The Enemy of People Who Move Around

Wednesday, October 1st, 2014

James C. Scott set out to understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of people who move around:

In the context of Southeast Asia, this promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions between mobile, slash-and-burn hill peoples on one hand and wet-rice, valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run-away slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project-perennial, in part, because it
so seldom succeeded.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “translate” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.

It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.

He went on to write Seeing Like a State.

Comments

  1. Toddy Cat says:

    This also explains why so many liberals and lefties, like James Kunstler, hate cars — all that mobility just makes the all-seeing, all-knowing central planners jobs more difficult.

    Although Kunstler has recently come out in favor of closing the border, and has noticed our society’s War on Young Men, so I suppose that I should cut him some slack…

  2. Toddy Cat:

    Well, except that early-mid century Progressives pushed for the automobile over private forms of mass transit such as street cars.

  3. Toddy Cat says:

    I suppose it depends who you call a progressive. The Robert Moses types certainly liked automobiles, but he wasn’t very progressive by today’s standards, and he was certainly no Commie. I guess that this just shows how much “progressivism” has changed in the last fifty-sixty years.

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