Formative Encounters

Autor(en)
Anna Maria Echterhölter
Abstrakt

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.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Geschichte
Journal
Science in Context
Band
34
Seiten
527-552
Anzahl der Seiten
26
ISSN
0269-8897
Publikationsdatum
2021
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
601008 Geschichtswissenschaft
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Social Sciences(all), History and Philosophy of Science
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/formative-encounters(76febf3d-caa9-4b54-804b-73d00431a70d).html