Political Optics and the Occlusion of Intimate Knowledge

In "Seeing Like a State" (1998), James Scott provides a comprehensive understanding of the optics of state power. He also shows how the bureaucratic logic of high-modernist official planning occludes the social and cultural worlds both of marginalized citizenries and of the bureaucrats the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American anthropologist 2005-09, Vol.107 (3), p.369-376
Main Author: Herzfeld, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropology
Bureaucracy
Complicity
Cultural anthropology
Cultural heritage
Democracy
Ethnography
Giddens, Anthony
Hegemony
heritage
Idioms
In Focus: Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence: Anthropological Engagements with the Work of James Scott
Logic
Marginality
Modernism
Modernist art
Nation states
Optics
Political anthropology
Politics
Resistance
Scott, James C
State
State Planning
State Power
States
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Summary:In "Seeing Like a State" (1998), James Scott provides a comprehensive understanding of the optics of state power. He also shows how the bureaucratic logic of high-modernist official planning occludes the social and cultural worlds both of marginalized citizenries and of the bureaucrats themselves, and accurately pinpoints the pernicious reductionism that has accompanied the modernist state's self-proclaimed "cult of efficiency." As in his earlier work, however, Scott overgeneralizes the idea of "resistance"; he also, and concomitantly, underestimates bureaucrats' complicity with local populations and the consequent modification of bureaucratic schemes (including the construction of national heritage) in actual practice. These absences reflect a relative lack of ethnographic specificity in the analysis as well as a partially uncritical endorsement of the master narrative of Western history.
ISSN:0002-7294
1548-1433
DOI:10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.369