The Evolution of Simplicity Principles of Commercial Extraction Could Be Inscribed and Taught
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Books general facilitating the management of forests so that The Evolution of Simplicity principles of commercial extraction could be inscribed and taught. The creation of monocultural forests, how- ever, failed to recognize the symbiotic relation among norman yoffee soils, fungi, insects, and so forth, that made the forest Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, resistant to fire and disease. The death of many forests Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109-1382, U.S.A. (nyoffee@ from soil depletion and epidemics was the result of the umich.edu . ) 17 iv 01 abstract logic imposed to make forests governable. High-modernist ideology was born in the late Renais- Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to sance and Enlightenment and intended to improve the Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.By human condition. The ability to transform the social and James C. Scott. New Haven: Yale University Press, natural orders, however, had to wait until the 20th cen- 1998. 445 pp. tury, when modern states acquired the power to set per- vasive, industrialized planning projects in motion for the “Dear Norm” (wrote the editor of CA), “I see several benefit of civil societies that were powerless to resist reasons for inviting an archaeologist, and more specifi- them. One villain in the narrative is Le Corbusier, whose cally you, to review this book. Scott addresses some basic megaprojects of building and transforming cities were questions about the relations of state to local popula- designed to eliminate waste, inefficiency, and disarray. tions, economic activities, and related matters such as Brası´lia is discussed as the result of such ideas of sci- record-keeping, systems of naming and measurement, entific urban planning and judged an “inhuman” city in etc. His claims extend quite broadly to states in general, which activities are functionally segregated and pedes- but the examples that he draws from are from the last trians are eliminated. Jane Jacobs is the corresponding few centuries, rather than the longer record of states. hero, campaigning against purely visual order and for Moreover, much of the evidence that he cites has to do cities of many mixed-use neighborhoods and lively social with buildings, roads, field patterns, etc.—topics that ar- interaction. chaeologists research as well. So it seems to me that an Lenin is the Le Corbusier of politics, and high-mod- archaeologist familiar with early states could see ernist views were designed by the vanguard party to in- whether Scott’s arguments apply to [them]. This stitute the technical rationality of modern production, book, by a major social scientist,...could either have to train and discipline millions of workers, and to trans- yet another review by a sociocultural anthropologist, or form society into a smoothly humming machine. The one of the very few reviews by an archaeologist.” models of Taylor and Ford in the West were explicitly “Dear Ben” (I replied), “I’ll try to do the book justice, drawn upon by Soviet social engineers for application to which will be challenging.” Little did I know. large-scale agriculture. Collectivization was imple- Modern states, according to Scott, attempt “to make mented by bureaucrats and ignored the local knowledge a society legible,” that is, to take ineffably complex and of farmers. It was also intended to disempower local “illegible” local social practices and to create a standard power elites by creating a peasantry dependent on the grid so that leaders and bureaucrats can record, monitor, state for combines, tractors, fertilizers, and seeds. Col- and control them. “Legibility” is effected by the state, lectivization—the appropriation and centralization of which mandates the formation of permanent last names, control—was a failure, producing worse yields than be- standardization of weights and measures, implementa- fore the revolution. tion of cadastral surveys, uniformity in legal discourse, In Tanzania in the early 1970s, Nyerere carried out a and, not least, the promotion of a single official language. policy of “villagization,” which settled pastoralists and The environment is similarly rationalized and simplified brought in schools, clinics, and clean water with the goal by planners, engineers, and architects who implement a of improving rural life and encouraging socialist coop- “high-modernist ideology” of scientific and technologi- eration. Modern scientific agricultural techniques, how- cal progress for a utopian goal. Scott exemplifies this ideology by showing historically ever, mainly ignored actual topographic conditions, vil- how states transformed forests from nature to natural lage sites were chosen from blanks on a map, and local resource, reducing a complex of habitats for the sake of knowledge about polycropping was, again, ignored. At- economic productivity. This was accomplished by min- tempts to regiment the peasantry economically and po- imizing the diversity of species, creating straight rows litically failed. The traditional organization of agricul- in large tracts, eliminating weeds and varmints, and in ture and settlement that was the jointly created, partly intended product of many people over generations was Permission to reprint items in this section may be obtained only disrupted by formal rules in ways that the planners from their authors. couldn’t possibly understand. 