Review Essays

Smelling Like a Market

FERNANDO CORONIL

I remember some markets as worldly celebrations of labor and sociality, their busy exchanges and careful presentation of goods and crafts a feast of abundance, colors, and smells. One of my favorite markets in the United States is Philadelphia's Italian market, which combines the buzz of a major city with the intimate feel of certain regional markets in Latin America, where goods have to do with local production and uses. Of course, there are also less appealing markets, like some in the barrios of Latin American cities, where no effort can dispel a sense of disorder and lack, the stink of abjection. In some markets, one can "smell" fear: one has to be careful not to be robbed by either the vendors or the clients. Others communicate calm, like my local farmer's market, a place for socializing and shopping in an atmosphere of cordial and safe exchange. There are also markets, alien to me, like the New York Stock Exchange, defined by the high-energy movements of betting on the shifting risks of corporate values, transacted in anonymous exchanges. The chain supermarket where I shop, homogenizing and impersonal, also qualifies as a market, as do the West's new temples, the malls, those commodity shrines whose excess, social control, and rarefied air so quickly disorient my senses. The markets of socialist Cuba have an estranging atmosphere all their own, one that smells of desires and social divisions defined by the boundaries of the dollar's circulation. While ordinary stores carry but a limited array of inexpensive local goods sold for Cuban pesos, new supermarkets and malls offer diverse imported goods at inflated state-set prices for U.S. dollars.	1
Markets not only have smells, they are also apparently able to smell. Advocates of the capitalist market tell us that it can smell a successful product, a crisis, or a consumer need. For those who imagine it as an invisible hand that turns selfish individual choices into harmonious collective ends, the market seems to operate as a hidden nervous system: it senses people's desires, monitors their private decisions, and directs their conduct toward the production and consumption of goods that satisfy ever more differentiated needs. For its critics, the capitalist market is an all-too-earthly invention, rather than a benevolent transcendent force, blind to human needs and aimlessly propelled by the short-sighted pursuit of filthy money.	2
Clearly, markets vary immensely in their purposes, organization, state relations, and social norms. Given not only its widely varying historical forms and attributes but also the divergent theories directed at explaining it, is there such a thing as smelling like a market?	3
These thoughts came to my mind as I read James C. Scott's thought-provoking book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, which proposes that the modern state has a distinctive way of "seeing" that constitutes a form of political power. In order to control and establish its authority over society through plans to improve it, Scott argues, the modern state strives to make society "legible" by means of homogenizing operations such as censuses and maps. It is these "simplifying" systems of representation, measurement, and naming that define the modern state's short-sighted way of seeing. The flatness of the modern state's vision concerns Scott not only because of its epistemic shortcomings but also because of its political effects: it shapes flawed and costly plans and molds the subjects it seeks to control. Critical of the belief that society can be improved through overarching rational designs—which he calls "high modernism"—Scott centers his discussion on large-scale state plans that embody this dangerous conceit. "Seeing like a state," the suggestive title of this book, refers to a simplifying mode of vision Scott attributes to the state that has been instrumental in effecting sweeping social transformations at considerable human cost since the end of the eighteenth century.	4
According to Scott, high modernist plans to improve the human condition tend to go awry independently of the intentions or skills of planners, for they are based on "thin simplifications" that misrepresent society's dense interplay of interdependencies and ignore people's practical knowledge. While Scott recognizes that the state is not the exclusive agent of grand schemes of social engineering and that these plans have on occasion been successful, this recognition does not alter his sole focus on the state and his critique of its blinding vision. His concern with failed high modernist plans to change society is limited to a critique of the state and its utopian designs.	5
Scott presents this general argument by means of an imaginative but problematic selection of failed schemes of large-scale state engineering. His cases proceed from state-led attempts to reorder "nature" through scientific forestry in order to increase productivity to efforts to reorganize "society" through state planning in capitalist and socialist societies with the goal of improving life and even human nature. The cases cover over two hundred years, advance chronologically from the second half of the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, and move from a critique of designs to transform specific areas of capitalist societies to a sustained censure of attempts to reshape society under socialist rule. The main target of his critique is the radical utopian vision. He contrasts the top-down totalizing views of progressive reformers such as Le Corbusier and revolutionaries such as V. I. Lenin to the more practical perspectives of radical thinkers such as Rosa Luxemburg and critics of modern urbanism such as Jane Jacobs. He attributes Jacobs's sensitivity to the microsociology of urban orders to her "woman's eye," an eye trained to observe ordinary activities such as taking a walk or window shopping that "have no single purpose or that have no conscious purpose in the narrow sense."1	6
