JAMES C.

SCOTT

Afterword to Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence

ABSTRACT This Afterword is a discussion of commentary and criticism of my books, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976),

Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and Seeing Like a State (1998). I examine the relation of moral economies to globalization, and hegemony to power and resistance, in agrarian societies and in contemporary U.S. politics. I debate contemporary neoliberal projects of governance in extractive, enclave economies and in current development practices in Indonesia. I question the use and misuse of high modernism as a term in my work. I discuss neoliberal internationalism and the immanent project of harmonizing institutional orders throughout poor countries. [Keywords: hegemony, high modernism, moral economy, resistance]

To The Book Go on then in your own time this is as far as I will take you I am leaving your words with you as though they had been yours all the time of course you are not nished how can you be nished when the morning begins again or the moon rises even the words are not nished though they may claim to be never mind I will not be listening when they say how you should be different in some way you will be able to tell them that the fault was all mine whoever I was when I made you up W. S. Merwin AND RIPOSTE TOUCHE To have such a distinguished crowd of anthropologists train their critical insight and close reading on my work is, well, intimidating. It is also an honor. I know only one way of

repaying the honor done me, and that is to engage directly with the issues they raise. This is what I intend to do. Before plunging in, however, a word about how a political scientistat least that is what my union card says came to be the object of such close scrutiny by anthropologists. The short explanation is that the peasantry is to blame. Bobbing like a cork in the currents of peasant revolutions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as revolutionary expectations at home, I wrote The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) in an attempt to explain the social and economic preconditions of peasant unrest.1 That book owes a great intellectual debt to my colleague and coteacher at the University of Wisconsin, Edward Friedman. It was a curious hybrid of politics, economics, and history with most of the data concerning Vietnam drawn from the Archives doutre mer in Paris and that concerning Burma drawn from the India Ofce Library in London. After it appeared, I was asked quite often where I had done my eldwork. The answer, of course, was that I had done no eldwork at all. I squirmed a little each time the question was posed, looked at the tops of my shoes briey, and nally admitted to having concocted the whole argument behind the backs of peasants, as it were. This was the beginning of a long period of anthropology envy that had at least three concrete results. First, I spent a year after the publication of The Moral Economy of the Peasant addressing what I thought was its most severe shortcoming: a failure to understand peasant culture and religion in the context of revolution. It is worth noting that

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American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005 to correct. The fact is that I had a previous life as a political scientist, some of which I would just as soon forget. In particular, my revised thesis, published as Political Ideology in Malaysia (1968), a study of higher civil servants, sank, justiably, without a trace. Another book, Comparative Political Corruption (1972a), and my articles on the analysis of patronclient relationships (Scott 1972b) and machinepolitics (Scott 1969) are, by contrast, not works I would sooner disavow, but they are clearly not the works of anyone within shouting distance of anthropology. This earlier work makes it even more difcult for anyone to nd a coherent line of inquiry running through my work. Such a case has been made, and I myself could, if pressed, cook up such a narrative. But it would be ex post facto, denitely not a continuity I experienced. The fact is that, as I experienced it, I have followed a kind of bootless intellectual pleasure principle, turning my attention to whatever seemed most interesting and enjoyable to think and read about at the time. Neither am I particularly good at theorizing whatever it is that I actually do. The only continuity I can make out, for what it is worth, is that I have applied the traditional concerns of political science with power relations and the state to the settings and with the methodology normally associated with anthropology. How can I possibly, in this necessarily brief commentary, do justice to six subtle, original, and critical articles about my work? Frankly, I am not sure I can. All six have, obviously, found my work good to think withor at least good to think against. I atter myself that I have had some intellectual impact even if it is only the point of departure for ships sailing in the opposite direction. Inasmuch as each of the articles here carries some aspect of my work into new territorynew, at least to meI propose to return the favor by engaging their ideas and carrying them, in turn, into new territory. Proceeding chronologically seems to make most sense. Marc Edelmans article takes the themes of The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) into the contemporary politics of globalization, so I begin there. Carol Greenhouse and K. Sivaramakrishnan address themes raised in Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and I turn to their articles next. Finally, the articles by James Ferguson, Michael Herzfeld, and Tania Li all deal, in wildly divergent ways, with Seeing Like a State (1998), and I conclude with them. It goes without saying that I cannot possibly do justice to all their insights and criticisms and that each article helped me see ssures, implications, and blind spots in my own work, of which I was previously unaware. Here, also, I want to record my particular thanks to K. Sivaramakrishnan (aka Shivi), my one-time brilliant student and now colleague and friend, for having conceived and organized this exchange with his characteristic dash and efciency.

