beyond "the state" and failed schemes

Beyond "The State" and Failed SchemesAuthor(s): Tania Murray LiSource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Sep., 2005), pp. 383-394Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3567024 .

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TANIA MURRAY LI

Beyond "the State" and Failed Schemes

ABSTRACT In this article, I propose five ways to move beyond the analytical scheme of James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998). I

question the spatial optic that posits an "up there," all-seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power, spread progressively outward to "nonstate" spaces beyond its reach. I highlight the role of parties beyond "the state" that attempt to govern-social reformers, scientists, and the so-called nongovernmental agencies, among others. I look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the more general problematic of "improvement" emerging from a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations. I explore the recourse to

mrtis (contextualized, local knowledge and practice) situated beyond the purview of planning. Finally, I reframe the

question posed by Scott-why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?-to examine the question posed so provocatively by James Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, conjunctural effects? [Keywords: state, governmentality, space, knowledge, planning]

LIKE A PLANNER CONSTITUTING a field of interven-

tion, an academic making an argument has to focus his or her field of vision, be selective, and simplify. James Scott is a master of focused vision, which is one reason why his work is widely read and cited in anthropology and other disciplines. His key concepts, phrases, and images are bold and memorable. Perhaps this has something to do with disciplinary training: He was trained in political science, a field that seeks to devise models about big topics (e.g., the state, power, democracy, rebellion). Anthropologists tend to be coy about turning complex, overdetermined conjunctures into grist for generalizing schemes. We recognize the value of ethnographic work that contributes to theory, but we seldom produce a single message that can be readily trans- ported and deployed in diverse settings. I believe both approaches have merit and that there are good reasons to continue the dialogue.

This article is a critical engagement with Scott's book, SeeingLike a State (1998). As I understand it, this is the core of Scott's argument: States construct simplified models of the world that they would like to control and improve, yet improvement schemes fail in proportion to their effectiveness at preventing people from applying the everyday knowledge essential to human well-being. He illustrates his argument with rich empirical material from a range of sites. He recognizes that grand schemes are contingent on a tangled set of practices, processes, and relations, but like a state planner, he keeps his eyes on the schemes themselves, leaving the messiness inside or around them on the peripheries

of his field of vision. I propose to situate state optics and improvement schemes in relation to other attempts to theorize how power works and to highlight some of the complexi- ties that are mentioned or anticipated in Scott's account but are consigned to the interstices and footnotes. I agree with the main outlines of Scott's argument: Ruling regimes do operate as he proposes, for the reasons and with the conse- quence? he observes. What I offer, then, is less a critique of Scott's main argument than an amplification of some of the points potentially lost or submerged in Scott's schematics. My use of the word beyond in my title acknowledges the value of Scott's work as a starting point and a provocation. Rereading Seeing Like a State (1998) reminded me of how much I have learned from this work; it further prompted me to try to articulate what else needs to be said.

Scott is an engaged scholar who has consistently addressed issues with important political stakes. Out of respect for his style of committed scholarship, I start with an account of the reasons why what I have to say might matter. I argue that vast schemes to improve the human condition continue to be designed and implemented, but many do not take the highly visible form Scott identifies as "high modern." Rather than etch their visions of improvement on the landscape by constructing orderly cities, forests, farms, and resettlement sites, these schemes work on and through the practices and desires of their target populations. Their proponents are not only the state apparatus but also an array of authorities, including the so-called nongovernment organizations (NGOs). They operate across multiple spatial

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 107, Issue 3, pp. 383-394, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433. 0 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.



384 American Anthropologist * Vol. 107, No. 3 * September 2005

scales. They seldom use coercion, aiming instead to reshape the actions of subjects who retain the freedom to act other- wise. Scott's binary categories "state-society," "state space- nonstate space," and "power-resistance" provide insuffi- cient analytical traction to expose the logic of these schemes or to examine their effects. One example will help orient the reader to the detailed arguments I develop below.

Between 1998 and 2006, the World Bank in Indonesia will spend $1 billion in loan funds on a scheme to reform Indonesian society from the bottom up.' The scheme fo- cuses on village infrastructure planning decisions, seeking to make them more accountable, transparent, and efficient. It does this by allocating funds through a minutely speci- fied and monitored process in which villages compete for funds, making proposals adjudicated at the subdistrict level. The small projects that are funded are conventional enough (e.g., village roads, bridges, minor irrigation, credit). The novelty of the program lies in the planning process itself, carefully designed to root out corruption, collusion, and waste. Social research experts have mapped every stage in the project-planning and delivery process, detecting the points at which funds leak and fine-tuning the project system to foster compliance and increase the opportunity-cost of rule breaking. Villagers have a choice: If they wish to access the funds, they must conform to the prescribed behav- iors. The World Bank scheme does not coerce people; rather, it attempts to act on their actions, guiding them in an improved direction. The scale of the scheme is impressive: It operates in one out of three Indonesian villages, affecting tens of millions of people.

Deliberately reversing the past practice of dictating improvement from a distance, the World Bank scheme has been designed by anthropologists, based on careful ethnographic study of village lives and power relations. The planners use pilot tests and a stepwise approach. They attempt to build on indigenous knowledge and practice and to em- power villagers to take control of their own affairs. They embrace the dynamic complexity of social and economic life, and they describe their efforts frankly as experiments that attempt to seed social change without controlling it precisely. They do everything, in short, that Scott recommends in his book as the antidote to the hubris of planning. But there is a fundamental continuity between the World Bank planners and high-modern planners Scott describes: They position themselves as experts who know how others should live, they collect and arrange data according to simplified grids, they diagnose deficiencies, and they devise elaborate interventions to bring about improvement.

