Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The problem necessarily arises of how to evaluate these constructions; on what basis is one construction to be preferred over another? The conceptual ground is treacherous here and proof, in the strict sense of natural sciences, is unavailable. Nevertheless, some standards of evidence and inference are possible. Such constructions should be economical and, at the very least, consistent with the practices and beliefs they purport to illuminate. To the degree that they also make sense of what would otherwise be unrelated or anomalous data from the record of human action, they are to be preferred over competing constructions. One final standard by which interpretations might be judged is the object of considerable dispute; it is that our interpretation or characterization should, in principle, be found plausible by those whose actions are being interpreted. The problem here, of course, is not only that all human actors have interests that lead them to conceal or misrepresent their intentions, but that this standard must also contend both with Freudian doctrine that judges many motivations to be inaccessible to the actor and with the notion of “false-consciousness.” Thus, while it may be unrealistic to insist that human actors confirm our construction of their actions, we can insist that our interpretations take account of the full range of self-descriptions they do offer.

  The last ten years have been momentous for the villagers of Sedaka and for their compatriots on the Muda Plain. One would be hard-pressed to find another decade in which their material life and production relations changed so dramatically or in which older patterns of social and economic life came unstuck so radically.3 These are the gross facts all villagers have had to grapple with, to [Page 140] understand, and to interpret. It should not surprise us that their constructions of what has happened, its meaning, who is to blame, and what it all portends should vary greatly. There are significant variations by individual, by age, by status, and, not least, by property relations-that is to say, by class. Whose ox is being gored makes a striking difference. One cannot expect a landless laborer to look on combine-harvesters with quite the same equanimity or satisfaction as does the large-scale farmer. And yet their divergent experiences and interests form part of the same community of discourse. Their disparate and often contradictory understandings of events are intended to speak to, to appeal to, one another and are fashioned from the same cultural materials available to all.

  What follows here and in the next chapter is thus an attempt to describe and analyze the beginnings of this new experience of class in Sedaka.

  If, in the last chapter, I surveyed the impact of the green revolution with the eyes of an economic or social historian, in this chapter I propose to survey the same events through the partisan eyes of two sets of villagers-winners and losers. Depending on whom one talks to, there are at least two green revolutions at work here. Before plunging in however, it should be perfectly obvious that class is hardly the only social experience available to villagers. Factions, neighborhoods, and kinship ties, to mention only a few, create their own fracture lines, which do not often coincide neatly with class. Villagers are also united for some purposes with their local antagonists as members of the same ethnic group, the same religion, the same village, the same sector of the economy (paddy). Depending on the issue and context, these other experienced selves may be decisive. What is undeniable, though, is that property relations have become far more salient since double-cropping. But property relations are, as always, rather tangled and do not serve to divide the village neatly in two or three parts like some sharp sociological scalpel. Each aspect of the changes since 1972 defines a somewhat different collection of winners and losers; small landowners who would like to expand their farms by renting, for example, may share a distaste for leasehold tenancy with the poor while not sharing their aversion to the use of combine-harvesters. And yet, as we shall see, there is enough of a cumulative impact at the top and at the bottom of the village stratification to provide the existential basis for the generation of something like a class point of view.

  The “poor” for the purposes of this analysis will generally mean the thirtyseven households with the lowest per capita income. The “rich,” in turn, refers to those twenty-five households with the highest per capita incomes.4 While per capita income is, by itself, a better measure of local class position than total [Page 141] income or the amount of land owned, it nonetheless produced a few anomalies that ran square against local perceptions. In such cases, I followed local opinion, as it appeared in each case to be accurate in a larger sense than my numbers.5 The divergent points of view examined below represent, then, what appeared to be the most salient differences in perspective between rich and poor. Apart from a “zone of agreement,” only those views of double-cropping and its consequences that divided the rich and the poor and that were held by a substantial number of either group are discussed.

