Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott (1998)

Chapter 8 - Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity

The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions, as we have seen, can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe. (p 262)

My purpose, rather, is to show how the imperial pretensions of agronomic science - its inability to recognize or incorporate knowledge create outside its paradigm - sharply limited its utility to many cultivators. Whereas farmers, as we shall see, seem pragmatically alert to knowledge coming from any quarter should it serve their purposes, modern agricultural planners are far less receptive to other ways of knowing. (p 264)

Modern, industrial, scientific farming, which is characterized by monocropping, mechanization, hybrids, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and capital intensiveness, has brought about a level of standardization intro agriculture that is without historical precedent. Far beyond mere monocropping on the model of scientific forestry explored earlier, this simplification has entailed a genetic narrowing fraught with consequences that we are only beginning to comprehend. (p 266)

Varieties developed with machinery in mind were available as early as 1920, when Henry Wallace joined forces with a manufacturer of harvesting equipment to cultivate his new, stiff-stalked variety with a strong shank, connecting the ear to the stalk. An entire field of plant breeding, termed “phytoengineering“, was thus born in order to adapt the natural world to machine processing. “Machines are not made to harvest crops,” noted two proponents of phytoengineering. “In reality, crops must be designed to be harvested by machine.” (p 267)

Taste and nutritional quality were secondary to machine compatibility. Or to put it more charitably, the breeders did what they could to develop the best tomato within the very sharp constraints of mechanization. (p 267)

To take West African indigenous farming systems as an example, colonial agricultural specialists encountered what seemed to them to be an astonishingly diverse regime of polycropping, but as many as four crops (not to mention sub species) in the same field simultaneously… given their visual modification of modern agricultural practice, most specialist knew, without further empirical investigation, that the apparent disorder of the crops was a symptom of backward techniques; it failed the visual test of scientific agriculture. (p 273)

As with the truly democratic aspects of Nyerere’s policies, those elements of research and policy that might threaten the position of a managerial elite tended, either not to be explored all or, explored, to be “selected against” in policy implementation. (p 287)

The complexities thus far introduced could, at least in principle, be accommodated within an a drastically modified, neoclassical notion of economic maximization, even though it would be too elaborate to model easily. Once we add such considerations as aesthetics, rituals, taste, and social and political considerations, this is no longer the case. (p 300)

Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice, and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification. (p 305)