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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 Scotts 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. 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 states control of nature, imposing order among the new administrators forest. Similar to the disarray of the old-growth forests, nonstate forms of measurementwhich were a product of localizationgenerated a headache for the states 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 states 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. Scott explains that goal of the modern state is to measure, codify, and simplify land tenure. Scotts 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 by breaking his dependence upon French land tenure. This reasoningprojected on a global scalefurthers 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 high-modernist agriculturewith its uniformity, pesticides, and desire for high crop yieldwas 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, reverting back to the imperialist ideology of agricultural high-modernism. In essence, constructive traits and benefits of polycropping and shifting cultivationsuch as soil fertility and conservation, an increased resistance to disease, volatile weather, and pestsproved insufficient as profit-maximizing enterprises. Ultimately, the managerial approach to the implementation of the high-modernist 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 high-modernization. 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 can hope to duplicate for the same terrain. 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. P. 15

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