Claim · Seed idea · last reconsidered September 8, 2026
Legibility costs local knowledge
Scott's claim that a scheme can only administer what it has first simplified, and pays for the simplification.
- Territories
- AppearancesKnowing
To administer a place, an authority must first make it legible, and legibility is bought by discarding the local, unwritten, particular knowledge that made the place work. The map then governs the ground, and what the map omitted is not merely unrecorded but actively destroyed.
James C. ScottPolitical anthropology1998
Connected ideas
derived from
- Seeing Like a StateSource
The book's central argument.
related to
- AbstractionConcept
It is a case study of what abstraction costs.
responds to
- What did the abstraction remove?Question
It gives the question a political answer: what was removed was somebody's competence.
supports
- We know more than we can tellClaim
The knowledge a scheme cannot capture is tacit knowledge, at the scale of a village.