Organizer and Chair: Seth Harter, University of Michigan
Discussants: Carolyn L. Cartier, University of Oregon; Kenneth M. George, University of Oregon; Thomas P. Gibson, University of Rochester; Seth Harter, University of Michigan; Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, University of Wisconsin, Madison; James C. Scott, Yale University
In Seeing Like a State, James Scott explores the universal ambition of modernizing states to create legible spaces filled with legible subjects. Using bureaucratic tools such as cadastral surveys and censuses, states have sought to gather detailed knowledge, thereby shaping populations on which they can act intelligently—extracting maximal resources with minimal resistance. Such knowledge, no matter how fine-grained, always simplifies actual practices and, backed by states’ coercive powers, can impose this simplified vision on their subjects’ behavior.
Thomas Gibson has shown how, under pressure from states hungry for intelligence and resources, populations have fled to physically remote areas and reinforced their isolation by emphasizing those cultural characteristics which differentiate them from state ideals. Kenneth George has examined the use of ritual and history to draw a shroud of secrecy around such regions, creating illegible enclaves. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney has reasoned that such arrangements can still be turned to the ideological advantage of the state through the creation of hierarchies of modernity. The state designates enclaved (or internal) others as primitive in order to project to western (or external) others a contrasting image of itself as modern.
This roundtable will bring together specialists on Japan, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia to examine how Asian states borrow and apply the tools of modernity and the discourses that legitimate them. It will discuss how resistance in enclaves, both rural and urban, forces adaptations to state policy and rhetoric. Finally, it will consider the potential for complicity that scholars seeking to study shrouded spaces might have with state projects to render them legible.