Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  67. One reason why the state might be held responsible is that the Paddy Act of 1967 in effect prohibits leasehold tenancy by limiting tenancy agreements to one year.

  68. Evasion of the zakat raja merits a study in itself as an example of peasant resistance to the state. Here I can note only a few particulars. Of those seventeen small-scale cultivators whose harvest is sufficient to subject them to the zakat raja but is less than fifty gunny sacks, only three pay anything at all to the amil. Among middle and well-to-do peasants, no one, not even the amil, paid the full zakat due the state. For the entire village, the zakat raja actually paid is something on the order of 15 percent of what would be required if the regulations were adhered to strictly. Villagers complain that only paddy farmers are systematically taxed, whereas others who are richer (settlers on rubber and palm oil schemes, businessmen, noncultivating landlords) are rarely taxed. They observe that none of the proceeds has ever found its way back to the village, and they suspect that much of it is siphoned off along the way to Alor Setar.

  69. These categories often overlap. Thus a cultivator may give zakat peribadi to a brother or nephew whom he has employed as a wage laborer and who may also be a neighbor.

  70. Nor is all of this distributed within the village, since gifts are often given to relatives and wage laborers living outside Sedaka. By the same token, however, a certain amount of zakat peribadi is also received by the poor of Sedaka from relatives and employers residing elsewhere. The figures cited here are necessarily approximate, as the amount of zakat given or received by any individual is frequently a matter of dispute, with the rich often exaggerating their generosity and the poor minimizing their receipts.

  71. Badan Dakwah Islamiah, Pejabat Zakat Negeri Kedah, Panduan Zakat (Alor Setar: Majlis Ugama Negeri Kedah, n.d., probably about 1970).

  72. Ibid., 5.

  73. Zakat is essentially a transfer of grain among men. Thus, with rare exceptions, widows or divorced women who are poor wage workers receive no zakat.

  74. Occasionally house-to-house collections are made by older Muslims from outside the village, who hope thereby to raise funds for the pilgrimage to Mecca. These donations are called derma as are donations to religious schools. Thus derma appears to have a more specifically religious connotation.

  75. More rarely, as in a keduri kekah (haircutting ceremony, but in Sedaka, at least, seen as a religious feast in which three or seven families slaughter a larger animal and hold a feast to pray for the souls of their ancestors), kenduri masuk Jawi (circumcision ceremony), or kenduri tolak bala (feast, held in a field to ward off misfortune such as drought), several families will collaborate (berpakat) in a single feast. This last feast, held to have disappeared by many authorities and frowned upon by official Islam, was held twice in Sedaka during my stay, in each case because the rains were late.

  76. I have heard that in some villages kenduri, especially for marriages (kenduri tersanding), can turn a profit when many guests are invited from town who will contribute M$ 10 or more toward expenses. A cursory examination of the gifts (which are generally noted down in writing for later reciprocation when the guest in turn gives a feast) and expenses for kenduri suggests that this is unlikely in Sedaka. Paid entertainment of varous kinds is also provided at large kenduri.

  77. Orang kaya sombong; tak ambil berat orang susah. Sedekah berkira; susah bagi.

  78. The shorthand ranking of kenduri, a nearly infallible guide to their sumptuousness, is by the kind and number of animals slaughtered for food. Thus, to say that the kenduri was an affair of twenty chickens is to describe what a modest feast it was. In order of declining prestige value, the meats in question are: water buffalo, cows, goats and sheep, chickens, and more rarely, fish, the everyday staple. The mythical granddaddy of kenduri in village lore is one held by the Sultan of Kedah at the marriage of his daughter; he is believed to have sold Penang and Province Wellesley to pay for it, and over two hundred water buffalo were eaten.

  79. Orang kaya pakai nipis; tak mau membazir duit.

  80. Dia pakai lagi hebat dairpada orang senang.

  81. The other possible exception is before Hari Raya Puasa (the feast day to celebrate the end of the fasting month), when a spirit of greater generosity prevails comparable, perhaps, to the Christmas spirit in Christian countries.

