Summary of Chapter 1: Nature and Space
Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation. (11)
This chapter is an exploration of the historical application of the above premise, particularly through the development of scientific forestry, tax reform, the imposition of standard measurements, and cadastral mapping; with the ensuing suffering, abuse, and centralization of power associated with this practical “myopia.” This history also shows the complicity of the modern, centralizing state with the emergence of markets and capitalism. “The logic of the state-managed forest science was virtually identical with the logic of commercial exploitation” (15). Scott adds in a footnote:
I was tempted to add that, with regard to the use of forests, the view of the state might be longer and broader than that of private firms, which can, and have, plundered old-growth forests and then sold their acreage or surrendered it for back taxes (e.g., the “cutover” in the Upper Midwest of the United States at the turn of the century). The difficulty is that in cases of war or a fiscal crisis, the state often takes an equally shortsighted view. (360n12)
This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the immanent logic of its techniques. It was not and could not ever be realized in practice. Both nature and the human factor intervened. The existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease conspired to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Also, given the insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, people living nearby typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and kindling, make charcoal, and use the forest in other ways that prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully realized. Although, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs. (19)
The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had afforded.
In contrast to most crops, which rotate at a rate of only a year or so, forests take about 80 years to rotate, so each rotation involves the careers of several generations of foresters. At Scott's time of writing many of these forests were only at the end of their third rotation. The first rotation produced promising results, but by the second rotation the negative ecological consequences became clear. These include damage to soil, erosion, loss of nutrients, and increase of pests created by the pest-favorable conditions of monocropping
The “virtual ecology” of so-called “forest hygiene” was an attempt to work around the problem with artificial solutions (such as installing boxes for owls, to make up for the lack of hollow trees), while retaining the core of the problem, which is the monocropping.
The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razor-sharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it. (21)
Such dangers can only partly be checked by the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. Given the fragility of the simplified production forest, the massive outside intervention that was required to establish it—we might call it the administrators' forest—is increasingly necessary in order to sustain it as well. (22)
The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and revenue.
If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose.
Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding that were adequate to these tasks. (23)
He turns to the example of taxation in authoritarian France. The relative blindness of the premodern state meant that much detail about actual landholdings, etc. in the countryside were in fact unknown to the state, because the state dealt through intermediaries such as local elites. The state embarks on a process of transforming the dense and multi-layered feudal order into a transparent nation of individual citizen-taxpayers; the analogy Scott is making with scientific forestry nevertheless breaks down (he points out) because trees are different from humans:
The trees themselves, however, were not political actors, whereas the taxable subjects of the crown most certainly were. They signaled their dissatisfaction by flight, by various forms of quiet resistance and evasion, and, in extremis, by outright revolt. A reliable format for taxation of subjects thus depended not just on discovering what their economic conditions were but also on trying to judge what exactions they would vigorously resist. (24)
Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were “illegible” to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand.
And yet this “shorthand” would then be treated as, and transform, reality. Drawing on the work of Witold Kula in Measures and Men, Scott turns to the encounter between the rationalizing state and local, non-state forms of measurement. Both state and non-state measurement practices are shaped by the purposes for which they are used, but these being very different purposes, very different “immanent logics” result:
Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request. In the part of Malaysia with which I am most familiar, if one were to ask “How far is it to the next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” The answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how much time it will take to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or riding a bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes—until recently, wristwatches were rare—but in units that are locally meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local rice. Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be “Half as much as to cook a chicken.” The reply refers back to a standard that everyone is expected to know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local, inasmuch as regional differences in, say, the type of rice eaten or the preferred way of cooking chicken will give different results. (25)
There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound. (26)
Modern abstract measures of land by surface area—so many hectares or acres—are singularly uninformative figures to a family that proposes to make its living from these acres. Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.
Farms, for example, are described not in terms of acreage but as a “farm of one cow,” “farm of two cows” etc; “three morgens (day’s work) of land,” etc.
The measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual, and historically specific....Directly apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.
Yet non-state measuring practices, on their part, were not somehow “objective” in contrast to state measurement, they were also shaped by power relations, reflecting the interests of different classes and subject positions; there was always a “politics of measurement.”
Perhaps the stickiest of all measures before the nineteenth century was the price of bread. As the most vital subsistence good of premodern times, it served as a kind of cost-of-living index, and its cost was the subject of deeply held popular customs about its relationship to the typical urban wage. Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to provoke a riot by directly violating the “just price,” managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour. (29)
[This is relevant also to the history of steam beer, as the price was sticky (stuck at five cents) and the glass size was apparently also sometimes fixed; also to the history of adulteration and the insistence on purity as a form of moral economy.]
Local forms of measurement were responsive to local circumstances and always malleable, which meant they each had their own, divergent, histories and political contexts.
The king’s ministers were confronted, in effect, with a patchwork of local measurement codes, each of which had to be cracked. It was as if each district spoke its own dialect, one that was unintelligible to outsiders and at the same time liable to change without notice.
This made it very difficult for the early modern state to monitor food supply, a crucial issue. Absolutist rulers sought conformity of rules and measures in their realms, but this was resisted by local elites to whom the existing system reserved some power. “The very particularity of local feudal practices and their impenetrability to would-be centralizers helped to underwrite the autonomy of local spheres of power.” (30)
Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the “metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.
The impersonality of long-distance trade, and mass production, favored metricalization:
Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its reliable uniformity. (30-1)
For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress.
