Grain, state power, and peasant resistance

The standard narrative about grain production is that it is an immense step forward for humankind that allowed for civilization to take place.  We get the impression that there are so many benefits to grain cultivation that people would be crazy not to grow grain, in large quantities, once they knew how to.  And yet, it has been the case that many people around the world actively resisted doing this! 

As I first learned in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, while grain is easy to store, this also makes it quite easy to steal, en masse.  The bandits in the movie had a practice of stealing as much as they could from the farmers while allowing them to be productive.  In the movie the farmers have a practice of hiding their grain.  Scott discusses how farmers across the world often bury their grain to keep it out of the hands of bandits, tax collectors, and armies.  He offers us some interesting facts that may give a twist to how we consider teaching the importance of grain for civilization: 

1) Because grain is less perishable than fruits and vegetables, it can be stored and used in military marches.

2) Military campaigns have typically been seasonal, planned to avoid the rains, and often in conjunction with the ripening of crops so armies could renew their food supply along the way.  In the Near East, China, and Southeast Asia - and I imagine in other areas as well - peasants with geographically accessible fields of grain would not be surprised to find an army stopping by once the harvest was over. 

3) In Scott's terms, grain is legible: fields of grain cannot be hidden, so the state knows exactly how much is being grown, knows when it ripens, when it will be harvested, and when it can be collected.

4) Grain can easily be destroyed: an effective form of punishment. 

5) Populations that grow grain are not mobile, and easy to keep track of.

6) It is easy to calculate the yield of a field of grain, meaning that a state can predict and plan for grain taxes.  When farmers produced less than the state predicted, they would typically not be cut a break.  This is true especially because from the states point of view, farmers have every reason to lie about their yield.  

All of these factors make grain an efficient crop for the state.  They also make life rather difficult for those who grow grain, and thus, many people have avoided the production of grain.  Root crops in particular are strategic in their illegibility to the state: only the community knows how much food is being grown.  Not only this, root crops can stay underground for a long time – they can be picked as needed by a community, meaning they are not at risk of being stolen en masse as is the case with sacks of grain.  In conjunction with this, many peoples have also chosen to live far from state centers, or in geographically inaccessible areas: the choice to be "uncivilized".    

   

A reflection on how we frame civilization

I recently began reading the work of James C. Scott, a political anthropologist who does a wonderful job at portraying the ingenuity and intelligence of peasants, especially as embodied through subtle acts of resistance to attempts at domination.  Scott's work is forcing me to reconsider many essential features of world civilizations, including the roles played by writing systems and grain cultivation.  As such, I hope to spend the next month or so reading his work and blogging their relevance to world history teachers.

James C. Scott discussing The Art of Not Being Governed 

In the first chapter of The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott points out that ancient civilizations were “in demographic terms, insignificant.  They occupied a miniscule portion of the world’s landscape… …their mark on the landscape and its people’s is relatively trivial when compared to their over-sized place in the history books.”  Perhaps this is strongly worded - I would need to look further into it.  Regardless, he asks us to consider the fact that vast numbers of people have lived outside of civilizations - even when they exist within an empires territory - and to consider exactly how effected people across the vast expanse of any empire actually were by that empire.  He asks us to reflect on why (or at least on if) history has tended to be about states, rather than about peoples. 

As a teacher, such considerations become reconsiderations of how I frame civilization for my students: if I show them a map of Mesopotamia, am I giving them the impression that all people living within that area are participating in the state?  Certainly peoples close to the cities did, but once you get a hundred miles away from the city walls, this may no longer be the case.  There are lots of people living farther out who may trade with various cities and states, but not be assimilated into them.  As Scott emphasizes, mass amounts of people lived in such a way as to actively avoid the state, its taxes, its conscriptions, and its forced labor practices. 

Text-books and teachers often point out that early civilizations grew up around rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, the Yangtze and the Yellow.  I think it’s important to help students understand that the vast majority of human beings did not live along these rivers, and that many that did still did not participate in the civilizations that grew up around them.  Many lived, by choice, in regions that made it difficult for states to gain access to them, such as in mountainous or marshy areas.

Civilization tends to be portrayed as a great leap forward.  And while I don’t want to say that it’s not, I think it is important not to oversimplify things and portray it as a beacon of light.  The rise of civilization is fraught with complex moral problems for students to explore.  Scott reminds us that slavery is built into the foundations of civilization: “Some subjects were no doubt attracted to the possibilities for trade, wealth, and status available at the court centers, while others, almost certainly the majority, were captives and slaves seized in warfare or purchased from slave raiders.”   There is a tension at the foundation of civilization that we still experience today: the tension between specialized work and the knowledge and commodities it produces, and unfair, often horrific labor practices that untold numbers of people desperately wishes they could escape. What does progress mean in this context? 

Another question regarding the notion of progress is how we portray “civilized” vs. “uncivilized”.  While most teachers, I hope, don't use those terms anymore, they are often implicit in the way civilization is discussed.  Are we automatically setting up the notion that written systems are superior to oral ones?  That large fields of grain are superior to numerous small patches of root vegetables grown in a forest?  Most of us are still taught, and perhaps have an unconscious understanding that one is better than the other.  What I hope to do by examining Scotts work in coming months is to explore the other side: the benefits and utility of oral language and other features of traditional life that civilization is lauded as having transcended.