Statecentered Approaches to StateSociety Relations

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State-centered Approaches to State-Society
Relations
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Question of the DayWhy do states try to
transform societies?
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Lecture drawn from
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What do you see in this picture?
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Interests of the State

• What are states interests in nature or natural
  resources?

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Revenue

• Its all about the benjamins

Timber had other uses as wellship building,
fuel, etcbut states were mostly concerned with
how forests could be turned into money
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Only Timber is Useful to State
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How the state sees nature

• Plants that are useful become crops
• Species that compete with them become weeds
• Insects are stigmatized as pests
• Trees that are valuable become timber
• Trees that compete with them become trash trees
• Valued animals become game and livestock
• Animals that prey on them become predators or
  varmints

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Problems and Solutions

• How can the state separate the useful and the
  valuable from the useless?

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Scientific forestry
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What is the difference between these two forests?
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How did states manage forests previously?
Harvesting in rotation on an 8-year growth cycle
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Problem

• Poor quality maps of areas
• Trees distributed unequally across the different
  plots
• Result?

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How does scientific forestry solve this problem?
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State solutions and new problems

• Scientific forestry worked well for first round
  of trees
• Problems showed up after 100 years
• Waldsterben

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State transformations of society

• Traditional Measurements
• In some villages in Malaysia ask the question
• How far is it to the next village?
• Answer Three rice cookings
• In Ethiopia
• How much salt is needed to cook this dish?
• Answer Half as much as to cook a chicken

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Problems with traditional measurements

• Context-specific
• Unstandardized No meaning outside of the
  locations in which they are used
• Imprecise not very accurate
• Why might the state not like these traditional
  measurements?

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What does the state want to measure most?

• Agriculture
• Largest part of the economy

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Traditional measures of agriculture

• Often measured along the lines of how many
  animals or families they could support
• In Ireland, had farm of one cow or farm of two
  cows
• In France, described in terms of morgen or
  journals, meaning how many days of work the
  farm required

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Measuring the harvest for taxation

• Could play tricks in how to measure grains
• Are the grains measured dry or wet?
• Are they poured from shoulder height or waist
  height?
• Is the bushel leveled-off at the top or heaped?

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Why was measuring agriculture important?

• Changes in food prices were often a source of
  riots
• Major source of tax revenue

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Traditional systems of land tenure
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Each village had own rules

• Much land communally-held
• Land may be redistributed periodically
• Whoever planted a tree can harvest its fruit, no
  matter where it is planted
• In the case of famine, women who married into the
  village but havent given birth to children may
  not be fed and should return to their native
  villages
• But in another village 10 miles away things may
  be entirely different

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What difficulties would this create for the state?
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How did states try to overcome this problem?
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Privatize property
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Social conflict

• Frontier areas
• Paper privatization
• The Black Act of 1723
• Illegal transfers

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Transforming Cities
Why are city blocks rectangular?
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What problems could this pose for states?
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How could you remedy these problems?
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City Planning
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How could a grid make things easier?
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Simplifies administration

• Collecting taxes
• Delivering mail
• Conducting a census
• Putting down protests
• Digging pipes and sewers
• Planning public transportation
• Trash removal

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Why do people have last names?
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• Family names first introduced in China in the 4th
  century BC
• Now have the term ???(laobaixing) which means
  common people
• The literal translation is the 100 old last
  names

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• Why would giving people last names help the state?

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• Taxation
• Forced labor
• Military conscription
• Increases the power of males in the family
• Allows state to hold men financially responsible
  for their whole family

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• In some societies (such as 15th century Tuscany)
  having a last name was a status symbol, a
  privilege reserved for the wealthy
• Family names in many countries had to do with
  occupation, geographical location, or fathers
  name.

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• At first family names had no real social meaning
• Property inheritance made them more important

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Example the Philippines

• Governor Narciso Claveria y Zaldua decreed on
  November 21, 1849 that all Filipinos should take
  on permanent Hispanic surnames
• Drew up a catalogue of personal names, flora,
  fauna, minerals, geography and the arts
• In practice each town given only a few pages of
  the catalogue
• Result everyone in town has a surname beginning
  with the same letter

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Why do states try to make these kinds of
transformations?

• States try to transform nature and societies in
  order to make them more legible. These
  transformation make it easier for the state to
  count, organize, tax and plan.
• "At the end of the day, we are so many digits in
  the machine. The point is are these digits
  stronger than the competitors' digits? --
  Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kwan Yew,
  speaking of Singaporean workers in 2005

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Contemporary Transformations

• Are states still trying to transform societies in
  such dramatic ways?

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Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov aka Turkmenbashi
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• First Secretary of the Turkmenistan Communist
  Party, 1985-1981
• In 1991 becomes president of Turkmenistan
• In 1998 becomes president for life
• In 2006 life ends

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Political Culture in Turkmenistan

• http//youtube.com/watch?vPvhpBSqjVYQfeaturerel
  ated

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Social transformations under Turkmenbashi

• In 2004 recommends that young people chew on
  bones for healthy teeth instead of going to the
  dentist

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• Turkmen words for bread and the month of April
  were changed to Gurbansoltanedzhe, the name of
  his late mother.

Vladimir Putin enjoying a loaf of
Gurbansoltanedzhe
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• In 2005 all rural libraries were closed because
  ordinary Turkmen do not read books