BiblioVault - Books about Scott, David

Conflict in the Great Outdoors

Toward Understanding and Managing for Diverse Sportsmen Preferences

Hobson Bryan, Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Conflict in the Great Outdoors addresses the different orientations and behaviors within sportsmen categories. A major problem of outdoor recreation management addressed in Hobson Bryan’s work is the difficulty in identifying sportsmen subgroups having distinctive preferences and expectations as to the composition of the “quality” outdoor experience. Land-use managers and planners are faced with the problem of matching resources with more users having increasingly specific motivations. Bryan applies his theory of variations within a leisure activity by addressing what sportsmen do and why they do it in various activities such as mountain climbing, hunting, canoeing, skiing, and backpacking.

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Conscripts of Modernity

The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment

David Scott

Duke University Press, 2004

At this stalled and disillusioned juncture in postcolonial history—when many anticolonial utopias have withered into a morass of exhaustion, corruption, and authoritarianism—David Scott argues the need to reconceptualize the past in order to reimagine a more usable future. He describes how, prior to independence, anticolonialists narrated the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism as romance—as a story of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption. Scott contends that postcolonial scholarship assumes the same trajectory, and that this imposes conceptual limitations. He suggests that tragedy may be a more useful narrative frame than romance. In tragedy, the future does not appear as an uninterrupted movement forward, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs.

Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, James told the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution as one of romantic vindication. In the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses James’s recasting of The Black Jacobins to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy. In an epilogue, he juxtaposes James’s thinking about tragedy, history, and revolution with Hannah Arendt’s in On Revolution. He contrasts their uses of tragedy as a means of situating the past in relation to the present in order to derive a politics for a possible future.

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Education System in Mexico

David Scott, C.M. Posner, Chris Martin, and Elsa Guzman

University College London, 2018

Over the past three decades, a significant amount of research has sought to relate educational institutions, policies, practices, and reforms to social structures and agencies. A number of models have been developed that have become the basis for attempting to understand the complex relation between education and society. At the same time, national and international bodies tasked with improving educational performances seem to be writing in a void, in that there is no rigorous theory guiding their work, and their documents exhibit few references to groups, institutions and forces that can impede or promote their programs and projects. As a result, the recommendations these bodies provide to their clients display little to no comprehension of how and under what conditions the recommendations can be put into effect. The Education System in Mexico directly addresses this problem. By combining abstract insights with the practicalities of educational reforms, policies, practices, and their social antecedents, it offers a long overdue reflection of the history, effects and significance of the Mexican educational system, as well as presenting a more cogent understanding of the relationship between educational institutions and social forces in Mexico and around the world.

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Formations of Ritual

Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil

David Scott

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Formations of Ritual was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Yaktovil is an elaborate healing ceremony employed by Sinhalas in Sri Lanka to dispel the effects of the eyesight of a pantheon of malevolent supernatural figures known as yakku. Anthropology, traditionally, has articulated this ceremony with the concept metaphor of "demonism." Yet, as David Scott demonstrates in this provocative book, this use of "demonism" reveals more about the discourse of anthropology than it does about the ritual itself. His investigation of yaktovil and yakku within the Sinhala cosmology is also an inquiry into the ways in which anthropology, by ignoring the discursive history of the rituals, religions, and relationships it seeks to describe, tends to reproduce ideological-often, specifically colonial-objects.

To do this, Scott describes the discursive apparatus through which yakku are positioned in the moral universe of Sinhala, traces the appearance of yakku and yaktovil in Western discourse, evaluates the contribution of these figures and this ceremony in anthropology, and attempts to show how the larger anthropology of Buddhism, in which the anthropology of yaktovil is embedded, might be reconfigured. Finally, he offers a rereading of the ritual in terms of the historically selfconscious approach he proposes.The result points to a major rethinking of the historical nature not only of the objects, but also of the concepts through which they are constructed in anthropological discourse.

David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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Omens of Adversity

Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice

David Scott

Duke University Press, 2014

Omens of Adversity is a profound critique of the experience of postcolonial, postsocialist temporality. The case study at its core is the demise of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983), and the repercussions of its collapse. In the Anglophone Caribbean, the Grenada Revolution represented both the possibility of a break from colonial and neocolonial oppression, and hope for egalitarian change and social and political justice. The Revolution's collapse in 1983 was devastating to a revolutionary generation. In hindsight, its demise signaled the end of an era of revolutionary socialist possibility. Omens of Adversity is not a history of the Revolution or its fallout. Instead, by examining related texts and phenomena, David Scott engages with broader, enduring issues of political action and tragedy, generations and memory, liberalism and transitional justice, and the possibility of forgiveness. Ultimately, Scott argues that the palpable sense of the neoliberal present as time stalled, without hope for emancipatory futures, has had far-reaching effects on how we think about the nature of political action and justice.

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On Learning

A General Theory of Objects and Object-Relations

David Scott

University College London, 2021

A philosophical work that tackles the question, “What is learning?”.

What is learning? This book is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations, examining concepts as acquired dispositions. David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. This volume offers a counterargument to empiricist conceptions of learning, rejecting the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum, and assessment. Instead, Scott argues that values are central to understanding how we live, permeating our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures, and our relations with other people.

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On Learning, Volume 2

Philosophies, Concepts and Practices

Edited by David Scott

University College London, 2024

An original and provocative interpretation of learning as a concept and as a practice.

The contributors to this volume focus on two meta-concepts: knowledge and learning, on the relationship between the two, and the way these can be framed in epistemic, social, political, and economic terms. Knowledge and learning, as meta-concepts, are positioned in various networks or constellations of meaning, principally: their antecedents, their relations to other relevant concepts, and the way the concepts are used in the lifeworld.

The various authors in this book explore several important concepts that are relevant to the idea of learning: Meta-concepts such as epistemology, inferential role semantics, phenomenology, rationality, thinking, hermeneutics, critical realism, and pragmatism. Meso-concepts such as probability, woman, training, assessment, education, system, race, friendship, Bildung, curriculum, ecology and pedagogy. Like David Scott’s first volume of On Learning, this collection also focuses on philosophy, concepts, and practices as a response to empiricist and positivist conceptions of knowledge. It challenges reductionist ideas of learning that have filtered through to the management of our schools, colleges, and universities; confronts over-simplified messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum, and assessment; and fosters the denial that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live, the normative dimension to social policy and social theory.

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Stuart Hall's Voice

Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity

David Scott

Duke University Press, 2017

Stuart Hall’s Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Hall’s intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the book—which he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his death—as an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Hall’s work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Hall’s style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening.

Hall’s intellectual life was animated by voice in literal and extended senses: not only was his voice distinctive in the materiality of its sound, but his thinking and writing were fundamentally shaped by a dialogical and reciprocal practice of speaking and listening. Voice, Scott suggests, is the central axis of the ethos of Hall’s style.

Against the backdrop of the consideration of the voice’s aspects, Scott specifically engages Hall’s relationship to the concepts of "contingency" and "identity," concepts that were dimensions less of a method as such than of an attuned and responsive attitude to the world. This attitude, moreover, constituted an ethical orientation of Hall’s that should be thought of as a special kind of generosity, namely a "receptive generosity," a generosity oriented as much around giving as receiving, as much around listening as speaking.

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