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Abstract
While the census is sometimes understood to be an objectifying practice that constructs and makes up a population, in this paper I am concerned with how it is necessary to produce census subjects in order to construct population. By drawing on formulations by Latour, Deleuze and Law, I conceive of census taking as a practice performed by heterogeneous socio-technical arrangements of actors – humans, paper forms, categories, concepts, definitions, topography, geography – whose mediations, interactions and encounters produce census subjects. It is through the relays and interactions between varying and never fixed technological, natural and cultural actors that census taking is performed. I analyse these arrangements as constituting agencements, which focuses our attention on how agency and action are configured by and contingent upon the socio-technical arrangements that make them up. Agencements assume different socio-technical configurations and thus construct different social realities and populations that cannot be captured in a single account.
The argument is advanced through an account of the taking of what was declared the first ‘scientific’ enumeration of ‘Indians’ and ‘Eskimos,’ the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Canadian Far North in 1911. I argue that the agencements were not able to bring forth the subjectivities necessary to construct population in the Far North. Not able to find subjects then, census taking could not produce nor construct a population in the Far North and the practice of census taking ended up creating a record of a census ‘other’ – an indeterminate multitude that could not identify and could not be identified as part of the population.
Notes
1. Census taking practices include provisions for subjects to identify others but only those with whom they share a social relation in a family, household or institution.
2. Agencement is advanced as an alternative to the English translation ‘assemblage’ for emphasizing agency and the uncertainty rather than fixity of socio-technical arrangements. See (Law & Urry Citation2004) and discussion by McFall and Verran (this issue).
3. The paper draws on the databases and research I undertook in my role as a co-Team Leader of The Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project (CCRI). See http://www.canada.uottawa.ca/ccri/CCRI/index.htm
4. Statistics on the Aboriginal population were, however, compiled by Indian agents. Also, beginning in 1871, Aboriginal groups living on Indian Reserves had been included in the target population of the census although the ‘success at enumerating these people prior to the mid-twentieth century is difficult to estimate’ (Lavin & Gauthier Citation2001).
5. Report of Rev. R.J. Renison of Moose Fort, Archdeacon of Moosonee, 8 May 1911 (Census and Statistics Office 1912). Further references to his report cited as Renison.
6. There were many more of course but these are the enumerators whose manuscript returns and accounts I have compiled and reference in this paper. I provide their surnames here as a summary list of the returns cited.
7. According to the 1911 federal census, the total population of the Northwest Territories was about 18,500 of which about 17,720 were categorized as ‘Indian.’ The total population of Canada was reported at approximately 7,207,000 and of this approximately 105,000 were categorized as ‘Indian.’
8. Report of Robt. Kinnes. 31 May 1911, Letter to Chief Officer, Census and Statistics Office, Ottawa, Canada. Census manuscript return 1911. Further references to his report cited as Kinnes.
9. Letter from Sergeant A.F. Borden to Courtlandt Starnes Esqr., Commissioner of Customs, Churchill, 13 March 1911. Census manuscript return 1911. Further references to his report cited as Borden.
10. Report of Courtlandt Starnes, Superintendent of the RCMP and Commissioner of Customs, Churchill, 18 March 1911. (Census and Statistics Office Citation1912). Further references to his report cited as Starnes. Also noted in Borden.
11. Report of Fabien Vanasse. Montreal, 24 October 1911. Appendix: Census of Canada 1911. Further references to his report cited as Vanasse.
12. Fabien Vanasse was a member of parliament from 1879–1891 as well as a lawyer and journalist.
13. Report of Rev. W.G. Walton, missionary of the Eskimos, Fort George, 31 August 1911, (Census and Statistics Office 1912).
14. See Caplan and Torpey (Citation2001) for a discussion of how ‘every person identifiers’ enabled linking observable regularities to individuals.
15. In comparison, census taking of ‘Indians’ inhabiting reservations in the organized parts of Canada were enumerated using the No. 1 schedule.
16. Census and Statistics Office 1912. Volume VI. Occupations.
17. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in both pre- and post-Confederation Canada, government policy and practice focused on assimilation and the belief that the ‘Indian race’ was dying out. Enfranchising Indians and their acquisition of full Canadian citizenship was achieved through either voluntary means or more coercive approaches (Kane Citation2000). By the late nineteenth century voluntary enfranchisement was not proving to be very successful as very few Indians chose to give up their Indian status. More successful was non-voluntary enfranchisement though a variety of legal definitions that limited the entitlement to Indian status (such as regulations related to marriage). Towards the end of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century, the government began to make greater use of compulsory enfranchisement through measures such as residential schools as a way of accelerating assimilation.
18. Language issues certainly also intervened in the enumerations of non-English/French speaking groups elsewhere in Canada.
19. For tables reporting on classifications not included on the A1 schedule such as nationality, the published volumes only stated that this information was not recorded for the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
20. Law (Citation2004) argues that assemblages always generate presences and absences and ‘Othering.’ Indeed, other indeterminacies were produced by census taking in 1911, for example, the enumeration of ‘Indians’ on reservations, ‘foreigners and aliens’ in inner city ‘slums’, and the unrecognized ethnic origin ‘Canadians’ as discussed in (Ruppert Citation2007).
21. Lavin and Gauthier (Citation2001, p. 6).