OWEN: What is happening? YOLLAND: I’m not sure. But I’m concerned about my part in it. It’s an eviction of sorts. OWEN: We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that? YOLLAND: Not in ... OWEN: And we’re taking place names that are riddled with confusion and... YOLLAND: Who’s confused? Are the people confused? OWEN: And we’re standardising those names as accurately and as sensitively as we can. YOLLAND: Something is being eroded.

— Brian Friel, Translations 2.1

Acknowledgments

This book has been longer in the making than I would care to admit. It would be nice to be able to claim that it just took that long to think it through. Nice, but not truthful. A nearly fatal combination of malingering and administrative chores accounts for part of the delay. For the rest, the scope of the book simply expanded, in an academic version of Parkinson’s Law, to fill all the space that I would give to it. Finally, I had to call an arbitrary halt or else start thinking of it as a life’s work.

The scope of the book together with the time it took to complete it explain the long list of intellectual debts I have accumulated along the way. A full accounting of them would be interminable except for the fact that I realize some of my creditors would just as soon not be associated with the final product. Though I shall not implicate them here, I owe them nonetheless. Instead of turning my argument in the direction they urged, I took their criticisms to heart by fortifying my case so that it would better answer their objections. My other intellectual creditors, having failed to disavow the final product in advance, will be named here and, it is to be hoped, implicated.

Some of my debts are to institutions. I spent the 1990–91 academic year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin as a recipient of their hospitality and largesse. The temptation of living for a time in Berlin, just a year after the Wall came down, proved irresistible. After physically laboring for six weeks on an ex-collective farm on the Mecklenburg Plain in eastern Germany (an alternative that I dreamed up to avoid sitting for six weeks in Goethe Institute classes with pimply teenagers), I hurled myself at the German language, Berlin, and my German colleagues. My research hardly advanced in any formal sense, but I realize that many fruitful lines of inquiry opened up then. I want particularly to thank Wolf Lepenies, Reinhard Prasser, Joachim Nettlebeck, Barbara Sanders, Barbara Golf, Christine Klohn, and Gerhard Riedel for their many kindnesses. The intellectual boon companionship of Georg Elwert, my local patron saint, as well as that of Shalini Randeria, Gabor Klaniczay, Christoph Harbsmeier, Barbara Lane, Mitchell Ash, Juan Linz, Jochen Blaschke, Arthur von Mehren, Akim von Oppen, Hans Luther, Carola Lenz, Gerd Spittler, Hans Medick, and Alf Lüdke opened my eyes to lines of inquiry that proved formative. Only the great efforts and unfailing friendship of Heinz Lechleiter and Ursula Hess brought my German to a (barely) tolerable level.

At various stages in the laborious preparation of this book, I had the privilege of making extended visits to institutions filled with largespirited but skeptical colleagues. My good luck was that they so often made a project of straightening me out. They might not be satisfied with the final result, but I’ll bet that they can see their influence at work. At the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Marseille, I especially want to thank my patron, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, Thomas Bierschenk, and their colleagues in the staff seminar. Living in Le Vieux Panier and working every day in the magnificent atmosphere of La Vielle Charite were unforgettable experiences. At the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, I had the benefit of an unmatched crowd of humanists and Asian specialists looking over my shoulder. Thanks go in particular to Graeme Clark, director, and lain McCalman, associate director, who invited me, and to Tony Reid and David Kelly, who organized the conference, “Ideas of Freedom in Asia,” which was the premise of my visit. Tony Milner and Claire Milner, Ranajit Guha (my guru) and Mechthild Guha, Bob Goodin and Diane Gibson, Ben Tria Kerkvliet and Melinda Tria, Bill Jenner, Ian Wilson, and John Walker in various ways made my stay convivial and intellectually rewarding.

This book would definitely have been much longer in the making were it not for the fact that Dick Ohmann and Betsy Traube invited me to spend the academic year of 1994–95 as a fellow of the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University. My colleagues there and our weekly seminars together were intellectually bracing, thanks in large part to Betsy Traube’s capacity to frame each paper brilliantly. The center’s ideal combination of solitude and a staff that could not have been more helpful allowed me to finish a first draft of the entire manuscript. I am enormously grateful to Pat Camden and Jackie Rich for their inexhaustible fund of kindnesses. The astute insights of Betsy Traube and Khachig Tololyan mark this work in many ways. Thanks also to Bill Cohen, Peter Rutland, and Judith Goldstein.

I would not have had the leisure for reflection and writing in 1994–95 had it not been for generous grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (Research for Understanding and Reducing Violence, Aggression, and Dominance) and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Program Fellowship. But for their confidence in my work and their assistance, which made possible a respite from all administrative and teaching chores, I wouldn’t have had a prayer of finishing this study when I did.

Finally, I want to thank my colleagues in the Netherlands and at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research for the opportunity of visiting there in order to give the Sixth Annual W. F. Wertheim Lecture: Jan Breman, Bram de Swaan, Hans Sonneveld, Otto van den Muijzenberg, Anton Blok, Rod Aya, Roseanne Rutten, Johan Goudsblom, Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Ido de Haan, Johan Heilbron, Jose Komen, Karin Peperkamp, Niels Mulder, Frans Hiisken, Ben White, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. Having Wim Wertheim there to offer advice and criticism was a great privilege for me, for I have admired his many contributions to social science theory and Southeast Asian studies. I learned at least as much from the thesis-writing graduate students in my seminar there as they learned from me; Talja Potters and Peer Smets were kind enough to read my chapter on urban planning and provide searching critiques.

There are a good many scholars whose writings opened up new perspectives for me or provided outstanding analyses of issues that I could not have hoped to study so comprehensively on my own. Some of them have not seen this work, some of them I have never met, and some of them would probably want to disown what I have written. Nevertheless, I will venture to acknowledge my heavy intellectual debts to them all: Edward Friedman, Ben Anderson, Michael Adas, Teodor Shanin, James Ferguson, and Zygmunt Bauman. I could not have written the chapter on the high-modernist city without taking shameless advantage of the insights of James Holston’s fine book on Brasilia. The chapter on Soviet collectivization and its connection with industrial agriculture in the United States leans heavily on the work of Sheila Fitzpatrick and Deborah Fitzgerald. I thank Sheila Fitzpatrick for her searching comments, only a few of which are adequately reflected in the finished chapter.

