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Political Optics and the Occlusion of Intimate Knowledge
Author(s) -
HERZFELD MICHAEL
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.369
Subject(s) - complicity , bureaucracy , politics , state (computer science) , power (physics) , sociology , cult , authoritarianism , ethnography , narrative , resistance (ecology) , epistemology , law , political science , anthropology , philosophy , ecology , linguistics , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science , democracy , biology
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.