Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Another level of justification emerged when the audience was composed exclusively of UMNO beneficiaries of the largesse, even those who were uneasy with the frankly partisan atmosphere. Here was at least an attempt at legitimation, albeit for only one set of listeners. Against the claims of the most needy or the claims of all households in the village was placed a homely metaphor from family life. The village was, in effect, divided into our children and their children, good children and bad children, “real” children and stepchildren. As [Page 232] Bashir so often put it to his allies, “We must give to our own children (anak sindiri) first, and if there is still more left, then only can we give to our stepchildren (anak tiri).” The theme is echoed with only minor variations by core members of the JKK. Amin: “’We have to give property to our children first.” Fadzil: “We must help our own children. How can we give to other people’s children (anak orang)?” Haji Salim develops this theme further, perhaps along the lines he used when he tried to convince Lebai Sabrani and others that only UMNO families should benefit.

  The UMNO government gives first and foremost to those people who support (sokong) them. There’s not enough for everyone, so all of them can’t get it. The rebellious children (anak derhaka) who oppose (lawan) the father must wait; they are headstrong (nafsu) and stubborn (keras kepala). When there are many children, we must give more to the children who listen to us, not to those who don’t follow. When our own children are [made] comfortable, only then can we give to the stepchildren.

  This notion of a justifiable favoritism within the family was, I suspect, designed as much to reassure the members of the JKK as to provide a plausible rationale to the wider UMNO membership.68 Poor UMNO members, for example, could willingly accept the stepchild analogy and still justifiably wonder why there were so many anomalies in the distribution within their own party, with quite a few well-to-do UMNO activists receiving more than poor party members. Even here, however, we can detect a kind of hedging that gives something away to other village values. The claim of our own children, or the loyal children, is paramount but not exclusive, and it is implied that all children, even stepchildren, have a claim as well to the “parents’” largesse. This last was emphasized frequently by Bashir, who expected that there would be a second stage to the RPK later in which even PAS members would be permitted to share.

  Among the more committed and partisan members of the JKK, a rather more cynical atmosphere prevailed-an atmosphere not for public consumption even by the generality of UMNO members. Here the talk of retribution and punishment of the PAS faction was openly voiced. Speaking with Amin and me late one evening in the privacy of his house, Bashir adopted a frankly partisan tone, which I imagine was usually reserved for the inner circles of UMNO. Those who are in PAS, he said, will never change; “Even if you cut off their heads they wouldn’t change.” So why give them anything? Even if we gave assistance to them, he continued, they would still complain, just as they did about the free fertilizer subsidy, saying they did not get their share or that it [Page 233] was mixed with sand. That is their “rule” (undang-undang), “always complain.” When I interjected that even some UMNO members seemed to think that everyone, or at least the poor, should have been helped, he replied, “This is not village social relations. Politics is a little different. The world is like that.”69 This was the closest Bashir came to recognizing openly that what village values required and what politics required were different and that, in this case, the former would just have to be ignored.

  Finally, if one were to step outside the village altogether, even the semblance of homage to local norms tended to evaporate. In the course of a conversation with the penghulu Abdul Majid after hours in his office in Sungai Tongkang, I delicately raised the question of complaints about the RPK. His reply was as unvarnished as were his opinions about villagers replaced by combine-harvesters. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear that the RPK is, in effect, intended to starve out the “recalcitrants” (pembangkang). “Sooner or later they’ve got to weaken; the rich may be able to hold out, but the poor won’t be able to last.”70 Freed by his outsider status from any need to adopt a social mask or to prettify the facts, Abdul Majid can speak without guile.

  The smaller and more partisan the audience, the more powerful and untouchable the speaker (Haji Salim and especially Abdul Majid), the less tongue-tied the explanations become. The largest landowners and the secure officials can, if they wish, dispense with the need to explain themselves or justify their action to those beneath them whose vital interests are at stake. Within Sedaka, however, the niceties are largely preserved and an effort is made, however lame, to justify the new opportunities for profit and patronage. The normative raw material at their disposal, alas, is not quite up to the task. The winners are more or less obliged to distort the facts, to give patently bad-faith performances, to claim that their hands are tied, and to make do with whatever scraps of moral justification they can cobble together on short notice. Their behavior may serve a higher, or at least different, rationality, but in village terms, in terms of the moral givens of Malay rural society, it is not convincing.

