“In the praise of the floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C Scott arrives, after a year of catastrophic floods. Last spring, heavy rains raised parts of the San Jacinto and Tinetti rivers, in eastern Texas, at least dozens of feet over the flooding stage, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In September, during Helen HurricaneThe French Broad River rose to commercial corridors in Atelier, North Carolina, where he wiped restaurants, beer factories, shops and housing. In October, in Spain, the Magro, Júcar and Turia rivers increased their banks in the area surrounding Valencia, which led to the death of two hundred and thirty people.
Scott wants us to look at previous disasters like this. It claims that the focus on the human costs of floods is anthropox. The flood, for humans, may be the “most harmful to“ natural ”disasters all over the world, but from“ a long -term hydrological perspective, it is just a river breathing deep The map – is a relatively biological dead, “he says. Or, as it puts it more briefly in the place in the book,” No flood, no river. “
It is difficult to imagine one of the survivors of the floods reading these sentences without objection, and it will be on the filming of a displaced resident in Pacific Palisades who reads a book called “Praise of Fires”. But Scott does not ignore the extent to which the river can be destroyed by those who live on its banks. In celebrating periodic floods, it also warns of the costs of human intervention. The dams and dams lead to less frequent floods, but corrosion and the removal of forests mean more catastrophic floods when violating these barriers. The more civilized you are, the less flexible.
“Praise the floods“He provides a conclusion after his death to a scientific profession to accomplish traditional wisdom. Malaysia and the attempt to the life of the village’s life.
Although Scott came from the political left, his most famous book, “A vision like a state“A strong criticism of large government projects aimed at improving the welfare of man, by the liberation right, has been received. When he was asked to define himself, hedge and qualified: sometimes he was called” raw Marxist, with a focus on “raw”. “The Anthropology” was a way of courtesy, “with acknowledgment of the fact that he had no formal training in discipline. Late life, he was drifted towards the chaotic, but even this system of belief practiced a dark grip, and he resisted” two “students.” Bring half -symmetrical ideas as a way to develop another risk.
The lives of people working in agriculture were at the Scott Work Center. Young farmers and farmers around the world carry exciting transformations in the twentieth century and were undergoing large and satisfactory experiences by both capitalist and communist countries. In colonial and post -colonial systems, they were forced to cultivate cash crops and taxes were severely imposed. Under Stalin and Mao, experiences in collective agriculture led to famine. Scott wanted to study how the rural population responded to these disorders.
Peasants are often seen as Suhain and my negative. Scott thought otherwise. He searched for the implicit “local knowledge” that countries have ignored in their giant programs for their social reshaping, and to distinguish them in small actions of disobedience a pattern of resistance that sometimes erupted into a widespread rebellion. In his subsequent work, he photographed the “barbarians” with the joy of “barbarians” who hover over the edges of the states, and they ignore the work of the recruits and the leadership of the bold raids on the grains of the grain. Scott himself was somewhat similar to one of these barbarians, as he was constantly attacking and anxious unanimity, stable in the value of the state’s strength, and the civilization itself.
Scott visited for the first time in Southeast Asia in his early twenties. He was born in southern New Jersey, in 1936, he joined the Kwaker School before going to Williams College. In Williams, a professor encouraged him to study Burma, now Myanmar. After graduation, Scott went there in a rotating fellowship, in 1959. Riding a victorious motorcycle in 1940, traveled throughout the country, and ended up at Mandalay University, where he studied the Purmes for five months. The Sojourn launched its interest in Southeast Asia and the peasants and the formation of states.
While abroad, Scott wrote reports on the policy of the Burmese students to the CIA, and participated in the United States National Association of StudentsThen a hotbed of international students ’activity. As is detailed by political scientist Karen Bagate, Scott’s participation with the CIA was short, but it seems that his time with USNSA has sparked his interest in radical policy. This was the third world era, when the countries that brought out colonial powers began to gather together, many of which are under the banner of socialism other than alignment. With Usnsa, Scott traveled to Singapore, where he met representatives of the Union of Socialist Students and to Indonesia, where he met the presidents of the Communist Student Student Union, many of whom were later killed in the anti -communist purification operations in the country in 1965.
In the sixties and seventies of the last century, the Vietnam War was an urgent interest in politics and scholarships alike. The main role in the war by the Vietnamese rural Scott is to ask what the peasants motivate the rebellion. This question led to his first main book, “The moral economy of farmers“From 1976, which borrowed the idea of“ moral economy ”from the British leftist historian EP Thompson. Scott described a world of mutual assistance in which peasants had never been from Southeast Asia, but his conclusion was general-was created on themselves to ensure that they have starved. Other means of preserving life have the precedence over the profit.
Such a collapse occurred in Vietnam and Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the colonial authorities began to parasitize the lives of farmers, the privatization of village lands, forests, fisheries and the provision of many punishment taxes. These moves disrupted the weak balance that allowed the farmers to survive. When the great depression reached these countries, in 1930, he put more pressure on the livelihoods of young farmers, they erupted in the resistance. The crowds, sometimes swollen into thousands, began an attack on the colonial state. In a series of rebel procedures in the center of Vietnam, Scott wrote: “The administrative offices and their tax roller were destroyed, the post offices, railway stations and schools were burned, alcohol warehouses, cooperative officials were looted, the assassination of forest guard sites, and rice stores were overcome, at least an attack of salt.”
The “moral economy of the farmer” came out as political events were aimed at the hopes that many put in a third global revolution. Post -colonial and socialist countries that were founded in opposing colonial repression have shown their brutality and repression. The country after another used great plans to improve public luxury, such as the great MAO jump forward and the Ujamaa Julius Nyrre campaign to resettle the rural population in Tanzania in its planned villages. These efforts often require coercive workers and decreasing democratic participation, and sometimes it has led to famine. When the peasants’ rebellions appeared, they were crushed even in the surface democratic countries such as India, whose government violently suppressed the Naxalite uprisings in Western Bengal. Later in life, Scott admitted that “he was disappointed by the way the revolutions produced a stronger condition that was more repressive than the one that replaced it.”
Scott IV book, extraordinary “Weak weapons“From 1985, he records increasing disappointment with revolutionary policy. Green, and the Malaysian government has presented new machines and cash crops aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity and restructuring the agricultural economy in ways of residency from the rural poor.