This would also, of course, make taxation easier. Scott discusses the Encyclopedists and the ideal of an unmarked French citizen, in a unified nation in which all are equal. “In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center.” (32)
There was of course resistance; toise sticks for local measurements were confiscated and replaced with meter sticks, but the people marked the old lengths on them.
Scott turns to the subject of land tenure reform by states, with a Javanese proverb: “The capital has its order, the village its customs” (33). He provides a detailed example of how use rights to common lands and resources could have been distributed in a hypothetical Southeast Asian village (33-4), a key element of which is plasticity:
To describe the usual practices in this fashion, as if they were laws, is itself a distortion. Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances-including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice. (34-5)
The law could never reproduce such a plastic, adaptive system:
Imagine a lawgiver whose only concern was to respect land practices. Imagine, in other words, a written system of positive law that attempted to represent this complex skein of property relations and land tenure. The mind fairly boggles at the clauses, sub-clauses, and sub-sub-clauses that would be required to reduce these practices to a set of regulations that an administrator might understand, never mind enforce. And even if the practices could be codified, the resulting code would necessarily sacrifice much of their plasticity and subtle adaptability. The circumstances that might provoke a new adaptation are too numerous to foresee, let alone specify, in a regulatory code. That code would in effect freeze a living process. (35)
And what of the next village, and the village after that? Our hypothetical code-giver, however devilishly clever and conscientious, would find that the code devised to fit one set of local practices would not travel well. Each village, with its own particular history, ecology, cropping patterns, kinship alignments, and economic activity, would require a substantially new set of regulations. At the limit, there would be at least as many legal codes as there were communities.
(He later gives example of postrevolutionary France attempt at a code rural, which fails for precisely these reasons). This is only a nightmare from the perspective of administrators seeking a single, universal code legible to their purposes of administration; to the villagers living with such traditional practices, they are perfectly legible. “Indeed, the very concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.” [And this is perhaps another aspect of the radicality of a proposal like ‘bolo’bolo: that it creates a situation of ungovernable local diversity].
To promote control over land the state creates and imposes the abstract individual subject as property-holder:
The historical solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the heroic simplification of individual freehold tenure. Land is owned by a legal individual who possesses wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and whose ownership is represented by a uniform deed of title enforced through the judicial and police institutions of the state. Just as the flora of the forest were reduced to Normalbäume, so the complex tenure arrangements of customary practice are reduced to freehold. (36)
The individual “taxpayer” becomes a legible unit imposed on the existing diversity, in the same way as the “normal” tree of the forest had been in scientific forestry. [Another reason for the importance of the concept of the Unique as a counter to the universalizing aspects of right-articulated individualism]. Nevertheless the project of course encounters various difficulties of local complexity and resistance by local elites,
It was claimed, although the evidence is not convincing, that common property was less productive than freehold property. The state’s case against communal forms of land tenure, however, was based on the correct observation that it was fiscally illegible and hence fiscally less productive. [emphasis added]
The state’s project of legibilization/rationalization worked in the service of [primitive accumulation]:
As long as common property was abundant and had essentially no fiscal value, the illegibility of its tenure was no problem. But the moment it became scarce (when “nature” became “natural resources”), it became the subject of property rights in law, whether of the state or of the citizens. The history of property in this sense has meant the inexorable incorporation of what were once thought of as free gifts of nature: forests, game, wasteland, prairie, subsurface minerals, water and watercourses, air rights (rights to the air above buildings or surface area), breathable air, and even genetic sequences, into a property regime.
“It is worth noting that, like the modern tax system, the modern credit system requires a legible property regime for its functioning” (366n79). The “objectivity” of the new system is achieved through abstraction and universality:
The value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality. In principle, at least, the same objective standard can be applied throughout the nation, regardless of local context, to produce a complete and unambiguous map of all landed property. The completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its abstract sketchiness, its lack of detail—its thinness. Taken alone, it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left blank—unspecified—since it is not germane to the map plotting itself. (44)
The complicity of the state and the regime of privatized property:
Before comprehensive cadastral surveys, some land was open to all and belonged to no one, though social arrangements might regulate its use. With the first cadastral map, such land was generally designated as state land. All land was accounted for; everything not owned privately became the property of the state. (367n82)
Such maps are for outsiders, as locals would not need them; thus they are tied to marketization of land.
The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is always moving, and in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence. (46)
He gives the example of the ridiculous door and window tax, which caused peasants to remove all windows from their dwellings, with health consequences that lasted a century. In colonial contexts, cadastral mapping created a shift in power relations, as traditional systems rooted in local knowledge and memory were replaced with written codes in languages only accessible to foreign officials and intermediaries.
The gulf between land tenure facts on paper and facts on the ground is probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in more tranquil times, there will always be a shadow land-tenure system lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land-records office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory. (49)
A strong civil society could hold off or resist cadastral mapping, so colonies often preceded the conquering nation in being mapped. He gives several examples of neat grid maps being imposed from a distance over land unsuited to it as part of commodification; (not mentioned, but very relevant, is the example of California, and San Francisco in particular).
A final paragraph foreshadows the subject of the next chapter:
Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The nineteenth-century Prussian state, for example, was very much interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants but not in their religions or races; what mattered to the state was keeping track of possible draft dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of military age. The state's increasing concern with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production, and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world. (52)