The elaboration of the concept of mētis I owe to Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Although our terminology differs, Stephen Marglin and I had, unbeknownst to one another, been taking separate trains to roughly the same destination. Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, Marglin organized a conference, “The Greening of Economics,” in Bellagio, Italy, where I had my first opportunity to present some of my initial ideas, and Marglin’s work on episteme and techne as well as his work on agriculture have influenced my thinking. Stephen Gudeman’s perceptive comments, Frédérique Apffel Marglin’s work on “variolation,” and Arun Agrawal’s work and commentary have helped to shape my sense of practical knowledge. Chapter 8, which is about agriculture, bears the distinct marks of all that I have learned from the work of Paul Richards and from Jan Douwe van der Ploeg. I am an amateur as an Africanist, and the chapter on ujamaa villages in Tanzania owes a great deal to Joel Gao Hiza, who wrote a brilliant senior honors thesis on the subject while at Yale University and who generously shared his voluminous research materials. (He is now finishing a thesis in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.) Bruce McKim, Ron Aminzade, Goran Hyden, David Sperling, and Allen Isaacman read the chapter on Tanzania and saved me from some blunders; some undoubtedly remain despite their efforts. Birgit Müller’s fine analysis of the role of “fixers and traders” in the East German factory economy before unification helped me to understand the symbiotic relationship between planned order and informal arrangements.

Larry Lohmann and James Ferguson read an early draft of the manuscript and made comments that clarified my thinking enormously and prevented some serious missteps. A few other good friends offered to read all or part of the manuscript, in spite of its forbidding length. Those who rolled their eyes when offering or whose body language suggested mixed feelings, I avoided burdening. The few who genuinely wanted to read it, or whose feigned interest was completely convincing, in every case provided a set of comments that shaped the book in important ways. I owe an enormous debt and my warmest thanks to Ron Herring, Ramachandra Guha, Zygmunt Bauman, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Mark Lendler, Allan Isaacman, and Peter Vandergeest.

A great many thoughtful colleagues made useful criticisms or brought to my attention work that contributed to improvements in the argument and evidence. They include Arjun Appadurai, Ken Alder, Gregory Kasza, Daniel Goldhagen, Erich Goldhagen, Peter Perdue, Esther Kingston-Mann, Peter Sahlins, Anna Selenyi, Doug Gallon, and Jane Mansbridge. I also thank Sugata Bose, Al McCoy, Richard Landes, Gloria Raheja, Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Jess Gilbert, Tongchai Winichakul, Dan Kelliher, Dan Little, Jack Kloppenberg, Tony Gulielmi, Robert Evenson, and Peter Sahlins. Others who kindly contributed are Adam Ashforth, John Tehranian, Michael Kwass, Jesse Ribot, Ezra Suleiman, Jim Boyce, Jeff Burds, Fred Cooper, Ann Stoler, Atul Kohli, Orlando Figes, Anna Tsing, Vernon Ruttan, Henry Bernstein, Michael Watts, Allan Pred, Witoon Permpongsacharoen, Gene Ammarell, and David Feeny.

For the past five years the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale has been for me the site of a broad, interdisciplinary education in rural life and a major source of intellectual companionship. The program has given me more that I can imagine ever giving back. Virtually every page of this book can be traced to one or another of the wide-ranging encounters fostered by the program. I will forgo mentioning fifty or so postdoctoral fellows who have visited for a year, but all of them have contributed in large and small ways to this enterprise. We invited them to join us because we admired their work, and they have never disappointed us. The chief of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Marvel Kay Mansfield, has been the heart and soul of the success of Agrarian Studies and every other enterprise with which I have been associated at Yale. This is not the first occasion I have acknowledged my debt to her; it has only grown with time. Nor could Agrarian Studies have thrived as it has without the initiative of K. Sivaramakrishnan, Rick Rheingans, Donna Perry, Bruce McKim, Nina Bhatt, and Linda Lee.

My intellectual debts to colleagues at Yale defy accounting. Those with whom I have taught—Bill Kelly, Helen Siu, Bob Harms, Angelique Haugerud, Nancy Peluso, John Wargo, Cathy Cohen, and Lee Wandel—have, in practice, taught me. Other Yale colleagues whose fingerprints can be found on this manuscript include Ian Shapiro, John Merriman, Hal Conklin, Paul Landau, Enrique Meyer, Dimitri Gutas, Carol Rose, Ben Kiernan, Joe Errington, Charles Bryant, and Arvid Nelson, a visiting fellow who is completing a thesis on forestry in East Germany and who was an exceptional source of information on the history of scientific forestry in Germany. The graduate students in my seminar, “Anarchism,” and in a jointly taught seminar, “The Comparative Study of Agrarian Societies,” read several draft chapters of the manuscript, pulling them to pieces in ways that forced me to rethink more than a few issues.

I have been blessed with research assistants who turned what began as wild goose chases into serious quests. Without their imagination and work I would have learned little about the invention of permanent last names, the physical layout of new villages, and language planning. Here is my chance to thank Kate Stanton, Cassandra Moseley, Meredith Weiss, John Tehranian, and Allan Carlson for their superb work. I owe Cassandra Moseley not only thanks but an apology, because all her fine work on the Tennessee Valley Authority resulted in a chapter that I reluctantly cut in order to keep the book within reasonable bounds. It will find another home, I trust.

Yale University Press has been good to me in more ways than one. I want to thank particularly John Ryden; Judy Metro; my editor, Charles Grench; and the best manuscript editor I have ever worked with, Brenda Kolb.

Several variants of chapter 1, each with some material from later chapters, have appeared elsewhere: “State Simplifications: Nature, Space, and People,” Occasional Paper No. 1, Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, November 1994; “State Simplifications,” Journal of Political Philosophy 4, no. 2 (1995): 1-42; “State Simplifications: Nature, Space, and People,” in Ian Shapiro and Russell Hardin, eds., Political Order, vol. 38 of Nomos (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 42-85; “Freedom Contra Freehold: State Simplification, Space, and People in Southeast Asia,” in David Kelly and Anthony Reid, eds., Freedom in Asia (forthcoming); “State Simplifications: Some Applications to Southeast Asia,” Sixth Annual W. F. Wertheim Lecture, Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam, June 1995; and “State Simplifications and Practical Knowledge,” in Stephen Marglin and Stephen Gudeman, eds., People’s Economy, People’s Ecology (forthcoming).

I’d like to kick the habit of writing books, at least for a while. If there were a detox unit or an analog to the nicotine patch for serial offenders, I think I would sign up for treatment. My habit has already cost me more precious time than I care to admit. The problem with book writing and other addictions is that the resolve to quit is greatest during withdrawal, but as the painful symptoms recede, the craving is apt to return. Louise and our children, Mia, Aaron, and Noah, would, I know, be only too happy to have me committed until I was “clean.” I’m trying. God knows I’m trying.

Introduction

This book grew out of an intellectual detour that became so gripping that I decided to abandon my original itinerary altogether. After I had made what appeared to be an ill-considered turn, the surprising new scenery and the sense that I was headed for a more satisfying destination persuaded me to change my plans. The new itinerary, I think, has a logic of its own. It might even have been a more elegant trip had I possessed the wit to conceive of it at the outset. What does seem clear to me is that the detour, although along roads that were bumpier and more circuitous than I had foreseen, has led to a more substantial place. It goes without saying that the reader might have found a more experienced guide, but the itinerary is so peculiarly off the beaten track that, if you’re headed this way, you have to settle for whatever local tracker you can find.