His first case concerns the rise of state-directed projects of scientific forestry in Prussia and Saxony in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a fascinating study of the unintended effects of large-scale plans. The effort to maximize timber production and revenues by creating stripped-down, timber-producing forests led instead to the destruction of the complex ecosystem on which the very growth of timber depends. Rather than maximizing long-term production, this state-led plan resulted in the destruction of the social and natural fabric of the forests and to a sharp decline in production after the first generation of rationalized tree planting.	7
Scott presents this case as paradigmatic of the processes he critiques, frequently evoking the "forest" as a metaphor for "society." He shows how the same mode of vision associated with state "simplifications" designed to make the forest more productive has informed a number of efforts to improve society, leading to the violent disruption of the historical fabric of society like that inflicted on the natural fabric of the forest. While the object of planning is significantly different from that of scientific forestry, the planning logic and its devastating effects are similar. The progression of his narrative, as it spirals from state-led plans to reorder nature to the ever more ambitious designs to reshape society, makes clear that his central target is "authoritarian high modernism," that is, the "aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society," which he presents as an extension of scientific forestry to the social domain.	8
His main case studies include the construction of Brasilia, the Brazilian state's modernization project inspired by Le Corbusier's vision of a total urban environment; the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, an expression of Lenin's centralized bureaucratic aim to build socialism in one country; and the forced "villagization" of Tanzania from 1973 to 1976, an instance of Julius Nyerere's effort to settle a largely nomadic population in administrative villages and create a modern and productive peasantry. All these plans "failed" because they were based on "state simplifications" that did not reflect the actual complexity of society but rather a will to render it manageable and to redesign it according to the state's utopian vision. Making an explicit analogy with scientific forestry, he argues that the "modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage."2	9
To the possible objection that some plans failed not just because they were grand but because they were ill-conceived or because of unpredictable changes in political or environmental conditions, Scott's book seems to provide a ready reply: it is precisely because no plan can account for life's contingencies that any plan aspiring to more than cautious reforms is doomed to failure. His suggestions make a reasoned argument for gradualism (but I see no reason why they could not orient the implementation of large-scale plans as well): "take small steps," "favor reversibility," "plan on surprises," and "plan on human inventiveness."3 While it is evident that his position reinforces both the conservative and liberal opposition to radical plans for societal change, it is less obvious that it may undermine the political ground of reformism itself. On the basis of his discussion of the unintended effects of high modernist designs, Scott proposes that thin simplifications cannot apprehend the dense complexity of social interdependencies—the removal of unsightly scrubs may thwart the growth of useful pine trees. But what of the possibility that without the threat of radical movements, as the historical evidence suggests, moderate reforms would find a less propitious political terrain? Scott would probably agree that utopian visions sometimes provide a necessary sense of direction for social reforms; he does not object to radical visions per se but to top-down grand designs that seek to change society without taking into account local particularities and practical knowledge. But since it is not always possible to separate utopian visions from the designs they inspire, the political feasibility of Scott's "thin" recipe for gradual reform may well depend, ironically, on the existence of the utopian schemes he warns against.	10
