The case history in the colonies

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:History of the human sciences 2020-10, Vol.33 (3-4), p.85-94
Main Author: Linstrum, Erik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Bias
Bureaucracy
Colonialism
Generalizations
History
Politics
Racialization
Researcher subject relations
Testimony
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Summary:The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed them whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose.
ISSN:0952-6951
1461-720X
DOI:10.1177/0952695119893601