Against The Grain, by James C. Scott [abandoned]

It's hard to beat the summary from some wag who said this book should've been called "Fuck Wheat".

I suspect this is a great, even outstanding, book, I just couldn't get into it and at some point just decided to give up (after several recent experiences of continuing with books I wasn't really feeling and later regretting it). Life is short, there's so many books to read, and every book you half-heartedly finish means one more you'll never get to get to (or more than one, since reading-pace is so tied up with reading-excitement).

This book is pushing back hard against various myths about agriculture: mainly (I think, having not-finished)

• that agriculture led directly and immediately to cities and states — Scott says there were actually 4 millennia between farming and cities
• that there was a clear distinction between agriculturalists and hunters or foragers or pastoralists — Scott says most subsistence groups straddled at least two of these, for more security if one failed
• that agriculture was Good — Scott thinks in many ways we were better off without it, hence the summary "Fuck Wheat"

Finally, while it's not a myth-pushback, the book is also claiming that grains ultimately dominated our food supplies because they're legible to the state (and to the taxman) — c.f. Scott's book Seeing Like a State, which is all about the ways that states want to impose order, legibility and taxability on human systems for the good of the state not the good of the people.

Ultimately, I suspect a/the reason I struggled with this book is that it's structured to push back against certain myths about agriculture and the state, but I just don't have enough history to REALLY have those myths — to a first approximation I just don't know anything about the past, so Scott is spending a lot of time arguing against misconceptions where personally I just have lacunas. (Seems like that might be a pattern in some kinds of specialist non-fiction?, but this case made it feel particularly clear).

It has absolutely no relevance to this book, but here's the story of the time I heard James C. Scott speak in Yangon:

Every morning I wake up and check my email, and first thing in the box is always the Yangon Expats Connection mailer. And every morning I berate myself for wasting time on that junk, for not unsubscribing already: it's full of household-goods for sale, apartments for rent, stuff I don't need. Pure procrastination. But today I get to the third bullet-point and, implausibly, it says "3:30pm today: James C Scott, a surprising perspective on rivers"

Now, in the (admittedly tiny, arcane, unpopular) academic world I come from, James C Scott is an absolute legend. He's this Yale political theorist/anthropologist who's famous for being kind of an anarchist, maybe worked for the CIA, famous professor with game-changing books about how states work but casually on the side he's an amateur sheep-farmer. I guess I had a vague recollection that he was a South East Asian-ist but I never would have imagined he'd be in Yangon and just casually giving talks. Obviously I was going, obviously.

I rock up to this intersection of a busy street and a patient Burmese lady grabs me by the arm and points at the large sign next to her -- she knows what I'm looking for. "Second floor," she says. I climb some stairs to this beautiful loft, all ceiling-fans and faded pastel wooden panels -- faded by time and not just by hipsters. The crowd is probably 90% foreigners, and exactly the type you'd expect: germanic grad-student types with exact beards and expensive glasses, baggy-panted hippies with man-buns or unwashed hair, earnest 40-something couples with very young children who are being Educated or Cultured or whatever it might be.

Surprisingly on time, this tall blond American dude stands up at the front and says "Hi, thank you all for coming, blah blah blah. Our distinguished guest will speak first in English, then in Burmese, then a Q&A." Ah, respect, he actually speaks some Burmese, gonna say something nice for the hosts -- nice. "Please welcome James C Scott!," says the dude, and up from the front row shuffles this sturdy guy in sandals and pale slacks and a big black shirt. He looks older than I thought from the book-covers but he's got good vibes to him, calm and unfussy. He's carrying a little exercise book like 5 year-old kids use, which he's clearly going to read from. I like him already.

"I'm just going to quickly outline my talk in English first," he says, "My topic is rivers. First I'm going to explain how humans change the course of rivers; then I'm going to talk about why floods can be a good thing; also I'm going to talk about the human causes of flooding. I've taught junior seminars on this at Yale but this is my first time speaking about it." That was pretty much it, maybe 30 seconds max. "Now, if any Burmese speakers would like to leave the room before I screw up your language please leave now."

Then, the absolute legend, he proceeds to talk in Burmese for the rest of the hour. Sure, some of the foreigners there probably spoke some Burmese but I'll be shocked if it was more than a small fraction. As for me, literally the only words I understood were "James C Scott", "utilitarianism", "Mississippi", "yellow river" and "salmon." Every five minutes another little crop of foreigners would sneak out the room till probably only 30% of the audience was left. Scott just ignores them, does his thing, makes eye contact with everyone and keeps on chatting away in (seemingly) pretty good Burmese with a bit of an Anglo accent. Dude was mesmerising, I would listen to him in Burmese all day.

At the end of the hour he opened for questions and absolutely nobody knew what to say -- I guess the few Burmese people were shy about asking questions, and the aggressive white grad students who normally jump in first on every Q&A couldn't say anything because they had absolutely no idea what he'd said in the talk. Absolute bliss. Eventually people asked some general river-related questions in English, which he answered in English, and I realised it was more tiring and draining to think and listen in a language you speak than to pretend to listen in a language you don't.

10/10, unbeatable trolling and/or nonchalance and/or priorities, would listen again.

—

Actual Book Notes

Introduction

Did we domesticate animals or did they domesticate us?

All classical states were based on GRAIN  — no cassava, sego, yam, taro, plantain. Only grain is suitable for taxing etc (tubors can be concealed, and can survive for two more years underground — if tax man wants it, he has to dig it up himself)

Note: legumes have some of these features but don't have a determinate harvest, which is required by the taxman

Word "barbarian" came from Greeks making fun of the sound "ba ba", how they thought non-Greeks spoke!

Ancient Chinese had "cooked" and "raw" barbarians, where "cooked" were at least partly under control

Berber saying: raiding is our agriculture

Native Americans realised the tame european cow was easier to hunt than the white-tailed deer

Chapter 1

> U: I'm not sure I have the myths that Scott is pushing against — that economic development happened around grain farming in arid places, where these places actually weren't even arid at the time — i just don't know enough falsified-history for that

There were 4 millennia between the beginning of farming and the city/state!

There was more fluidity between pastoralists agriculturalists hunters and foragers — most subsistence groups straddled at least two

Chapter 2

• by selecting and breeding most tame silver foxes, Russian researchers got 18% extremely-tame foxes in 10 generations, 35% extremely-tame in 20 gens

"As a sheep breeder, I'm always personally offended when sheep are used as a synonym for cowardly crowd behaviour and a lack of individuality". Ahahaha, great sentence. Basically, we've been selecting for these characteristics in sheep for 8000 years, how can we criticise it?

[abandoned shortly after]