The first of the three institutions is the Census. Anderson cites a recent study that shows how colonial census-makers in Malaysia transformed “identity categories.” The study argues that these categories grew “more and exclusively racial,” rather than religious. Over time, the census-makers eliminated most complexity, reducing a wide variety of identities to just four: “‘Malaysian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Indian,’ and ‘Other.’” Anderson notes that the category “Malay” came to include various other ethnic groups in Malaysia, but in Indonesia, it stands alongside those other groups as an equal category.
Anderson looks at the census because it shows how states made their populations legible and understood the people under their control. The gradual consolidation of categories in Malaysia indicates that the Malaysian government began thinking that race was the most important dividing line among its people and imagining a narrow, schematic view of what “race” meant in its country. The “Malay” group includes many of the nation’s indigenous peoples, and therefore collapses ethnic distinctions within the country’s boundaries, as though to promote the nation itself as the correct or proper basis for identity.
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Anderson takes up two more examples of colonial censuses to compare. First is the Spanish census in the Philippines, which “imagined” into being a unified society where there were really just independent landowners “mostly unaware of one another’s existence in the huge, scattered, and sparsely populated archipelago.” And second is an interesting court case in 17th century Indonesia, which reveals that “the [native] Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like ‘race.’” Unaware that China was an incredibly diverse place, the Dutch decided all its people were “Chinese” and “began to insist that those under its control whom it categorized as Chinezen [Chinese people] dress, reside, marry, be buried, and bequeath property according to” this racial category.
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For Anderson, these colonial censuses were novel because of “their systematic quantification.” Earlier native censuses counted potential draftees and taxpayers, but now, for the first time, everyone was counted and the whole bureaucracy was organized around “ethno-racial hierarchies.” Colonial administrators ignored religion, about which they could do nothing. Places of worship became “zones of freedom” and were important sites of nationalist resistance to colonialism, as they continued to grow despite the colonial government’s best attempts to limit religious freedom.