Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  1. A healthy skepticism is surely called for when such claims are made. This is particularly the case when supposedly unifying themes are detached from their historical roots and appear to hover over a culture like some Hegelian spirit. This brand of “idealism” makes human actors into mere vectors or pawns of ideas that are, after all, human creations. Only when such ideas are linked firmly to the historical conditions that have favored their appearance and influence and that could, if altered, spell their weakening or disappearance do they merit being taken seriously at all.

  2. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” chap. 1 in The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basic, 1973), 9.

  3. The decade from 1940 to 1950, which includes the Japanese interregnum, is a plausible rival for this honor.

  4. In practice, however, a disproportionate amount of the actual material comes from the poorer strata of “the poor” and from the richer strata of “the rich.” This is the case, I think, both because the class interests of those at opposite ends of the class spectrum are less ambiguous and because I chose to devote more time listening to the poorest and the richest.

  5. For example, Hamid (#38) is in the middle of the income distribution, but nearly all villagers think of him as well-to-do since he owns nearly 10 relong and a tractor. It is his gambling, they say, that has forced him to lease out his land, thus making him appear temporarily poorer. Fadzil (#42) and Abdul Rahman (#41) are analogous cases, each being a substantial landowner; the former, however, has had to lease out some of his land to pay for a recent purchase of paddy land while the latter has had a string of crop failures. Both are considered among the well-to-do. Another anomalous case is Tok Mahmud (#56), who has always been a fairly poor man but is now a widower with only a single granddaughter at home. His per capita income is thus rather high, but villagers, taking a longer view of his life history, place him among the poor.

  6. Malay nicknames are typically formed by the last syllable of the given name: thus, Osman becomes “man”; Zakariah becomes “Ya”; Ahmad becomes “Mat.” Appended to these nicknames is usually a reference to some personal characteristic of the individual or to his father or grandfather. Thus Mat Din is known, behind his back, as “Mat Kabur” (kabur is a coconut palm beetle that he is said to resemble); Mat Sarif is known as “Mat Rabit” (rabit means “torn” and is shorthand for his harelip); Jamil is known as Jamil Pak Ngah (Pak Ngah is a reference to his father, who as middle son was called Ngah, a shortening of tengah meaning “middle”).

  7. Orang senang tauk orang susah ke-tefi. Lagi mau angkit, lagi dalam, lagi kejam. Nak bubuh dalam bumi.

  8. They can surely guess that a man is rich from the bounty of his harvest, but they are generally not in a position to know the debts that he may have had to pay off. Thus in one respect the widespread use of cash marks a shift to a village in which wealth is more easily hidden. Knowing how rich a family is, moreover, is no idle pastime in peasant villages; it is vital information that forms the basis of claims and obligations among neighbors. Zola might have been describing any peasant village when he wrote, “They went on endlessly, evaluating every inch of land, for they knew how much everybody in Rognes was worth, down to the value of the bedlinen.” The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 194. The wealth of a paddy-growing family could in the past have been inferred from the amount of paddy stored in the granary. As the Malay proverb puts it: “If the granary is empty, so is the stomach” (jelapang kosong, perut pun kosong).

  9. Depa pandang, orang susah, hina! Cakap, tak mau, cerdik, tak mau. La ini, orang susah berlagak lebih; orang senang tengok, lagi marah.

  10. Kena berak tanah orang. This is almost precisely equivalent in meaning to the American slang expression that someone is so poor that “he doesn’t have a pot to piss in.”

  11. Depa kata Pak Yah, senang; Dullah pun, senang, Sukur pun, senang.

  12. The rhythm of hand threshing normally requires that two men work at each threshing tub; while one is fetching a bundle of paddy stalks, the other is flailing the grain into the tub. Whenever I found that there were an odd number of threshers I would join the “odd man out” when invited. Although I was a good deal slower at threshing than most, my partner benefited since he collected the piece-rate (then M$2 per gunny sack) for the grain we both threshed.

