Scott's Work Research Articles

Seeing Like an Infrastructure: Low-resolution Citizens and the Aadhaar Identification Project

Large-scale data systems play a central role in how state bureaucracies come to know and manage citizens. Such systems are endemically uneven in implementation, producing distributed and exclusionary consequences that are among their most important effects. These systems also operate as infrastructures in the rich and complex sense of the term that has been a core contribution of CSCW to the wider computing and social science fields. Building on James Scott's work on 'seeing like a state', we conceptualize 'seeing like an infrastructure' as a more supple analytic perspective that maps the distributed work and uneven consequences through which designers, bureaucrats, and users (here, citizens) assign or claim representation in the consequential data systems that increasingly shape and define citizenship. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork into Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based identification project, and studies of infrastructure, marginalization, and citizenship in CSCW and allied fields, we argue that this perspective provides crucial insight into the strategies and mechanisms by which effective access to the basic rights and entitlements of citizenship are granted, claimed, and at times undermined. More specifically, we show how challenges in implementing Aadhaar's three key processes-enrollment, seeding, and authentication-give rise to a spectrum of resolution in which the rights and entitlements of 'high-resolution citizens' are expanded, while those of 'low-resolution citizens' are curtailed.?

History, Zomia, Closure

It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain, Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is “one of their own.” This has certainly been true “internally” as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors.

Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation, improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

This article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.

The Expansion of Prevent: On The Politics of Legibility, Opacity And Decolonial Critique

It is argued here that the liberal state has authoritarian aspects that are irreducible to the authoritarian aspects of neoliberalism. The argument draws on James Scott's work on modern state ruling through bureaucratic 'legibility', and the decolonial work of S. Sayyid on how a form of political Islam he calls 'Islamism' challenges the west's construction of modernity as an intrinsically western project. The state's need for legibility undermines democracy by seeking to shape political debate and political activity to fit its bureaucratic channels for engagement, and Islamophobia caused by the UK state's reaction to Islamism, shapes how the UK state seeks control via legibility. Prevent expanded in 2011 from focusing on 'violent extremism' to 'extremism', with extremism defined in terms of normative commitments the state takes to be in tension with its conception of 'British values'. The state defined the Muslim population as opaque because they were taken to not be socially integrated. This was used to justify a repressive ubiquitous surveillance based on what is termed here a 'legibility of symptoms'. This was presented, after 2015, as paternalistic 'safeguarding', when workers in public sector bureaucracies became legally obligated to carry out Prevent surveillance. Left-wing and environmental organisations engaged in extra-parliamentary protest are now as defined as potentially extremist. With the expansion of Prevent in 2011, the state created a 'pre-crime' space in civil society that is taken to justify repressive surveillance, presented as paternalistic safeguarding to save individuals 'at risk' of 'radicalisation' from going on to commit criminal acts.