Scott's often brilliant insights concerning the individual cases contribute to our understanding of specific state practices and warn against the modernist hubris that rational schemes are capable of redesigning society. Yet as a study of the unplanned consequences of high modernist plans, his book makes a limited contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the effects of partial interventions in complex systems. Since it examines only cases of failure, it provides thin support for his general argument about high modernism. His sample does not help us understand the conditions that lead to the failure or success of high modernist designs or to the outcome of plans by non-state actors that also use "simplifications" to reorder society and that, if we accept his categories, "see like a state." Why did Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia "fail" rather miserably while Baron Haussmann's redesign of Paris famously succeeded? Why did the Marshall Plan work while the "villagization" of Tanzania did not? How to compare the public health systems of England or Spain to the health services available in the United States? Scott's limited sample supports only the rather obvious point that some ill-conceived modernist plans indeed had ill consequences, or the more general but truistic claim that bad plans generally lead to bad results. But even these assertions assume a number of unexamined premises about standards for evaluating historical outcomes and for isolating the factors that determined them.	11
Any book necessarily focuses on certain problems and cannot be faulted for excluding other questions. Yet Scott's general claims about high modernism require a consideration, however partial, of a number of issues. Among these, I would list the following: the criteria used to judge historical outcomes in terms of "failure" or "success"; the factors external to planning that affect its results; "successful" instances of modernist designs, of which there are examples in a range of countries and fields; non-state designs to transform society, particularly by market institutions; "simplifications" that have enabled the development of complex social formations in the modern world; the interplay of "realism" and "utopia" in political struggles and in defining the horizon of social expectations; the existence within modernism of philosophical, aesthetic, and political currents of thought that questioned the flat vision of formalized "normal" science (which Scott identifies with modernism) and provided a more dynamic view of modernity; and the appropriateness of a reflectionist or scopic framework for analyzing the state's sign-systems, instead of a dialogic or performative model that examines representational systems as processual practices within fields of power.	12
Scott's focus on the state grows out of his conviction that the state has been responsible for the failure of the major twentieth-century designs to improve the human condition. The tragic failure of these plans can be explained, according to him, by a combination of four conditions: the state's efforts to order nature and society by administrative means, a high modernist ideology according to which science is capable of improving both society and human beings, the deployment of authoritarian state power to implement large-scale transformations, and a weak civil society unable to resist these measures of control. In this set of conditions, Scott presents the state as the only actor that incarnates high modernist ideology. In contrast, he portrays civil society not as a terrain where this ideology could be produced or take root but only as a potential site of resistance against it, particularly when it is "strong" and can repel state interventionism.	13
His lack of attention to the designs of non-state actors that have also had tragic effects is remarkable, particularly since Scott acknowledges that market institutions have been fundamental bearers of high modernism and are today perhaps one of its principal agents. Scott recognizes this lack in his book's introduction:	14
As I finished this book, I realized that its critique of certain forms of state action might seem, from the post-1989 perspective of capitalist triumphalism, like a kind of quaint archeology. States, with the pretensions and power that I criticize, have for the most part vanished or have drastically curbed their ambitions. And yet, as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety.4
It is striking that Scott's awareness of the role of the capitalist market in high modernism did not oblige him to modify his focus on the state, except by stating that his book is also a critique of the market through his examination of "scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general." His discussion of scientific forestry, however, did not lead him to develop an argument about the role of the market as an agent of high modernist designs but instead to build a paradigmatic model of state planning for the rest of the book. If Scott's argument is that high modernism entails a simplifying, abstracting, and homogenizing mode of vision that can be deployed by state and non-state social actors (since "large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state"), then why attribute this way of seeing to the state and restrict analysis to state designs without justifying this partial focus? If the claim is that abstractions and simplifications of the state, given its political power, are unlike those of the market or have different effects, why not develop this argument? Nowhere in the book is there a sustained discussion of the capitalist market as an institution that has redesigned societies through no less costly modalities of social engineering than the ones Scott examines in this book. The current faith in the free market and the impact of neo-liberal policies throughout the world only make it more urgent to examine the role of the market in intensifying ecological destruction and worldwide social inequalities amidst unprecedented plenty. One is left to wonder about the role of a clarification that does not modify the overall narrative that required making it in the first place.