I took this criticism of my work far more seriously than the rational choice criticisms of Samuel Popkins The Rational Peasant (1979), criticisms that I took largely to be a willful misunderstanding of the argument that I had made. My attempt to come to grips with peasant culture and religion resulted in, among other things, a two-part article in Theory and Society (1977) called Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition. The second result was a decision to become something of a peasantist. I reasoned that peasants were the most numerous class in world history and that, therefore, understanding large abstraction such as politics and development meant understanding how these abstracts affected the peasantry. That meant putting my money where my mouth was and doing serious eldwork. I felt at the time that I could not take myself seriously unless I spent long enough in the eld to understand actual peasants in one setting, in some considerable detail. Every time I was tempted to reach for a fourth-order abstraction about peasants, I would have, I hoped, the sort of contextual knowledge that would allow me to check my analytical hubris against at least one local reality. In any event, I have seldom been able to grasp any fourth-order abstraction unless I could see it walk on the ground in an example with which I was familiar. The third result was, therefore, to try my hand at eldwork on the Muda Plain of Malaysia: a task for which I was, as a political scientist, singularly ill prepared. It was the tradition of meticulous eldwork, its self-conscious na vet e, and the attempt to minimize analytical presuppositions that are typically built into the infrastructure of political science research that most attracted me. Somehow, I acquired the mimeographed lectures that F. G. Bailey gave to novices he sent off to study mountain villages in Europe, and that led, eventually, to Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation (Bailey 1971). The lectures were entirely practical in a Jesuitical way: OK, youve just gotten off the bus in your village, what do you do next? It recommended techniques of observation, ways to take notes and not be buried in details, ways to cope with the Natives annoyance with you and your annoyance with them. Having no formal training or other guide, I made Baileys lectures my catechism and followed it religiously. It served me well in the two years of eldwork that led to Weapons of the Weak in 1985. My common-law marriage with anthropology has been a happy onefor me at any ratefor two reasons. First, I am occasionally mistaken as a full-edged anthropologist. The rst time this happened was at the University of Toronto where the little yer announcing my talk read: James C. Scott, Social Anthropologist, Yale University. I remember how pleased I was to have, without trying, passed myself off as the real McCoy. Basking in my successful imposture, I neglected to correct the misimpression. The second, and also quasi-guilty, pleasure of my life among the anthropologists is that they, by and large, imagine that my rst book was The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976). It is another misimpression in my favor that I do not go out of my way

MARC EDELMAN: MORAL ECONOMY Marc Edelmans article made me proud again that I had written The Moral Economy of the Peasant ; he makes it

