| Abstract / standardized citizens |
The generic, interchangeable human units assumed by high-modernist planning -- stripped of gender, taste, history, values, opinions, traditions, and distinctive personality. |
Ch. 10 |
| Anti-politics machine |
James Ferguson's concept: the development apparatus as a mechanism for reinforcing and expanding bureaucratic state power, which incidentally takes "poverty" as its point of entry. |
Notes, Ch. 7-8 |
| Bounded rationality / satisficing |
Herbert Simon's concepts describing decision-making by educated guesswork and rules of thumb rather than comprehensive optimization. Scott identifies these as essentially metis under academic terminology. |
Ch. 9 |
| Brasilite |
Residents' term for the psychological condition -- anomie, disorientation, and social sterility -- experienced by inhabitants of Brasilia's rigidly planned environment. |
Ch. 4 |
| Bricolage |
Levi-Strauss's concept: innovation through recombination of existing elements rather than radical invention. The characteristic innovation mode of metis. |
Ch. 9 |
| Cadastral map |
A map recording individual landholdings, boundaries, and ownership for purposes of taxation and property law. A paradigmatic tool of state legibility. |
Ch. 1 |
| Cameral science (Kameralwissenschaft) |
The broader discipline of systematic fiscal state management from which scientific forestry emerged. The science of administering state resources for revenue maximization. |
Ch. 1 |
| Disjointed incrementalism |
Charles Lindblom's concept: policy practice as piecemeal, sequential trial-and-error rather than synoptic rational planning. Also called "the science of muddling through." |
Ch. 9 |
| Elective affinity |
Max Weber's concept, applied by Scott to describe the structural "fit" between high-modernist ideology and authoritarian state power, and between scientific method and monoculture. |
Ch. 8 |
| Everyman cultivator |
Scientific agriculture's greatest abstraction: a stock character interested only in maximizing yields at minimum cost, ignoring the complex, shifting, non-economic goals of real cultivators. |
Ch. 8 |
| Field resistance |
The process by which landraces that perform best over time naturally contribute more seed to subsequent seasons, producing adapted, resilient cultivars through in situ selection. |
Ch. 8 |
| Fiscal forestry |
Forestry organized solely around the state's revenue needs -- measuring forests exclusively by commercial timber yield while ignoring all other ecological and social functions. |
Ch. 1 |
| Fiscal Heisenberg principle |
The phenomenon whereby state observation and measurement instruments do not merely record social reality but actively transform it. Tax categories reshape economic behavior; cadastral maps reshape land use. |
Ch. 1 |
| Hicksian income |
Income that can be consumed without diminishing the capital base that generates it. Polyculture and shifting cultivation produce Hicksian income; monoculture often does not. |
Ch. 8 |
| Imageability vs. legibility |
Kevin Lynch's distinction: how inhabitants can picture and navigate their own neighborhood (imageability) versus how readable a place is for a planner or administrator (legibility). Often negatively correlated. |
Ch. 4 |
| Institutional neurosis |
The apathy, withdrawal, lack of initiative, and reduced resourcefulness produced by single-purpose, high-modernist environments that approach the character of total institutions. |
Ch. 10 |
| Landraces |
Crop varieties developed through generations of farmer selection under local conditions. Possess broad genetic diversity and field-proven resistance. Modern scientific agriculture depends on their genetic capital. |
Ch. 8 |
| Le pays legal vs. le pays reel |
The official mandated order ("the legal country") versus the actual daily practices and lived reality ("the real country"). The inevitable gap between plan and practice. |
Ch. 7 |
| Metis-friendly institutions |
Scott's constructive alternative: institutions designed to enhance the skills, knowledge, and responsibility of participants, shaped by their values and experience. Democracy, common law, and language itself are exemplars. |
Ch. 10 |
| Miniaturization of order / perfection |
The retreat to controlled micro-environments (model villages, experimental plots) when large-scale plans fail. These work under artificial conditions but cannot be replicated at scale. |
Ch. 7 |
| Natural capital vs. cultivated natural capital |
Replacing wild systems with managed ones gains immediate productivity but loses redundancy, resiliency, and stability. External costs accumulate before narrow profitability signals a problem. |
Ch. 10 |
| Nonstate spaces |
Territories beyond the reach of state administrative control, historically serving as refuges for populations fleeing taxation, conscription, and coerced labor. |
Intro, Part 3 |
| Normalbaum |
The abstract, standardized tree model used in German scientific forestry to calculate wood volume per unit area. Exemplifies reducing a complex organism to a single metric. |
Ch. 1 |
| Polyculture / intercropping |
Mixed-cropping systems where multiple species are grown together. Offers advantages in yield, weed suppression, pest limitation, erosion control, and risk spreading. Dismissed as "primitive" by high-modernist agronomists. |
Ch. 8 |
| Polyvalent institutions |
Multifunctional, decentralized, adaptive institutions (family farms, small firms, mixed-use neighborhoods) that outlive rigid, single-purpose organizations because they can absorb shocks. |
Ch. 10 |
| Proletarian vs. petit-bourgeois crops |
Soviet classification: "proletarian" crops (wheat, flax) are amenable to industrial-scale cultivation; "petit-bourgeois" crops require intensive, small-scale, knowledge-rich cultivation. |
Ch. 6 |
| Resolute singularity |
The high-modernist assumption that for any activity under scrutiny, "there is only one thing going on" -- only commercial wood in forests, only efficient transport in cities, only shelter in housing. |
Ch. 10 |
| Sedentarization |
State strategy of forcing mobile or semi-mobile populations into permanent, legible settlements amenable to taxation and administration. |
Intro, Part 3 |
| Social taxidermy |
Jane Jacobs's metaphor for the freezing of living, diverse social arrangements into fixed designed orders. The reduction in diversity, movement, and life produced by imposed simplification. |
Ch. 4 / Ch. 8 |
| The translation problem |
The gap between generic, standardized findings from laboratories and the site-specific conditions of any actual farm, workshop, or community. All environments are intractably local. |
Ch. 8 |
| Thick communities |
Organically evolved social forms with rich informal norms, local knowledge, multiple institutions, and adaptive capacity. Contrasted with "thin" planned communities. |
Ch. 7 |
| Waldsterben (Forest Death) |
The ecological collapse of German monocropped forests after approximately one rotation (~80 years). Caused by soil depletion, pest vulnerability, and loss of biodiversity from single-species plantations. |
Ch. 1 |
| Work-to-rule strike (greve du zele) |
A labor action where workers follow formal rules meticulously, bringing work to a halt. Demonstrates that productivity depends on informal understandings rather than official procedures. Proves formal order is parasitic on metis. |
Ch. 9 |
