19 Quotes by James C. Scott

But all these systems of ‘education’ lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times.

Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest “state project,” a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and services?” Her answer is simple: “Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man would want to.

Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in point. Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first “discover” – in the epidemiological sense – such hitherto unknown diseases as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire’s disease, and AIDS.

Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances – including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plasticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice.

At another level, collectivization was, in a curious state-centric way, a qualified success. Collectivization proved a rough-and-ready instrument for the twin goals of traditional statecraft: appropriation and political control.

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had... Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.

Telling a farmer only that he is leasing twenty acres of land is about as helpful as telling a scholar that he has bought six kilograms of books.