A word about the road not taken. Originally, I set out to understand why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of “people who move around,” to put it crudely. In the context of Southeast Asia, this promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions between mobile, slash-and-burn hill peoples on one hand and wet-rice, valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern state was, in many crucial respects, partially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their landholdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. It lacked, for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “translate” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.

It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state gradually get a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed comprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In each case, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.

The organization of the natural world was no exception. Agriculture is, after all, a radical reorganization and simplification of flora to suit man’s goals. Whatever their other purposes, the designs of scientific forestry and agriculture and the layouts of plantations, collective farms, ujamaa villages, and strategic hamlets all seemed calculated to make the terrain, its products, and its workforce more legible—and hence manipulable—from above and from the center.

A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. In premodern times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive-patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s problem. With a device called a “queen excluder,” it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space”—the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, “legible” hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully.

I do not wish to push the analogy further than it will go, but much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format. The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance, and relief for the poor.

These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft, were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, not just maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus a state cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law. Much of the first chapter is intended to convey how thoroughly society and the environment have been refashioned by state maps of legibility.

This view of early modern statecraft is not particularly original. Suitably modified, however, it can provide a distinctive optic through which a number of huge development fiascoes in poorer Third World nations and Eastern Europe can be usefully viewed.

But “fiasco” is too lighthearted a word for the disasters I have in mind. The Great Leap Forward in China, collectivization in Russia, and compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia are among the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of both lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted. At a less dramatic but far more common level, the history of Third World development is littered with the debris of huge agricultural schemes and new cities (think of Brasília or Chandigarh) that have failed their residents. It is not so difficult, alas, to understand why so many human lives have been destroyed by mobilized violence between ethnic groups, religious sects, or linguistic communities. But it is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.

I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.

The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.

High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term “ideology” implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization: the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.

High modernism was about “interests” as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities), because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials.

Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform.

Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.

A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for largescale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

I have not yet explained, the reader will have noted, why such high-modernist plans, backed by authoritarian power, actually failed. Accounting for their failure is my second purpose here.

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

Much of this book can be read as a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order. I stress the word “imperialism” here because I am emphatically not making a blanket case against either bureaucratic planning or high-modernist ideology. I am, however, making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.

Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability. In chapters 4 and 5, I contrast the high-modernist views and practices of city planners and revolutionaries with critical views emphasizing process, complexity, and open-endedness. Le Corbusier and Lenin are the protagonists, with Jane Jacobs and Rosa Luxemburg cast as their formidable critics. Chapters 6 and 7 contain accounts of Soviet collectivization and Tanzanian forced villagization, which illustrate how schematic, authoritarian solutions to production and social order inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable knowledge embodied in local practices. (An early draft contained a case study of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the United States’ highmodernist experiment and the granddaddy of all regional development projects. It was reluctantly swept aside to shorten what is still a long book.)

Finally, in chapter 9 I attempt to conceptualize the nature of practical knowledge and to contrast it with more formal, deductive, epistemic knowledge. The term mētis, which descends from classical Greek and denotes the knowledge that can come only from practical experience, serves as a useful portmanteau word for what I have in mind. Here I should also acknowledge my debt to anarchist writers (Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Proudhon) who consistently emphasize the role of mutuality as opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordination in the creation of social order. Their understanding of the term “mutuality” covers some, but not all, of the same ground that I mean to cover with “mētis.”

Radically simplified designs for social organization seem to court the same risks of failure courted by radically simplified designs for natural environments. The failures and vulnerability of monocrop commercial forests and genetically engineered, mechanized monocropping mimic the failures of collective farms and planned cities. At this level, I am making a case for the resilience of both social and natural diversity and a strong case about the limits, in principle, of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order. One could, I think, successfully turn this argument against a certain kind of reductive social science. Having already taken on more than I could chew, I leave this additional detour to others, with my blessing.

In trying to make a strong, paradigmatic case, I realize that I have risked displaying the hubris of which high modernists are justly accused. Once you have crafted lenses that change your perspective, it is a great temptation to look at everything through the same spectacles. I do, however, want to plead innocent to two charges that I do not think a careful reading would sustain. The first charge is that my argument is uncritically admiring of the local, the traditional, and the customary. I understand that the practical knowledge I describe is often inseparable from the practices of domination, monopoly, and exclusion that offend the modern liberal sensibility. My point is not that practical knowledge is the product of some mythical, egalitarian state of nature. Rather, my point is that formal schemes of order are untenable without some elements of the practical knowledge that they tend to dismiss. The second charge is that my argument is an anarchist case against the state itself. The state, as I make abundantly clear, is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being. Short of that draconian but all too common situation, we are left to weigh judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their costs.

As I finished this book, I realized that its critique of certain forms of state action might seem, from the post-1989 perspective of capitalist triumphalism, like a kind of quaint archaeology. States with the pretensions and power that I criticize have for the most part vanished or have drastically curbed their ambitions. And yet, as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety. (In Enlightenment’s Wake, John Gray makes a similar case for liberalism, which he regards as self-limiting because it rests on cultural and institutional capital that it is bound to undermine.) The “interruption,” forced by widespread strikes, of France’s structural adjustments to accommodate a common European currency is perhaps a straw in the wind. Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.

Part 1. State Projects of Legibility and Simplification

Chapter 1. Nature and Space

Would it not be a great satisfaction to the king to know at a designated moment every year the number of his subjects, in total and by region, with all the resources, wealth & poverty of each place; [the number] of his nobility and ecclesiastics of all kinds, of men of the robe, of Catholics and of those of the other religion, all separated according to the place of their residence? ... [Would it not be] a useful and necessary pleasure for him to be able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths?

— Marquis de Vauban, proposing an annual census to Louis XIV in 1686

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.

The invention of scientific forestry in late eighteenth-century Prussia and Saxony serves as something of a model of this process. Although the history of scientific forestry is important in its own right, it is used here as a metaphor for the forms of knowledge and manipulation characteristic of powerful institutions with sharply defined interests, of which state bureaucracies and large commercial firms are perhaps the outstanding examples. Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation operate in forest management, we can then explore how the modern state applies a similar lens to urban planning, rural settlement, land administration, and agriculture.

The State and Scientific Forestry: A Parable

I [Gilgamesh] would conquer in the Cedar Forest.... I will set my hand to it and will chop down the Cedar.

— Epic of Gilgamesh

The early modern European state, even before the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. To be sure, other concerns—such as timber for shipbuilding, state construction, and fuel for the economic security of its subjects—were not entirely absent from official management. These concerns also had heavy implications for state revenue and security. Exaggerating only slightly, one might say that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number: the revenue yield of the timber that might be extracted annually.

The best way to appreciate how heroic was this constriction of vision is to notice what fell outside its field of vision. Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. Each species of tree—indeed, each part or growth stage of each species—had its unique properties and uses. A fragment of the entry under “elm” in a popular seventeenth-century encyclopedia on aboriculture conveys something of the vast range of practical uses to which the tree could be put.