However well-meaning-recall that the planners of high-modern schemes were also well-meaning-the World Bank's scheme is still an exercise of power. Not only do experts direct peoples' conduct without a democratic mandate, they define what counts as development and how it can be achieved. Focused on the improvement of village-level planning, the scheme sets aside other causes of poverty. Like the development programs in Lesotho ana- lyzed by James Ferguson two decades ago, the World Bank's

scheme reposes "political questions of land, resources, jobs, or wages as technical 'problems' responsive to the technical 'development' intervention" (1994:270). The World Bank scheme has an impressive record of delivering on its material promises: good quality village infrastructure at low cost. But if, as Ferguson recommends, we step away from the World Bank's way of seeing the problem of poverty (as a matter of deficient planning), and away from the question of the program's success or failure, different questions come into view. Why, and for whom, is the fostering of competition, the stimulation of entrepreneurship, and the elimination of corruption in village planning a preeminent goal? How does the World Bank reconcile its mandate to relieve poverty with a strategy that withholds funds from villages unable to meet the "performance" standards the program demands? Are the World Bank's neoliberal criteria for distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor to be accepted without debate? Why focus on correcting the deficiencies of villagers while leaving the deficiencies of senior officials, politicians, and army generals unexamined and unimproved?

My article has five sections. First, I question the spatial optic of Scott's account that posits an "up there," all- seeing state operating as a preformed repository of power spread progressively and unproblematically across national terrain, colonizing nonstate spaces and their unruly inhab- itants. There is, I argue, no spatial beyond of the state, and there are no subjects outside power. Second, I argue that we need to look beyond "the state" to the range of parties that attempt to govern. "The state" has seldom had a monopoly on improvement: It shares this function with social reformers, scientists, missionaries, the so-called nongovernmental agencies, and, in the global south, donor agencies with their teams of expert consultants. Third, I argue that we should look beyond authoritarian high modernism to the more general problematic of "improvement," which emerged his- torically when the purpose of rule was recast in terms of a governmental rationality focused on the welfare of populations. Fourth, I propose a more complex rendering of the relationship between simplification, control, and improvement, and I examine the range of contexts in which mftis (contextualized, situated knowledge and practice) is nur- tured both within and beyond the state apparatus. Metis, I argue, is not the opposite of power; it is imbricated with it. Finally, I suggest we need to go beyond the question posed by Scott-why have certain schemes designed to improve the human condition failed?-to examine the question posed by Ferguson: What do these schemes do? What are their messy, contradictory, multilayered, and conjunctural effects? My presentation here is necessarily synoptic, and I refer the reader to writings by anthropologists and others who explore these issues in greater depth.

BEYOND "THE STATE" AND STATE SPACE: PRACTICES AND POSITIONS

Scott does not define what he means by "the state," but talk of what the state sees or does suggests an image of the



Li * Beyond "the State" and Failed Schemes 385

state as a unified source of intention, "a person writ large" (Mitchell 1991:83), capable of devising coherent policies and plans. This image of the state serves Scott's purpose well because he is interested in centrally planned schemes; however, it has several limitations. The state, argues Philip Abrams (1988), is not a fact but a claim. For him, the idea of "the state" is "at most a message of domination-an ide- ological artifact attributing unity, morality and independence to the disunited, amoral and dependent workings of the practice of government" (Abrams 1988:81). Timothy Mitchell draws our attention to the modern techniques of governing that produce the apparent solidness of the state and its separation from society. Rather than take the presence of "the state" for granted, Mitchell recommends that we examine the practices "through which the un- certain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced" (1991:78). In this way, we can account for the prominence of the state idea, without attributing to the state a "coherence, unity, and absolute autonomy" (Mitchell 1991:78) that it does not have.2 Several anthropologists have pursued this line of inquiry to good effect, examining not only how state officials produce plans but also how practices of data collection, planning, and so on produce the apparent autonomy and authority of "the state."3

The idea of the state is associated with an image of power as a "thing"-one that is spatially concentrated in the bureaucratic apparatus and the top echelons of the ruling regime, from which it spreads outward across the nation, and downward into the lives of the populace. Critics of the concept of an "up there" state with stored powers ready for deployment argue for a decentering of our power geome- tries, to examine how power works to constitute distinctive spaces and how, conversely, the arrangement of space generates the effect of power.4 The idea of "the nation," for example, is the effect of practices such as marking and policing borders, mapping and dividing territory, issuing passports, passing laws, and collecting statistics. Attending to practices keeps the focus on "how" questions: "how different locales are constituted as authoritative and powerful, how different agents are assembled with specific powers, and how different domains are constituted as governable and administrable" (Dean 1999:29).

In his account of indirect rule in colonial Fiji, Nicholas Thomas provides an illustration of how practices produce the effect of distinct spaces with uneven powers. The colonial regime needed to support the authority of local chiefs over villagers while simultaneously subordinating the chiefs to colonial rule and imparting to the populace the sense of being subject to an overarching power. These goals were achieved by having the Native chiefs perform as petty officials. They were instructed by the governor to write everything down-letting no event, no birth, death, or alterca- tion pass through the mesh of surveillance-and to submit regular reports. This activity was significant, Thomas argues, not so much for the substance of the information thus collected, which was mostly trivial, but for the way the practice

created the effect of overview, of government as a system, and of preeminent powers revolving around the figure of the governor, to whom all reports were submitted. The "re- markable array of regulations, ordinances, resolutions and interventions ... [were] essentially irrational" and had little impact on the health of the populations or even on political control; "specification and regulation were rather ends in themselves, which constituted the ambit of state control" (Thomas 1994:123-124).

