L’Enquête, entre science de l’État et thérapie sociale

Herrnstadt, Martin; Renard, Léa

doi:10.4000/rhsh.5059

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While the documented rules are certainly not all reliable, especially given the flexibility and ad hoc nature of unwritten common law (Kuppe 2000, 2001), the results of the survey are still counted among the most important existing documents on indigenous law for the region around 1900. Recently, the content of the responses has been investigated as part of the enquête tradition (Herrnstadt and Renard 2020; Midena 2022, Midena and Echterhölter forthcoming). Local officials, although clearly dependent on informants and go-betweens, often knew more about indigenous rules and institutions than scholars of law in Berlin (Echterhölter 2020).…”

Section: Circulating Rights To Resources: the Evidence From A Survey ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Echterhölter

2021

Sci Context

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Circulating Rights To Resources: the Evidence From A Survey ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Echterhölter

2021

Sci Context

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The history of social surveying and anthropological questionnaires is by now well represented in research (Bulmer 1991; Greenhalgh 2014; Topalov 2015; Herrnstadt and Renard 2021; Midena and Yeo 2022; Corbould et al 2023). Many studies, however, focus mainly on French and English-speaking countries and the history of social sciences and anthropology.…”

Section: Building On Research From the History Of Data Quantification...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Data at the doorstep

Schlicht,

Ledebur,

Echterhölter

2021

Sci Context

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Die Differenz Haushalt vs. Markt als latentes Beobachtungsschema

Wobbe

2021

Köln Z Soziol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

ZusammenfassungAusgehend von der Teilung in nichtaktive (Haushalt) und aktive Bevölkerung (Markt) fragt der Beitrag nach der Rolle, die statistische Vergleichsverfahren bei dieser Grenzziehung in der Welt der Arbeit spielen. Dies geschieht vor dem Hintergrund der Verzweigung von zwei strukturellen Entwicklungen, nämlich dem Wandel der (Arbeits‑)Welten und der statistischen Vergleichsverfahren. Der Beitrag gehört zu den ersten, der diese Nahtstelle systematisch und empirisch an der nationalen und internationalen (Beschäftigungs‑)Statistik untersucht. In diesem Beitrag schlage ich vor, die beiden Beobachtungsebenen als ein Feld der inter/nationalen Statistik zu verstehen. Ihre Ähnlichkeiten, Unterschiede und Verzweigungen werden soziologisch bislang noch nicht wahrgenommen. Im Unterschied dazu behandele ich sie aus einer wissensgeschichtlichen und wissenssoziologischen Perspektive gemeinsam hinsichtlich ihrer Selektionsleistungen, Beobachtungsinstrumente und Beschreibungsebenen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen die zunehmende Spezifizierung und Ausdehnung der ökonomischen Dimension von Arbeitstätigkeiten, die durch die Ordnungstechniken der inter/nationalen Statistik, verstärkt nach 1945, forciert werden. Diese Verschiebungen, so das Argument, sind eng mit dem Aufstieg des technischen Wissens im „technical internationalism“ verbunden, die nach 1945 das statistische und das Alltagsverständnis von der wirtschaftlich nichtaktiven Haushaltsarbeit bekräftigen.

show abstract

L’Enquête, entre science de l’État et thérapie sociale

Cited by 3 publications

References 36 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

Data at the doorstep

Die Differenz Haushalt vs. Markt als latentes Beobachtungsschema

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About