767 768 F current anthropology These high-modernist schemes, which simplified so- texts occur in the city of Uruk and date to about 3200 ciety and environment in order to apprehend and regu- b.c., the time of the first clearly urban formation in Mes- late them, were unable to recognize or incorporate ways opotamia. Whereas the large majority of the first texts of knowing created outside their paradigm. Standardizing are records of accounts of goods, some of the first texts agriculture in order to maximize productivity, for ex- were lists of people and things, the best-known of which ample, by selecting crops whose architecture was com- is the list of professions (Nissen, Damerow, and Englund patible with mechanization, often reaped unintended 1990, Englund 1998). These lists were products of scribal consequences of such simplification. Monocropping (the training and have been reconstructed from many frag- word itself now practically a pejorative [Smiley 1995: ments of clay tablets that were schoolboy exercises. One 341]) and genetic uniformity regularly led to epidemics might say that writing was invented so that there could and infestations, while diversity is the enemy of diseases. be schools. Of course, it seems unlikely that the idea of Large-scale employment of commercial fertilizers, peri- systematizing the universe began with the first writing, odic applications of pesticides, and the mechanization of but it is the case that the first writing became part of a field preparation and harvesting led to the possibility of tradition that was reproduced and commented upon (in failure where none had existed before. The power and scribal schools) over the next 2,500 years (Civil et al. prestige of science and industrial technology led to vi- 1969, Civil 1995). The language of the first texts, Su- sions of unparalleled agricultural productivity, but the merian, itself became standardized as it was increasingly concomitant contempt for practices of actual cultivators employed for all manner of inscriptions throughout the and what might be learned from them had tragic 3d millennium b.c. Sumerian was used by many people consequences. whose spoken language was not Sumerian, and even for Although Scott sees modern states, Western as well those who did speak a form of Sumerian as their mother- as Eastern, in the First as well as in the Third World as tongue it was an artificial, written language (Michal- hubristic, desiring to improve the human condition but owski 1993, n.d.). One of the first goals of the first Mes- lacking confidence in the ability of humans not versed opotamian states was to make their societies “legible” in the laws of progress and scientific truth to lead pro- through the invention of writing. ductive, modern lives, there are other possible readings For many archeologists (and just about all sociocul- of his argument (which I have admittedly bowdlerized tural anthropologists), the social evolutionary project has and simplified and in any case have no special compe- fallen into disrepair. Questions asked over the past four tence to assess). If the main problem with high-modern- decades such as “What sort of society was it?”—in which ist ideology is that it is bad science or abstract, laboratory the answers were limited to bands, tribes, chiefdoms, or science, might one not call for better science, more en- states or some variation on those terms—have yielded gaged science, more informed planners? Don’t large ag- disappointing results (Yoffee 1993) and have not ad- ricultural projects now employ anthropologists precisely vanced research into how societies emerge as changing to help build local knowledge into development alignments of social groups, segments, and classes, how schemes? In Smallholders, Householders. Robert Net- groups exploit the ambiguities of inherited forms, giving ting (1993) considers a variety of smallholder “alterna- them new evaluations, or borrow other forms, and how tives” to industrialized, mechanical, specialized com- people create new forms in response to changed circum- modity-producing, high-modernist agricultural schemes. stances (after Wolf 1982:357). Some archaeologists, tiring Through many varied examples, Netting provides, it of the debates over whether certain societies were chief- seems to me, the necessary anthropological sequel to doms or states (or even of defining those terms), have Scott’s long prologue by showing many successful small- proposed the category “complex society” to include so- holder adaptations to the global economy. cieties that were clearly socially and economically dif- At the outset of the book, Scott notes (p. 2) that “the ferentiated and stratified and that might be states, stand premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially on the precipice of statehood, or, for some reason, be blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their reluctant to advance to that high status.