  13. It is of course true that my presence is the stimulus for their small “presentation.” The argument they are making to me is not an argument they would bother making directly to Pak Yah. In this sense, what they say is artificial-an argument designed to impress and convince an outsider who might be powerful. What is notable, however, is that in making their case they must necessarily fall back on the values and standards embedded in village life and make more explicit-for someone quite ignorant-what could perhaps be conveyed among them by a mere gesture or phrase.

  14. “Resourceful” seems the best translation for pandai pusing, which literally means “clever at moving around.” “To hustle,” “to be diligent,” or “to shift for oneself’ also capture the spirit of this verb.

  15. This process, known locally as ambil kuasa (to take legal title), costs roughly M$50 for legal fees plus 1 percent of the estimated market value of the land for the Moslem inheritance tax.

  16. Tak berapa rajin.

  17. Dia tak beringat sampai la.

  18. The feast they most often mention is the kenduri berendul, literally “cradle feast,” celebrated for recently born infants, which includes a ceremonial haircutting and, for girls, circumcision. During my stay this was celebrated only twice. The games they mentioned included main gasing, or competitions with spinning tops, and bersilat, the Malay/Indonesian act of self-defense, both of which are very rarely seen today. The Islamic chanting from the Koran includes berdikir and berzanji, which are still occasionally performed, often by groups that are paid a fee, at feasts in the village. All of these activities are described as hiboran, or “entertainment.”

  19. Sudah tambah sikit; tak kena layang macham dulu; boleh makan saja. Layang means “to slice thinly,” hence “to scrimp.”

  20. Orang susah-lah bergantung kapada orang senang.

  21. This is, of course, especially true of the pure wage laborers in Sedaka, but it is also true of the more numerous marginal smallholders and tenants who have traditionally relied on fieldwork wages for a larger share of their income.

  22. Masa sewa padi, penyewa boleh tipu, senang-lah! Kamil is referring here to actual sharecropping, which has long since disappeared from the usual meaning of sewa padi.

  23. Orang ini jahat. This phrase might also be translated as “These people are playing tricks.”

  24. Kalu bagi duit dahulu, depa kena jaga kuat, tak boleh main-main saja, kena ambil berat sikit.

  25. Wahid is an illustration: he rents 6 relong and would ordinarily be expected to fall in the middle range of village incomes despite his large family. For the past two seasons, however, he has had quite poor yields of nine or ten gunny sacks per relong and fairly high rents that are not negotiable. As a result his earnings have been minimal and he is openly debating giving up two of his three rented plots and working much of the year in Penang.

  26. This holds true for many tenancies in which the landlord is a close relative as well.

  27. Tak boleh rundingkan, tak boleh tawar-menawar, tak boleh tolak ansur, tak boleh apa-apa.

  28. Padi rosak, hang punya pasal.

  29. Senang kira might be translated literally as “easygoing about calculating.”

  30. La, depa kata, kalau tak boleh padi, potong sikit. Dulu, boleh tolak ansur, ada timbang rasa. La ’ni, kira duit saja, kata, hang tak mau ini harga, aku cari orang lain. Terang-terang. Amin, in village terms, is a wealthy man, but he also rents in 7.5 relong and thus has a tenant’s perspective on this issue.

  31. Ships are once again passing in the night and the distance between them has much to do with class. There is, as always, a reconstruction of his
tory being undertaken here. Under sewa padi, there were some landlords who did not allow reductions after a bad harvest. Karim can remember a landlord who found after a bad harvest that the rent (this time paid in kind) was short by four gantags (a trivial amount). He came to collect it anyway, claiming that it had “been promised.” The point is that, for tenants anyway, the older system has taken on a rosier hue now that they confront sewa tunai.

  32. To these must also be added a few (five) small farmers who use the machine because it frees them quickly for wage work elsewhere and/or because they have little or no household labor that would allow them either to exchange labor (berderau) or harvest their own crop themselves.

  33. Abu Hassan is to some degree showing off his school learning here by using petani for peasants. The term, common in official talk and newspapers, is not frequently used by villagers, who are likely to call themselves “villagers” (orang kampung). The term for combine-harvester in everyday use is simply mesin or mesin padi.

