James C. Scott

American political scientist and anthropologist, for most of his career at Yale, where he taught political science and directed the agrarian studies programme. His fieldwork was principally in Southeast Asia.

The terms this collection draws from him, legibility and mētis, were developed in that context, as descriptions of the relationship between states and agrarian populations, before being applied more widely.

Scott described his own position as anarchist. The critical argument of Seeing Like a State is considerably more developed than its prescriptive one, a point he addressed in the later Two Cheers for Anarchism.