Elm is a timber of most singular use, especially whereby it may be continually dry, or wet, in extremes; therefore proper for water works, mills, the ladles and soles of the wheel, pumps, aqueducts, ship planks below the water line, ... also for wheelwrights, handles for the single handsaw, rails and gates. Elm is not so apt to rive [split] ... and is used for chopping blocks, blocks for the hat maker, trunks and boxes to be covered with leather, coffins and dressers and shovelboard tables of great length; also for the carver and those curious workers of fruitage, foliage, shields, statues and most of the ornaments appertaining to the orders of architecture.... And finally ... the use of the very leaves of this tree, especially the female, is not to be despised, ... for they will prove of great relief to cattle in the winter and scorching summers when hay and fodder is dear.... The green leaf of the elms contused heals a green wound or cut, and boiled with the bark, consolidates bone fractures.

In state “fiscal forestry,” however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined to the direct needs of the state.

From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state’s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except those that interested the crown’s gamekeepers.

From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s tunnel vision. The state did pay attention to poaching, which impinged on its claim to revenue in wood or its claim to royal game, but otherwise it typically ignored the vast, complex, and negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, fishing, charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable minerals as well as the forest’s significance for magic, worship, refuge, and so on.

If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. Some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The entry under “forest” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie is almost exclusively concerned with the utilité publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.

The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use. A comparable logic extracts from a more generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies those species that compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the yields of the valued species. Thus, plants that are valued become “crops,” the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.”

The kind of abstracting, utilitarian logic that the state, through its officials, applied to the forest is thus not entirely distinctive. What is distinctive about this logic, however, is the narrowness of its field of vision, the degree of elaboration to which it can be subjected, and above all, as we shall see, the degree to which it allowed the state to impose that logic on the very reality that was observed.

Scientific forestry was originally developed from about 1765 to 1800, largely in Prussia and Saxony. Eventually, it would become the basis of forest management techniques in France, England, and the United States and throughout the Third World. Its emergence cannot be understood outside the larger context of the centralized state-making initiatives of the period. In fact, the new forestry science was a subdiscipline of what was called cameral science, an effort to reduce the fiscal management of a kingdom to scientific principles that would allow systematic planning. Traditional domainal forestry had hitherto simply divided the forest into roughly equal plots, with the number of plots coinciding with the number of years in the assumed growth cycle. One plot was cut each year on the assumption of equal yields (and value) from plots of equal size. Because of poor maps, the uneven distribution of the most valuable large trees (Hochwald), and very approximate cordwood (Bruststaerke) measures, the results were unsatisfactory for fiscal planning.

Careful exploitation of domainal forests was all the more imperative in the late eighteenth century, when fiscal officials became aware of a growing shortage of wood. Many of the old-growth forests of oak, beech, hornbeam, and linden had been severely degraded by planned and unplanned felling, while the regrowth was not as robust as hoped. The prospect of declining yields was alarming, not merely because it threatened revenue flows but also because it might provoke massive poaching by a peasantry in search of firewood. One sign of this concern were the numerous state-sponsored competitions for designs of more efficient woodstoves.

The first attempt at more precise measurements of forests was made by Johann Gottlieb Beckmann on a carefully surveyed sample plot. Walking abreast, several assistants carried compartmentalized boxes with color-coded nails corresponding to five categories of tree sizes, which they had been trained to identify. Each tree was tagged with the appropriate nail until the sample plot had been covered. Because each assistant had begun with a certain number of nails, it was a simple matter to subtract the remaining nails from the initial total and arrive at an inventory of trees by class for the entire plot. The sample plot had been carefully chosen for its representativeness, allowing the foresters to then calculate the timber and, given certain price assumptions, the revenue yield of the whole forest. For the forest scientists (Forstwissenschaftler) the goal was always to “deliver the greatest possible constant volume of wood.”

The effort at precision was pushed further as mathematicians worked from the cone-volume principle to specify the volume of saleable wood contained by a standardized tree (Normalbaum) of a given size-class. Their calculations were checked empirically against the actual volume of wood in sample trees. The final result of such calculations was the development of elaborate tables with data organized by tree size and age under specified conditions of normal growth and maturation. By radically narrowing his vision to commercial wood, the state forester had, with his tables, paradoxically achieved a synoptic view of the entire forest. This restriction of focus reflected in the tables was in fact the only way in which the whole forest could be taken in by a single optic. Reference to these tables coupled with field tests allowed the forester to estimate closely the inventory, growth, and yield of a given forest. In the regulated, abstract forest of the forst- wissenschaftler, calculation and measurement prevailed, and the three watchwords, in modern parlance, were “minimum diversity,” the “balance sheet,” and “sustained yield.” The logic of the state-managed forest science was virtually identical with the logic of commercial exploitation.

The achievement of German forestry science in standardizing techniques for calculating the sustainable yield of commercial timber and hence revenue was impressive enough. What is decisive for our purposes, however, was the next logical step in forest management. That step was to attempt to create, through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to count, manipulate, measure, and assess. The fact is that forest science and geometry, backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques. To this end, the underbrush was cleared, the number of species was reduced (often to monoculture), and plantings were done simultaneously and in straight rows on large tracts. These management practices, as Henry Lowood observes, “produced the monocultural, even-age forests that eventually transformed the Normalbaum from abstraction to reality. The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science. Practical goals had encouraged mathematical utilitarianism, which seemed, in turn, to promote geometric perfection as the outward sign of the well-managed forest; in turn the rationally ordered arrangements of trees offered new possibilities for controlling nature.”

The tendency was toward regimentation, in the strict sense of the word. The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks, as it were, to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of lookalike conscripts. As an army, it was also designed hierarchically from above to fulfill a unique purpose and to be at the disposition of a single commander. At the limit, the forest itself would not even have to be seen; it could be “read” accurately from the tables and maps in the forester’s office.

How much easier it was to manage the new, stripped-down forest. With stands of same-age trees arranged in linear alleys, clearing the underbrush, felling, extraction, and new planting became a far more routine process. Increasing order in the forest made it possible for forest workers to use written training protocols that could be widely applied. A relatively unskilled and inexperienced labor crew could adequately carry out its tasks by following a few standard rules in the new forest environment. Harvesting logs of relatively uniform width and length not only made it possible to forecast yields successfully but also to market homogeneous product units to logging contractors and timber merchants. Commercial logic and bureaucratic logic were, in this instance, synonymous; it was a system that promised to maximize the return of a single commodity over the long haul and at the same time lent itself to a centralized scheme of management.

The new legible forest was also easier to manipulate experimentally. Now that the more complex old-growth forest had been replaced by a forest in which many variables were held constant, it was a far simpler matter to examine the effects of such variables as fertilizer applications, rainfall, and weeding, on same-age, single-species stands. It was the closest thing to a forest laboratory one could imagine at the time. The very simplicity of the forest made it possible, for the first time, to assess novel regimens of forest management under nearly experimental conditions.