Scott Afterword sound cleverer and more prescient than I suspect it actually was. The intellectual lineage he traces through the Annales School of historiography (both its longue dur ee and mentalit e populaire wings), A. V. Chayanov, E. P. Thompson, and Karl Polanyi are, in fact, the inuences I was reecting at the time. They were not on the reading list of political scientists then or now. But what is of most interest in Edelmans closely reasoned article is the wholly original way in which he takes the social and economic insecurities of peasant smallholding agriculture and examines how they operate in the new global economy created after World War II and reinforced with a vengeance since 1989. The insecurities of smallholder agriculture have been amplied exponentially in this new world of IMF-structural adjustment loans; commodity dumping; intellectual property rights; new markets for credit, technology, and services; and giant agrobusiness conglomerates. Let me sketch, in my own terms, the situation Edelman wants us to appreciate. In the early 20th century, the Burmese and Vietnamese peasantry were in the throes of being incorporated into both a more implacable state and a larger market nexus. Their reex was one of self-protection. It took the form of trying to revivify and enforce certain hard-won understandings of the minimal subsistence rights owed them by landlords and local elites and to appeal to an older and more exible tax regime. It is worth emphasizing once again that, in the past, such forms of social insurance had never been practiced as a matter of altruism or noblesse oblige either by local elites or the state. Instead, they were a response to the immanent threat of theft, arson, riot, or rebellion by a hard-pressed peasantry defending its right to survive. Edelman explains how the insecurities I have examined have been replicated and transformed by the post Bretton Woods world economy. What has happened, as I understand Edelmans argument, is that the scale of market failure had been vastly amplied and that, as a consequence, the scale of Polanyian reexes of self-protection must correspondingly be amplied. Typically, in the world that Polanyi, Thompson, and I were describing, the remedy for the collapse of local social-insurance arrangements designed to avoid subsistence crises lay in new national schemes of social insurance. Thus, the collapse of parish relief (the Speenhamland system)so tellingly described by Polanyiis replaced by a national system of poor relief and, eventually, by the welfare state. Thus, the subsistenceregarding rules enforced by Thompsons riotous crowd are, when they collapse, replaced after a long struggle by national social legislation designed to cope with the political dangers of market failure. Much of the history of social struggle from, say, 1830 to 1950 could, in fact, be written as the attempt to create, in place of the wreckage of local moral-economies, an analogous moral-economy state to provide national social insurance along comparable lines no longer seen as a matter of local reciprocity but as right of citizenship.

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Edelmans point is that today, under the prevailing neoliberal dispensation, the nation-state has been largely superseded as the locus of market-rule-making by the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. Just how hegemonic these institutions agendas have become since 1989 is reected in the fact that systematic land reform (at the center of policy debates in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) has all but disappeared from the policy agenda to be replaced by an extraordinary solicitude toward private property of all kinds and toward the frictionless ow of capital (but not labor) across national frontiers.2 Now that capital is embedded in international institutions and multinational agribusiness, the reex of self-protection, Edelman implies, must also be internationalized. He points to the increasing supranational cooperation between farmers groups defending local intellectual property rights, food security, biodiversity, and the continuity of peasant communities themselves as a step in the right direction. The V a Campesina movement is indicative of this trend and, indeed, its critique of the WTO sounds, for all practical purposes, like a moral-economy argument ratcheted up to the level of international institutions and world governance. Logic would seem to favor Edelmans implicit claim that the opposition to the new international, neoliberal trade regime must scale-up to match its formidable enemy. Let me, however, as devils advocate, inject a note of skepticism. In the matter of scale, the peasantry and the working class has always been at a disadvantage vis-` a-vis traditional or capitalist elites. Somewhere, Eric Hobsbawn notes that conservative political parties are often no more than stage armies, because conservative elites are already unied by marriage alliances, commercial ties, and public-ofce holding. Their coordination was embedded in their very social organization. Workersand, by extension, peasantsneeded real political organization, real armies, because they were otherwise socially disaggregated to the local or, at best, provincial level. For Hobsbawm, of course, the general staff of that army was the Marxist vanguard party. Since the dawn of the labor movement, the dream of a genuinely international workers alliance (the very name International Workers of the World [IWW] is indicative) has animated the left. Foundering rst on the shoals of nationalist military mobilization during World War I, the results have not been encouraging, although its ideological inspirational value has been notable. If the obstacles even to national working-class solidarity have proved so daunting, why should we be optimistic about peasant solidarity, let alone a Peasant Internationale that could hold its own against the WTO and world agribusiness? Edelman does a brilliant job of showing what might be achieved by groups like V a Campesina in making the ideological, cultural, and environmental case for smallholders. The political traction for that case, however, I suspect lies at the national level rather than the international. Here, some combination of power at the polling place, alliances with workers, and what is left of the national bourgeoisie not forgetting the capacity for insurrectionseem