  82. Berasa malu minta kawan. Sayang; sampai hari-hari pe minta. Malu.

  83. Tok Mahmud’s 4 relong, 3 of which he farms, are now more than adequate for his modest household of two. Ten years ago, however, he was substantially poorer owing to his large family.

  84. Kira duit, mau pusing duit saja. Pusing means literally “to turn or spin” and is used here in the sense of “turning over” money so that it is never idle, so that it is always multiplying.

  85. Lest this seems a particularly peasant form of consciousness, it is worth noting that Francis Hearn regards this imaginative appropriation of the past as a key element in the early solidarity of the English working class. Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance. The Incorporation of the Nineteenth Century English Working Class (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978), chap. 1.

  86. In this context it is worth recalling Simmel’s analysis of the differences in class conflict in early capitalism as opposed to what he calls “mature capitalism.” In the latter, labor conditions are, he claims, seen as the product of “objective conditions” or “forms of production.” “The personal bitterness of both general and local battles has greatly decreased. The entrepreneur is no longer a bloodsucker and damnable egoist.” To the degree that it prevails, this larger, more “objective,” view is likely to reduce conflict. Whether it is a more “objective” view, however, is questionable; the “personal” view, however narrow, has the merit of recognizing that processes like the market and technological innovations are social creations. See Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), 88.

  87. Institutional factors are of course decisive here too. If there were a movement or political party that supported security of tenure, land reform, or full employment in rural areas, the realm of plausible action might be appreciably widened. As it is, neither UMNO nor PAS, each of which is dominated by rather well-to-do farmers and landlords, has addressed itself to the class issue on the Muda Plain.

  6 • Stretching the Truth: Ideology at Work

  [Page 184]

  Homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens. Each man, finally… carries on some form of intellectual activity… he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being modes of thought.

  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

  IDEOLOGICAL WORK IN DETERMINATE CONDITIONS

  Double-cropping and mechanization in Sedaka have presented rich peasants and landlords with a host of unprecedented new opportunities for profit. These opportunities have, with few exceptions, been eagerly seized.

  To exploit these new chances for capital accumulation, however, large farmers and landlords have stripped away many of the economic and social ties that previously bound them to poorer villagers. They have had to hire machines in place of village laborers, raise rents, dismiss tenants, and cut back their ceremonial and charitable obligations within the community. In doing so, they have found themselves operating in something of an ideological vacuum. What we observe in Sedaka and elsewhere on the Muda Plain is an emerging capitalist agrarian class which has been steadily shedding its ties to laborers and tenants but which acts in a largely precapitalist normative atmosphere that makes it extremely difficult to justify the actions it has taken. They are, in this sense, capitalists who are obliged to explain themselves—to justify their conduct publicly—without the benefit of the elaborated doctrines of a Malaysian Adam Smith, let alone a Bentham or a Malthus. This ideological handicap is, as we shall see, only partially circumvente
d by a rather tortured but creative attempt by rich farmers to bend the facts of the case to suit themselves.

  The historically given, negotiated, moral context of village life is one in which, if only ideologically, the cards are stacked against the newer forms of capitalist behavior. This moral context consists of a set of expectations and preferences about relations between the well-to-do and the poor. By and large, these expectations are cast in the idioms of patronage, assistance, consideration, and helpfulness. They apply to employment, tenancy, charity, feast giving, and the conduct of daily social encounter. They imply that those who meet these expectations will be treated with respect, loyalty, and social recognition. What is [Page 185] involved, to put it crudely, is a kind of “politics of reputation” in which a good name is conferred in exchange for adherence to a certain code of conduct.1

