James Scott

Seeing Like A State

If the plans for villagization were so rational and scientific, why did they bring about such general ruin? The answer, I believe, is that such plans were not scientific or rational in any meaningful sense of those terms. What these planners carried in their minds eye was a certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual codification of modern rural production and community life. Like a religious faith, this visual codification was almost impervious to criticism or disconfirming evidence. The belief in large farms, monocropping, 'proper' villages, tractor-plowed fields, and collective or communal farming was an aesthetic conviction undergirded by a conviction that this was the way in which the world was headed—a teleology. For all but a handful of specialists, these were not empirical hypotheses derived from particular contexts in the temperate West that would have to be carefully examined in practice. In a given historical and social context—say, wheat growing by farmers breaking new ground on the plains of Kansas—many elements of this faith might have made sense. As a faith, however, it was generalized and applied uncritically in widely divergent settings with disastrous results.

If the proverbial man from Mars were to stumble on the facts here, he could be forgiven if he were confused about exactly who was the empiricist and who was the true believer. Tanzanian peasants had, for example, been readjusting their settlement patterns and farming practices in accordance with climate changes, new crops, and new markets with notable success in the two decades before villagization. They seemed to have an eminently empirical, albeit cautious, outlook on their own practices. By contrast, specialists and politicians seemed to be in the unshakable grip of a quasi-religious enthusiasm made even more potent in being backed by the state.

This was not just any faith. It had a direct relation to the status and interests of its bearers. Because the bearers of this visual codification saw themselves as self-conscious modernizers of their societies, their vision required a sharp and morally loaded contrast between what looked modern (tidy rectilinear, uniform, concentrated, simplified, mechanized) and what looked primitive (irregular, dispersed, complicated, unmechanized). As the technical and political elite with a monopoly on modern education, they used this visual aesthetic of progress to define their historic mission and to enhance their status.

Their modernist faith was self-serving in other respects as well. The very idea of a national plan, which would be devised at the capital and would then reorder the periphery after its own image into quasi-military units obeying a single command, was profoundly centralizing. Each unit at the periphery was tied not so much to its neighboring settlement as to the command center in the capital; the lines of communication rather resembled the converging lines used to organize perspective in early Renaissance paintings. 'The convention of perspective ... centers everything in the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of travelling outward, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.'

The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that of mass exercises—thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality; the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex—and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the elites.

The modernist visual aesthetic that animated planned villages has a curiously static quality to it. It is rather like a completed picture that cannot be improved upon. Its design is the result of scientific and technical laws, and the implicit assumption is that, once built, the task then becomes one of maintaining its form. The planners aim to have each new village look like the last. Like a Roman military commander entering a new camp, the official arriving from Dar es Salaam would know exactly where everything could be found, from the TANU headquarters to the peasant association and the health clinic. Every field and every house would also, in principle, be nearly identical and located according to an overall scheme. To the degree that this vision had been realized in practice, it would have made absolutely no connections to the particularities of place and time. It would be a view from nowhere. Instead of the unrepeatable variety of settlements closely adjusted to local ecology and subsistence routines and instead of the constantly changing local response to shifts in demography, climate, and markets, the state would have created thin, generic villages that were uniform in everything from political structure and social stratification to cropping techniques. The number of variables at play would be minimized. In their perfect legibility and sameness, these villages would be ideal, substitutable bricks in an edifice of state planning. Whether they would function was another matter.