Practices position people as subjects with variable ca- pacities for action and critique. Thus, practices of planning and management position people as experts, or as targets of expertise; practices of mapping, census taking, and law making position people as residents of villages, bearers of rights, and members of groups; kinship practices position people in gendered and generational hierarchies; and cultural practices mark ethnic boundaries and territorial enti- tlements. Resistance arises from within these matrices and responds to multiple fields of power. Donald Moore (1998) illustrates this point strikingly in his account of Angela, a farmer in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands who constructed a solitary, bright blue house inside the linear grid of an official resettlement scheme. Her action was, at once, a response to official threats and coercion, a claim to the ben- efits promised by her participation in the independence struggle, a critique of an ineffective tribal chief, and an as- sertion of the autonomy she gained by farming on land situated beyond the control of multiple male guardians and instructors.

Scott is interested in locating pristine spaces outside power, pure sites of resistance, and subjects whose geographical location on the margins of markets and states enable them to retain their autonomy and practical knowledge intact." A focus on positioning, I suggest, brings a more complex field of meaning and action into view. It enables us to distinguish and examine the relations between positions of different kinds: geographical location (margins or centers), social standing (dominant or subaltern), and political stance (acquiescent or resistant). Resistance may be found at the heart of the bureaucratic apparatus, where experts debate the merits of diverse plans or argue against excessive intervention in peoples' lives. Populations excluded from official maps and invisible in the national census may be more deeply taken by the idea of "the state" than savvy, urban skeptics; therefore, they devise strategies to position themselves closer to what they imagine to be the center.6

BEYOND STATE SCHEMES: MULTIPLE AUTHORITIES DEVISING IMPROVEMENTS

Scott recognizes the potential anachronism of his focus on "the state" as the singular source of grand schemes, and he situates state-driven, high-modern planning from roughly 1830 to World War I (1998:89). He explains that only states have the material and coercive resources to move people around and build cities and settlements. Furthermore,




only states have an interest in mapping and listing populations for the purpose of taxation and control. Less visible in Scott's account are the missionaries, social reformers, scientists, political activists, ethnographers, and other experts who routinely diagnose deficiencies in the population or some segment of it, and who propose calculated schemes of improvement. These parties were active in colonial situations, sometimes aligning with and other times contesting the priorities of the ruling regime.7 Today they are joined by the misnamed "nongovernmental" organizations, both national and transnational, which are involved in arenas such as public health, welfare, agricultural extension, conservation, human rights, good governance, and, increasingly, peace building-all elements of the hydra- headed endeavor we have come to know as "development." The extent to which improvement schemes are concentrated in-or coordinated by-the official state apparatus is a matter for empirical investigation at specific sites and conjunctures.

Rather than emerging fully formed from a single source, many improvement schemes are formed through an assemblage of objectives, knowledges, techniques, and practices of diverse provenance. In the words of Nikolas Rose (1999:276), a scheme often starts out as a "contingent lash- up" with less coherence than we might assume. He gives the example of 19th-century working-class pedagogy in Britain that

arose out of a multitude of attempts by churchmen, phi- lanthropists and organizations of working people themselves, seeking to educate their children and to campaign for the extension of their own experiments in pedagogy on a wider scale: only later were these diverse and often radical lines of development to be captured, reorganized and rationalized within a programme of universal education which combined these aspirations with others to do with order, civility and domestication. [Rose 1999:276]

Marc DuBois (1991:10-18) describes a similar trajectory in the field of birth control. Women in the late 19th century demanded contraception in the name of reproductive health and autonomy. Their demand generated a new domain of intervention for medical professionals who devised technologies, regulated access, and dictated morality. Con- traceptive techniques were later taken up for quite different purposes by social engineers concerned with the eugenic improvement of populations. These techniques traveled to the global south under the label "population control," where the concern was with impoverished masses making demands on the world's resources. Invasive, top-down population control was subjected to critique and reframed, iron- ically enough, as a measure to secure women's reproductive health and autonomy.

It is important to note that each point in the trajectories Rose and DuBois describe involved a different assemblage of interests, experts, techniques, and discourses; further, the shift from one conjuncture to the next was the outcome of agency and struggle rather than a master plan. There was no single state vision. Different government departments were

involved, pursuing various agendas that meshed with pop- ular demand in contingent ways. When an assemblage be- comes stabilized as a discursive formation, it supplies a complex of knowledge and practice in terms of which certain kinds of problems and solutions become thinkable whereas others are submerged, at least for a time. The goals and desires of particular social groups contribute to the emergence of a discursive formation, but such a formation is not the preserve of one social group, and it does not necessarily serve the interests of a dominant class. It is formed within relations of power, but it is not conjured up ex nihilo by a sovereign will. Assemblage is itself an ongoing process, and a discursive formation is never complete or finished. In fact, neither is it really singular: It is always subject to contesta- tion and reformulation by a range of pressures and forces it cannot contain.8

The stability of a discursive formation is demonstrated when elements that are pragmatically "lashed up" become systematized, their discrepant origins submerged. Another indicator is its transferability, when problems remote in time, space, or substance from the original problematic come to be thought about in a similar way (Rose 1999:27- 30). It may crystallize into institutions. Most significantly, it is stabilized when it comes to inform individual behavior and to act as a grid for perception and evaluation (Foucault 1991b:81). An example of a discursive formation that has remained remarkably stable as it has been revised and reworked in terms of new concerns is the "problem" of shifting cultivation in Zambia, described by Hen- rietta Moore and Megan Vaughan (1994). They show how a body of (selective) knowledge about this "problem" was produced at one period, circulated, archived, dredged up, and redeployed not once but repeatedly, obsessively, for more than a century-each time in a changed context but with many of the constituent elements (e.g., terms, images, rationales, proposed solutions) intact. Moreover, it was not simply imposed from outside: Zambian "in- siders," including farmers, contributed to this discursive formation.

