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two concepts of legibility

ideolalia.com · 2,235 words · saved by 1 readers

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott defines “legibility” as something a state imposes on its people and resources. It is a coercive abstraction, not only treating different people, places, and ways of life as if they were the same1, but creating an environment which encourages people to forget those differences ever existed. One of Scott’s first examples is land ownership in pre-modern rural villages, each of which had its own peculiar practices built over generations, describing the obligations between neighbors, the obligations between relatives, and the use of common pastures and forests. These practices were perfectly legible within a given village, but a cacophonous mess to state officials trying to understand all of them at once. And so the states sent in surveyors, who drew sharp boundaries on their maps. A year later came the tax collectors, maps in hand. If a family paid taxes on what was once common property, they had little motivation to let their neighbors continue to us

In Seeing Like a State , James C. Scott defines “legibility” as something a state imposes on its people and resources. It is a coercive abstraction, not only treating different people, places, and ways of life as if they were the same 1 , but creating an environment which encourages people to forget those differences ever existed. One of Scott’s first examples is land ownership in pre-modern rural villages, each of which had its own peculiar practices built over generations, describing the obligations between neighbors, the obligations between relatives, and the use of common pastures and fore

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