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38 NOMOS: Am. Soc'y Pol. Legal Phil. 42 (1996)
State Simplifications: Nature, Space, and People

handle is hein.journals/nomos38 and id is 58 raw text is: 2 STATE SIMPLIFICATIONS: NATURE, SPACE, AND PEOPLE JAMES C. SCOTT I. INTRODUCTION Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into very sharp focus 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 far more legible and, hence, more susceptible to careful mea- surement, calculation, and manipulation. The invention of scientific forestry in late-eighteenth-century Prussia and Saxony serves as a model of this process.' While the story of scientific forestry is important in its own right, I plan to use it here as a metaphor for the forms of knowledge and manipulation characteristic of large institutions with sharply defined interests, of which the state is perhaps the outstanding example. Once we have seen how simplification, legibility, and manipulation operate in forest management, we can then ex- plore how a similar optic is applied by the modern state to urban planning, rural settlement, land administration, and agri- culture. 42

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