violence by other means, given that it happened in the aftermath of the defeated Pohnpei Rebellion. The argument of the paper is, therefore, that data collection can have formative effects on society, and that measurement and quantified information are often, as Witold Kula argued, a scene of conflict. At its core, the installation of these metric regimes signified a change in patterns of justification, resource management and the unwritten constitution of the Pacific island.

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confidence: 99%

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

Echterhölter

2021

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Introduction.

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

Formative encounters: Colonial data collection on land and law in German Micronesia

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