The grandiose, high-modern, state-driven projects of rural and urban planning described by Scott were utopian attempts to remake the world according to criteria of rationality and aesthetics, with spaces neatly divided, and populations listed and classified. Finding the world refractory, they often retreated into miniaturism, as Scott observes, mi- cromanaging confined spaces and producing visual effects that were all the more striking because of their spatial con- centration. Less visible, but directed to similar ends, are the formal techniques and grids of calculation-the surnames, maps, and censuses designed to know and manage populations. Less visible still are the "countless, often competing, local tactics of education, persuasion, inducement, management, incitement, motivation, encouragement" (Dillon 1995) in fields such as public schooling, health, and rural development. Such tactics typically operate at a distance, relying on processes of translation that instrumentalize existing forms of authority, invoke a range of expertise,




and adapt the projects devised by one party to the language and concerns of another (Rose 1999). Whether visible and grandiose, or subtle and discrete-and whether initiated by a centralized state apparatus or by other experts-all of these schemes attempt to "improve the human condition." To better understand the origins and contours of the will to improve, and the range of schemes it has spawned and le- gitimized, we can usefully turn to Michel Foucault's theo- rization of governmental power.

BEYOND HIGH MODERNISM: THEORIZING GOVERNMENTALITY Foucault's work on governmentality traces the history of the emergence in Europe of a novel concern among rulers and philosophers: how to optimize the well-being of the population. This concern arose gradually during the 16th century in the context of changing views about statecraft, but it came sharply into view in the 18th century when the new science of statistics revealed that populations have patterns of health, fertility, mobility, and prosperity that can be examined and managed for the benefit of one and all. Se- curing the well-being of the population required attention to the

complex composed of men and things ... men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with all its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to... customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to... accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc. [Foucault 1991a:93]

Determining when to intervene in these relations, and to what ends, came to constitute a new "art" of government. This art required a governmental rationality-a new way of thinking about government as the "right manner of dispos- ing things" in pursuit not of one dogmatic goal but rather a "whole series of specific finalities" to be achieved through "multiform tactics" (Foucault 1991a:95).9

Intrinsic to the art of government applied at the level of the population is respect for the complexity of the relations on which the population's well-being depends, and recognition that the processes intrinsic to populations cannot be managed in micro detail. Government entails (1) setting conditions so that people will be inclined to be- have as they should, (2) acting on actions, yet (3) not attempting to dictate actions or coerce the population. Gov- ernmentality's principal form of knowledge, observes Fou- cault, is "political economy": a reference to Adam Smith's discovery of the "invisible hand" of the market, the hugely complex and largely self-regulating way that economic processes unfold and coordinate the infinite range and vari- ability of individual wills. Just as governing authorities should tread lightly in attempting to regulate "the economy," the art of government directed toward the population recognizes the delicate balance of its vital processes. It devises projects of improvement while respecting "the

integrity and autonomous dynamics of the social body" (Hannah 2000:24).

The elaboration of government as a liberal art late in the 18th century was a reaction to earlier attempts to use new technologies of surveillance-technologies such as the standardized names, measures, maps, lists, permits, and censuses described by Scott-to govern through exhaus- tive regulation (Burchell 1991:126). The liberal argument was that attempts at detailed management were despotic, futile, and harmful. As Graham Burchell explains the critique was not against despotism in the name of citizens' rights ("You must not do this, you do not have the right"); rather, it focused on the hollowness of the claim to omniscience and totalizing direction ("You must not do this because you do not and cannot know what you are doing" [1991:137]).

Foucault's examination of the liberal arts of government throws the specificity of the high-modern schemes described by Scott into sharp relief. These schemes shared a governmental concern with securing, sustaining, and en- hancing life. But they ignored the lessons of political economy, attempting to fix social and economic processes into a perfected model that brooked no movement. These schemes deliberately removed people from the relations in which their lives were embedded to build on a clean slate. They were planned without humility. They were imposed coercively by authoritarian regimes without democratic checks and balances. They permitted no critique from liberal voices within or outside the regime arguing against governing too much. They were, as Scott observes, exceptional schemes that flourished at particular conjunctures in which it became thinkable and, for some, acceptable to attempt to direct life in more depth and detail than liberal doctrines advise. Finally, these schemes failed for the reasons liberal critics of the late 18th century had already identified: Their designers claimed an omniscience they did not have, and they did not-indeed, could not-know what they were doing.

Bringing together the insights from Foucault and Scott enables us to situate "schemes to improve the human condition" on a continuum that ranges from the more to the less coercive, and that encompasses a range of tactics and techniques. The World Bank scheme that I outlined earlier attempts to direct conduct through the tactic of entice- ment: Rational actors who wish to access project funds will chose to conform to project rules. The urban and rural planning schemes described by Scott coercively destroyed existing spatial arrangements and introduced new ones, with the expectation that from the novel spatial arrangements improved conduct would follow. More authoritarian forms of government are often reserved for sections of a population deemed especially deficient and unable to exercise the responsibility of freedom. Indeed, liberalism is replete with contradictions, as the freedom of some is predicated on the unfreedom of others.10 In 19th-century Europe, as Giovanna Procacci (1991) explains, social experts separated paupers from the general category "the poor" and deprived




paupers of rights on the grounds of chronic, cultural inca- pacity. Excluded from full citizenship, they were the target of schemes for heightened surveillance, extending at times to enforced discipline in pauper colonies and penal institutions. The "normal" poor, in contrast, were largely unana- lyzed and unadministered.