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American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005 capitalism, in general, but this moneylender, this trader, this factory boss, and this foreman, each with his or her own personality, ethnicity, and routines. One of the most impressive examples of how illuminating it can be to attach a historical process to its actual historical bearers is Hillel Levines 1991 work, Economic Origins of Antisemitism. He shows how anti-Semitism barred Polish Jews from a host of occupations and drove many into moneylending, cropbuying and production loans, retail trade, and the sale of alcohol. Thus, the Jew came, willy nilly, to occupy the last rung above the peasantry in a capitalist world of markets and credit. And, thus, it was in a capitalist slump that the Polish peasant often experienced the shocks in the form of an (also relatively powerless) Jewish shopkeeper, moneylender, and rent collector. And thus, nally, it was that rage at personal ruin originating in the nancial centers of New York and London that took, in the Polish countryside, the form of anti-Semitism. Weapons of the Weak was an attempt to discuss class and ideology, leaving aside the abstractions of political science and sociology and encountering them, instead, in lived experience. I take Sivaramakrishnans pointone that has been made by others but rarely with such claritythat I deal better with the subtleties of resistance than I do with the subtleties of domination or, more important perhaps, the complicity and reciprocity between the two. This is, as well, the claim made implicitly by Greenhouse in her article. I think I should plead guiltyas a rst move, anyway. Then, I will try to take back some of the ground I have lost. Sivaramakrishnan draws my attention to Thompsons evocation of a eld-of-force, or what Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash call the entanglement of power and resistance (1992:1). Elaborating, Sivaramakrishnan believes that both the moral economy arrangements I earlier examined and the low-intensity warfare I described in Weapons of the Weak can be best understood as a kind of struggle or contest constrained within some rough limits. The antagonists in such contests, if I understand Sivaramakrishnan right, know each others repertoire of practical action and discursive moves. There is, in other words, a kind of larger social contract that gives some order and limits to the conict. This formulation seems to me both correct and, as Sivaramakrishnan elaborates it, even elegant. If I had thought of it myself, I would have claimed credit. There are, however, two qualications I would make. First, the limits and constraints characterizing conict are never cut-and-dried to the participants. The antagonists are, all of them, continually prospecting new terraintrying out new stratagems and wrinkles that threaten to change, and often do change, the shape of the game itself. Second, what regularities to conict an observer discerns are underwritten by larger boundary conditions, such as property relations, the law, expectations about market performance, and the political regime. Any substantial change in these ever changeable boundary conditions also threatens to change the game or destroy it altogether.

to be the most likely routes to blocking the clean sweep of neoliberal governance and preserving national food security and the communities of peasant producers. Recent politics in Bolivia, Ecuador, and even Argentina remind us that the neoliberal internationalism and democratic governance are very uneasy bedfellows. International farmers organizations may help frame the global debate and help link national struggles; regretfully, though, only the nation-state seems capable of thwarting neoliberal political integration.

K. SIVARAMAKRISHNAN AND CAROL GREENHOUSE: HEGEMONY K. Sivaramakrishnan and Carol Greenhouse both address the issue of hegemony, although each in a quite different and original way. Here is perhaps the place for a moment of self-criticism and a belated apology to the ghost of Gramsci himself. Strictly speaking, the task Gramsci set himself in his discussion of hegemony was to account for the relative quiescence of the working class in a political landscape of parliamentary democracy, in which they had the right to vote. The term hegemony, as opposed to domination, was applied explicitly and exclusively to such settings because the vote was a key element in legitimating a political order in which all the other political assetsthe means of production, landed property, the Church, the media, the school system, and the lawwere rmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its allies. The right to vote and parliamentary democracy were both working-class achievements with real consequences and, at the same time, institutions that suggested the complicity and participation of the working class in creating a political order that was manifestly unfair. As such, the term hegemony is, strictly speaking, inapplicable to most of the settings (e.g., slavery, serfdom, caste, dictatorships) described in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) and is only marginally applicable to the peasantry of Sedaka, the subjects of Weapons of the Weak (1985). I ought to have used the term domination in its place. Although the authors of systems of domination also attempt to justify their rule in terms of the well-being of their subjects (e.g., paternalism, superior knowledge, security), they lack any institutions of apparent consent that are the very center of Gramscis attention. At stake for me in my Malaysian village eldwork and in writing Weapons of the Weak, was the task of examining closely the struggle over material appropriation and the struggle over the moral high ground (aka ideology) in one small place. As a card-carrying political scientist, my inspiration was nothing more and nothing less than what every anthropologist takes for granted: namely, that no abstract force, collectivity, or system ever arrives at the door of human experience, except as it is mediated by concrete, particular human carriers. Not the landed aristocracy in general, but a particular lord of the land, with his own family history, his own personality, in this particular place. Not

