Scott’s Against the Grain

A Deep History of the Earliest States

Author
James C. Scott
Publisher
Yale University Press
Year
2017
Collections
Food
Liberation
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Like another book with the same name, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain argues that the “just so” story of humans’ progression from barbarians to civilized agriculturalists is not the success story we might have thought. Instead, he notes that the early states involved a kind of enclosure—often quite literally, with walls built more to keep the farmers in than the barbarians out. And rather than benefitting from that enclosure, those early citizens suffered greatly: both in terms of their health (agrarians were smaller and more malnourished, especially the women) and in terms of their freedom, which was dramatically curtailed. (Many of the early states had slave populations that exceeded the number of peasants.) In addition to troubling that just-so story, I think Scott’s analysis gives us something else to think with: why should we imagine the states that exist today to be any more free than their predecessors? And what does that mean for us?

Reading notes

Undiscovered

One of the reasons we seem enamored with the early states, per James C. Scott’s excellent Against the Grain, is that they left records for us to read:

Thus if you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be “discovered” and to dominate the pages of ancient history. If, on the other hand, you built with wood, bamboo, or reeds, you were much less likely to appear in the archaeological record. And if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record.

Scott, Against the Grain, page 13

I think about this phenomena also with respect to the relative dearth of understanding of many pre-Christian “pagan” religions. (The word “pagan,” like its compatriot “barbarian,” was an insult.) Or indeed of women’s history in general, both before and after statehood. We have an unfortunate impulse to think that the history we can read is all the history there is—or all the history that matters. Which makes for some interesting questions about our current moment in time: what kind of marks will our digital and increasingly slippery present make in the archaeological record? What knowledge have we already lost?

Elsewhere, Scott does signal a more positive note:

But the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad...date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them. One might well argue, in fact, that such oral epics that survive by repeated performance and memorization constitute a far more democratic form of culture than texts that depend less on performance than on a small class of literate elites who can read them.

Scott, Against the Grain, page 216

This brings to mind Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series. In the books, the steerswomen are literate travelers who wander the land, writing down all the things they learn. But when one of their number, Rowan, visits an annex where old logs are stored, she finds the books in disarray, with some missing and others imperiled by mold and bugs. Meanwhile, her outskirter (i.e., barbarian) friend, Bel, speaks often of the oral histories of her people, many of which contain wisdom and knowledge unknown to the steerswomen, and likely critical to the survival of both their peoples. Like the Greek epics, the outskirter’s histories are stories, told in verse and song, passed down by memory instead of pen. And maybe that’s a clue: perhaps a story well told can be trusted to outlast both paper and stone.