In Europe's colonies, rule was based on conquest. As Achille Mbembe (2001) reminds us, there was no colonial contract and no regime of rights to limit the greed or destruction wrought by extractive regimes. Discipline could be imposed without the interjection of liberal scruples. Yet the liberal arts of government were not absent from the colonies: They coemerged in the colonies roughly in par- allel with their emergence in Europe, although for rather different reasons. Like the paupers of Europe, colonial populations were racialized and pathologized: Entire populations were regarded as both different and deficient. But the response to this pathology could not be the same. Whereas Europe's paupers could be separated from the general population and subjected to intense disciplinary tutelage, it was often not feasible, militarily or economically, to subject entire colonial populations to the same treatment. The req- uisite apparatus of surveillance was not in place. Thus, the search was on for means to govern colonial populations through existing social forces, a prime example being systems for indirect rule that enrolled the authority of chiefs and deployed it to new purposes. Another tactic was to divide the colonized on ethnic or spatial lines-leaving some segments of the population to find their way in a regime of liberal freedoms, subjecting others to detailed programs designed to inculcate new habits and values, and designat- ing still others as static bearers of tradition.11 In contexts in which their extractive endeavors were modest, it was generally in the interest of colonial authorities to desist from interventions that might provoke resistance or upset the balance of economic, social, and ecological processes unnecessarily. Countering the reticence to intervene was the will to improve, a notion emphasizing the right and the responsibility of the colonial power to develop nature's bounty and bring Native welfare and productivity up to new standards. 12

The concept of "governmentality" offers a useful theo- rization of the distinctive mode of power focused on populations and their improvement. But like all theories, it must be judged by its yield: the questions it enables us to ask and the light it sheds on particular conjunctures, with their own histories, spatialities, and practices of rule. A focus on governmentality provokes us to ask how particular governmental programs are devised, the techniques they assem- ble, and how they are transformed or fall apart. It is consis- tent with a differentiated view of ruling regimes, engaged in their own debates over the appropriate forms and limits of intervention, and variably responsive to input from experts and other publics. It enables us to understand why, for example, there was no consensus about how to rule colonial Indonesia in the 19th century. Far from a singular state vision, there were multiple experts and authorities. Some ad-

vocated the drastic reconstitution of Native society to render it modern, others proposed only to adjust and optimize traditional Native ways-even though to optimize "tradition" also meant to transform it, and sometimes to invent it anew.13

BEYOND SIMPLIFICATION: EMBRACING COMPLEXITY AND METIS Scott is surely correct to observe that experts devising improvement schemes generate only the type and density of data required to constitute a field of intervention and to meet specific objectives."4 Less solid, I would suggest, is Scott's argument that the elimination of local knowledge and control are "preconditions" for administrative order, taxation, worker discipline, and profit (Scott 1998:335- 336). To refine the inquiry initiated by Scott about the relationship between simplification, control, and improvement, it is useful to identify conjunctures at which complexity and local knowledge are sustained and to tease out the reasons why. Here, I consider four such conjunctures: (1) when systematic data is ignored in favor of local knowledge, (2) when adjusting local knowledge and practice is the purpose of the intervention, (3) when local knowledge sustains bureaucratic and profit-making schemes that would other- wise collapse, and (4) when local knowledge and practice is embraced because experts recognize it to be intrinsically sound.

I begin with instances in which ruling regimes and other authorities collect very detailed data they do not actually use. I have already drawn on Nicholas Thomas's account of excessive data gathering in colonial Fiji. In colonial Java, in the context of the so-called Ethical Policy that recognized Dutch responsibility for Native well-being, a Diminished Welfare Inquiry was initiated in 1902 cover- ing 533 topics (Hiisken 1994:215). It aimed at "a complete survey of Native life: food, land tenure, methods of cultivation, irrigation and indebtedness; the state of the fish- eries, and of industry and commerce; and the influence of European enterprise and Foreign Orientals on Native life and welfare" (Furnivall 1944:393). The report, which took a decade to compile, came to no overall conclusions about the causes of "diminished welfare," and it did not provide a clear direction for policy. Such clarity, argues Frans Hiusken, was impossible in view of the contradictory interests at work in colonial society. Business interests concerned to promote commercial development in the home country saw increased Native welfare as a boon to the newly emerging Dutch industrial export sector; for en- trepreneurs in the colonial plantation sector, cheap labor was key (Hiusken 1994:217). In practice, comprehensive information was not really needed for policy formulation, which proceeded on the basis of existing diagnoses of the Native problem. Foremost was the "problem" of population increase, to be compensated by improved irrigation, education, credit, and agricultural extension-solutions already proposed by senior officials before the survey was conducted




(see van Deventer 1961:256-261). Neither did all this information clarify whether making the Javanese more industri- ous would suffice to solve the problem of Native poverty, a solution that retained faith in market forces, or whether poverty was the outcome of Native culture and hence difficult, if not impossible, to change. The desire for totalizing information, with its prospect of making policy on a scien- tific basis, was not matched by the political or administrative utility of that information.

Also in Java, decades earlier, there had been attempts to map land and collect data on its productivity to standardize taxes; much of the data, however, was never used. A land rent ordinance of 1872 that required officials to use this data produced tax assessments that, according to the Resi- dents (senior Dutch officials), "bore no relation to reality" (Hugenholtz 1994:163). The Residents advocated a return to the old system of routine tax bargaining between Dutch officials and village heads. This system, known as admodi- atie, had permitted ad hoc but fine-grained calibrations of peasants' capacity to pay. It was "irregular, but not unfair" (Hugenholtz 1994:166). It seems the Residents recognized that the subtle adjustments they could make when the expe- rience, wisdom, and local knowledge of Dutch officials was combined with that of village heads was more adept. It also caused less resistance and disruption. Nevertheless, under the Ethical Policy, the attempt to produce comprehensive maps and codifications was revived. These examples suggest that the "will to know" exceeds the requirements of orderly rule and may actually hinder it.

