Facebook 
Twitter 
Soundcloud 
Youtube 
Rss 
Among the great unanswered questions from the 1960s and 70s is how to understand politics and counter movements in the former colonies. The old imperial rulers thought they understood but had lost out. The new global masters were convinced they knew better, but failed to export their models from the West, East, China, or Nordic welfare states. Even in the universities, critics had limited opportunities to study how repression worked; how most people resisted in the countryside and slums; and how alternatives could be created even when the powerful hijacked the state and societies were divided, short of public education, strong institutions, industrialists and trade unions. Thus the researchers who still made their way became particularly important. Like the recently deceased James C. Scott, 87. One of the leading and most innovative liberal leftist social scientists of our time. How was he able to break through, and what did we learn from him?
Jim, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was of course influenced by his family’s community of Quakers with godly “inner light”, compassion, and an aversion to hierarchy. But he would soon also be influenced by new American superpower’s need to know something about the world it would dominate. In the late 1950’s, after college, he got scholarships and learned a lot from Burma to Paris, but felt obliged to share information with the CIA.
Yale University was so much better, especially its politics department. In the shadow of the Vietnam War and with giants such as the nestor of democracy research Robert Dahl in the faculty, there were resources as well as inspiration and academic independence. Here, Jim was able to address the big issues of the time—ideology and corruption – in his masters as well as PhD theses with a focus on Malaysia. As is customary in the United States, he then qualified as a teacher and researcher at another university, in Wisconsin, but returned to a tenured position at Yale and was able to publish his breakthrough book The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976). Its argument—which troubled all those who believed farmers longed for free markets—was that the subordinate clients of the landowning patrons only revolt when their relative security is disrupted, usually by market forces themselves.
Thus, Jim’s path to the stars was secured, it was thought. But he himself believed that more knowledge required fieldwork, beyond the prevailing theories and the sources in libraries and archives. The department management discouraged him with the argument that such absence would hinder his career. But after two years of ethnographic work in northwest Malaysia he came back and showed them how wrong they were. His groundbreaking book Weapons of the Weak (1985) documented various forms of everyday resistance among the poor that made a difference in-spite of little if any leadership or organisation. Thus, Jim could both claim that Gramsci’s thesis about the paralysing hegemony of the dominant classes was insufficient, and that there was an important informal politics which political science neglected, because it could not be studied from home with theories from other contexts and insufficient sources. To become good and dynamic, political science must be broadened and cooperate with, among others, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians (including oral historians).
Might it be possible to expand and develop the results into a general theory of popular struggle? In Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Jim showed how groups that were subordinated in various ways, from slavery to sexual violence, develop a hidden transcript in criticism of the authorities; a script which, when it becomes clear to the oppressed, could also unite them. But was this sufficient? Those of us who also studied the role of activists, and alternative programs to unite behind, as in Brazil, South Africa and Indian Kerala, were of course not entirely convinced; and Jim was open to discussion. But in the new zeitgeist from the 1980s of the primacy of civil society and social movements, these took on a life of their own. Jim and his colleagues broadened the perspective through an interdisciplinary Agrarian Studies program that attracted countless researchers and students from far and wide. He himself returned to an in-depth empirical study, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), on how Southeast Asia’s mountain peoples stay away from state domination.
The character of dominance must also be studied. Seeing Like a State (1998) analyses how development programs failed when they were centralist, required detailed uniform governance, mapping and control of citizens, and overlooked local conditions and people’s participation. This was not only about states and regimes, but also about dogmatic parties and movements, many with roots in freedom struggles. But the hijacking and looting of the state for the accumulation of private capital received less consideration. So although Jim’s critique was directed at authoritarian modernisation policies regardless of ideological pretensions and interests, the results could also be used in the neoliberal, sometimes libertarian, discourse of the time.
Jim stood firm. In Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) he argued for democratic principles of liberal socialism and a touch of anarchist “squint” to counteract dogmatism and the pursuit of universal laws in the social sciences. In addition, the critique of authoritarian modernisation was soon deepened in Against the Grain (2017), where the states’ historical roots were traced to the primacy of grain cultivation in the earliest civilizations, which required territorial control and bonded labour. And in a final book, In Praise of Floods (due March 2025), development and plundering of nature and people along the Irrawaddy River—the fundament of Burmese culture—is subjected to in-depth empirical analysis. Jim had devoted much of his time to mastering Burmese, supporting the democracy movement, and promoting engaged studies in the country and among its refugees.
That Yale’s political scientists fostered and were enriched by Jim and his colleagues’ study of informal politics and democratic engagement shows what the study of politics can be at its best. At Yale he was counted among the elite of sterling professors. Those of us who elsewhere did what we could in the margins were impressed and grateful for inspiration and discussion. Jim shared in seminars at Yale, during visits and study breaks (as in Uppsala and Oslo) and informal conversations, from midsummer festivities in Kungshamn (on the Swedish west coast) to dinners on his farm in Durham with sheep and highland cattle. Jim lived his research and teaching. This, as well as how he showed that the study of politics must be broadened, remain relevant. To quote Jim in the discussion of how new theoretical and methodological fashions hijack political science: “I have a zoo-theory—any zoo with just elephants is boring”.
This text is a translation of an article that will soon appear in Swedish and Norwegian. New Mandala will provide a link to the original version when it becomes available.