  In a village deeply embedded in a larger economy, where a share of the local paddy land is owned by outsiders and where villagers seek work and land outside the community, class issues can hardly be confined to the local sphere alone. Most of these issues, however, have a clear local manifestation. Thus, for virtually every change in production relations that the poor have come to resent—for example, mechanization, rents in advance, decline in charity, shifts in wage rates—there are local, as well as outside, targets for their resentment. For a few matters—most notably leasehold tenancy—which are most definitely class issues, there are few local antagonists. Here the “winners” are largely outside the village, and most of the local population is largely in accord although, as we shall see, at quite different levels of enthusiasm.

  SHIPS PASSING—AND SIGNALING—IN THE NIGHT

  Two brief commentaries on the present state of affairs in Sedaka will serve to illustrate how the facts reported in the previous chapter can take on widely divergent meanings. I have chosen them to highlight a style of argument and for the contrast they provide. But they are neither the most divergent examples available nor the least. They are, in fact, fairly representative. Presented here with a minimum of interpretation, their meaning in the larger discourse between winners and losers will become apparent only later.

  Pak Yah, a landless laborer with eight children, has always been hard-pressed to make ends meet. His situation is reflected not only in his house, which is a better maintained version of Razak’s, but in his nickname. He is called Yah [Page 142] Botol (Yah—Bottle).6 The reference is to the sound made by the bottle of cooking oil rattling in his bicycle basket as he pedals back and forth nearly every afternoon to his house near the far end of the village. It is at the same time a reference to his poverty, since he can seldom afford more than the 30¢ minimum purchase and must therefore buy oil daily. Unlike Razak, he is widely regarded as an honest and reliable worker. I have heard him complain bitterly before about the difficulty of finding work and about his futile efforts to rent in even a small piece of paddy land. On this occasion, however, he is angrier than usual about having been denied any of the funds recently distributed by local UMNO leaders as part of the Village Improvement Scheme (RPK). Spurred on by a couple of neighbors (Nor and Mat “halus”), who were also ignored at the handout, he launches into a more global assessment of the situation.

  “The well-to-do are throwing those who are hard up aside.” “The more we want to lift ourselves, the more we are pushed down, the more cruel [they are to us].” “They want to bury us.”7 As he says this last phrase, Pak Yah thrusts the heel of his hand toward the ground at his feet as if pushing something into the earth and adds, “We want to be higher.” To illustrate what he means, he notes that in the past it was possible to get loans of rice from well-off villagers. But now, he claims, they sell their rice for cash and then claim they have no money.

  This last charge, which I had heard several times before from other poor villagers, deserves some comment. The traditional medium for loans and advances was, fittingly, paddy or polished rice (beras), the basic food staple. Loans of cash were exceptionally rare, as they are today. The poor
appear to believe that the sale of paddy for cash is, in part, an attempt by the wealthy to avoid being importuned for loans. Having sold most of their harvest, the rich can now claim that they have only enough paddy to feed their own family and that their cash is spent. This procedure has the added advantage of concealment, for while it is generally possible to know whether a man’s granary is full, it is not possible to know whether he has any cash.8

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  The refusal to give loans, Pak Yah adds, shows that “As they see it, those who are hardup are despicable.” “They don’t want us to speak up.” “They don’t want us to be clever.” “[But] now the poor are acting up a bit [and when] the rich see that, they are even more angry.”9 The comment about “acting up” almost certainly refers to the open complaints that greeted the partisan distribution of government funds for house repairs.

  He continues, “They say we are lazy, but we don’t get the chance to continue school or to get government jobs [for example, government settlement schemes].” “They say we don’t want to work, but it’s hard to find work.” Here, as elsewhere, Pak Yah and other poor villagers conduct what amounts to both sides of a debate, a dialogue, in which the accusations the rich make against them are first stated and then refuted. This debate is, moreover, cast in terms of rich and poor, although the immediate issue that has aroused Pak Yah’s ire is one between UMNO members, by no means all of whom are rich, and PAS members, by no means all of whom are poor.