  34. Kawan yang ambil upah, tak jenuh, orang yang tak ambil upah, seronok.

  35. If the field is very wet the sacks are often hauled on wooden sleds (andur) pulled by water buffalo. Otherwise they are carried on men’s backs to the narrow bunds to be transferred to bicycles and then, on larger bunds, to motorcycles or lorries. Piece-wages vary according to the distance and mode of transport. If the charge per gunny sack is M$1.50, the total cost per relong for an average yield (twenty-four gunny sacks) will amount to roughly 15 percent of production costs and between 12 and 13 percent of net profit for a tenant paying normal rents.

  36. Thus, hand harvesting is often described by large cultivators as renyah (troublesome, intricate) as compared with the machine, which requires only a single transaction.

  37. Clive Bell, Peter Hazell, and Roger Slade, The Evaluation of Projects in Regional Perspective: A Case Study of the Muda Irrigation Project (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, forthcoming), chap. 2.

  38. It is quite possible that some farmers did occasionally experience losses due to delays in harvesting the off-season crop. What is missing, however, is any indication that agricultural authorities thought this was a serious problem between 1972 and 1977. On the other hand, it is certainly plausible that, now that migration from Thailand has been sharply curtailed, a withdrawal of combine-harvesters would, today, result in serious crop losses.

  39. Orang susah bertahan saja, mewah tak ada.

  40. Penyegan pun.

  41. Setengah-setengah tak ada gerek buruk pun masa dulu, la’ ni ada moto. Haji Salim, it should be added, has some special reasons for defending himself. During the main season of 1979 he went to the central office of the Muda Scheme to request permission to import Thai transplanters, claiming he could not find help locally. More than a dozen Thai planters were brought, for which he is roundly criticized by the village poor, who believe that he simply wanted to find cheaper labor than he could get nearby and to have all his land planted simultanously so that it could later be harvested in a single combine pass.

  42. Orang kata sombong, tarink diri.

  43. Orang kampung payah. Payah might also be translated as “troublesome” or “fussy.” Small children who are demanding and exasperating to their parents are typically described as payah.

  44. Kerja pagi saja, cabut, balek rumah.

  45. “It’s no use looking for work” is a translation of Takpayah cari makan, literally, “It’s no use looking to eat.” Cari makan is the universal phrase in Malay for “making a living” and thus covers both work and the goods, particularly food goods, which that work makes it possible to buy.

  46. The social construction of broadcasting (tabur kering) follows much the same pattern by class as the dialogue about combines. Whether yields are higher or lower with broadcasting than with hand transplanting is a subject of constant discussion and dispute, with most of the large cultivators favoring it and most of the wage workers and small farmers opposing it. For many of the village poor it is the coup de grace to their livelihood; as Rokiah says, “If they braodcast, that will kill us (mampus).”

  47. Tak ada timbang rasa.

  48. Orang kaya tak ingat. This might also be translated more literally as “Rich people don’t remember (give a thought to) such matters.”

  49. Among them are Tajuddin, Bakri bin Haji Wahab, his brother Dzulkifli bin Haji Wahab, Tok Mahmud, Samat, Lebai Pendek, Abdul Rahman, Basir, and Kamil. Aside from Basir, whose political role might impel him to hire more labor than he might otherwise wish, there is nothing that distinguishes these cultivators from their neighbors except, perhaps, public-spiritedness. Even this list is somewhat controversial, since some suggest that X or Y actually employ villagers because their land is too waterlogged, etc., to take the machine.

  50. As with tractors, combine brokers (berokar) are always Malays living in the village who then become personally responsible for seeing that the fees are paid to him. Any shortfall comes from his pocket. In this way, the machine owners make use of mutual obligations between Malays of the same village. It would be tempting to cheat the machine owner of his fee, but to cheat one’s neighbor is another matter. Daud, the son of Haji Jaafar, is also a combine and tractor broker.

  51. Karut.

  52. Kita cari makan juga, or, in its more common form, sama-sama cari makan (We all have to make a living) is the standard defense used to justify employment that others might imagine to be socially harmful.

