High Modernism, Conflict, and the Nature of Change in Canada: A Look at <i>Seeing Like a State</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seeing Like a State (1998), anthropologist James C. Scott's critique of twentieth-century development and the ideology of “high modernism” that animates it, has shaped the writing of Canadian history, as it has in so many other fields. Environmental historians of Canada, particularly those who study hydroelectric development in the postwar period, have found it especially useful because it links social and environmental change to political power, putting nature at the core of the project of modernization. This article reviews some of that literature to illustrate and critique Scott's key concepts and arguments. Specifically, it takes issue with Scott's contention that high modernist development pitted local knowledge against the expertise of the state's agents. The article also challenges the declensionist narrative offered in the book, which portrays the nature of high modernist change solely in terms of degradation. Finally, it suggests that adopting the very way of seeing that Scott criticizes – an imperial, encompassing, reductive vision – has, and can hold out, the promise for a better kind of development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".