  On an afternoon nearly a month later, I am listening to much the same group assembled below Pak Yah’s house, and the anger at the partisan distribution of patronage is still rife. Their anger is focused particularly on what they regard as a fraudulent survey of households conducted before allocations were made. One of the questions the clerk asked was, quite literally, “Where do you shit?” Pak Yah’s reply was to squat on the ground, flick his heel, and then to add that he even “had to shit on someone else’s land.” This expression is the standard, in village parlance, for real poverty.10

  When the money was handed out, however, it was clear that the survey had been a mockery. As Pak Yah says, it was “thrown in the trash.” He then does a short pantomime of a clerk checking a list of names with his index finger. “They say Pak Yah is well-to-do, even Dullah is well-to-do, even Sukur is well off.”11 Those assembled find this hilarious as they know that these three house [Page 144] holds, all PAS supporters and among the very poorest in the village, received nothing. Pak Yah continues his sketch: “They say Lebai Pendek is hard up, Shamsul is so hard up they have to give him house paint, Abu Hassan is hard up.” These three men are, of course, from among the wealthiest UMNO supporters in the village, and all received assistance. The ridicule is so biting in large part because the village UMNO leadership wantonly disregarded its own facade of fair, impersonal procedures in order simply to reward themselves and their followers. Once again, however, the issue is cast in terms of rich and poor and the distortion of the facts by wealthy UMNO leaders.

  If we listen briefly to other villagers, however, we hear a very different story. The occasion for this story was special. It was not, like most of my conversations with villagers, simply a casual encounter. When Haji Kadir, his brother-in-law Tok Kasim, and his son-in-law Ghazali sat down to talk with me one evening, it was clear that they had something to say which they had worked out together. The context in which they came was undoubtedly significant. I had spent much of the previous two weeks threshing paddy along with many of the poorer men in the village.12 In the course of the work I had come to know quite a few heads of poor households whom I had known only slightly before. Their concerns about the loss of work to combine-harvesters and the decline of “charity” payments (zakat peribadi) previously given to threshers had found its way into the questions I had begun to ask other villagers. These three men appeared to be concerned that I was getting the wrong picture; they had come to set me straight.13 All three were, as one might expect, well-off by village standards. Haji Kadir (Pak Ceti) is, of course, the richest man in the village; his son-in-law farms 8.5 relong, much of which he can expect to inherit; and his brother-in-law farms 6 relong, most of which he owns.

  Haji Kadir begins with a rhetorical question: “Why is it,” he asks, “that we call some people poor when they are really well-off, and others well-off when they are really poor?” He then proceeds to answer his own question with some [Page 145] strategically chosen examples. “Like Kamil, he doesn’t have any property, but he manages because he is resourceful.”14 “Or like Mat Khir, who has no land but is also resourceful.” These two illustrations are both apt and selective. They are two of only five heads of household who own no paddy land and have no prospect of inheriting any but nonetheless have incomes that put them well above the median for the village. Kamil has, for decades, been the largest tenant in Sedaka and now farms 15 relong of productive paddy land, while Mat Khir rents in only two relong but has a stable and coveted job with a successful Chinese shopkeeper and paddy dealer in the nearby town. Both men are able to provide comfortably for their large families. They are striking exceptions to the general rule that landowning is the basis of wealth in the village. And yet, as Haji Kadir implies, their income is more precarious than that of a landowner and each must work unstintingly to achieve it.

