Scott’s work has been a major influence on scholars — practitioners of the Subaltern Studies school, for instance — who believe that most resistances do not speak their name.
In the late 1950s, when a young doctoral researcher at Yale University left for fieldwork in a Malaysian village of 70 families, several of his friends and teachers warned that the “unglamorous” move could prove detrimental to his career. About three decades later, the experience would provide James C Scott the basis for his groundbreaking work, The Weapons of the Weak. It explored the techniques used by peasants to resist state power and launched Scott as one of the leading figures of resistance studies. Scott, who died on July 19 aged 87, often described the book that explored the non-ideological ways in which the farmers opposed authorities — food dragging, evasion, gossip — as a piece of work that gave him the most satisfaction. “The greatest emancipatory value for human freedom and the promise for liberty,” he was to write in one of his last works, Two Cheers for Anarchism, “have not been the result of orderly institutional procedures, but disorderly spontaneous action cracking open the society”.
Scott’s work has been a major influence on scholars — practitioners of the Subaltern Studies school, for instance — who believe that most resistances do not speak their name. It made social scientists realise that by paying attention only to formal organisations and public protests, they had pushed away a lot of resistance from their radar. Weapons of the Weak gave a new lens to examine acts such as jaywalking, army desertions — as opposed to mutinies — as struggles for citizenship rights. It nudged sociologists and economists to examine assembly-line slowdowns as a form of resistance against factory elites.
Other works — Seeing Like the State and The Art of Not Being Governed — placed Scott amongst the ranks of seminal critics of the hyper rationalism and overconfidence of the modern state. Ironically, as a student on field work, the anthropologist had given information to US intelligence on his Southeast Asian respondents. Scott has written about this experience as a matter of fact, and it is not known if he ever regretted his actions. What is well known, however, is his support for “open democratic politics as a process of gradual education”.