Although the geometric, uniform forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction, it quickly became a powerful aesthetic as well. The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance. Forests might be inspected in much the same way as a commanding officer might review his troops on parade, and woe to the forest guard whose “beat” was not sufficiently trim or “dressed.” This aboveground order required that underbrush be removed and that fallen trees and branches be gathered and hauled off. Unauthorized disturbances-whether by fire or by local populations-were seen as implicit threats to management routines. The more uniform the forest, the greater the possibilities for centralized management; the routines that could be applied minimized the need for the discretion necessary in the management of diverse old-growth forests.

The controlled environment of the redesigned, scientific forest promised many striking advantages. It could be synoptically surveyed by the chief forester; it could be more easily supervised and harvested according to centralized, long-range plans; it provided a steady, uniform commodity, thereby eliminating one major source of revenue fluctuation; and it created a legible natural terrain that facilitated manipulation and experimentation.

This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the immanent logic of its techniques. It was not and could not ever be realized in practice. Both nature and the human factor intervened. The existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations, and disease conspired to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Also, given the insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, people living nearby typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and kindling, make charcoal, and use the forest in other ways that prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully realized. Although, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs.

The principles of scientific forestry were applied as rigorously as was practicable to most large German forests throughout much of the nineteenth century. The Norway spruce, known for its hardiness, rapid growth, and valuable wood, became the bread-and-butter tree of commercial forestry. Originally, the Norway spruce was seen as a restoration crop that might revive overexploited mixed forests, but the commercial profits from the first rotation were so stunning that there was little effort to return to mixed forests. The monocropped forest was a disaster for peasants who were now deprived of all the grazing, food, raw materials, and medicines that the earlier forest ecology had afforded. Diverse old-growth forests, about three-fourths of which were broadleaf (deciduous) species, were replaced by largely coniferous forests in which Norway spruce or Scotch pine were the dominant or often only species.

In the short run, this experiment in the radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity was a resounding success. It was a rather long short run, in the sense that a single crop rotation of trees might take eighty years to mature. The productivity of the new forests reversed the decline in the domestic wood supply, provided more uniform stands and more usable wood fiber, raised the economic return of forest land, and appreciably shortened rotation times (the time it took to harvest a stand and plant another). Like row crops in a field, the new softwood forests were prodigious producers of a single commodity. Little wonder that the German model of intensive commercial forestry became standard throughout the world. Gifford Pinchot, the second chief forester of the United States, was trained at the French forestry school at Nancy, which followed a German-style curriculum, as did most U.S. and European forestry schools. The first forester hired by the British to assess and manage the great forest resources of India and Burma was Dietrich Brandes, a German. By the end of the nineteenth century, German forestry science was hegemonic.

The great simplification of the forest into a “one-commodity machine” was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying “outside the brackets” returned to haunt this technical vision.

In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent.”

A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora—which were, and still are, not entirely understood—was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.

Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong, but mentioning a few of the major effects of simplification will illustrate how vital many of the factors bracketed by scientific forestry turned out to be. German forestry’s attention to formal order and ease of access for management and extraction led to the clearing of underbrush, deadfalls, and snags (standing dead trees), greatly reducing the diversity of insect, mammal, and bird populations so essential to soil-building processes. The absence of litter and woody biomass on the new forest floor is now seen as a major factor leading to thinner and less nutritious soils. Same-age, same-species forests not only created a far less diverse habitat but were also more vulnerable to massive storm-felling. The very uniformity of species and age among, say, Norway spruce also provided a favorable habitat to all the “pests” which were specialized to that species. Populations of these pests built up to epidemic proportions, inflicting losses in yields and large outlays for fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, or rodenticides. Apparently the first rotation of Norway spruce had grown exceptionally well in large part because it was living off (or mining) the long-accumulated soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest that it had replaced. Once that capital was depleted, the steep decline in growth rates began.

As pioneers in scientific forestry, the Germans also became pioneers in recognizing and attempting to remedy many of its undesirable consequences. To this end, they invented the science of what they called “forest hygiene.” In place of hollow trees that had been home to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local schoolchildren. Several species of spiders, which had disappeared from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced. What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production purposes. In this case, “restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity.

The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately, however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely bracketed came back to haunt it.

Even in the realm of greatest interest—namely, the production of wood fiber—the consequences of not seeing the forest for the trees sooner or later became glaring. Many were directly traceable to the basic simplification imposed in the interest of ease of management and economic return: monoculture. Monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are. As Richard Plochmann expresses it, “One further drawback, which is typical of all pure plantations, is that the ecology of the natural plant associations became unbalanced. Outside of the natural habitat, and when planted in pure stands, the physical condition of the single tree weakens and resistance against enemies decreases.” Any unmanaged forest may experience stress from storms, disease, drought, fragile soil, or severe cold. A diverse, complex forest, however, with its many species of trees, its full complement of birds, insects, and mammals, is far more resilient—far more able to withstand and recover from such injuries—than pure stands. Its very diversity and complexity help to inoculate it against devastation: a windstorm that fells large, old trees of one species will typically spare large trees of other species as well as small trees of the same species; a blight or insect attack that threatens, say, oaks may leave lindens and hornbeams unscathed. Just as a merchant who, not knowing what conditions her ships will face at sea, sends out scores of vessels with different designs, weights, sails, and navigational aids stands a better chance of having much of her fleet make it to port, while a merchant who stakes everything on a single ship design and size runs a higher risk of losing everything, forest biodiversity acts like an insurance policy. Like the enterprise run by the second merchant, the simplified forest is a more vulnerable system, especially over the long haul, as its effects on soil, water, and “pest” populations become manifest. Such dangers can only partly be checked by the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, and fungicides. Given the fragility of the simplified production forest, the massive outside intervention that was required to establish it—we might call it the administrators’ forest—is increasingly necessary in order to sustain it as well.

Social Facts, Raw and Cooked

Society must be remade before it can be the object of quantification. Categories of people and things must be defined, measures must be interchangeable; land and commodities must be conceived as represented by an equivalent in money. There is much of what Weber called rationalization in this, and also a good deal of centralization.

— Theodore M. Porter, “Objectivity as Standardization”

The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and revenue.

If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, although, like a forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to easily yield its secrets to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest—nor should they—in describing an entire social reality, any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, and until the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding that were adequate to these tasks. As we shall see, here are some instructive parallels between the development of modern “fiscal forestry” and modern forms of taxable property in land. Premodern states were no less concerned with tax receipts than are modern states. But, as with premodern state forestry, the taxation techniques and reach of the premodern state left much to be desired.

