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American colonial rule over the Philippines was one of the conditions of possibility that enabled the formulation of knowledge about and over the Philippines. The will to colonial power elicited a desire for knowledge and incited discourse about the Philippines. How was this colonial power exercised, institutionally speaking? Surely the will to American colonial power in the Philippines was first given collective representation and emblematized by the U.S. military invasion, conquest, and occupation that began in 1898. And that will to power was just as surely concretized, extended, and maintained by the ensuing elaboration of a colonial state, the history of which is a fundamental theme of this volume. But is the epistemology of empire fundamentally a product of the colonial state? The colonial state based in Manila often played a central role in the formulation of American imperial knowledge about the Philippines. It directed ethnographic surveys and the census, sponsored expeditions and tours throughout the Philippines, published its own voluminous reports and journals, served as a clearinghouse for the shipment of these and other texts and various exhibits to the United States, and, last but not least, was also one of the principal consumers of knowledge about the Philippines. Not surprisingly, it is easy to see the colonial state at the center of American knowledge production about the Philippines. Our line of sight is drawn to that conclusion by the visibility of the colonial state through its large archive, simultaneously centralized by the United States National Archives and widely dispersed through the distribution to libraries of voluminous public documents such as the reports of the Philippine Commission and the Philippine census. There is much validity and value to such an approach. Nevertheless, any depiction of one-way knowledge relations with the colonial state playing the central role would be far too simplistic, untenable in light of the Confabulating American Colonial Knowledge of the Philippines What the Social Life of Jose E. Marco’s Forgeries and Ahmed Chalabi Can Tell Us about the Epistemology of Empire michael salman 260 sociology of knowledge, empirically wrong, and it might rob Filipinos of all agency, creativity, and originality. The epistemology of American empire, despite its own manifestly hierarchical and dualistic tendency to establish American rule over the Philippines and Filipinos, has a genealogy that is complex, transnational , and rhizomatic.1 American world power at the end of the nineteenth century was not primarily military or territorial but commercial, built on the foundation of industry, agriculture, and finance capital. The same was true of emerging American institutions of knowledge production—for example, libraries, museums, and universities .Along with the mass media, these institutions worked to construct colonial knowledge in a dispersed way that departed from the centralized direction and focus of the colonial state. Perhaps the ultimate message often remained the same as that disseminated by the colonial state, but the specific relations that produced knowledge differed, and therefore offered differential opportunities for resistance , evasion, participation, and subversion. Contrary to what one might expect from a focus on the colonial state, most Philippiniana in the United States was acquired privately by individuals or nonstate corporations, stored in privately funded museums, published with private funds, and research on these materials and the Philippines itself was financed by nonstate foundations and the commercial media. American colonial knowledge about the Philippines had a social life that fed it, sustained it, and consumed it.2 Marketplaces of Colonial Artifacts The most influential Philippiniana collections assembled in the United States have been the Newberry Library’s in Chicago and the monumental, fifty-fivevolume compilation of documents edited by Emma H. Blair and James Alexander Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898.3 These two collections were related to each other. Edward E. Ayer, the wealthy industrialist who donated his collection on the Philippines, Hawai’i, and American Indians to the Newberry, also played a leading role in supporting Blair’s and Roberston’s endeavor. In return, Blair and Robertson aided him in acquiring rare manuscripts and books, and once they completed their massive compilation they sold their collection of transcriptions to Ayer, who transferred them to the Newberry. Robertson went on to direct the Philippine National Library from 1910 to 1916, an eventful time in the collection of Philippiniana. One could trace succeeding generations of authors using the Blair and Robertson collection, and soon the linked texts would encompass most of the last hundred years’ scholarly and not so scholarly output. Robertson’s career...

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