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Greg Turissini Writing Assignment 11
Scott, James C. "Nature and Space." In Seeing Like a State, 11-52, 359-369. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998.
Abstract
James Scott’s “Nature and Space” initially explores how the state handled and developed
forest management, later applying those same principles to how the current state manages
agriculture and land distribution. In great detail, Scott describes how fiscal forestry transformed
from a disorderly endeavor of cultivating “domainal deciduous forests” to one of great precision:
“careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to count,
manipulate, measure, and assess.”1 These uniform and geometrically inclined deciduous forests
were replaced by equally uniform coniferous forests, further isolating one variable, converting the
forest into a “single commodity”. Though the coniferous forests had trouble lasting past more than
one growth cycle, the uniformity of forestry paved the way for state’s control of nature, imposing
order among the new “administrator’s forest”. Similar to the disarray of the old-growth forests,
“nonstate forms of measurement”—which were a product of localization—generated a headache
for the state’s quantification of land and yields, and therefore, taxable entities. Originally, the state
relied on local clergy and nobility to decipher the local standards, but this was eventually replaced
by the state’s standardization and implementation of the metric system. Like the uniform forests of
the Germany, the state reflected the notion that “A rational unit of measurement would promote a
rational citizenry.”2 Scott explains that goal of the modern state is to “measure, codify, and
simplify land tenure.”3 Scott’s utilization of the historical progression of fiscal forestry to modern
land possession, especially in the U.S. Land Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, reinforce his argument
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P. 15
P. 32
3
P. 36
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by breaking his dependence upon French land tenure. This reasoning—projected on a global
scale—furthers his argument significantly.
Scott, James C. "Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity." In Seeing Like a
State, 262-306, 414-423. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Abstract
In "Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity", James Scott addresses
why the high-modernist agriculture is only successful in the West, and how these “systematic
failures” can be attributed to administrative and managerial incompetence. Scott claims that highmodernist agriculture—with its uniformity, pesticides, and desire for high crop yield—was
counterintuitive to the assortment of methods utilized by the Third World farmers. Among these
practices included polycropping, or the cultivation of more than one crop at a time in a field, and
“shifting cultivation”, which comprises of controlled burning and letting fields lie fallow. Scott
states that Western agronomists felt distanced by the “sloppiness and disorder,”4 reverting back to
the “imperialist ideology” of agricultural high-modernism. In essence, constructive traits and
benefits of polycropping and shifting cultivation—such as soil fertility and conservation, an
increased resistance to disease, volatile weather, and pests—proved insufficient as “profitmaximizing” enterprises. Ultimately, the managerial approach to the implementation of the highmodernist agriculture was a scientific endeavor with an economic patronage. Social factors, such
as food security and job responsibility, were often overlooked in the bureaucratic process of highmodernization. Scott states that “West African cultivators have at their disposal a lifetime of
careful, local observation and the fine-grained knowledge of the locality that no research scientist
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P. 273
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can hope to duplicate for the same terrain.”5 Indeed, the Western scientists’ ignorance of local
tradition, intolerance for the past, and dependence on experimentation contributed to the
unsuccessful execution of high-modernist agriculture in the Third World.
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P. 305