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Along the Archival Grain
THINKING THROUGH
COLONIAL ONTOLOGIES
Ann Laura Stoler
princeton university press
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Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press
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Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
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TO LARRY
Whose mind stirs mine
Whose love quenches the soul
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
Appreciations xi
Chapter One
Prologue in Two Parts 1
Chapter Two
The Pulse of the Archive 17
Part I: Colonial Archives and Their Affective States 55
Chapter Three
Habits of a Colonial Heart 57
Chapter Four
Developing Historical Negatives 105
Chapter Five
Commissions and their Storied Edges 141
Part II: Watermarks in Colonial history 179
Chapter Six
Hierarchies of Credibility 181
Chapter Seven
Imperial Dispositions of Disregard 237
Appendix 1
Colonial Chronologies 279
Appendix 2
Governors-General in the Netherlands Indies, 1830–1930 285
Bibliography 287
Index 000
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LIST OF LLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. Archive Page, Verbaal 4 Dec. 181872, no. 35/1888 xvi
Figure 2. Map of Sumatra 16
Figure 3. Archive Page from 1848 56
Figure 4. Harmonie Club 81
Figure 5. Harmonie Club 85
Figure 6. Archive Page from 1860 104
Figure 7. Archive Page from 1873 140
Figure 8. Archive Page from 1877 180
Figure 9. Deli Planters 189
Figure 10. Deli Planters 190
Figure 11. Postcard Drawing of a Street in Laboehan Deli
Where Valck Resided, c. 1876 192
Figure 12. Work in the Tobacco Sheds 194
Figure 13. Transport 195
Figure 14. Photo: Tobacco Trading in Amsterdam 196
Figure 15A. Map of Deli 1876 212
Figure 15B. Detail Map of Deli 1876 213
Figure 16. Military Map of Deli 1 218
Figure 17. Military Map of Deli 2 219
Figure 18. Image: Archive Page (from Suze’s Letter) 236
Figure 19. Frans Carl Valck 239
Figure 20. Susanna Antoinette Lucassen 240
Figure 21. Susanna Augusta Theodora Valck 244
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APPRECIATIONS
The term “acknowledgment” has always struck me as a misnomer
that carries with it more an obligatory recognition of debt than the valued
recognition that appreciation implies. How to convey the gratitude that
comes from those savored friendships, nourished by trust and care that in
turn enable bolder forays and more engaged critique?
I thank first of all those who became such dear friends as we collec-
tively built the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the Uni-
versity of Michigan during the luminous years I was there and who graced
me with their attentive readings of parts of this book: Frederick Cooper,
Fernando Coronil, Valentine Daniel, Nicholas Dirks, Nancy Hunt, Webb
Keane, Brinkley Messick, Sherry Ortner, and Julie Skurski. I especially
thank Val, Webb, and Nick, who shared in my first forays into this ven-
ture and then were there to read and think with me again nearly twenty
years later—at its finish if not its end.
Students with whom I have been honored to work shaped the content
and form of this book in successive waves. Beginning in 1995, when I
gave my first graduate seminar on Ethnography in the Archives, the stu-
dents who thought with me about archives (there, and everywhere in classes
on sentiment, on empire, on memory, on race) animate these pages with
insights that went beyond my own. I especially thank Javier Alicea-
Morillo, Laura Bear, John Collins, Grace Davie, Laurent Dubois, Paul Eiss,
Ilana Feldman, Jennifer Gaynor, Anjan Ghosh, Andrew Goss, Kate Jellema,
Laura Kunreuther, Veve Lele, Ken Maclean, Delphine Mauger, Carole Mc-
Granahan, Penelope Papailias, David Pedersen, Stephen Pierce, Anuparna
Rao, Natalie Rothman, Eric Stein, Karen Strassler, Greta Uehling, and
Sarah Womack, each of whom captured what I call “the pulse of the
archive” in their own unique and innovative ways.
The years in which this book took form coincided with the heady rush
of another intellectual venture of which I was privileged to be a part: the
program in Comparative Studies in Societal Transformation, a dynamic
constellation of faculty from the departments of Sociology, Anthropol-
ogy, History, Comparative Literature, and Political Science who reveled in
reaching beyond their prescribed disciplines to engage one another’s work
and the different understandings of social critique and history that each
brought to it. From the collective exhilaration of those late-night semi-
nars, I owe most to those who helped me think about form and content, ___–1
history and power, affect and archives. Julia Adams, Charlie Bright, Jane ___ 0
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xii • Appreciations
Burbank, Julie Ellison, Juan Cole, Nancy Florida, Ray Grew, Linda
Gregerson, Liisa Malkki, Bruce Mannheim, Rudolph Mrazek, Marty Per-
nick, Adela Pinch, Peggy Somers, Ron Suny, George Steinmetz, and
Katherine Verdery all leave traces here beyond any specific things they
read or said. Geoff Eley encouraged my first effort to present my new
thinking on colonial states of sentiment in 1991. Bill Sewell encouraged
me to do more.