  53. Some villagers claim that another form of “squirming” is reflected in the fairly common practice of selling paddy in the field (jual pokok padi). In this way the landowner escapes censure by transferring the crop, prior to harvest, to someone else, often a machine owner. This, if true, has many parallels with the tebasan system in Java, where the object is not to avoid censure for use of combines but to avoid censure for hiring outsiders who harvest with sickles. In any event, there are a multitude of other reasons why a cultivator might wish to sell his standing crop.

  54. One possible exception was the scene of another misfortune, when a local police officer from the station in Kepala Batas wrecked his new Volvo (purchased under a special car-loan plan for civil servants) after colliding with a lorry that had turned in front of him to deliver goods to a shop. The officer, a fairly new recruit, was infamous for extracting bribes from motorcyclists living nearby. Most motorcycle owners are in systematic contravention of the law, as they have not paid the necessary road tax or insurance fees to the state. They are thus easy game.

  55. I was not there when the combine was finally freed, but it was widely believed that the combine owners had, in desperation, finally hired a Malay bomoh (specialist in traditional medicine and curing rituals), whose incantations were mainly responsible for releasing it from the clay.

  56. Senang berkira.

  57. There are, however, other villages such as Mengkuang, immediately to the south, in which there are substantial landlords residing in the village and either farming themselves or renting out pajak, large parcels of land. Here, some of the conflict to be described shortly would be internalized.

  58. Wahid and others claim that the increasing resort to selling crops in the field (jual pokok padi) is a modified version of the same practice. In this case a landowner prepares the field, plants the crops, and then sells the standing crop to an entrepreneur, often a Chinese combine owner. The planter gets back his money quickly and avoids much of the risk associated with the harvest. This practice, common in Mengkuang, is somewhere between full cultivation and rental, but in any case the small tenant is excluded.

  59. This was made possible by the fact that, unlike most tenancies, this one was of long duration and was actually registered under the Padi Act of 1955. This act regulates rents and dismissals, although most rents, even under registered tenancy, are well above the maximum provided for in the statute. The law allows for resumption of use of such plots by the landlord, but if a complaint is made the local land officer (usually the Assistant District Officer) is lik
ely to seek a compromise or a delay. Such a delay, for example, explains why the aristocratic family mentioned above has resumed cultivation of only 50 relong of the more than 100 relong it owns in Mengkuang.

  60. The supple use of the verb “to eat” (makan) here in the sense of consuming food and in the sense of exploitation is notable. Boleh makan, tak makan, dia tak kira. Dia mau makan kita.

  61. Berani ambil.

  62. Dia mau tekan; dia mau makan semua.

  63. Sekarang ini, depa mau perut dulu, adek-beradek tolak tepi.

  64. So nicknamed because he always has a cigar (cheroot) stuck in his mouth.

  65. At a rent of M$220 per relong, and ignoring the interest on the lump sum if it were borrowed, the net cash return would be only M$71 per relong, assuming an average yield of fourteen gunny sacks. Only someone with capital who is able to spread his risks across, say, 100 relong would be willing to accept such a small profit margin. If, on the other hand, one has access to tractors and combines at minimal cost (maintenance, fuel, and depreciation) the profits per relong are substantially higher. Although a good many wealthy Malays own tractors, only a handful in Kedah are members of a combine syndicate. Mechanization has thus had the double impact of raising the break-even rent for large tenants and increasing the optimum farm size.

  66. Poor and modest peasants in the village who are leasehold tenants frequently complain bitterly about the practice of tacking on additional years at the whim of the landowner. A lease will be three or four seasons from expiration when the landowner suddenly shows up and announces that he wants rent for another so many seasons immediately. There follows a rush by the tenant to raise the required cash for fear of losing the land when the current contract runs out. When such sudden demands are condemned, it is usually in terms of the wealth of the landlord who, it is implied, has no business making such demands on tenants who are poorer than he. Thus Rokiah, who leases land from her younger brother (an outsider), who often comes to ask to extend the contract, notes that he has rubber land, a car, and three wives and denounces him as “very stingy” (sangat berkira).