As I see it, the issue is not that the capitalist market should be included solely because it has been a major agent of high modernism, or because it plays an even larger role as a homogenizing force now that many socialist states have collapsed, but because the opposition between state and market that structures the book is itself a thin simplification that obscures the mutual historical constitution of "state" and "market," their close interaction, and their ongoing transformation. The modes of objectification, homogenization, and abstraction that Scott attributes to the state are inseparable from conceptual, technological, and social transformations linked not just to the constitution of modern state bureaucracies but to the development of global capitalism and the generalized commodification of social life. That Scott sees scientific forestry as an example not only of state planning but also of market rationality shows that the opposition between state and market may be misleading and that some designs are best seen as the joint result of a high modernist vision shared by states and markets. In this century, states that sought to build socialism often relied on conceptual schemes generated within capitalist society, such as the notion of "scientific management" or conceptions of industrialization as the motor of progress. If after 1989, "global capitalism is the most powerful force for homogenization," it is not just in opposition to some states that resist it, as Scott says, but in alliance with major states that help define the shifting legal, cultural, and political parameters that shape capitalism. While Weberian and Marxist discussions of the state have been premised on a separation between the state and society (or the economy), new approaches suggest the inseparability of the political and the social, particularly now that it is easier to see how the capitalist market has imposed its logic on society and become a "political" force of its own.	15
Scott's treatment of the state and society as separate entities is reinforced by his discussion of two different modalities of knowledge: abstract and practical. He poses a stark contrast between scientific planning from above, based on fixed designs geared to grand transformations, and practical knowledge from below, stored in habits and traditions attuned to the complexity of reality and open to the play of contingency. While restricting his critique of high modernist knowledge to state-led exercises in social engineering, Scott turns to civil society as the locus of an alternative mode of knowledge: the practical knowledge the ancient Greeks called metis, exemplified by the flexible intelligence that guided Odysseus's quest through unexpected situations. This binary contrast between abstract and practical knowledge, treated not so much as different modalities of knowledge that any social actor or institution can deploy but as rooted in the state and society as separate social domains, helps consolidate the opposition between state and society that underwrites his argument about the way the modern state sees.	16
Scott's critique of the abstract knowledge informing large-scale state designs and his celebration of the practical knowledge stored in civil society resonates with liberal rejections of state planning and endorsement of the free market. Although Scott clarifies that "his bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is not a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman," he endorses Hayek's critique of state planning, approvingly citing his claim that a "command economy, however sophisticated and legible, cannot begin to replace the myriad, rapid, mutual adjustments of functioning markets and the price system."5 Like Scott, but with more theoretical rigor, Hayek forcefully argued against what he called the "constructivist fallacy," by which he meant the notion that social institutions can be the object of successful rational design. Similarly, Michael Oakeshott, Karl Polanyi, and Gilbert Ryle warned against institutions that seek to make decisions for their intended beneficiaries, the bearers of the practical knowledge that these institutions cannot systematize or control. While he shares the liberal critique of the state, Scott warns that market designs, just as much as state planning, may deny the practical knowledge of common people, but he does not show how this may be the case.	17
Scott's generous desire to empower the individual against external constraints is flawed by his murky treatment of the source of these constraints. His insistence that his critique of the state as an agent of high modernism is not a "case for the invisible hand of market coordination as opposed to centralized economies" is cast in terms that show that, in effect, it is a limited critique of the market that upholds its basic principle. He objects to the market because it "is itself an instituted, formal system of coordination, despite the elbow room that it provides to its participants, and it is therefore dependent on a larger system of social relations which its own calculus does not acknowledge and which it can neither create nor maintain."6 Yet any complex social institution is constituted through processes of formalization and is dependent on larger fields of social relations; the market is not unique in this respect. As Emile Durkheim showed, social facts constrain and empower; as Karl Marx argued, the issue is to discern the particular manner in which specific social facts alienate or enable differentially distinct sectors of society. While on the one hand Scott objects to the market as a coercive formal structure, on the other he endorses Thomas Jefferson's celebration of yeomanry, which he calls a "training ground of democratic citizenship."7 This combined focus helps cast the institution of private ownership of the means of production, the material foundation of Jeffersonian yeomanry as well as of the capitalist market, not as a source of profound inequalities in the real world but as the foundation of an implausible democracy of small property owners in an ideal world.	18
Given his slippery treatment of capitalism, it is hard not to smell something fishy in Scott's exclusive focus on the state and his inattention to the market and its ways of seeing, a partial view all the more odd given his criticism of the capitalist market in this and previous books. Would a book critical of modernist visions titled "Seeing Like a Market" be likely to be produced or to gain wide acceptance at this time? It is as if neo-liberal hegemony had worked in this text to present capitalism's complex contradictions as a Manichean opposition between the state and society. Authorial intentions aside, Seeing Like a State turns the state into the leading agent of ill-conceived modernist fantasies and construes society as the potential site of a Panglossian vision of capitalism (or pre-capitalism)—a bucolic community of small property owners without dispossessed proletarians or giant conglomerates, unhampered by institutional constraints, where everyone freely cultivates his or her own capital garden.	19