Next, let us consider instances in which local wisdom and knowledge is itself the subject of detailed research and planned improvement. The premise of the World Bank project I outlined earlier is that the customary practices of association, trust, mediation, and mutual surveillance already existing in Indonesian villages have been undermined by clumsy top-down regulations and blueprints. Restored, optimized, and adapted to new purposes, these customary practices, glossed as "social capital," can be an important development resource. To document this local wisdom, and to devise the necessary improvements, the World Bank project has generated thousands of pages of detailed ethnographic descriptions, case studies, and field reports as well as exten- sive surveys subject to statistical analysis.

What does this data do? Planning data, as James Ferguson (1994) demonstrated, is sui generis: It identifies only those problems for which a technical remedy within the competence of the planners can be supplied. In this case, because the anticipated remedy to the problem of poor planning requires tinkering with village practices and institutions, justification for the intervention must be derived from the details of what goes on inside Indonesia's villages. More substantively, in order to design interventions to change behavior, the planners need to know why villagers act as they do. Only then can they devise appropriate rules and set conditions to bring about improvement.

Ethnographic data of the kind collected by the World Bank cannot be used in its raw form. One could say that it

needs to be simplified, but the operation performed by the World Bank's social experts is more accurately described as "rendering technical" the domain to be governed. Render- ing technical means to represent the arena of intervention "as an intelligible field with specifiable limits and particular characteristics... whose component parts are linked together in some more or less systematic manner by forces, attractions and coexistences" (Rose 1999:33). In this case, it was the concept of "social capital" that enabled World Bank experts to represent Indonesian village life in technical terms, organizing the potentially overwhelming diversity of practices into a set of diagnoses (too little social capital, the wrong kind of social capital, or exemplary social capital) and make plausible connections between the interventions proposed and the outcomes anticipated. These operations of classification, interpretation, and connection do simplify, but they also generate something new-new ways of seeing oneself and others, new problems to be addressed, new modes of calculation and evaluation, new knowledge, and new powers.is

A third type of intersection between local knowledge, simplification, and control arises when local knowledge is tacitly tolerated or actively sustained because it supports both rule and profit. Scott's emphasis on state simplification as a precondition of administrative order sits uneasily with his recognition that planning encounters "nearly endless and shifting sets of implicit understandings, tacit coordina- tions, and practical mutualities that could never be success- fully captured in a written code" (1998:255-256). Indeed, Scott speculates, "The greater the pretense of and insistence on officially decreed micro-order, the greater the volume of non-conforming practices necessary to sustain that fiction" (1998:261). The obvious gap between official rules and on- the-ground practices, and Scott's observation that they are mutually constitutive and parasitic, offers an insight into how power works that could well be extended.

Scott highlights "communities that are marginal to markets and to the state" (1998:335) where direct reliance on natural resources and covillagers fosters observation, experimentation, and learning-by-doing. Yet practical knowledge of the kind he identifies is at work everywhere, at all times. It is not concentrated in remote rural areas, and it is not associated with the past or "tradition." The knowledge a person needs to negotiate the bureaucracy or find a moment's peace on an assembly line, a factory farm, or in a prison is just as localized, often collective, transmit- ted informally, and continuously revised. It is not the case that an "up there," all-seeing, systematizing state both-pro- mulgates and observes rules, which a "down there" populace tries to resist. Officials and other parties that seek to govern need to be every bit as creative in negotiating their own work regimes, and devising practices to translate shaky numbers into solid ones or failed projects into plausible ver- sions of success. Scott recognizes this when he describes Tanzanian officials coming up with "notional" villages and inflated numbers of households resettled (1998:244). How bureaucrats fix facts routinely become "public secrets," part




of a knowledge base that enables people to manage their relations to the state apparatus. The gaps between plans, claims, and "facts on the ground" compromise the authority of the ruling regime and its ability to exert control.16

Attempts to close gaps result only in the proliferation of un- derground practices both within and outside the state apparatus. Gaps are inevitable, and they are necessary not only for surviving or resisting rule but also for maintaining it.

If we recognize that rule depends not on the elimination of local knowledge but on an uneasy set of compromises, what of Scott's second claim-that the elimination of local knowledge is a precondition for profit? No doubt there are conjunctures where that is the case: The expulsion of indigenous populations from their land producing "empty" spaces ripe for exploitation and laborers deprived of access to the means of production is a radical simplification of this kind; the Taylorization of factory work is another. But there are counterexamples that are more complex. I am thinking of peasant agriculture and the informal economy in both city and countryside. Scott argues that peasant agriculture has endured because of its flexibility and capacity to adapt to changing ecological, economic, and social conditions as well as farmer preference for autonomy. Yet a significant literature in the 1970s explored how large-scale capitalist enterprise profited from the retention of peasant and petty commodity production as well as women's unpaid domestic labor.17 People who produce their own subsistence are able to supply goods to the market at prices that do not cover the costs of their own reproduction. This reduces the wage that must be paid to laborers in capitalist enterprises.

Employers do not need to know the details of how peasants, informal sector workers, or women laboring at home provide cheap goods and services, and they do not necessarily need to regulate or improve their techniques. They only need to set the conditions so that this kind of production continues to subsidize their own ventures. In the case of apartheid South Africa, these conditions were set coercively, by forcibly relocating people to "homelands" in which they had somehow to sustain themselves. Often, however, the relationship between sectors is more organic. It would be difficult for a planner to conjure peasant production or the urban informal sector into being simply because it is func- tional to capital. Petty producers maintain this form of activity for their own reasons. But corporations and ruling regimes can recognize the profitability of this set of relations arising "naturally" in the population and conclude that it should be sustained rather than closed down or redirected.