Some Versions of Equality in Godwin

Some Versions of Equality in Godwin Samuel Rowe (bio) In an essay published in 1797 as part of The Enquirer, William Godwin offers a clarion call for egalitarianism: "Thus much is certain, that a state of cultivated equality, is that state which, in speculation and theory, appears most consonant with the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive diffusion of felicity." 1 This sentence, with its double, conjoined objects, hesitates between two statements about why people should be equal. A state of equality may be desirable because equality is natural for humankind, or it may be desirable because equality diffuses happiness more widely than other states. This stylistic hesitation, in presenting two distinct cases for equality, is also a hesitation between two intellectual and political paradigms, a hesitation that Godwin makes repeatedly in his celebrated writings from the first half of the revolutionary decade: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Things as They Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). Godwin merits revisiting at a moment of intense interest in economic and social inequality in the social sciences, when ambitious new macroeconomic theories and global histories reaching back to the Stone Age are reshaping the debate. On one hand, economic historians—prominently, if from different ideological perspectives, Thomas Piketty and Walter Scheidel—have argued that modern economies tend in the long run toward high equilibrium inequality.2 On the other hand, trends in archeology—as summarized in James Scott's recent work—are converging on an account of species history in which relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer and pastoral societies are the historical norm and the steep inequalities introduced by the appearance of states five thousand years ago the exception.3 The picture that emerges, viewed in its broad outlines, is an ambiguous one: obdurate inequality in the long run for human societies, egalitarianism in the very long run for the human species. Though these discussions are taking shape in the context of faltering welfare states and rising Gini coefficients, they also constitute a return to central Enlightenment questions: do human groups tend toward equality or inequality, [End Page 473] and should we have a normative preference for either condition? The new answers to these questions echo the old. On one hand, the neo-Platonic "great chain of being" so beloved by eighteenth-century thinkers was a powerful intellectual tool that placed hierarchy in the very fabric of being.4 On the other, state of nature theory, one of the Enlightenment's great conceptual innovations, assumed naturally occurring equality among persons and viewed latter-day deviation from this state as a puzzle that required explanation. As the intellectual historian Siep Stuurman has argued, the European Enlightenment, or at least its radical wing, championed an account of "natural equality," or an equality existing "among all human beings on the sole grounds of their humanity."5 According to Stuurman, though the Enlightenment gave birth to new ways of excusing inequality among individuals and groups—political economy, biological-determinist accounts of gender and race, stadial theories of history—these discourses were subject to the new demand that they be reconcilable with universalist and egalitarian assumptions. This essay tries to broach the question of what eighteenth-century studies has to offer to the new debates about equality and inequality via a case study of Godwin's early political thought and fiction. As "equality" made its debut as a central element within reformist and revolutionary political programs, the word did not carry just one meaning. Rather, multiple political and intellectual programs laid claim to the term, carrying with them profoundly different understandings of what equality was and how one might foster it. As the Godwin scholar Mark Philp has argued, the ideology of the British radical reform movement of the 1790s was "fragmented," inhabited by a variety of tendencies and interest groups.6 In the case of equality, this fragmentation extends into the usage of a single concept. At a moment when key political and intellectual debates continue to turn on precisely the content of "equality"—as distributive or relational, attached to opportunity or to outcomes, essential or irrelevant to democracy—the protean role of the term in early radical reformism seems...

States of nature: Geographical aspects of current theories of human evolution

The paper is the 2018 Political Geography invited lecture. I discuss the geographical component to early state formation and its impact on theories of human nature. Ever since Rousseau accused Hobbes of taking post-state passions as constitutive of human nature and projecting them onto pre-state peoples, the question of whether or not early state formation produced qualitative changes in human emotional and cognitive structures has been debated in anthropology and philosophy. The work of James C Scott, especially in The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain has emphasized the geographical component of early state formation and the concomitant and often futile attempts of states to stop flight from states as in the proverbial "run for the hills!" I will put Scott's work in dialogue with the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as with new anthropological theories of human evolution, including the Human Self-Domestication thesis of Brian Hare, and the obligate collaborative foraging thesis of Michael Tomasello. At stake will be attempts to account for prosocial egalitarian sentiments and their conflict with hierarchical states.

Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Towards the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry

In spite of a recent re-evaluation of Scott's work there is no scholarly edition of his poetry. This is a crucial lack that distorts our understanding of the nature of poetry in the Romantic period. However, such a scholarly edition in ten volumes is under preparation at the University of Aberdeen under the guidance of those who produced the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. My article examines the questions that have been explored in order to develop a methodology for editing Scott's poetry, the ways in which its creative evolution differs from that of his fiction, and outlines some of the discoveries that have been made along the way.

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.