  Ironically, the moral context of class relations that rich farmers are now violating is a social artifact which they themselves had a major hand in creating at a time when it served their purposes. It was once in their interest to employ harvest laborers and to ensure their loyalty with advance wages, gifts (for example, zakat peribadi after harvest), and invitations to feasts. It was once in their interest to take on tenants to farm their surplus land and to adjust rents after a poor harvest in order to keep good cultivators. It was not only in their interest to behave in this fashion, but it was also in their interest to describe this behavior in ideological terms as assistance, help, kindness, and sympathy. They thus clothed their behavior—behavior that made eminent good sense when land was relatively plentiful and labor relatively scarce—in the language of patronage and liberality. No cynicism is implied here, only the universal tendency to put the best possible face on one’s actions. Nor is anything necessarily implied about whether poorer villagers fully accepted this social construction of their behavior, although it is unlikely they would have challenged it publicly.

  A word of qualification is in order about the social scope of this professed patronage and liberality. It applied with greatest force to the bilateral kinship group and to residents of the same village. Where close kin lived in the same village, the claim to consideration was particularly strong. The greater the distance from the core of this charmed circle, the more attenuated the claim to special consideration.

  Within these limits, both the “ideology” and the practice of liberality are, today, more than just a fading historical memory. They exist, albeit in truncated form, in kinship tenure, lower rents for village tenants, surviving forms of charity, village feasts, and preferential hiring. Not even mechanization has completely eliminated the need for casual labor from time to time, for transplanters, or for a loyal political following. Thus, the rich farmers of Sedaka are not yet able to dispense entirely with the precapitalist normative context of village life.

  They do, however, wish to limit radically the applicability of these values in which they once had a far greater vested interest. The full application of these values today would prevent them from stripping away the social obligations that stand between them and the profits of the green revolution. How they go about this “ideological work”—their strategy, its logic, its applications, and the resistance they encounter—is the subject of this chapter. I begin with the concept of exploitation as it is embedded in language and practice and then show how the rich and poor each manage to bend the facts so as to make these values serve partisan, class goals. Since these values are fashioned only through social conflict, I examine their practical use in three social conflicts: the attempt to raise land [Page 186] rents or dismiss tenants, a dispute over the village “gate,” and the charges and countercharges surrounding the distribution of government funds in the Village Improvement Scheme. Finally, I pause to explore the meaning of symbolic and ideological struggle in Sedaka.

  THE VOCABULARY OF EXPLOITATION

  Before examining how different classes of villagers maneuver to reinforce or alter the normative context of local conduct, it is essential to establish what that context is. The beliefs and practices surrounding class relations are by no means cut-and-dried, for like any set of norms they are the historical product of continuous struggle and negotiation. It is possible, however, to identify the broad outlines of what this process of struggle has yielded, and what now forms the normative environment of current discourse. This normative environment is perhaps best reflected in the vocabulary of exploitation as it is used in Sedaka.

  As is so often the case, the terms and categories used by intellectuals and/or bureaucrats are an indifferent guide to the terms that humbler citizens use to describe the same situation. Thus, the loaded term green revolution (revolusi hijau) used in official papers and documents describing irrigated rice cultivation on the Muda Plain is rarely heard in the village; instead it is simply called “doublepaddy-cropping” (dua kali padi). The same divergence of elite and “folk” categories of discourse is even more apparent in the case of exploitation.

  There is a standard Malay verb (tindas, menindas), which may be accurately translated as “to exploit, to oppress, to crush, to rule unjustly.” It is in common village use to cover such banal acts as the crushing of body lice between one’s fingernails. Except for one or two younger villagers who were obviously showing off their school learning, however, it is not used to express the concept of exploitation.2 Other words that carry much the same meaning—among them tekan, kejam, peras, desak, sesak—are occasionally heard in village conversations. Each conveys the sense of physical pressure—pressing, squeezing, pushing, choking—that makes it an appropriate vehicle for suggesting extortion and oppression. Thus, when Nizam bin Haji Lah’s landlord, Haji Zahir, insisted on shifting to a higher rent and a two-year leasehold contract, Nizam told me, “He wants to squeeze (tekan), he wants to gobble up (makan) everything.” And when local members of the opposition complain that only ruling party members have a chance of being accepted as settlers on government land schemes, Dullah adds, “The government really oppresses (tekan sunggoh) us; we can’t stir (bergerak) at [Page 187] all.” Some phrases that suggest exploitation carry this physical metaphor even further and imply that exploiters insist on their pound of flesh. Thus a poor villager refers to officials who “sit on soft chairs” and “beat on (tutuh) the backs of villagers.” Another mentions landlords who “plough the backs (menenggala atas belakang) of villagers.”3