Absolutist France in the seventeenth century is a case in point. Indirect taxes—excise levies on salt and tobacco, tolls, license fees, and the sale of offices and titles—were favored forms of taxation; they were easy to administer and required little or nothing in the way of information about landholding and income. The tax-exempt status of the nobility and clergy meant that a good deal of the landed property was not taxed at all, transferring much of the burden to wealthy commoner farmers and the peasantry. Common land, although it was a vitally important subsistence resource for the rural poor, yielded no revenue either. In the eighteenth century, the physiocrats would condemn all common property on two presumptive grounds: it was inefficiently exploited, and it was fiscally barren.

What must strike any observer of absolutist taxation is how wildly variable and unsystematic it was. James Collins has found that the main direct land tax, the taille, was frequently not paid at all and that no community paid more than one-third of what they were assessed. The result was that the state routinely relied on exceptional measures to overcome shortfalls in revenue or to pay for new expenses, particularly military campaigns. The crown exacted “forced loans” (rentes, droits aliénés) in return for annuities that it might or might not honor; it sold offices and titles (vénalites d’offices); it levied exceptional hearth taxes (fouages extraordinaires); and, worst of all, it billeted troops directly in communities, often ruining the towns in the process.

The billeting of troops, a common form of fiscal punishment, is to modern forms of systematic taxation as the drawing and quartering of would-be regicides (so strikingly described by Michel Foucault at the beginning of Discipline and Punish) is to modern forms of systematic incarceration of criminals. Not that there was a great deal of choice involved. The state simply lacked both the information and the administrative grid that would have allowed it to exact from its subjects a reliable revenue that was more closely tied to their actual capacity to pay. As with forest revenue, there was no alternative to rough-and-ready calculations and their corresponding fluctuations in yields. Fiscally, the premodern state was, to use Charles Lindblom’s felicitous phrase, “all thumbs and no fingers”; it was incapable of fine tuning.

Here is where the rough analogy between forest management and taxation begins to break down. In the absence of reliable information about sustainable timber yield, the state might either inadvertently overexploit its resources and threaten future supply or else fail to realize the level of proceeds the forest might sustain. The trees themselves, however, were not political actors, whereas the taxable subjects of the crown most certainly were. They signaled their dissatisfaction by flight, by various forms of quiet resistance and evasion, and, in extremis, by outright revolt. A reliable format for taxation of subjects thus depended not just on discovering what their economic conditions were but also on trying to judge what exactions they would vigorously resist.

How were the agents of the state to begin measuring and codifying, throughout each region of an entire kingdom, its population, their landholdings, their harvests, their wealth, the volume of commerce, and so on? The obstacles in the path of even the most rudimentary knowledge of these matters were enormous. The struggle to establish uniform weights and measures and to carry out a cadastral mapping of landholdings can serve as diagnostic examples. Each required a large, costly, long-term campaign against determined resistance. Resistance came not only from the general population but also from local power-holders; they were frequently able to take advantage of the administrative incoherence produced by differing interests and missions within the ranks of officialdom. But in spite of the ebbs and flows of the various campaigns and their national peculiarities, a pattern of adopting uniform measurements and charting cadastral maps ultimately prevailed.

Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were “illegible” to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand. The logic behind the required shorthand was provided, as in scientific forestry, by the pressing material interests of rulers: fiscal receipts, military manpower, and state security. In turn, this shorthand functioned, as did Beckmann’s Normalbaume, as not just a description, however inadequate. Backed by state power through records, courts, and ultimately coercion, these state fictions transformed the reality they presumed to observe, although never so thoroughly as to precisely fit the grid.

Forging the Tools of Legibility: Popular Measures, State Measures

Nonstate forms of measurement grew from the logic of local practice. As such, they shared some generic features despite their bewildering variety-features that made them an impediment to administrative uniformity. Thanks to the synthesis of the medievalist Witold Kula, the reasoning that animated local practices of measurement may be set out fairly succinctly.

Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving expressions as a “stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and a “cartload,” a “basketful,” or a “handful” for volume. Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place to place and that a stone’s throw might not be precisely uniform from person to person, these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally. Even measures that were apparently fixed might be deceptive. The pinte in eighteenth-century Paris, for example, was equivalent to .93 liters, whereas in Seine-en-Montagne it was 1.99 liters and in Precy-sous-Thil, an astounding 3.33 liters. The aune, a measure of length used for cloth, varied depending on the material (the unit for silk, for instance, was smaller than that for linen), and across France there were at least seventeen different aunes.

Local measures were also relational or “commensurable.” Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request. In the part of Malaysia with which I am most familiar, if one were to ask “How far is it to the next village?” a likely response would be “Three rice-cookings.” The answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how much time it will take to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or riding a bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes—until recently, wristwatches were rare—but in units that are locally meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local rice. Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be “Half as much as to cook a chicken.” The reply refers back to a standard that everyone is expected to know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local, inasmuch as regional differences in, say, the type of rice eaten or the preferred way of cooking chicken will give different results.

Many local units of measurement are tied practically to particular activities. Marathi peasants, as Arjun Appadurai notes, express the desired distance between the onion sets they plant in terms of handbreadths. When one is moving along a field row, the hand is, well, the most handy gauge. In similar fashion, a common measure for twine or rope is the distance between the thumb and elbow because this corresponds with how it is wrapped and stored. As with setting onions, the process of measuring is embedded in the activity itself and requires no separate operation. Such measurements, moreover, are often approximate; they are only as exact as the task at hand requires. Rainfall may be said to be abundant or inadequate if the context of the query implies an interest in a particular crop. And a reply in terms of inches of rainfall, however accurate, would also fail to convey the desired information; it ignores such vital matters as the timing of the rain. For many purposes, an apparently vague measurement may communicate more valuable information than a statistically exact figure. The cultivator who reports that his rice yield from a plot is anywhere between four and seven baskets is conveying more accurate information, when the focus of attention is on the variability of the yield, than if he reported a ten-year statistical average of 5.6 baskets.

There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound.

Nowhere is the particularity of customary measurement more evident than with cultivated land. Modern abstract measures of land by surface area—so many hectares or acres—are singularly uninformative figures to a family that proposes to make its living from these acres. 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. Customary measures of land have therefore taken a variety of forms corresponding to those aspects of the land that are of greatest practical interest. Where land was abundant and manpower or draftpower scarce, the most meaningful gauge of land was often the number of days required to plow or to weed it. A plot of land in nineteenthcentury France, for example, would be described as representing so many morgen or journals (days of work) and as requiring a specific kind of work (homée, bechée, fauchée). How many morgen were represented by a field of, say, ten acres could vary greatly; if the land were rocky and steeply pitched, it might require twice as much labor to work than if it were rich bottomland. The morgen would also differ from place to place depending on the strength of local draftpower and the crops sown, and it would differ from time to time as technology (plow tips, yokes, harnesses) affected the work a man could accomplish in a day.