The Impatient Jesus and the Fig Tree: Marcan Disguised Discourse against the Temple

In this article I propose an interpretation of the Marcan fig tree episode (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25) in its final form that draws on a vegetable metaphor widely known in Antiquity, and highlights the connection between the episode and the temple scene (Mark 11:15–19) that divides it. This interpretation addresses the problem posed by the narrator's commentary in verse 13d and makes of it a key element to understand the Marcan Jesus' attitude towards the temple. With the aid of James C. Scott's work on resistance discourse of subordinated groups, I show that this text, together with the other Marcan references to the temple's destruction, belong to one type of Scott's resistance discourse, and deduce some implications for the social setting of the Gospel of Mark.

Beyond the Ethno–Territorial Binary: Evidencing the Hill and Valley Peoples in Manipur

The binary of the hills and the valley is a central theme in understanding the Northeast of India. Although the multiplicity of ‘ethnic’ groups that inhabit both the valley and the hills makes such a generalisation difficult in places like Manipur, the distinctiveness of the two groups is stressed both in everyday and scholarly articulations. Notwithstanding the popularity and power of the hill–valley binary, this article critically engages with various ‘theories’ that have been put forward on this issue and confronts their foundational claims. The intent of the paper is to argue that this binary of hill and valley is not a constructive category either historically or in the contemporary. By looking at the colonial classification between hill and valley, and the popularity of James C. Scott's recent work, I argue that there are multiple strategies adopted to maintain this binary with major implications for politics and society in Manipur and beyond.

Primitive Accumulation and ‘Progress’ in Southeast Asia: The Diverse Legacies of a Common(s) Tragedy

AbstractMore than any other scholar, James C. Scott has drawn attention to the significance of what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’ in the historical transformation of the societies of Southeast Asia. Taking Scott's work as its point of departure, this article sketches the broad contours of primitive accumulation across the region from the mid-nineteenth century up through the early twentieth century. The article shows how primitive accumulation unfolded in different ways in different parts of Southeast Asia and suggests how the different modalities of primitive accumulation have continued to shape the trajectories and parameters of politics across the region to this day.

The infrapolitics of subordination in Patrice Nganang's Dog Days

Patrice Nganang's award winning novel Dog Days illustrates a recent trend in African literature in French from the mid-1990s, namely a move away from narratives about rulers to narratives about the ruled, a move away from studying the socially dominant to analyzing the socially subordinate. This paper aims to foreground some of the thinking on social subordination in recent African literature by examining Patrice Nganang's Dog Days in the light of James Scott's work on power relations and resistance in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, as well as Achille Mbembe's reflections on power relations in his book, On the Postcolony. Unlike earlier works of African literature that either underscore the process of victimisation of social subordinates and/or the place of resistance in their everyday acts, these more recent works exude pessimism about the willingness of subordinate subjects to engage in resistance, while affirming the necessity for, and efficacy of direct resistance as the primary antidote for social disorder. In the theory of social subordination elaborated upon in this novel which accords with, but also contradicts, Scott's analysis of the nature and process of resistance at particular points, acts of deference on the part of social subordinates do not necessarily conceal hidden transcripts. Furthermore, and to the extent that we occasionally encounter hidden transcripts, such transcripts are noteworthy mainly in so far as they instigate direct resistance against those who exercise power unjustly.

Municipal Websites

In this paper the authors draw on Scott's (2006) work on e-government and democratic theories to examine how governments engage their citizens online. The three theories they focus – representative, pluralist, and direct – are the most prominent in the democratic theory literature. Using data from the 200 American local governments, they examine two research questions: What factors drive governments to employ each theory? Which theory predominates in the implementation of e-government? Our assumption is that providing answers to these two questions will help set the stage for future research linking e-government and democratic theory.

Feminist asylums and acts of dreaming

This article explores how US legal expansions narrow justice possibilities. Drawing from Joan Scott's work on experience, echo and reverberation, the article puts forth a method for reading the convergence of historical absences within legal subjectivity. In particular, it traces the denial of one Nigerian woman's US political asylum claim within the context of US handlings of Nigerian human rights cases focused on petroleum violence alongside the expansion of political asylum to include gender and sexual violence. The article accounts for the production of gender within a larger context of colonial state violence and questions how gender becomes a viable legal category through a variety of violent histories that implicate the US. By reframing questions of feminist justice within the site of law, the article argues for a deeper engagement with discontinuous narratives, which read against our common sense understandings, as a first step in divesting in US legal privilege.