Scott Afterword Greenhouses article takes my ideas of the ofcial and the hidden transcript into wholly new territory. In the process, she sees possibilities and subtleties to the analysis that, although I wish they were mine, are actually her own quite original inventions. To gloss what seems to me a powerful insight, she sees the key hegemonic move as the way in which the genuine resentments of subalternscitizens are repackaged in a fashion that contributes to the political capital and projects of rule. Scapegoating minorities, draconian anticrime laws, and saber-rattling nationalism might fall in that category. What is new, I think, is that it points to the link between the genuine fears of subalterns and the play of ofcial discourse, much as Fredric Jameson (1981) shows in The Political Unconscious how advertising depends on popular hopes and utopias for its effect. Where virtually all my attention was devoted to the hidden transcript of subordinate groups, Greenhouse proposes a novel scheme for uncovering the deeper game behind ofcial public acts. Her brief but utterly convincing tracing of what she calls the discursive trails behind President Bushs Military Order of November 13, 2001, which established military tribunals for noncitizen detainees, shows the promise of this line of inquiry. Her investigation of the lineages of this order makes it evident that it was also a tactical move in a larger strategic plan to assert executive branch power over Congress and the courts, and to curtail due process protections. The best and deepest investigative reporting, in the tradition of I. F. Stone, has always followed Greenhouses model. What is so valuable here is that she has theorized the practice so well as to make it clear how high the stakes are in discursive analysis of this kind. If it were up to me, I would make her analysis required reading for the handful of reporters who take their jobs seriously.

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striking form of my argument. Only in that fashion is there a sharply dened thesis to evaluate. I have always felt that the reader of my books ought to be in no doubt about what Ive said and that a books thesis ought to be expressible in a couple of paragraphs. Tania Li wonders whether it might be the little political scientist in me that makes me do this. Perhaps it is so. Early training as an economist and in positivist political science makes me less preoccupied with the nuances in which anthropologists delight. So, I am willing to cop a plea, but the question is whether I should show contrition. The closest I can come, is to confess, before anthropologists, that the book of mine of which I am proudest (thus far) is that which owes most to anthropology: Weapons of the Weak (1985). Herzfeld, again delicately but deliberately, catalogues his residual disquiet with my arguments in three points: 1. the absence of an ethnographic sensibility toward state functionaries equivalent to that accorded peasants; 2. a consequent failure to explain how so many local projects with high-modernist states survive; and 3. the implications of [my] turn to a classical Greek concept to describe the elusive forms of practical knowledge. [this issue] Again, to the rst charge I plead guilty. I recognize that there is a m etis of ofceholding every bit as practiced and accomplished as the m etis of subalterns. I also recognize, as Herzfeld has so ably demonstrated elsewhere, that state ofcials are often willingly, even enthusiastically, complicit in creating livable, local, de facto departures from unworkable high-modernist plans. Some early Soviet bureaucrats could not quite make out whether it was the collective farm that had swallowed peasant Russia or peasant Russia that had swallowed the collective farm. Less authoritarian settings facilitate accommodations between high-modernist plans and local practicesproducing strange and wondrous local hybrids. In more authoritarian settings, local practices are suppressed or, more likely, limp along as illegalif tolerated and even necessarybehavior. The difference, however, between the ofcial and the subaltern is that the former has, when he or she chooses to deploy it, the authority of the ofcial regulations at his or her back and the subaltern does not. Part of the m etis of the ofcial is the strategic use of the rules. That is why, as Herzfeld astutely notes, ofcials were the original work-to-rule exponents. As for choosing me tis as shorthand for local knowledge, I thought the term, as I understood it, conveyed the practiced skill that local knowledge might not. My own writing practice is normally to avoid jargon and neologisms like the plague. This case, I thought, was the exception that proves the rule. Sometimes it seems helpful to defamiliarize a concept that readers imagine they already know (Oh, local knowledge, thats simple enough) to reconsider afresh its importance and scope. Hence, I made the choice of me tis. Was it, as Herzfeld charges, the reex, Eurocentric dogma about classical Greece that made me do it? Probably it was

