Prof James C. Scott - Beyond the Pale: The Earliest Agrarian States and “their Barbarians”, SOAS
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- Опубліковано 21 жов 2024
- www.soas.ac.uk...
How did so many of us, Homo sapiens, quite late in our species history, come to live in sedentary heaps of people, grain, and domesticated animals and governed by units we call states? And what was the relationship between these polities and those remained outside their control? The earliest agrarian states were small and fragile. More people lived outside them than within. They were subject to internal fracture, abandonment, and raiding-both sporadic and systematic. They also represented valuable trade depots that enhanced the exchange value of products from non-state ecologies. The result was, for a time at least, what one might call a “golden age of barbarians.”
James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression.
Recent publications include “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed”, Yale University Press, 1997; “Geographies of Trust: Geographies of Hierarchy,” in Democracy and Trust, 1998; “State Simplifications and Practical Knowledge,” in People’s Economy, People’s Ecology, 1998 and “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” (Yale Press, 2009).
More about this event: goo.gl/YlpvQn
Scott begins at 9:27
You guys might want to put James C. Scott's name in the title so people can search for and find this talk more easily. Loved it. Thanks!
what a man what a man what a man what a mighty good man
What were the types of public goods that the early states furnished other than protection? Would the rulers in states engaged in trade with barbarians keep all of the goods for themselves, their families, and the state bureaucracy or would some of those goods "trickle down" to the agriculturists?
Fabulous talk. But the sound is a bit glitchy.
my question would be: how were pre-state societies dealing with the ''tragedy of the commons' ? How do they deal with depletion of the wetland / soil salinization, to what degree would a pre-state society come up with collective action to solve common challenges like this?
The work of Elinor Ostrom is a good place to start on this question. Her work demonstrated that non-state (community-based) governance of the commons can be - and is - sustainable provided certain conditions ('design principles') are in place.