  There is, then, hardly any linguistic shortage when it comes to expressing the notion of exploitation. And yet the verb most consistently in favor-the one most often heard in daily conversation and the one with the richest connotationis the verb “to eat” (makan). To get a salary is “to eat a salary (makan gaji), to collect interest is “to eat interest” (makan bunga), to take bribes is “to eat bribes” (makan duit), to betray one’s friends is “to eat one’s friends” (makan kawan sindiri), to drive someone hard is “to eat their bones” (makan tulang), to exploit another is “to eat their sweat” (makan peluh orang).4 The most common formulation is simply, “He wants to eat us” (Dia mau makan kita). Here the peasantry’s historical preoccupation with food and the accusation of what amounts to cannibalism are joined together in a powerful, suggestive metaphor.5 As we have seen, moreover, the metaphor is used not only by the poor to describe what is done to them by the powerful but is used also by the rich to describe the demands for loans and charity pressed on them by the poor.

  What is remarkable, though, is that the local vocabulary of exploitation is to be found less in this collection of verbs, taken together, than in the concepts of stinginess and arrogance. When a tenant rails against his landlord for raising the rent, he may or may not say privately that the landlord is extorting (tekan) from him or “eating” (makan) him. But he will almost certainly accuse the landlord of being stingy or greedy (kedikut, kikir, bakhil, berkira, lokek, tamak, keras hati, tankai jering, haloba) and, often, of being proud or arrogant (sombong). A poor villager whose request for a loan or charity from an employer has been spurned may not say private
ly that his employer is oppressing him, but he will rarely fail to complain that he is tightfisted and without shame. The terms in which these backstage accusations are cast constitute the core of “folk” concepts of exploitation in Sedaka. Taken collectively, they embody something close to an [Page 188] ideology of class relations-an ideology which, moreover, is not exclusively the perspective of the village poor but is shared to a considerable extent by the rich as well.

  The preoccupation with stinginess that characterizes Malay village society is already evident in the stories that make up the legend of Haji Ayub (Haji Broom). That he exploited his fellow Malays is hardly in doubt, but it is his surpassing stinginess that is the center of attention. We have seen in the previous chapter how frequently the accusation of stinginess rises to the lips of villagers. When Nizam bin Haji Lah complains of his landlord’s oppression (tekan), he also explains that oppression by citing his stinginess (berkira) and heartlessness (keras hati). Rosni characterizes her landlord as very calculating or stingy (sangat berkira), and the fact of exploitation is left to be inferred from his conduct. Rokiah cannot expect any leniency from her landlord, who is her own brother, after a poor season and speaks bitterly of his heartlessness (keras hati) as well. When Taib laments the difficulty of renting in land these days he points, as do others, to the “greed” (lokek) of landowners as the cause. Yaakub, who depends on wage labor that has largely evaporated since the combines arrived, attributes their use to the fact that large farmers are “more stingy” (lagi kedekut) these days. Tok Kasim, when he notes that charity and large kenduri are much rarer now, adds, by way of explanation, that the rich are now stingier (susah berkira la’ni). Even the wealthy outside landowner Haji Nayan, noting that many dismissed tenants have had to emigrate, attributes their plight to landlords who have resumed cultivation by machine because they are now “more calculating” (lagi susah kira).