Resolution of Respect: W. Scott Overton

Resolution of Respect: W. Scott Overton

The Friction of Cartography: On the Politics of Space and Mobility among Migrant Communities in the Thai–Burma Borderlands

The dominant approach to understanding migration in the Thai–Burma borderlands frames migration largely as an economic effect of industrialization in Thailand and economic stagnation in Burma. Drawing on a range of secondary sources and long-term field-based research on the Thai–Burma border, this article pursues a different approach, seeking to situate current migration trends in a historical and political context. James Scott's recent work on Zomia and upland Southeast Asia is instrumental here. Key factors Scott cites as drivers of flight from state space over the longue durée—taxation, forced or corvée labor, and war and rebellion—remain strikingly relevant today. This article examines the applicability of Scott's migration analysis to contemporary mobility patterns in the Thai–Burma borderlands, proposing two concepts that highlight the politics of mobility in this border area: the friction of cartography and migrant counter-topographies. The former evokes the protective quality of the border line itself, whereby ostensibly economic migrants who cross it achieve a measure of distance and refuge vis-à-vis Burma's predatory state structures, especially the military; the latter seeks to name the spaces created by migrants to evade forms and structures of state power, in both Thailand and Burma. I argue that today's migrant communities, far from being overdetermined reflections of recent trends in political economy, much resemble Scott's state-evading peasants from centuries past, displaying political agency and intentionality in their strategic use of space to seek and secure refuge in the Thai–Burma borderlands.

Stretching the Border: Confinement, Mobility and the Refugee Public among Karen Refugees in Thailand and Burma

In this paper, I hope to add a complementary perspective to James Scott's recent work on avoidance strategies of subaltern mountain people by focusing on what I call the refugee public. The educated Karen elite uses the space of exile in the Thai borderland to reconstitute resources and to re-enter Karen state in Eastern Burma as humanitarians, providing medical, educational resources and help to document human rights violations and do advocacy work. In addition, local missionaries and faith-based groups also use the corridor to spread the word of God. I argue that Karen humanitarian community-based organizations succeed to stretch the border by establishing a firm presence that is supported by the international humanitarian economy in the refugee camps in Northwestern Thailand.

In Defense of Experience

This article studies our philosophical understanding of experience in order to question the current political and theoretical dismissal of experiential accounts in feminist theory. The focus is on Joan Scott's critique of experience, but the philosophical issues animating the discussion go beyond Scott's work and concern the future of feminist theory and politics more generally. I ask what it means for feminist theory to redefine experience as a linguistic event the way Scott suggests. I attempt to demonstrate that the consequences that she draws from such a theoretical move are both philosophically and politically problematic. A critical study of the evidence of experience does not have to imply metaphysical or epistemological foundationalism, as Scott claims, but on the contrary, such a study is indispensable for challenging them. We must hold onto experience as an important resource for contesting sexist discourses and oppressive conceptual schemas.

Pirate Nations: Maritime Pirates as Escape Societies in Late Imperial China

This article assesses the pirate bands in the coastal waters of late imperial China as political communities in flight from the state. James C. Scott's (2009) recent work on fugitive political communities in the highlands of Southeast Asia presents a novel and compelling account of small, remote groups living as escapees from the state. I expand on Scott's thesis by considering pirate bands as escape groups that not only escape state coercion but go on to accumulate sufficient power to reengage with and sometimes coerce the states they escaped. The pirate bands of the period formed relationships with the Chinese state that were by turns competitive, cooperative, coercive, and extractive. They were persistently loyal to no one but themselves. Two cases illustrate the argument: that of the pirate band of Zheng Zhilong and his son Zheng Chenggong and that of the pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao.