Legibility in culture

This paper theorizes legibility—the potential for an environment to be interpreted by an agent—as a central mechanism for the possibility of culture. I critically evaluate the concept of legibility and explicate the mechanisms by which it underpins social and cultural practice. I define legibility and its role in the flow of meaning in social interactions and environments, where it has four functions: it mediates, rationalizes, organizes, and discriminates. I then show that legibility is not specific to “modern” or large-scale social environments, examining the phenomena of surveillance, preference capture, and opacity of explanation, each of which I argue are integral to culture in any form. We then interrogate the value of scrutability in social processes and evaluate the claim that legibility regimes threaten people's “original” preferences. We argue that scrutability is deceptive and “original preferences” are illusory. We find that legibility regimes are foundational to the very possibility of culture. The arguments are supported with reference to diverse empirical examples including conversation, house design, menstruation signaling, domestic manners, algorithm-based decision-making, human emotions, witchcraft accusations, and games, drawing on original field research in the uplands of central Laos as well as secondary sources.