The political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott (1936 to 2024) showed, in Against the Grain (2017), that farming and settled life came thousands of years before the first states, and that those states were built on grain because grain is easy to see, measure, store and tax. Early states, he argued, were fragile machines for capturing people and their harvests, and for most ordinary people life outside them was often easier, freer and healthier, a picture close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s account of how domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this began the break from animism and the city-states turned it into the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.
Who was James C. Scott? #
A political scientist who crossed into anthropology, history and ecology. Born in New Jersey in 1936, he taught for nine years at the University of Wisconsin and then, from 1976 until he retired in 2021, at Yale University, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology, and where he founded and long directed the Program in Agrarian Studies. He spent two years in a rice-growing village in Kedah, Malaysia, which gave him Weapons of the Weak (1985), on the small, everyday ways in which peasants resist those above them.
His other books include Seeing Like a State (1998), on how states try to make the people and land they rule simple and readable, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) and Against the Grain (2017). He kept bees and sheep on his farm in Connecticut, and wrote with sympathy for the anarchist tradition. He died at home in Durham, Connecticut, in July 2024, aged eighty-seven.1
What does Against the Grain say? #
That the old story of civilisation is back to front. We were taught that farming led straight to settled villages, and settled villages straight to states, and that each step was a great advance in well-being. Scott, drawing together the archaeology of the last few decades, found that settled life came before the domestication of plants and animals, and that both were in place “at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared.” The first states, in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, appeared only around 3,100 BC, “more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.”2
Nor was farming a step up for most people. “Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case.” Farming was far more laborious than hunting and gathering, and crowding people, livestock and crops together brought new diseases. The early states, far from drawing people in, “had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding.”3 Scott was clear that the book was a drawing together of other people’s findings, a work that aimed to “connect the dots”.
Why grain? #
Because grain suits the tax collector. Virtually all the classical states were based on grain, and “History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states.” Wheat, barley and rice ripen at the same time in open fields, where an official can see and measure them, and the harvest can be stored, counted and carried away. Cassava, by contrast, grows below ground, is easy to hide and can stay there, still edible, for two years. “If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dig up the tubers one by one”.4
So, in Scott’s words, “state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains.” Peoples who lived by foraging, herding or shifting cultivation were much harder to govern, and he saw that as part of the point. See Why did some peoples avoid the state?
Was life outside the early states really better? #
For most ordinary people, often it was. Scott wrote that “life outside the state, life as a ‘barbarian’, may often have been materially easier, freer, and healthier than life at least for nonelites inside civilization.”5 ‘Barbarian’, for him, was not a cultural term but a political one, which simply meant the people the state did not yet govern. In the age of the early states these were the great majority of humanity, a mix of hunter-gatherers, herders and shifting cultivators, living across most of the earth.
He called that long period “the golden age of barbarians”, when people outside the states enjoyed a more varied diet and greater freedom, trading with the fragile states nearby without paying their taxes or fighting their wars. Even the ‘collapse’ of an early state, usually told as a tragedy, may often have been a relief for its ordinary people, as a kingdom came apart into smaller and looser communities. And the ‘dark ages’ that followed, Scott suggested, may often have marked “an actual improvement in human welfare.”6
Were humans domesticated too? #
Scott asked whether we were. Domesticated sheep and goats became smaller, more placid and “less aware of their surroundings”, and he asked whether a similar process affected the people who lived crowded together in the farming settlement, alongside their crops and animals. Comparing the life of a farmer, “strapped as it is to the metronome of a major cereal grain”, with the life of the hunter-gatherer, he found the farming life “comparatively far narrower experientially” and poorer in culture and ritual.7
Therapeutic Shamanism takes this further, whilst being clear that the evidence is thin and that this is a good guess, not a proven fact. Hunter-gatherer cultures “were also clearly cultures of highly sensitive people”, and, following Scott’s case in Against the Grain, domestication literally deadened us and dumbed down our senses. Scott himself put the case more tentatively, as a question. See What is a highly sensitive person, and why are so many drawn to shamanic work? and Are humans a self-domesticated species?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In its order of events and in its sympathies. For Therapeutic Shamanism, the seeds of the Fall were sown with agriculture around 11,000 BC, and the break became the Fall itself with the first city-states, from around 4,000 BC. Taking up agriculture “was probably not so much a decision as something that we slid into”, and farming “generally” produces a surplus, so populations grew until a return to hunting and gathering was no longer possible.8 Scott’s long gap between the first farming and the first states, and his early states as coercive machines that people had to be captured into, fit that slow, uneven story well.
Therapeutic Shamanism also adds what Scott, writing as a secular historian, left out, the change in consciousness and in our relationship with the living world. Rather than being a part of the land, “we decided that we owned the land”.9 Totalitarian agriculture means “growing only the things that we want, using the land as we wish, and waging war on anything that gets in our way”.10 Scott told the story through grain, taxes and bodies; Therapeutic Shamanism tells it through the same events as a wound in our relationship with Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and the other Peoples. See What is the Fall? and What does domestication do to us?
What did The Art of Not Being Governed add? #
The other side of the story, the people who got away. Its subject is ‘Zomia’, the great upland region of mainland South-East Asia, whose hill peoples, Scott wrote, were not people left behind by progress but, over two thousand years, largely runaways from the slavery, taxes, conscription and wars of the rice-growing valley states. Much about their lives, such as living scattered in rugged hills, moving often, and growing root crops by shifting cultivation instead of grain in fixed fields, can be read, he wrote, as ways of keeping the state at arm’s length.11
The hill peoples were mostly shifting cultivators, not hunter-gatherers, so Scott’s account is evidence of how farming peoples have avoided the state, not of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived. See Who was Pierre Clastres, and what is “society against the state”?
What do critics say? #
Some reviewers found the picture one-sided. The philosopher Alex Sager, reviewing Against the Grain, wrote that its account of the rise of states “ignores the good they do”, and that Scott “extols the virtues of life outside of the state, but says little about its vices”.12
On the other side, the economists Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav and Luigi Pascali, comparing societies across the world, found that hierarchy and states arose where land suited cereals, not simply where land was most productive, and suggested that fertile land for roots and tubers in the tropics “might be a curse of plenty”.13 The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow also agree that “an affinity exists between grain economies and the interests of predatory elites”, noting that Scott never claimed cereal farming always produces a state; their own book describes early grain-farming cities, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia, that seem to have been run by large councils long before kings appeared.14
