Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity

TWO Mapping Modernization and Growth

TWO Mapping Modernization and Growth Why choose state units at all? Since they do not always constitute self-contained economic systems, the unit chosen is not necessarily a natural one, i.e., one that would be de‹ned by a student delimiting an economic region. A great deal of arbitrariness and historical accident, and a marked absence of historical continuity, may characterize the territorial composition of any given sovereign state. True, every sovereign state attempts to inculcate a feeling of unity and continuity in its citizens. But should economic science further such attempts by accepting those doctrines at their face value, couching all its discourse in terms of statewide economies, and making its basic estimates in terms of national totals, i.e., totals for the relatively arti‹cial boundaries of states? —Simon Kuznets, National Income and Its Composition Our subject matter is growth, not distribution. —W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth Legibility and Development Economics In his book Seeing like a State, James Scott provides a new way of thinking about modernization in the twentieth century, especially as regards to certain attempts by governments to transform their societies. Examining such disparate cases as Soviet planning, Tanzanian villagization, managed forestry in Germany, and the urban-planning experiment of Brasília, Scott shows the similarities among these politically varied projects. These include the value they placed on making society “legible,” or utilizing social simpli‹cations that make a society appear to be more administratively manageable, and their marginalization of local knowledges that might challenge these managerial orderings. One of the key metaphors that Scott 30 uses in his analysis of modern projects of legibility is the image of the map. In Scott’s use of the metaphor, the state takes on the role of the mapmaker, and the landscape being described is the national civil society. States have used their “maps”—which for Scott includes social statistics and models as well as representations of physical space—as part of ambitious, often utopian projects of social change that have generally been motivated by the best of intentions. But these good intentions are frequently overshadowed by what Scott calls an ideology of high modernism: “envisioning a sweeping , rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition” (1998, 88). Seeing like a state, Scott argues, does not simply describe, but transforms . It entails an attempt at creating a population with the characteristics that will be easiest to monitor and manage. Projects standardized on the goal of legibility cannot take into account those peoples and activities that fail to ‹t their model; thus they are left out of the frame. And, as Arturo Escobar (1995a) argues in Encountering Development, legibility also means turning those who don’t ‹t the frame into anomalies or pathologies that need to be transformed. Whether ignoring certain populations and practices , eliminating others (for instance displacing whole communities to make way for dam-building projects in India), or labeling particular practices and peoples as pathologies and then attempting to correct them, this homogenizing, abstract vision has resulted far too frequently in loss of freedom , social dislocation, alienation, and environmental degradation aside from whether the outcome resulted in a success or failure as measured by its intended consequences. Scott’s critique of social engineering is by now a familiar one to readers of late twentieth-century social theory. In the 1950s and 1960s, the philosopher Karl Popper and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek developed in›uential criticisms of utopian engineering projects, and by now there is a rich legacy of critique from Left to Right, modernist to postmodernist currents, that Scott was able to call upon in developing his analysis. It is Scott’s connecting up of social engineering projects on the one hand and the desire for legibility and intelligibility on the other that represents his distinctive addition to the literature. Among other things, Scott’s focus on legibility as a key aspect of modernist projects gives us a different angle of vision for understanding the role that economic theory has played in the development and deployment of certain high-modernist social experiments. As discussed in the last chapter, the twentieth century marked the “discovery” of the economy of each Mapping Modernization and Growth 31 nation-state as a particular sort of rei‹ed, legible object, separate from the state and subject to intelligible description using scienti‹c methods. This new...