Mētis

The Greek term for cunning, adaptive skill: the knowledge of the pilot who reads a particular estuary, the farmer who knows this field. It is held by doing rather than by describing, it is local rather than general, and it survives in practice rather than in writing.

Its importance here is negative. Mētis is what legibility destroys. A scheme that replaces local practice with a standard procedure does not merely fail to capture the local knowledge; it removes the conditions under which that knowledge was maintained, so it is not recoverable afterwards.

Attribution

Not Scott's coinage. He takes it from Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, who reconstructed the term from Greek sources, and applies it to the modern administrative case. The slug drops the macron per the naming convention; the title carries it.