JAMES FERGUSON, MICHAEL HERZFELD, AND TANIA LI: STATES AND CATEGORICAL VIOLENCE These three articles all address issues raised in Seeing Like a State (1998), again in quite different ways and from different geographical vantage points. In his characteristic erudite and subtle fashion, Michael Herzfeld makes a criticism of Seeing Like a State that has been made before and that, in fact, I was quite aware of as I nished writing the book. The essence of the chargeHerzfeld is too delicate to state it quite so boldlyis that, in my representation of high-modernist planning and development, I end up creating something of a stripped-down, standardized caricature of the phenomenon that has, itself, many of the features for which I castigate high modernism: in other words, that I have made a high-modernist argument (schematic, linear, and formal) against high modernism. I would like to plead guilty, or at least nolo contendere, to the charge. I wrote as much in the Introduction: In trying to make a strong, paradigmatic case, I realize that I have risked displaying the hubris of which high-modernity is justly accused (1998:7). I have always, except perhaps with Weapons of the Weak, reached for the boldest and most

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American Anthropologist Vol. 107, No. 3 September 2005 still more rigorous. Whether it is Toyota selling cars, General Electric selling washing machines, or McDonalds pushing hamburgers, each enterprise requires something beyond the hothouse order of an enclave to thrive. My point is simply that although Ferguson is clearly right about oil enclaves, in particular, global capitalism, in general, may require far more in the way of complicit nation-states and social engineering. I take up this theme again below in the discussion of Lis article. Much of what Ferguson points to, however, is still valid in a different sense. One has the impression that in increasingly neoliberal China and India, large swaths of the countryside and the urban slums are considered simply irrelevant to the current project of economic growth and progress. We are talking, between the two countries, of perhaps a billion people. They are the functional equivalent of what has been called lAfrique inutile. Such areas and populations may be monitored for potential signs of unrest, but they are not the objects of any positive projects of social engineering. This brings me to Tania Lis challenging article. In frequent polemical ourishes, she accuses me of a search for pristine spaces outside power, pure sites of resistance (this issue). I have conducted no such search. Throughout Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), I was at pains to demonstrate precisely that there are no pristine sites outside of power. And in Seeing Like a State (1998), I devoted much space to the messy encounter between tangled and ineffective state plans, on the one hand, and local forms of resistance and accommodation, on the other hand, that produce, yes, contingent hybrid confections that meet no ones pristine vision. Lis case, as I understand it, is that the state is not a unitary actor but a contingent lashup and that, at any rate, there are many other would-be Svengalis in the guise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), missionaries, and so forth, with competing schemes for social order. On the other side of the equation, the subjects of planning exercises are, themselves, something of a contingent lashup of desires, practices, and ideas that are partly a result of past state projects, modernization ideas, and ofcial encounters. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reader is implicitly asked to imagine a state that is thoroughly confused and permeated by its various subjects yet also a subject population that is a vector-sum of governmentality. If you follow this train of thought to its destination, the state and its subjects are conceptually inseparable andPresto!the very terms of my argument evaporate into thin air. Not so fast. Allowing for the fact that political scientists are, by training, inclined to batten onto central tendenciesand anthropologists, by training, onto variationLis view is at least as myopic about power as she accuses me of being about the state. It may be that in observing any particular skirmish, the battleeld seems all confusion and disorder. From a greater distance and with some hindsight, however, larger patterns of change can be discerned.