Finally, we can consider the relation between local knowledge, control, and improvement when local knowledge is recognized and embraced. Scott advocates this position. He recommends that experts pay attention to the com- plexities of peasant agricultural techniques and learn from them. Embracing does not mean doing nothing: It means that experts should study, document, and perhaps propose improvements, so long as these are finely attuned to local conditions. In Southeast Asia there has been two decades of research on indigenous agroforestry systems, dissecting

their nutrient cycling processes, canopy features, and so on. Much of this research has been funded by donor agencies, evidence of the expectation that description will eventu- ally lead to prescription of improved techniques and best practices suitable for replication in new venues. Often, the proposition is that scientists will learn from farmers and also teach them something useful. Also, it is expected that one set of farmers will learn from another. I find something quite contradictory about this endeavor. If the premise is that indigenous knowledge is derived from decades, if not centuries, of farmer observation and experimentation with cultigens and cultivation practices adapted to specific mi- croenvironments, social habits, family labor, inheritance patterns, and market niche, what can scientists add? Why should the practices of one group of farmers be of interest to another group, who have presumably devised their own, equally adaptive farming system?18

Contradictions of this kind quickly emerge when interventions are designed to improve on complex indigenous farming systems. In a part of Indonesia I know quite well, an NGO is promoting "Low External Input Sustainable Agri- culture" (LEISA) combined with "Participatory Technology Development" (PTD). With this combination, the NGO in- tends to blend science and local knowledge to arrive at "improved and integrated farming systems that yield stable and sustainable production levels," mimicking nature and maintaining diversity, living soil, and cyclic flows of nutrients (CARE 2002:15). The project proponents describe LEISA as a principle rather than a fixed technology, and they consider it especially suited to bring together the goals of small farmers and conservationists, because it increases on-farm biodiversity while also improving livelihoods. The LEISA approach and goals meet Scott's criteria for planned improvements very well-start small, proceed stepwise, rely on local knowledge, and expect farmers to have objectives other than short-run profit. But an evaluation of the NGO project found that the farmers had little interest in biodiversity; instead, they were mainly interested maximizing incomes from the current boom crop-cocoa. The expert agronomists were not able to devise any interventions that would increase livelihoods significantly: Whatever could be done, farmers were already doing it. In relation to their preferred crop, the farmers understood full well that shade- grown cocoa lives longer and requires fewer chemical inputs, but they still opted to grow their cocoa in full sun to commence harvest as soon as possible.19

In another example, also from Indonesia, Patrice Levang (1997) recounts the troubled trajectory and rapid demise of an agroforestry project that was planned as a direct response to criticism that Indonesian resettlement schemes promoted agricultural techniques and monocrop systems unsuited to upland environments. Experts devised a system to combine several varieties of food crops with the cash crop rubber in a package carefully tailored to promote farmer self-sufficiency. They offered intensive advice and training to the resettled farmers. But the farmers found the proposed biodiverse farming system with its many




operations and inputs far too expensive and labor intensive. They soon switched to monocrop rubber combined with wage labor, a combination they found more profitable and more secure. Farmer metis, that is to say, included a short-run, market orientation.

Scott advocates the retention of complex, biodiverse, farm-and-forest systems with multigenerational time hori- zons for very sound, ecological reasons, but these are not necessarily the systems preferred by farmers-even farmers in the physically remote highland areas he imagines to be marginal to markets and states. There are contexts in which biodiversity can be protected simply by recognizing and valuing farmer practices and knowledge. In other contexts, to promote ecological values over short-run cash incomes is to claim an expert knowledge about how farmers should live and to seek to direct their conduct.

BEYOND FAILURE: WHAT SCHEMES DO The subtitle to Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998) is "How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed"; this phrase captures his principal interest and the driving argument. Yet the question of failure can be usefully turned around in the manner proposed by Ferguson in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994): What do schemes do? What are their contradictory, messy, and refractory effects? Scott's book offers many insights into this question, as he describes what happened to the various schemes he ex- plores, but more could be said if effects became the principal focus. To draw on my previous discussion, the emergence of practices of compromise and collusion to fill the gap between project plans and on-the-ground realities is an effect. It jeopardizes, or at least compromises, the authority of officials and the position of those who claim expertise. Scott reports that high-modern schemes were routinely resisted. Resistance involves not simply rejection but the creation of something new, as people articulate their critiques, find allies, and reposition themselves in relation to the various powers they must confront. Although Scott is correct that we should not assume local practice conforms to official design, it is nevertheless shaped and affected by that design, often in unexpected ways. It is not the case, as I argued earlier, that we can separate power and resistance: They are intertwined.

Scott's attempt to generalize about the effects of high- modern schemes yields an unresolved contradiction. He argues that "high-modernist designs for life and production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative, and morale of their intended beneficiaries" (1998:349). But he soon quotes a woman from Novosibirsk, scolding experts for thinking Soviet collectivization had destroyed peasant skills and initiative. The woman points out that without skill and initiative, members of collective farms could never have survived (Scott 1998:350). If this kind of initiative was exercised in and around a collectivization project imposed by a regime without checks to its coercive powers, one can safely assume it is exercised everywhere. Thus, improvement schemes are

simultaneously destructive and productive of new forms of local knowledge and practice. Rather than attempt to generalize, the effects of planned interventions have to be examined empirically, in the various sites where they unfold- families, villages, towns, and inside the bureaucracy, among others.

High-modern planners, according to Scott, prefer to construct new landscapes on a blank slate so that everything can be designed and implemented without reference to what went before. Scott makes a convincing case that farmers who are resettled in ecological zones where none of their previous farming practices are relevant lose their previous stock of knowledge and the associated seeds, tools, and so on, and they must devise new ones. People can never be entirely blank, but Scott argues that removing them from their lands, communities, kin, and traditions can radically disorient them and make them more vulnerable to official command (1998:235, 251). He is surely correct to remind us of the dreadful consequences of change imposed in this manner. In Canada, the practice of tearing Native children from their families and sending them to residential schools was deliberately designed to "undo" them and then remake them, minus the presumed pathologies of their "Native- ness." It had a devastating effect on individuals and communities, damage that continues to affect new generations who never attended these schools.

