'investigative modalities'. Cohn identifies historiographical, observational/travel, survey, enumerative, surveillance and museological modalities. These different forms of collecting information accumulatively lead to a comprehensive, all embracing colonial archive. Collecting and recording historical information formed a significant base for colonial power and the colonial cultural remit. The observational modality particularly concerned the actual understanding of the Indians by the European travellers and how they recorded this in journals, letters and the like. The survey modality was seen by Cohn as 'any systematic and official investigation of the natural and social features of the Indian empire'. The enumerative modality was, according to Cohn, of decisive significance for the administrative successes of the colonising power. By distilling the reality of Indian pluralism into categories and numbers, India became ordered in an administrative sense; manageable and controllable.7 Or, as James Scott calls it: 'State agents have no interest in describing an entire social reality Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives 8 The surveillance modality is an extension of this form. Colonial administration constructed special instruments to control groups who were defined as beyond civil bounds. Finally, India was also seen as a vast museum, full of ruins from antiquity and populated by people who - from a European perspective - still lived for the greater part in the past. The British collected this past and India became an important supplier of the collections of future museums.9 Efere Cohn sketched out the constituting processes and information gathering which did lead to the panoptical colonial archives. It is true that with this typology it becomes easier to define the term colonial archives, but this approach has at least two problems when looking at it from an archivistics viewpoint. Cohn's typology only covers part of the object of archival science (after all, he only speaks about collecting and recording information) and the term colonial has so far not been defined in relation to the term archive. Colonies and colonialism Archivists have defined the term archive as process bound information,10 but in order to determine what constitutes colonial archives, it is necessary to define the meaning of colonial or colony. Jan A. Somers provides a simple but striking description of the effects of the appearance of the Dutch merchant ships under the command of the brothers Cornells and Frederik Houtman on the Bantam coast in 1596: 'relations were gradually formed which we would later characterise as colonial'.11 However, this colonial relationship is much more complicated to define. Somers describes the colonial relations between the Netherlands and the East Indies as 'a relationship between nations conducted in a territory which was initially defined as property, and then almost in the legal sense of private ownership A colonial relationship is and will by definition remain a relationship where the power of domination is maintained by (military) force'.12 CHARLES JEURGENS AND TON KAPPELHOF COLONIAL ARCHIVES 9 Cohn, Colonialism, 9-10. 10 Thomassen, 'Een korte introductie'. Other definitions are also in circulation. See for example Yeo, who defines archival documents as 'persistent representations of activities or other occurrents, created by participants or observers of those occurrents or by their authorized proxies' in: Yeo, 'Concepts of Record (2)', 136. 11 Somers, Nederlands-Indie, 13. 12 Somers, Nederlands-Indië, 18. 9

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2012 | | pagina 11