A similar tension between abstract critique and concrete celebration appears in his discussion of language as an example of both rigid simplification and fluid metis. In his early discussion of the relationship between language and the state, Scott states that "of all state institutions, then, the imposition of a single, official language may be the most powerful, and it is the precondition of many other simplifications." Yet in the concluding pages of the book, he treats language as the "best model" of a metis-friendly institution; the book's last sentence refers to language as "a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisation of all its speakers."8 This tension between language as an instrument of the powerful and language as an empowering institution for all speakers remains unresolved; it is difficult to see how language is "open to the improvisation of all its speakers" when some speakers (through institutions they control) not only have more say than others but can define the language in which everyone must speak. Juan Marinello, the Cuban essayist, incisively captured the dilemma of colonized populations condemned to use the colonizer's language: "The American writer is a prisoner. Firstly of his language." Arguing that colonial language has been "the most powerful obstacle to a vernacular idiom," Marinello explains why it has made it difficult for the (Latin) American writer to improvise: "language has a life of its own. We struggle to secrete creolisms onto the mother tongue, and when we make a serious effort to innovate our speech, we come up with forms that lived a youthful existence centuries ago in Andalusia or Extremadura. Or that could have had such an existence."9	20
Just as the "democratic" figure of yeomanry serves to occlude the presence of power in the market, the homogenizing trope of "all speakers" evacuates power from language. As power vanishes from our sight, we are left with a vision of a world of property owners and speakers with equal shares of material and symbolic capital. Independently of Scott's intentions, his abstract critique of the market as a formal institution and endorsement of the myth of individual ownership of the means of production ends up lending support to the really existing market.	21
Since Scott restricts his attention to state designs, his pair of binary oppositions between state/society and abstract knowledge/metis unfolds as a compound opposition between state-abstract knowledge/society-metis. This opposition has the unintended effect of confirming current neo-liberal prejudices against the state. The contemporary religion of the free market transforms the market into society's best organizational form. It also turns the market into the locus of individuality and common sense in opposition to the state as the domain of authoritarian practices and impractical designs. Within this charged ideological landscape, it is difficult not to smell the hegemonic presence of the market behind Scott's critique of the state and celebration of metis.	22
It is also difficult not to see the state as the embodiment of a threat against society's "normal" functioning, despite the fact that any such "normality" presupposes power relations mediated by specific states. States, like societies, come in many forms, and their changing configurations reflect ongoing social struggles over different conceptions of the normal and the desirable. While Scott says a great deal about the way some state plans work, nowhere does he offer a conceptualization of the state. The modern state emerges from his narrative as a unified actor endowed with a single mode of vision. The immense variety of states and their no less varied internal heterogeneity and complexity is flattened into a unique type that stands in opposition to society.	23
From a Latin American perspective, the conception of the state as a unified actor having a single mode of vision is particularly problematic. States in Latin America have been formed within complex hierarchical processes of institutionalization and codification. During colonial times, local state officials knew that imperial orders were to be obeyed but also violated. "Obedezco pero no cumplo" (I obey, but I do not comply) expressed the conventional response of state officials in the Americas to commands from imperial Spain, a veiled effort to adjust plans to local conditions and power relations. Colonial officials learned when to apply, ignore, or flexibly interpret laws and designs.	24
In this ability to combine abstract and practical knowledge, "modern" states are not significantly different. In my own study of state planning in twentieth-century Venezuela, I showed how plans are formulated by the state but are not plans of the state, for they are produced in conjunction with other powerful actors that shape the state and are modified by the ongoing play of politics.10 Diverse state institutions, as well as individuals within the same institution, play different roles with respect to state planning. Plans to create "the Great Venezuela" after the 1974 oil boom were devised by state technocrats but were typically transgressed by upper-level state officials less concerned with the coherence of the plans than with their political effects. States embody both the abstract logic Scott associates with high modernism and also the practical knowledge he identifies with metis. No state in Latin America—or anywhere for that matter—would be able to function without being adept at combining multiple modalities of knowledge. As a form of "practical" knowledge, metis is a term that aptly describes a required mode of operation of any complex social institution. Modern states, like markets, "see" and "smell" in many ways. Instead of using maps that reproduce common illusions, in order to orient ourselves within the labyrinthine boardrooms and halls of mirrors of modern states we need to develop a critical cartography of modernity.	25
