Read By the River: James C. Scott's In Praise of Floods
Saving dolphins, propitiating river spirits, and the future of history
We kicked off our Read by the River book club last week with a discussion of esteemed Yale sociologist James C. Scott's In Praise of Floods.
Was the book directly related to fly-fishing? Not exactly. But the discussion came back to angling lickety-split, as In Praise of Floods touches on the essential elements of riparian (river-related) ecosystems. Of which—spoiler alert—floods are one.
Scott's other works
Several members of the discussion group had read Scott's other published work, which slants toward what you could describe to explorations of anthropological anarchism. Several had read one or both of his best known works. Both of which concern engineering and control of natural modes of being, a theme in Floods. Against the Grain looks at how domesticating cereal crops and organized agriculture led to the rise of the modern state. Seeing Like a State analyzes several major efforts to quantify reality for state control, and how they didn't quite work out.
Scott mentions both in Floods, and also key elements of another of his books, The Art of Not Being Governed, an earned medley from an author and thinker who's long-since established a Greatest Hits of ideas.
Mission of Burma
The book's thesis spans watersheds and rivers around the globe—the Yellow River in China, the Mississippi in North America, the Nile in Africa—but its central character is the Ayeyarwady, a river that runs like a central nervous system across Burma.
The book has tinges of melancholy, not just for the negative issues that have caused flora and fauna—in the Ayeyarwady and worldwide—to decline at a precipitous rate.
Scott—who died in last July at 87—was clearly both passionate about the country, and unable, due to its present political inaccessibility and his advanced age at the time of writing the book, to visit.