so. On the other hand, it was something more than the repertoire of folk-trickster (anti-) heroes or Bauernschlau that I had in mind. It was for this reason that I found cunning a woefully narrow inadequate translation of me tis. Finally, it had not occurred to me that the tidying up characteristic of high modernism is applied to the past as well as the future. The gaze of high modernists is trained relentlessly on future hopes but, as Herzfeld shows, authorizing those hopes requires tidying up the narrative of the past. Thus, it seems that the occlusion of the huge African and near-Asian component in the narrative of Western civilization is replicated in a version of Greek history in which the Ottoman component is similarly written out of the narrative. This much is even apparent to a novice like me at the banal level of cuisine: Blindfolded and deaf, I am not sure I could tell whether I was in Greek or Turkish restaurant. This selective creation of pasts nds an echo in how Central European states, all the way to the Ukraine, now see the Soviet period as a political hijacking of their natural history as part of Western Europe. James Ferguson makes one large, powerful, and convincing claim with respect to my argument in Seeing Like a State (1998). I assert, almost in passing, that the force behind high-modernist standardization after 1989 is global capitalism. I still think this assertion is broadly correct, but Ferguson demonstrates that, in the context of weak states in Africa and mineral-rich resources, capitalist rms have no interest in refashioning whole states and societies; instead, they create small, tightly controlled enclaves to facilitate extraction. Why, indeed, should global oil companies take on the costs of society-wide governance when all they require is easy access to point-specic resources? This claim seems absolutely right. The interesting question becomes, then, what economic and social order does global capitalism require? The answer, I think, depends very much on what sector of global capitalism we are discussing. Ferguson has examined the sector most favorable to his case. Oil extraction alone, once set up, requires little in the way of a domestic labor force and, if the wells are offshore, they are well nigh extraterritorial. In some cases, as in the case of the Arab Emirates, little statelets have been drawn around the pools of oil to give the enclave itself the trappings of a nation-state. What about mining? Depending on the technology, mining may require a larger labor force and a decent road system, thereby implying a need for order beyond a tiny enclave. The classic and tragic examples, of course, are the great Spanish colonial silver mines at Potosi, which, over three centuries, took the lives of eight million Indians. Organizing this holocaust required that the Spanish control a vast hinterland just to force-feed the mine its quota of victims. Modern strip mines require far less labor but still more, generally, than oil wells. And what about plantations for export crops: cacao, oil palm, rubber, tea, and so forth? Here, the conditions for prot necessitate a still wider span of control. If, further, we consider the global producers of consumer (durable or nondurable) goods, the social and political conditions for prot become