Land might also be evaluated according to the amount of seed required to sow it. If the soil were very good, a field would be densely sown, whereas poor land would be more lightly seeded. The amount of seed sown to a field is in fact a relatively good proxy for average yield, as the sowing is done in anticipation of average growing conditions, while the actual seasonal yield would be more variable. Given a particular crop regimen, the amount of seed sown would indicate roughly how productive a field had been, although it would reveal little about how arduous the land was to cultivate or how variable the harvests were. But the average yield from a plot of land is itself a rather abstract figure. What most farmers near the subsistence margin want to know above all is whether a particular farm will meet their basic needs reliably. Thus small farms in Ireland were described as a “farm of one cow” or a “farm of two cows” to indicate their grazing capacity to those who lived largely by milk products and potatoes. The physical area a farm might comprise was of little interest compared to whether it would feed a particular family.

To grasp the prodigious variety of customary ways of measuring land, we would have to imagine literally scores of “maps” constructed along very different lines than mere surface area. I have in mind the sorts of maps devised to capture our attention with a kind of fun-house effect in which, say, the size of a country is made proportional to its population rather than its geographical size, with China and India looming menacingly over Russia, Brazil, and the United States, while Libya, Australia, and Greenland virtually disappear. These types of customary maps (for there would be a great many) would construct the landscape according to units of work and yield, type of soil, accessibility, and ability to provide subsistence, none of which would necessarily accord with surface area. The measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual, and historically specific. What meets the subsistence needs of one family may not meet the subsistence needs of another. Factors such as local crop regimens, labor supply, agricultural technology, and weather ensure that the standards of evaluation vary from place to place and over time. Directly apprehended by the state, so many maps would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They definitely would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.

The Politics of Measurement

Thus far, this account of local measurement practices risks giving the impression that, although local conceptions of distance, area, volume, and so on were different from and more varied than the unitary abstract standards a state might favor, they were nevertheless aiming at objective accuracy. That impression would be false. Every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations. To understand measurement practices in early modern Europe, as Kula demonstrates, one must relate them to the contending interests of the major estates: aristocrats, clergy, merchants, artisans, and serfs.

A good part of the politics of measurement sprang from what a contemporary economist might call the “stickiness” of feudal rents. Noble and clerical claimants often found it difficult to increase feudal dues directly; the levels set for various charges were the result of long struggle, and even a small increase above the customary level was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition. Adjusting the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the same end. The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller baskets. While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction might increasingly favor the lord. The results of such fiddling were far from trivial. Kula estimates that the size of the bushel (boisseau) used to collect the main feudal rent (taille) increased by one-third between 1674 and 1716 as part of what was called the réaction féodale.

Even when the unit of measurement-say, the bushel-was apparently agreed upon by all, the fun had just begun. Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be adjusted through wear, bulging, tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of the rim, and so on. In some areas the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall. Nor did it end there. How the grain was to be poured (from shoulder height, which packed it somewhat, or from waist height?), how damp it could be, whether the container could be shaken down, and, finally, if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy. Some arrangements called for the grain to be heaped, some for a “halfheap,” and still others for it to be leveled or “striked” (ras). These were not trivial matters. A feudal lord could increase his rents by 25 percent by insisting on receiving wheat and rye in heaped bushels. If, by custom, the bushel of grain was to be striked, then a further micropolitics erupted over the strickle. Was it to be round, thereby packing in grain as it was rolled across the rim, or was it to be sharp-edged? Who would apply the strickle? Who could be trusted to keep it?

A comparable micropolitics, as one might expect, swirled around the unit of land measurement. A common measure of length, the ell, was used to mark off the area to be plowed or weeded as a part of feudal labor dues. Once again, the lengths and widths in ells were “sticky,” having been established through long struggle. It was tempting for a lord or overseer to try raising labor dues indirectly by increasing the length of the ell. If the attempt were successful, the formal rules of corvee labor would not be violated, but the amount of work extracted would increase. Perhaps the stickiest of all measures before the nineteenth century was the price of bread. As the most vital subsistence good of premodern times, it served as a kind of cost-of-living index, and its cost was the subject of deeply held popular customs about its relationship to the typical urban wage. Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers, afraid to provoke a riot by directly violating the “just price,” managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour.

Statecraft and the Hieroglyphics of Measurement

Because local standards of measurement were tied to practical needs, because they reflected particular cropping patterns and agricultural technology, because they varied with climate and ecology, because they were “an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege,” and because they were “at the center of bitter class struggle,” they represented a mind-boggling problem for statecraft. Efforts to simplify or standardize measures recur like a leitmotif throughout French history—their reappearance a sure sign of previous failure. More modest attempts to simply codify local practices and create conversion tables were quickly overtaken and rendered obsolete by changes on the ground. The king’s ministers were confronted, in effect, with a patchwork of local measurement codes, each of which had to be cracked. It was as if each district spoke its own dialect, one that was unintelligible to outsiders and at the same time liable to change without notice. Either the state risked making large and potentially damaging miscalculations about local conditions, or it relied heavily on the advice of local trackers—the nobles and clergy in the Crown’s confidence—who, in turn, were not slow to take full advantage of their power.

The illegibility of local measurement practices was more than an administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the Achilles heel of the early modern state; short of religious war, nothing so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting social upheavals. Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively. Obliged to grope its way on the basis of sketchy information, rumor, and self-interested local reports, the state often responded belatedly and inappropriately. Equity in taxation, another sensitive political issue, was beyond the reach of a state that found it difficult to know the basic comparative facts about harvests and prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military garrisons, to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually provoke a political crisis. Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets. No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.

Simplification and Standardization of Measurement

The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could gradually get there, the same language; that is what is proclaimed as the perfection of the social organization.... The great slogan of the day is uniformity.

— Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquete

If scientific forestry’s project of creating a simplified and legible forest encountered opposition from villagers whose usage rights were being challenged, the political opposition to standard and legible units of measurement was even more refractory. The power to establish and impose local measures was an important feudal prerogative with material consequences which the aristocracy and clergy would not willingly surrender. Testimony to their capacity to thwart standardization is evident in the long series of abortive initiatives by absolutist rulers who tried to insist on some degree of uniformity. The very particularity of local feudal practices and their impenetrability to would-be centralizers helped to underwrite the autonomy of local spheres of power.

Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the “metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire.

Large-scale commercial exchange and long-distance trade tend to promote common standards of measurement. For relatively smallscale trade, grain dealers could transact with several suppliers as long as they knew the measure each was using. They might actually profit from their superior grasp of the profusion of units, much as smugglers take advantage of small differences in taxes and tariffs. Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures. Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its reliable uniformity. In proportion, then, as the volume of commerce grew and the goods exchanged became increasingly standardized (a ton of wheat, a dozen plow tips, twenty cart wheels), there was a growing tendency to accept widely agreed upon units of measurement. Officials and physiocrats alike were convinced that uniform measures were the precondition for creating a national market and promoting rational economic action.

