Presenters
Bulten Luc - Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United KingdomLyna Dries - Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Panel
33 – Beyond the Island: The Categorization of Ethnicity in Colonial Lanka in the Indian Ocean ContextAbstract
Feeding into current debates on ethnic identities in colonial South Asia, this article questions
to what extent Dutch institutions articulated and impacted social categories of people
living in coastal Sri Lanka during the eighteenth century. A thorough analysis of three
spheres of Dutch bureaucracy (reporting, registering, and litigating) makes it clear that
there was no uniform ideology that steered categorisation practices top-down throughout
the studied colonial institutions. Rather, the rationale of the organisation as such affected
the way people were classified, depending to a large extent on what level of bureaucracy
individuals were dealing with, and what the possible negotiation strategies were for the
people recorded. Future research should perhaps not ask “when” certain ethnicities were
“made up,” but strive to understand the process in which they were created, the institutional
contexts in which they were recorded, and how changing bureaucratic practices not
only articulated, but also transformed, social categories in the long run.
