States and "legibility"

I read a wonderful book by James C. Scott this summer, with the impressively long title Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book is about a lot of different things, and is difficult to summarize into one sentence, but if I simply had to do it I'd say: "The book is an examination of the systematic erosion of locally-generated, locally-relevant, practical knowledge by states over the course of time, and provides sobering historical accounts of particular schemes where human beings went too far with their efforts to superimpose a grand order from above."

Not all such efforts were entirely "bad", of course. The metric system, for instance, superseded a staggeringly diverse variety of measurement systems, each of which was relevant and usable only within a tiny locality. Undoubtedly it's far more difficult for humans to relate to an abstract measure of length like a metre than to a concrete measure like an armspan. But at the same time, this also makes trade and communication harder, especially over large distances. The metric system, imposed top-down, is equally abstract in all places and thus far more suitable for enabling trade.

But there were other cases in which such top-down efforts were not so benign in their unintended consequences. 
Scott is particularly critical of what he calls the "high modernist" way of thinking, especially when it is wedded to a totalitarian regime that is capable of brutally and crudely implementing schemes even to the detriment of its own populace. As examples, he points to the planning of cities like Brasilia and Chandigarh (not surprisingly Le Corbusier comes in for a lot of criticism), to Soviet agricultural reform, and to agricultural reform practices imposed in Africa by Western-educated bureaucrats with no awareness of the benefits of local practices.

One of the words that comes up a lot in his book is "legibility". I suspect this is a technical term in sociology because it certainly does not get used the way one would have expected it to! It refers, rather, to the efforts made by the state to "read" its population and capture information about it as extensively and as intensively as possible, in order to have the ability to better impose its vision upon its subjects.

One of the earliest acts on the part of the state (extensively explored by Scott), indeed one of the earliest acts that defined the state, was the use of cartography to map out the boundaries of its territories. (And hence the immense importance accorded to borders in the last few centuries! Borders were typically always very fuzzy in the past, which made such acts such as migration far more possible. Think also of the artificial manner in which the borders that exist today, particularly in the once-colonized regions of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, cut across the actually meaningful distinctions of language, geography, and culture.) And one of the most important parts of cartography is the naming of places.

Which brings me to a very interesting post on precisely the same point by precisely the same author: "The Trouble with the View from Above" by James C. Scott. Briefly,

Purely local, customary practices, as we shall see, achieve a level of precision and clarity—often with impressive economy—perfectly suited to the needs of knowledgeable locals. State naming practices are, by contrast, constructed to guide an official “stranger” in unambiguously identifying persons and places, not just in a single locality, but in many localities using standardized administrative techniques.

The point that Scott makes about colonialism cannot be overemphasized.

In the case of colonial rule, when the conquerors speak an entirely different language, the unintelligibility of the vernacular landscape is a nearly insurmountable obstacle to effective rule. Renaming much of the landscape therefore is an essential step of imperial rule. This explains why the British Ordinance Survey of Ireland in the 1830s recorded and rendered many local Gaelic place names (e.g., Bun na hAbhann, Gaelic for “mouth of the river”) in a form (Burnfoot) more easily understood by the rulers.

The entire Orientalist enterprise can be seen as a multidimensional effort on the part of colonizing powers with a single overriding goal: the study and classification of exotic lands in order to make it easier to rule them. (This is an oversimplification, of course, but a useful one.) And this process could not have even begun without the assistance of local experts who cooperated (for a variety of reasons) with the colonial powers. What made the colonial enterprise different from the empires of previous times was that earlier empires were, by and large, tributary states that often preserved pre-existing administrative arrangements in the hands of local authorities—not coincidentally, because they lacked the ability to make their territories "legible". 

The one semi-exception to this I can think of right now was Rome, and it's not surprising that Rome went to such great lengths to systematize language and administration throughout its lands. (Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men has a fascinating chapter on what he calls the Latin countercosmopolis, in which he compares and contrasts the conscious spread of Latin as a language of empire with the gradual diffusion of Sanskrit over an equally vast region but seemingly without any single motivating force behind it.)

This post is rambling and disconnected, but I swear it all makes sense in my head!