I thank the Lewis Henry Morgan selection committee at the University
of Rochester for inviting me to give the 1996 lectures where I first deliv-
ered this work in its emergent form. I owe special thanks to friends in the
Netherlands: Peter Boomgaard, who steered me to sites and sources to
which I would not otherwise have gone; to Mrs. F. van Anrooij and
Mr. G. H. A. de Graaf, archivists at the Algemeen Rijksarchief who nav-
igated me through archival movements I could not have made without
their guidance; Rob van Drie at the Central Bureau of Genealogy, who
welcomed my work, and Dieuwke Valck-Lucassen, who spent days with
me at the bureau photocopying letters and working through her family’s
genealogies; Benjamin White and Ratna Saptari, who so warmly housed
me in Scheveningen and shared my delight as I read each letter and real-
ized that my daily route to the archives took me directly past Frans Carl
Valck’s house in The Hague.
Other friends and family mark these pages with wisdom and sensibili-
ties they so graciously shared: Lisa Albert, Arjun Appadurai, Scott Atran,
Bernard de Bonnerive, Carol Breckenridge, Leonoor Broeder, Barbara
Cain, Peggy Choy, Jean and John Comaroff, Victoria Ebin, Chantal and
Michel Fevrier, Oz Frankel, Douglas Holmes, Henk Maier, Marjorie
Levinson, Nancy Lutkehaus, Hazel Markus, Adeline Medalia, Martine
Perney, Paul Rabinow, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Karen Seeley, Dan Sper-
ber, Will and Linda Stoler, and Gary Wilder. With their acute vision and
serenity, Ed West and Kate West’s friendship carried me through the
book’s finish. I owe special thanks to the Center for Advanced Study in
Palo Alto, California, for providing me with an environment that pushed
the book forward; to Dominick LaCapra, for inviting me to participate as
a seminar leader at the School of Criticism and Theory in summer 2007;
and to colleagues and students in Ithaca, who shared my excitement as
final revisions took unanticipated forms. Earlier versions of these chapters
were given at the New York Academy of Sciences, University of Alberta,
Barnard College, Boston University, University of British Columbia, Cam-
bridge University, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, Colum-
bia University, the KITLV, London School of Economics, Melbourne Uni-
versity, Michigan State University, New York University, Oxford
–1___ University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, and as
0___ keynote addresses at Cornell University and the Australian Historical As-
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Appreciations • xiii
sociation in Adelaide. I thank those audiences for their engagements and
hope that I have adequately addressed their queries here. I thank Trude
Stevenson, Kim Schoen, Maria Speller, Geke de Vries, Henrike Floru-
bosch, and Arthur Verhoogt for transcribing and translating Dutch docu-
ments that I did not have time to do myself and some of which I would
have struggled to decipher. Andrew Goss kindly helped me track various
persons through the colonial civil service and their itineraries through the
archives.
My colleagues and students at The New School for Social Research not
only made the return home to New York a delight; they have nourished my
sense of an intellectual home. I owe very special thanks to the philosopher
Jay Bernstein, a childhood sweetheart whom I had not seen for thirty years
until we were to meet again under the sign of Adorno and Foucault. He is
a cherished reader and interlocutor, who dazzles me with his insights and
who continues to teach me about epistemology. I owe deepest thanks to
my dear colleague Richard Bernstein who, with such perspicuous critique
and care, read every page. Larry Hirschfeld, Claudio Lomnitz, Adriana
Petryna, Hugh Raffles, Janet Roitman, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Hylton White
have all made these last four years in the New School’s Department of An-
thropology a transformed and transformative place. Charles Whitcroft’s
proficient calm and finesse makes our department work.
Teaching at the New School over the last four years has allowed me to
reconfigure this book in ways I had only broached in early renditions: stu-
dents in my seminars on the History of Sentiment, The Politics of Truth,
and Anthropology as a History of the Present have asked some of the
hardest questions, which I still wrestle to address. I thank two students
with whom I thought these pages when I first returned to the manuscript in
New York: David Bond and the late Imogen Bunting, whom I so sorely
miss. Tjitske Holtrop meticulously checked the Dutch in the midst of
classes; Emily Sogn deftly gathered the book together in its proper form. It
is she who has crafted an index that attends to watermarks and grains. I
thank Heleen Vieveen at the Iconography Bureau in The Hague for so
readily making the Valcks’s portraits available to me, and Ingeborg Eggink
at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen for helping me to locate images.
Finally, I thank Mary Murrell, former anthropology editor at Prince-
ton, who first signed on the book more than a decade ago, and Fred Appel
for so seamlessly bringing it to closure. Bruno and Tessa make my world
afresh with love and life-force everyday. My dearest historian niece,
Gwenn, reminds me for whom I write. Without Larry, there would be no
book.
21 December 2007 ___–1
New York City ___ 0
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Description:Along the Archival Grain offers a unique methodological and analytic opening to the affective registers of imperial governance and the political content of archival forms. In a series of nuanced mediations on the nature of colonial documents from the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies, Ann Laura