The perennial state project of unifying measures throughout the kingdom received a large degree of popular support in the eighteenth century, thanks to the réaction féodale. Aiming to maximize the return on their estates, owners of feudal domains, many of them arrivistes, achieved their goal in part by manipulating units of measurement. This sense of victimization was evident in the cahiers of grievances prepared for the meeting of the Estates General just before the Revolution. The cahiers of the members of the Third Estate consistently called for equal measures (although this was hardly their main grievance), whereas the cahiers of the clergy and nobility were silent, presumably indicating their satisfaction with the status quo on this issue. The following petition from Brittany is typical of the way in which an appeal for unitary measures could be assimilated to devotion to the Crown: “We beg them [the king, his family, and his chief minister] to join with us in checking the abuses being perpetrated by tyrants against that class of citizens which is kind and considerate and which, until this day has been unable to present its very grievances to the very foot of the throne, and now we call on the King to mete out justice, and we express our most sincere desire for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure.”

For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress. The academicians of the revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make France “revenue-rich, militarily potent, and easily administered.” Common measures, it was supposed, would spur the grain trade, make land more productive (by permitting easier comparisons of price and productivity), and, not incidentally, lay the groundwork for a national tax code. But the reformers also had in mind a genuine cultural revolution. “As mathematics was the language of science, so would the metric system be the language of commerce and industry,” serving to unify and transform French society. A rational unit of measurement would promote a rational citizenry.

The simplification of measures, however, depended on that other revolutionary political simplification of the modern era: the concept of a uniform, homogeneous citizenship. As long as each estate operated within a separate legal sphere, as long as different categories of people were unequal in law, it followed that they might also have unequal rights with respect to measures. The idea of equal citizenship, the abstraction of the “unmarked” citizen, can be traced to the Enlightenment and is evident in the writings of the Encyclopedists. For the Encyclopedists, the cacophony among measurements, institutions, inheritance laws, taxation, and market regulations was the great obstacle to the French becoming a single people. They envisioned a series of centralizing and rationalizing reforms that would transform France into a national community where the same codified laws, measures, customs, and beliefs would everywhere prevail. It is worth noting that this project promotes the concept of national citizenship—a national French citizen perambulating the kingdom and encountering exactly the same fair, equal conditions as the rest of his compatriots. In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center. The proponents of this vision well understood that what was at stake was not merely administrative convenience but also the transformation of a people: “The uniformity of customs, viewpoints, and principles of action will, inevitably, lead to a greater community of habits and predispositions.” The abstract grid of equal citizenship would create a new reality: the French citizen.

The homogenization of measures, then, was part of a larger, emancipatory simplification. At one stroke the equality of all French people before the law was guaranteed by the state; they were no longer mere subjects of their lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens. All the previous “natural” distinctions were now “denaturalized” and nullified, at least in law. In an unprecedented revolutionary context where an entirely new political system was being created from first principles, it was surely no great matter to legislate uniform weights and measures. As the revolutionary decree read: “The centuries old dream of the masses of only one just measure has come true! The Revolution has given the people the meter.”

Proclaiming the universal meter was far simpler than ensuring that it became the daily practice of French citizens. The state could insist on the exclusive use of its units in the courts, in the state school system, and in such documents as property deeds, legal contracts, and tax codes. Outside these official spheres, the metric system made its way only very slowly. In spite of a decree for confiscating toise sticks in shops and replacing them with meter sticks, the populace continued to use the older system, often marking their meter sticks with the old measures. Even as late as 1828 the new measures were more a part of le pays légal than of le pays réel. As Chateaubriand remarked, “Whenever you meet a fellow who, instead of talking arpents, toises, and pieds, refers to hectares, meters, and centimeters, rest assured, the man is a prefect.”

Land Tenure: Local Practice and Fiscal Shorthand

The revenue of the early modern state came mainly from levies on commerce and land, the major sources of wealth. For commerce, this implied an array of excise taxes, tolls and market duties, licensing fees, and tariffs. For landed wealth, this meant somehow attaching every parcel of taxable property to an individual or an institution responsible for paying the tax on it. As straightforward as this procedure seems in the context of the modern state, its achievement was enormously difficult for at least two reasons. First, the actual practices of customary land tenure were frequently so varied and intricate as to defy any one-to-one equation of taxpayer and taxable property. And second, as was the case with standardizing measurement, there were social forces whose interests could only be damaged by the unified and transparent set of property relations desired by the state’s fiscal agents. In the end, the centralizing state succeeded in imposing a novel and (from the center) legible property system, which, as had the work of the scientific foresters, not only radically abridged the practices that the system described but at the same time transformed those practices to align more closely with their shorthand, schematic reading.

An Illustration

Negara mawi tata, desa mawi cara (The capital has its order, the village its customs).

— Javanese proverb

A hypothetical case of customary land tenure practices may help demonstrate how difficult it is to assimilate such practices to the barebones schema of a modern cadastral map. The patterns I will describe are an amalgam of practices I have encountered in the literature of or in the course of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, and although the case is hypothetical, it is not unrealistic.

Let us imagine a community in which families have usufruct rights to parcels of cropland during the main growing season. Only certain crops, however, may be planted, and every seven years the usufruct land is redistributed among resident families according to each family’s size and its number of able-bodied adults. After the harvest of the mainseason crop, all cropland reverts to common land where any family may glean, graze their fowl and livestock, and even plant quickly maturing, dry-season crops. Rights to graze fowl and livestock on pastureland held in common by the village is extended to all local families, but the number of animals that can be grazed is restricted according to family size, especially in dry years when forage is scarce. Families not using their grazing rights can give them to other villagers but not to outsiders. Everyone has the right to gather firewood for normal family needs, and the village blacksmith and baker are given larger allotments. No commercial sale from village woodlands is permitted.

Trees that have been planted and any fruit they may bear are the property of the family who planted them, no matter where they are now growing. Fruit fallen from such trees, however, is the property of anyone who gathers it. When a family fells one of its trees or a tree is felled by a storm, the trunk belongs to the family, the branches to the immediate neighbors, and the “tops” (leaves and twigs) to any poorer villager who carries them off. Land is set aside for use or leasing out by widows with children and dependents of conscripted males. Usufruct rights to land and trees may be let to anyone in the village; the only time they may be let to someone outside the village is if no one in the community wishes to claim them.

After a crop failure leading to a food shortage, many of these arrangements are readjusted. Better-off villagers are expected to assume some responsibility for poorer relatives—by sharing their land, by hiring them, or by simply feeding them. Should the shortage persist, a council composed of heads of families may inventory food supplies and begin daily rationing. In cases of severe shortages or famine, the women who have married into the village but have not yet borne children will not be fed and are expected to return to their native village. This last practice alerts us to the inequalities that often prevail in local customary tenure; single women, junior males, and anyone defined as falling outside the core of the community are clearly disadvantaged.

This description could be further elaborated. It is itself a simplification, but it does convey some of the actual complexity of property relations in contexts where local customs have tended to prevail. To describe the usual practices in this fashion, as if they were laws, is itself a distortion. 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.

Imagine a lawgiver w