Metis, far from being rigid and monolithic, is plastic, local, and divergent. It is in fact the idiosyncracies of metis, its contextualness, and its … - James C. Scott

A good many institutions in liberal democracies already take such a form and may serve as exemplars for fashioning new ones. One could say that democracy itself is based on the assumption that the metis of its citizenry should, in mediated form, continually modify the laws and policies of the land. Common law, as an institution, owes its longevity to the fact that it is not a final codification of legal rules, but rather a set of procedures for continually adapting some broad principles to novel circumstances. Finally, that most characteristic of human institutions, language, is the best model: a structure of meaning and continuity that is never still and ever open to the improvisations of all its speakers.

Following the illuminating studies of Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, we can find in the Greek concept of metis a means of comparing the forms of knowledge embedded in local experience with the more general, abstract knowledge deployed by the state and its technical agencies.

A state mainly concerned with appropriation and control will find sedentary agriculture preferable to pastoralism or shifting agriculture. For the same reasons, such a state would generally prefer large-holding to small-holding and, in turn, plantation or collective agriculture to both. Where control and appropriation are the overriding considerations, only the last two forms offer direct control over the workforce and its income, the opportunity to select cropping patterns and techniques, and, finally, direct control over the production and profit of the enterprise. Although collectivization and plantation agriculture are seldom very efficient, they represent, as we have seen, the most legible and hence appropriable forms of agriculture.
The large capitalist agricultural producer faces the same problem as the factory owner: how to transform the essentially artisanal or metis knowledge of farmers into a standardized system that will allow him greater control over the work and its intensity. The plantation was one solution. In colonial countries, where able-bodied men were pressed into service as gang labor, the plantation represented a kind of private collectivization, inasmuch as it relied on the state for the extramarket sanctions necessary to control its labor force. More than one plantation sector has made up what it lacked in efficiency by using its political clout to secure subsidies, price supports, and monopoly privileges.