One reason for the attempt to relocate and remake populations, according to Scott, is to thwart collective protest (1998:253). Again, whether or not this is actually the effect is an empirical question. In my research on resettled high- landers in Sulawesi, Indonesia, the effect has been quite the opposite. People moved under state schemes were made promises about improved lives and livelihoods that have not been met. Rather than accept the discrepancy between promise and outcome, they have begun to challenge experts and officials, and organize themselves to claim their due. Resettlement did not render them quiescent and ab- ject, it radicalized them in ways no one would have pre- dicted. In Paris in the mid-19th century, as Scott notes, the people dislocated by Haussman's city planning reassembled and struck back with the revolutionary claims of the Paris Commune (1998:59-63).

Some effects take years, perhaps decades, to emerge, and they, too, are conjunctural: Overt protest against resettlement was rare in Indonesia under Suharto where the level of coercion was high, but it has emerged with a vengeance in the reform period since 1998. Sadly, protests are not always directed at the bureaucratic apparatus that promoted resettlement schemes, or at the donors who funded them, but instead toward ethnic others in what have become het- erogeneous spaces. Indigenous people are now attempting to reclaim land appropriated by the government for resettlement schemes. They run up against the resettled populations that generally want to stay in the places to which they were sent-places where they have formed communities, at- tracted further spontaneous migrants, and produced a new generation. There is an urgent need for peaceful processes




to settle claims and reach agreements-processes required to sort out the tangled thicket of tenure relations left behind by official attempts to map and divide territory and to shift

people around. There can be no return to the status quo ante, except through violent processes of ethnic cleansing. Some of the downstream effects of improvement schemes are very serious indeed, and they will be felt for a long time to come.20 Scott has done much to bring these schemes to our attention. Anthropologists have plenty of work ahead as we investigate the beyond of grand plans at particular sites and conjunctures.

TANIA MURRAY LI Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G3, Canada

NOTES Acknowledgments. Thanks to K. Sivaramakrishnan for inviting me to participate in this project and for seeing it through. Thanks to James Scott for encouraging debate and for his patience and generosity as an interlocutor. Since 1989, the Canadian Social Sci- ence and Humanities Research Council has supported my research in Indonesia. A writing grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Program on Global Security and Sustain- ability 2001-03 enabled me to develop the ideas reflected here. 1. For descriptions of this project and its premises, see Guggenheim 2004; Woodhouse 2001; and World Bank 2001a, 2002a, 2002b. To understand how it fits within the World Bank's larger neoliberal program for improving Indonesia, see World Bank 2001b and 2004. 2. Abrams recommends avoiding use of the term the state in ways that reinforce the state idea. Instead, he suggests replacing it with more specific terms: the ruling regime, the bureaucratic apparatus, government policy, officials in the forest department, and so on. 3. See Escobar (1995), Ferguson (1994), Gupta (1995), and Hansen and Stepputat (2001). 4. See Allen (1999, 2003), Ferguson and Gupta (2002), Li (1999b), Massey (1993), Mitchell (1988), and Moore (1998). 5. Scott describes marginal and nonstate spaces in SeeingLike a State (1998:185-189, 335). For a critical engagement with the concept of "nonstate space" in the context of the Sulawesi highlands, see Li (2001). Mitchell (1990) uses a close reading of Weapons of the Weak (1985) to argue that Scott seeks to discover autonomous, authentic subjects and private, offstage places unpenetrated by power. See also Moore (1998). 6. See Hansen (2001), Joseph and Nugent (1994), Li (2001), Nugent (1994), Peluso (1995), Rosaldo (2003), and Tsing (1993). 7. See, for example, Schrauwers's account of the relationship between government officials and missionaries in colonial Indonesia (2000). 8. O'Malley et al. (1997:513) discuss the exaggerated closure of expert schemes. 9. For helpful definitions and discussions of governmentality, see Dean (1999) and Gordon (1991). 10. This argument is made by Dean (2001), Hindess (2001), Mehta (1997), Parekh (1995), and Valverde (1996). 11. On colonial governmentality and its variations, see Comaroff and Comaroff (1991), Cooper (1994), Mamdani (1996), Pels (1997), Scott (1995), Stoler (1992), Stoler and Cooper (1997), and Thomas (1994). The division of colonial populations and their differential treatment is especially well described in Hindess (2001). 12. On the connection between improvement and the colonial right to rule, see Drayton (2000). 13. On the invention of tradition, see Ranger (1993). For debates about how to rule late colonial Indonesia, see Burns (2004), Cribb (1994), Furnivall (1944), Kahn (1993), Lev (1985), Robinson (1995),

and Wertheim (1961); for an examination of the governmental rationality embedded in the coercive Cultivation System in the 1830s, see Schrauwers (2001). 14. See Scott (1998:77, 80, 184). 15. See also Mitchell's discussions of enframing as the set of techniques and practices that produce an apparently exterior object world susceptible to management (1991, 2002). 16. I have written about compromise in the context of improvement schemes in Li (1999a). See also Herzfeld (1997). 17. See Bradby (1975), Bromley (1979), Foster-Carter (1979), Scott (1979), and Whitehead (1981, 1990). 18. See the "resource book" on shifting cultivation produced by a set of international research agencies (IFAD et al. 2001); also Crasswell (1998) and Garrity and Amoroso (1998). 19. On LEISA and problems in implementation, see CARE (2002). On farmer interest in monocrop, market-oriented production, see Belsky and Siebert (2003) and Li (2002b). 20. I have discussed some of these problems in Li (2002a, 2003).

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beyond "the state" and failed schemes

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