Excerpted from James Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

From Chapter 9: Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Metis

The Art of the Locality

Why are the rules of thumb that can be derived from any skilled craft still woefully inadequate to its practice? Artists or cooks, Michael Oakeshott has noted, may in fact write about their art and try to boil it down to technical knowledge, but what they write represents not much of what they know but rather only that small part of their knowledge that can be reduced to exposition. Knowing a craft’s shorthand rules is a very long way from its accomplished performance: “These rules and principles are mere abridgements of the activity itself; they do not exist in advance of the activity, they cannot properly be said to govern it and they cannot provide the impetus of the activity. A complete mastery of the principles may exist alongside a complete inability to pursue the activity to which they refer, for the pursuit of the activity does not consist in the application of these principles; and even if it did, the knowledge of how to apply them (the knowledge of actually pursuing the activity) is not given in a knowledge of them.”¹³

Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of metis. The subtleties of application are important precisely because metis is most valuable in settings that are mutable, indeterminant (some facts are unknown), and particular. ^{14 Although} we shall return to the question of indeterminacy and change, here I want to explore further the localness and particularity of metis.

In seamanship, the difference between the more general knowledge of navigation and the more particular knowledge of piloting is instructive. When a large freighter or passenger liner approaches a major port, the captain typically turns the control of his vessel over to a local pilot, who brings it into the harbor and to its berth. The same procedure is followed when the ship leaves its berth until it is safely out into the sea-lanes. This sensible procedure, designed to avoid accidents, reflects the fact that navigation on the open sea (a more “abstract” space) is the more general skill, while piloting a ship through traffic in a particular port is a highly contextual skill. We might call the art of piloting a “local and situated knowledge.” What the pilot knows are local tides and currents along the coast and estuaries, the unique features of local wind and wave patterns, shifting sandbars, unmarked reefs, seasonal changes in microcurrents, local traffic conditions, the daily vagaries of wind patterns off headlands and along straits, how to pilot in these waters at night, not to mention how to bring many different ships safely to berth under variable conditions.¹⁵ Such knowledge is particular, by definition; it can be acquired only by local practice and experience. Like a bird or an insect that has adapted brilliantly to a narrow ecological niche, the pilot knows one harbor. Much of his knowledge would be irrelevant if he were suddenly transposed to a different port.¹⁶ Despite the rather narrow context of this knowledge, it is agreed by captains, harbormasters, and, not least, those who insure maritime commerce against losses that the pilot’s knowledge of a particular port must prevail. The pilot’s experience is locally superior to the general rules of navigation.

Mark Twain’s classic Life on the Mississippi reflects at great length on the knowledge acquired by riverboat pilots. Part of that knowledge consists of rules of thumb about surface features that may signal shallows, currents, or other navigational hazards. Much of it, however, consists of a quite specific familiarity with their particular stretch of the Mississippi at different seasons and water levels — knowledge that could have been gained in that particular place only through experience. Although there is something that might properly be called a knowledge of rivers in general, it is a quite thin and unsatisfactory knowledge when it comes to making a particular trip on a particular river. A native pilot is no less necessary on a given river than a native tracker for a given jungle or a local guide in Bruges or in the medina of an ancient Arab City.

The practice and experience reflected in metis is almost always local. Thus a guide on mountain climbing may be best at Zermatt, which she has scaled often; an airplane pilot best on Boeing 747s, on which he was trained; and the orthopedic surgeon best at knees, where her surgical experience has given her a certain expertise. It is not entirely clear how much of these experts’ metis would be transferable if they were suddenly shifted to Mont Blanc, DC3s, and hands.

Every instance of the application of a given skill will require specific adjustments for local conditions. For a weaver, each new supply of yarn or thread handles differently. For a potter, a new supply of clay “works” differently. Long experience with different materials will have the effect of making such adjustments quasi-automatic. The specificity of knowledge goes even deeper, in the sense that each loom or potter’s wheel has its own distinctive qualities, which an artisan comes to know and appreciate (or work around). Every general knowledge that is actually applied, then, requires some imaginative translation. A consummate knowledge of looms in general does not translate directly into the successful operation of this particular loom with its peculiarities of design, use, woods, and repairs. To speak of the art of one loom, the art of one river, the art of one tractor, or the art of one automobile is not preposterous; it is to point to the size and importance of the gap between general knowledge and situated knowledge.

We might reasonably think of situated, local knowledge as being partisan knowledge as opposed to generic knowledge. That is, the holder of such knowledge typically has a passionate interest in a particular outcome. An insurer of commercial shipping for a large, highly capitalized maritime firm can afford to rely on probability distributions for accidents. But for a sailor or captain hoping for a safe voyage, it is the outcome of the single event, a single trip, that matters. Metis is the ability and experience necessary to influence the outcome — to improve the odds — in a particular instance.

The state simplifications and utopian schemes we have examined in earlier chapters all concern activities that are carried out in spatially and temporally unique settings. While something can indeed be said about forestry, revolution, urban planning, agriculture, and rural settlement in general, this will take us only so far in understanding this forest, this revolution, this farm. All farming takes place in a unique space (fields, soil, crops) and at a unique time (weather pattern, season, cycle in pest populations) and for unique ends (this family with its needs and tastes). A mechanical application of generic rules that ignores these particularities is an invitation to practical failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both. The generic formula does not and cannot supply the local knowledge that will allow a successful translation of the necessarily crude general understandings to successful, nuanced, local applications. The more general the rules, the more they require in the way of translation if they are to be locally successful. Nor is it simply a matter of the captain or navigator realizing at what point his rules of thumb are inferior to the intimate local knowledge of the pilot. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that the rules of thumb themselves are largely a codification derived from the actual practice of sailing and piloting.

One last analogy may help to clarify the relationship between general rules of thumb and metis. Metis is not merely the specification of local values (such as the local mean temperature and rainfall) made in order to successfully apply a generic formula to a local case. Taking language as a parallel, I believe that the rule of thumb is akin to formal grammars whereas metis is more like actual speech. metis is no more derivative of general rules than speech is derivative of grammar. Speech develops from the cradle by imitation, use, trial and error. Learning a mother tongue is a stochastic process — a process of successive, self-correcting approximations. We do not begin by learning the alphabet, individual words, parts of speech, and rules of grammar and then trying to use them all in order to produce a grammatically correct sentence. Moreover, as Oakeshott indicates, a knowledge of the rules of speech by themselves is compatible with a complete inability to speak intelligible sentences. The assertion that the rules of grammar are derivative of the practice of actual speech is nearer to the truth. Modern language training that aims at competence in speaking recognizes this and begins with simple speech and rote repetition in order to imprint pattern and accent while leaving the rules of grammar implicit, or else introducing them later as a way of codifying and summarizing practical mastery.

Like language, the metis or local knowledge necessary to the successful practice of farming or pastoralism is probably best learned by daily practice and experience. Like serving a long apprenticeship, growing up in a household where that craft is continually practiced often represents the most satisfactory preparation for its exercise. This kind of socialization to a trade may favor the conservation of skills rather than daring innovation. But any formula that excludes or suppresses the experience, knowledge, and adaptability of metis risks incoherence and failure; learning to speak coherent sentences involves far more than merely learning the rules of grammar.