Scott Afterword Rather than yield to Lis criticism, and in the spirit of provocation she invites, let me make what she would consider to be an even more outrageous argument for state(and suprastate-) led transformation than I did previously. The case I will make depends on a general recognition of the asymmetry in power relations between the state (however confused it may have been) and its subjects since at least the end of the 18th centuryan asymmetry that is reproduced, I would argue, through international agencies and NGOs. It is no surprise that many of the structures and practices of governance in the ex-coloniesfrom the routines of local ofcials and police to the structure of ministries, the collection of statistics, and resettlementperpetuate and extend routines established by the colonial state. The state, although derived from a European model, was far more powerful vis-` a-vis its subjects than its metropolitan parent. Hence, colonial populations were made the subjects of experiments in public health, cadastral techniques, forced resettlement, police administration, penal institutions, and military tactics. It is not far off the mark to claim that the colonies were used (starting, in the case of Britain, with Ireland) as guinea pigs for experiments in governance that would not have been tolerated in the metropole. If the experiments succeeded, they might be reimported. Viewed with a wide-angle lens, surely the relative uniformity of governance forms and practices vis-` a-vis the precolonial world is what is most striking. Today, the forces for convergence are, arguably, even more powerful. The major worldwide activity of the World Bank is not the (relatively) promising local community development program Li describes in Indonesia but a massive effort at individual freehold land titling on the neoliberal model. In addition to the IMF and WTO, whose powers of persuasion are backed by powerful incentives (what inelegant political scientists have sometimes called throffersi.e., threats plus offers), there is, I would argue, an international model of governance along North Atlantic lines at work. This model encompasses intellectual property rights, independent central banks, convertible currencies, the free movement of capital and repatriation of prots, standardized (harmonized is the preferred euphemism) business laws and systems of adjudication, comparable statistical routines, and accounting methods. The immanent logic of this project is to create something of a universal gear in which the institutional order of southern countries will mesh as seamlessly as possible with the neoliberal institutional orderaka North Atlantic capitalism. Yes, it has willing local collaborators. Yes, it is modied in practice. Yes, parts of it are self-contradictory. But surely, as a plan for governance, it has been more successful than colonialism. To the degree that the project succeeds, North Atlantic business executives, entrepreneurs, or ofcials disembarking (at a high-modernist airport) will nd the institutional order familiar. And why should they not? It is a copy of what they know at home. Only the costumes, native dances, cuisine, music, and landscape will be different,

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because these folkloric differences are sources of touristic prot. But wait, I hear Li objecting that none of these projects reach the ground uncontaminated, uncompromised. Yes, of course. But can there be much doubt about which players in this cultural encounter hold most of the high cards? There may be reverses and skirmishes lost, but their deep pockets and geopolitical advantages over the long run systematically push the game in their direction. But wait, I hear Li say again, what about the transnational activist coalitions opposing World Bank plans, human- and indigenous-rights groups, and environmental NGOs? Do they not thwart the reach of neoliberal schemes of governance and provide room for maneuver, resistance, and honorable compromise? Yes, I agree. But what is just as important is to recognize that virtually all these NGOs bring their own module of governanceone that is usually, if not always, from the North American world. The World Wildlife Fund, Human Rights Watch, World Vision, and Oxfamnot to mention all the UN agencieseach bring a template developed elsewhere: powerful provincialisms dressed up as universals for travel, just like neoliberalism itself. The room for maneuver, then, is in the crawl space that the clash of contending modernist projects for rule opens up. One may successfully exploit and colonize in turn the contradictions between and among such schemes to confect a hybrid of ones own liking, but theres no transcending them. J AMES C. S COTT Department of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 065208209

NOTES
1. This was not to be read, as I explained at the time, as a theory of peasant rebellionlet alone, revolution. For discontent to develop into rebellion requires a whole series of contingent, mediating factors that are beyond myand I daresay most other observers capacity to formulate simply. 2. Technically, land reform survives as a policy option, providing it follows strict principles of liberal economics: namely, it must bring together a willing seller and willing buyer. In practice, and with a few exceptions such as Brazil, the scal requirement for such programs is such that they are virtually a dead letter.

REFERENCES CITED
Bailey, Frederick G., ed. 1971 Gifts and Poisons: The Politics of Reputation. Oxford: Blackwell. Haynes, Douglas, and Gyan Prakash 1992 Introduction: The Entanglement of Power and Resistance. In Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia. Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, eds. Pp. 1 22. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jameson, Frederic 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Levine, Hillel 1991 Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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1976 The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1977 Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition. Theory and Society 4(1) and 4(4):138, 211246. 1985 Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Popkin, Samuel 1979 The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, James C. 1968 Political Ideology in Malaysia: Reality and the Beliefs of an Elite. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1969 Corruption, Machine Politics and Political Change. American Political Science Review LXIII(4):11421158. 1972a Comparative Political Corruption. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1972b Patron Client Politics and Political Change. American Political Science Review LXVI(1):91113.