Maps have often been used as a trope to reflect on the relationship between representations and reality and on the uses of knowledge. Scott opens his discussion of state simplifications in the area of urban planning in Chapter 2 with the following epigraph about a map: "And the Colleges of the Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point . . . Succeeding generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless, and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and the Winters." He attributes this text to Suárez Miranda's Viajes de varones prudentes (1658). As far as I know, however, this book was never written and its author did not exist. Nevertheless, the text Scott quotes does exist but only as part of a slightly longer fictional story written by Jorge Luis Borges titled "On Exactitude in Science." (A footnote in the following chapter reveals that Scott has not read this story, but he knows through a colleague that Borges wrote one about maps.) Borges's story is written as a citation that he attributes to Suárez Miranda's Viajes de varones prudentes (1658); he gives a fuller reference: Fourth Book, Chapter XLV, Lérida. Borges's story at once tells a tale about maps that exposes the imperial conceit that the empire's cartographers can represent the empire as a geographical and historical reality "point by point," and enacts a related conceit by creating a replica of a text written in the literary style of seventeenth-century Spain.	26
Borges's story is immensely suggestive. I have interpreted it as Borges's attempt to problematize the relationship between reality, representation, and power.11 I see it as an allegory not just of science but of power, or, rather, of the connection between knowledge and power. As a story about the power to determine the terms in which the empire should be represented, it addresses the relationship between imperial power and imperial knowledge. It is therefore a story not just about the truth of scientific representations but about the representation of truth, about power's representations and the power to represent, about the truth of power. Through it, Borges calls our attention to the conditions of production of knowledge, its politics and uses.	27
By seeing Borges's literary replica as a literary original, Scott adds an unexpected but corroborating wrinkle to Borges's concern with the limits and (mis)uses of knowledge. Following a longstanding Latin American concern with the relation between image and reality, Borges tricks us, but his trick is a playful invitation to think about the belief that as scientists we are free to reproduce or interpret the world as it is, rather than under specific cultural constraints and political conditions. He also invites us to think of a map, or any interpretation, as an inexact model, which reveals not just its inevitable partiality as an incomplete representation but also its inescapable partiality as a design of power. As such, any representation must be evaluated by its uses and effects.	28
Seeing Like a State is in this sense an imperial map of the modern world. From a lofty position, it gazes on a wide geographical and historical terrain, recounts imaginatively a number of themes and problems, and offers a set of recommendations for social reform. Like most maps, this book helps us see some things and occludes others from view. At the end, one is left with a striking irony. Scott's map of what he calls high modernism seems to be produced from the same all-seeing standpoint he identifies with high modernism—an imperial way of seeing for which Mary Louise Pratt has persuasively established a longer, colonial genealogy.12 As a high modernist critique of high modernism, it reinscribes the hubris he has so aptly discerned, and ends up producing a simplified account of high modernism and of the state and its way of seeing.	29
My concern is not that this map does not show us all of reality, for no map can do this. Rather, it is that its significant but one-sided illumination of a complex social landscape leaves obscured much of the terrain we have traversed, directs us to an impoverished destiny, and blocks alternative pathways. Scott invites us to keep our eyes so close to the ground, to take such small steps, that we may become blind to the violence of familiar paths and never risk to step out of the capitalist dystopia that surrounds us. I wish to have a map that would ask us to proceed with caution, as Scott does, but that would recognize the marks of human daring, a map that would dare our imagination, that would show new vistas and make us desire to mold the existing order into a different, dignified landscape for humankind. As Borges's story suggests, the truth of a map lies in its use. A map of history is not simply its model but its figuration. Our journey's desired destiny also defines the way we depict its trajectory.	30
Fernando Coronil, a Venezuelan citizen, was trained at Stanford University (BA in Social Thought and History) and the University of Chicago (PhD in Anthropology). He is an associate professor in the departments of anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, where he chairs the doctoral program in anthropology and history. The author of The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997), and co-author of States of Violence (forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press), Coronil has written extensively on issues of social theory, postcoloniality, and globalization. His most recent articles are "Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature," Public Culture 12 (Spring 2000), and "Magical Illusions or Revolutionary Magic: Chávez in Historical Context," NACLA 33, no. 6 (May/June 2000). His next book is about the visual imaginary of the Cuban Revolution, tentatively titled Nation and Imagination: Images of History in the Revolution. Notes 1 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 138. 2 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 81–82. 3 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 345. 4 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 7–8. 5 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 8, 256. 6 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 351. 7 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 355. 8 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 72, 357. 9 Juan Marinello, "Americanismo y cubanismo literarios" [1932], in Ensayos (Havana, 1977),48–49. 10 Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Money, Nature and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago, 1997). 11 Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories," Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996): 51–87. 12 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).

LOCKSS system has permission to collect, preserve, and serve this Archival Unit

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.