  Having cited two cases of families who are poor in property but nevertheless manage to do well by virtue of their resourcefulness, Haji Kadir takes up the opposite side of the coin. Here the examples he uses are Hamzah and his older brother, the ever-serviceable Razak. “They have property, they have land,” says Haji Kadir, “as much as 2 or 3 relong, so much that they rent it out like big landlords.” With the vigorous assent of his companions, Haji Kadir notes that, if Hamzah and Razak were clever and thought ahead, they could plant this land and harvest twenty to thirty gunny sacks of paddy a year, enough to feed their families. The fact that they do not is not because they are poor but because they are not “resourceful.” Again, the illustrations are carefully selected. Only five of the poorest fourteen villagers own any paddy land at all, and Razak and Hamzah are among them. Strictly speaking, neither actually owns the land, inasmuch as they do not have the capital to pay the fees and Islamic inheritance tax (faraid) required to transfer-ownership from their long-since-deceased father.15 Nor is it clear that Hamzah would get title to the 2 relong his mother has let him rent out, as there are claims on the land by two additional sons who live outside the village. At the moment, Hamzah rents out his 2 relong as does Razak his .25 relong. Both claim that the loss of work during the droughtcancelled season, their large families, and their reduced wage-labor earnings make it impossible for them to finance a rice crop through till harvest. Hamzah actually planted a crop in the irrigated season of 1977 but claimed that he had to sell the standing paddy in the field before harvest to feed his family. But Haji Kadir and his friends obviously believe that it is improvidence, not poverty, that [Page 146] accounts for Hamzah and Razak becoming petty landlords. Who is correct is a matter of charged opinion that no resort to financial evidence alone could settle.

  Tok Kasim and Haji Kadir then address themselves to the case of Hamzah in particular, taking it for granted that Razak’s reputation speaks for itself. Although they stop short of calling Hamzah lazy, they do claim that he is “not very industrious.”16 “That’s why,” Tok >The rest, they claim, are either not so badly off or are not resourceful.

  Warming to the main theme after having been sidetracked momentarily by my question, Haji Kadir returns to the problem of those who ask for work and alms in bad faith. As an exhibit, he offers his nephew Hashim, from Yan. He regularly comes shortly before the harvest, Haji Kadir claims, to announce that he will help thresh and to ask for a portion of his wages in advance. When threshing time comes, however, he often goes to Megat Dewa in the neighboring state of Perlis where the wages and zakat gifts are better. Once, he adds, Hashim told him in the evening, after having been given an advance, to have the coffee ready early n
ext morning as he would be coming to thresh. Early next morning Haji Kadir spied him walking along the canal to the south of Sedaka, but he turned off to work for someone else. He also suspects that the rice he and two other relatives had given Hashim before Hari Raya (Ramadan) was sold rather than eaten, and he once told Hashim that he should beg rice only from those for whom he threshes. Still, he continues, Hashim has come begging every year for the past decade like clockwork. When Haji Kadir offered to rent him nearly 2 relong he owns in Megat Dewa for a couple of years, Hashim declined. “He wasn’t that interested,” concluded Haji Kadir.17

  Hashim is thus assimilated to the cases of Razak and Hamzah. None of them, by this account, are particularly interested in work; none are particularly resourceful, except perhaps when it comes to asking for alms or for wages in advance. Some, if not all of them, are pretty well-off after all. And certainly none of them, to judge by their conduct and resources, are worthy of the sympathy and help they have gotten.

  The discourse, at a distance, between Pak Yah and Haji Kadir is as remarkable for what it ignores as for what it includes. The material facts of the present situation-wage rates, the loss of fieldwork, actual loans and charity given and received-are conspicuous by their relative absence. Perhaps this is merely because they are taken for granted as common knowledge. What is emphasized, however, are the social facts, the quality of human relations. Thus Pak Yah, [Page 147] when he talks about the refusal to give loans, focuses not on the material loss but on the attitude of the rich who regard the poor as “despicable.” Thus Haji Kadir, when he speaks of being importuned for loans, is less openly concerned with what it costs him and more concerned with what he sees as the moral lapses of those who ask for help. Just as in the stories of Razak and Haji Broom, there is a text here on what decent and seemly social relations should be.