All Our Names Mengistu Epub 12
Lutero Chaloux
The scope of the book together with the time it took to complete itexplain the long list of intellectual debts I have accumulated alongthe way. A full accounting of them would be interminable except forthe fact that I realize some of my creditors would just as soon not beassociated with the final product. Though I shall not implicate themhere, I owe them nonetheless. Instead of turning my argument in thedirection they urged, I took their criticisms to heart by fortifyingmy case so that it would better answer their objections. My otherintellectual creditors, having failed to disavow the final product inadvance, will be named here and, it is to be hoped, implicated.
Finally, I want to thank my colleagues in the Netherlands and at theAmsterdam School for Social Science Research for the opportunity ofvisiting there in order to give the Sixth Annual W. F. WertheimLecture: Jan Breman, Bram de Swaan, Hans Sonneveld, Otto van denMuijzenberg, Anton Blok, Rod Aya, Roseanne Rutten, Johan Goudsblom,Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Ido de Haan, Johan Heilbron, Jose Komen, KarinPeperkamp, Niels Mulder, Frans Hiisken, Ben White, Jan NederveenPieterse, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, and Keebet vonBenda-Beckmann. Having Wim Wertheim there to offer advice andcriticism was a great privilege for me, for I have admired his manycontributions to social science theory and Southeast Asian studies. Ilearned at least as much from the thesis-writing graduate students inmy seminar there as they learned from me; Talja Potters and Peer Smetswere kind enough to read my chapter on urban planning and providesearching critiques.
Larry Lohmann and James Ferguson read an early draft of the manuscriptand made comments that clarified my thinking enormously and preventedsome serious missteps. A few other good friends offered to read all orpart of the manuscript, in spite of its forbidding length. Those whorolled their eyes when offering or whose body language suggested mixedfeelings, I avoided burdening. The few who genuinely wanted to readit, or whose feigned interest was completely convincing, in every caseprovided a set of comments that shaped the book in important ways. Iowe an enormous debt and my warmest thanks to Ron Herring, RamachandraGuha, Zygmunt Bauman, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Mark Lendler, AllanIsaacman, and Peter Vandergeest.
A great many thoughtful colleagues made useful criticisms or broughtto my attention work that contributed to improvements in the argumentand evidence. They include Arjun Appadurai, Ken Alder, Gregory Kasza,Daniel Goldhagen, Erich Goldhagen, Peter Perdue, Esther Kingston-Mann,Peter Sahlins, Anna Selenyi, Doug Gallon, and Jane Mansbridge. I alsothank Sugata Bose, Al McCoy, Richard Landes, Gloria Raheja, Kiren AzizChaudhry, Jess Gilbert, Tongchai Winichakul, Dan Kelliher, Dan Little,Jack Kloppenberg, Tony Gulielmi, Robert Evenson, and Peter Sahlins.Others who kindly contributed are Adam Ashforth, John Tehranian,Michael Kwass, Jesse Ribot, Ezra Suleiman, Jim Boyce, Jeff Burds, FredCooper, Ann Stoler, Atul Kohli, Orlando Figes, Anna Tsing, VernonRuttan, Henry Bernstein, Michael Watts, Allan Pred, WitoonPermpongsacharoen, Gene Ammarell, and David Feeny.
For the past five years the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale hasbeen for me the site of a broad, interdisciplinary education in rurallife and a major source of intellectual companionship. The program hasgiven me more that I can imagine ever giving back. Virtually everypage of this book can be traced to one or another of the wide-rangingencounters fostered by the program. I will forgo mentioning fifty orso postdoctoral fellows who have visited for a year, but all of themhave contributed in large and small ways to this enterprise. Weinvited them to join us because we admired their work, and they havenever disappointed us. The chief of the Program in Agrarian Studies,Marvel Kay Mansfield, has been the heart and soul of the success ofAgrarian Studies and every other enterprise with which I have beenassociated at Yale. This is not the first occasion I have acknowledgedmy debt to her; it has only grown with time. Nor could AgrarianStudies have thrived as it has without the initiative ofK. Sivaramakrishnan, Rick Rheingans, Donna Perry, Bruce McKim, NinaBhatt, and Linda Lee.
I have been blessed with research assistants who turned what began aswild goose chases into serious quests. Without their imagination andwork I would have learned little about the invention of permanent lastnames, the physical layout of new villages, and languageplanning. Here is my chance to thank Kate Stanton, Cassandra Moseley,Meredith Weiss, John Tehranian, and Allan Carlson for their superbwork. I owe Cassandra Moseley not only thanks but an apology, becauseall her fine work on the Tennessee Valley Authority resulted in achapter that I reluctantly cut in order to keep the book withinreasonable bounds. It will find another home, I trust.
Yale University Press has been good to me in more ways than one. Iwant to thank particularly John Ryden; Judy Metro; my editor, CharlesGrench; and the best manuscript editor I have ever worked with, BrendaKolb.
It is at this point that the detour began. How did the state graduallyget a handle on its subjects and their environment? Suddenly,processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, thestandardization of weights and measures, the establishment ofcadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freeholdtenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, thedesign of cities, and the organization of transportation seemedcomprehensible as attempts at legibility and simplification. In eachcase, officials took exceptionally complex, illegible, and localsocial practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, andcreated a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded andmonitored.
I do not wish to push the analogy further than it will go, but much ofearly modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted torationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into alegible and administratively more convenient format. The socialsimplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tunedsystem of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced statecapacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions ofevery kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance,and relief for the poor.
These state simplifications, the basic givens of modern statecraft,were, I began to realize, rather like abridged maps. They did notsuccessfully represent the actual activity of the society theydepicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that sliceof it that interested the official observer. They were, moreover, notjust maps. Rather, they were maps that, when allied with state power,would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade. Thus astate cadastral map created to designate taxable property-holders doesnot merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a systemthrough its ability to give its categories the force of law. Much ofthe first chapter is intended to convey how thoroughly society and theenvironment have been refashioned by state maps of legibility.
This view of early modern statecraft is not particularly original.Suitably modified, however, it can provide a distinctive optic throughwhich a number of huge development fiascoes in poorer Third Worldnations and Eastern Europe can be usefully viewed.
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It isbest conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, versionof the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, theexpansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, themastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, therational design of social order commensurate with the scientificunderstanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West,as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.
Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does thecombination become potentially lethal. The third element is anauthoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight ofits coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs intobeing. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been timesof war, revolution, depression, and struggle for nationalliberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster theseizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previousregime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the pastand who have revolutionary designs for their people.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civilsociety that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War,revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil societyas well as make the populace more receptive to a newdispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineeringaspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition,occasionally met this last condition.
In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity forlargescale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides thedesire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act onthat desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveledsocial terrain on which to build.
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it alwaysignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. Thistruth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on thefact that any production process depends on a host of informalpractices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merelyfollowing the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually haltproduction. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plansfor, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as aset of instructions for creating a functioning social order. Theformal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, itcould not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal schememade no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, itfailed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers aswell.
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