  ARGUMENT AS RESISTANCE

  Taken collectively, the arguments that the village poor have been making have a striking coherence to them. They single out the most damaging economic and social consequences of double-cropping and mechanization. They assert a wide array of “facts” about income, combine-harvesting, land-tenure shifts, and employment to bolster their case. They promote the view that the well-off, by reason of custom, neighborliness, kinship, and race, are called upon to provide [Page 234] work, land, loans, and charity when possible. Referring to these claims, they condemn those whose callousness and concern for profit has led them to violate what the poor consider their legitimate expectations. These themes, and the assertion of rights which they imply, are much in evidence in the disputes over the gate and the Village Improvement Scheme. In the first case, the owners of motorcycles-themselves comfortable families-successfully availed themselves of the logic that once defended the village poor. In the second case, the moral logic of tradition yielded to the logic of faction but at substantial symbolic cost and only because the co-optation of the UMNO poor secured their complicity or silence. Such attempts, partly successful, to preserve and promote a particular worldview, a style of normative discourse, constitutes a form of resistance that is much more than purely symbolic.

  At a minimum, the worldview of the poor represents something of a symbolic barrier to another latent form of discourse that would openly legitimize the current practices of most well-off farmers. The latent form of discourse would be the straightforward language of narrow economic interests, profit maximization, accumulation, and property rights-in short, the language of capitalism. As it is, such language has no moral standing in village life. This symbolic disadvantage under which the wealthy labor has, in fact, material consequences. The values promoted most vigorously by the poor, and given tacit recognition even in the discourse of the rich, confer reputation, status, and prestige on those who observe them. Conversely, they make those who systematically violate them the object of character assassination. Forced to choose, in effect, between their reputation in the village and the full profits of double-cropping, many of the wealthy steer a course that does not completely repudiate those norms. The choice is not, after all, a single choice, but one that must be made day in and day out in a host of small transactions. Thus, there are seven farmers in the village, four well-off, who are praised for not using the combine-harvester on part or all of their land, at least after the irrigated season. A few rent out to neighbors or relatives small plots of land, seldom more than a single relong, that they might otherwise farm themselves. Abdul Rahman is particularly notable for occasionally renting a relong or two to poorer friends and charging modest rents. Land rented within the village, as this and other studies have shown, is provided at lower rents than land rented to outsiders. Some comfortable villagers, among them Lebai Pendek, Haji Ja
afar, and Bashir, are often praised for the frequency with which they hold feasts to which all villagers are invited.71 At least ten villagers, not all of them wealthy, are known to be rather more generous with zakat to laborers and to give wages in advance. None of these facts should obscure the overall tendency for wealthy villagers, and especially [Page 235] outside landlords, to pursue profit at the expense of their reputation. What they do suggest, however, is that the sanction of local opinion and custom continues to exert a small but perceptible influence on conduct. The desire to be thought well of, or at least not despised, is a material force in the village made possible only by the symbolic mobilization of the poor around certain customary values.72 Put another way, the delaying of the complete transition to capitalist relations of production is in itself an important and humane accomplishment. It is often the only accomplishment within reach of a beleaguered peasantry.73

  The values the poor are defending are all, without exception, very much tied to their material interests as a class. We would, however, mistake the full nature of the struggle here if we were to limit ourselves to its material effects alone. So long as men and women continue to justify their conduct by reference to values, the struggle for the symbolic high ground between groups and classes will remain an integral part of any conflict over power. In this context, the conclusions of E. P Thompson, in his discussion of eighteenth-century plebian culture and protest, are applicable, with a few adjustments, to Sedaka.

  The gentry had three major sources of control-a system of influence and preferment which could scarcely contain the unpreferred poor; the majesty and terror of law; and the symbolism of their hegemony. There was, at times, a delicate social equilibrium, in which the rulers were forced to make concessions. Hence the contest for symbolic authority may be seen, not as a way of acting out ulterior “real” contests, but as a real contest in its own right. Plebian protest, on occasion, had no further objective than to challenge the gentry’s hegemonic assurance, strip power of its symbolic mystifications, or even just to blaspheme.74

  If we understand that the “protest” in Sedaka is rarely openly manifested and that the “symbolic hegemony” of the wealthy class is far more tenuous, we are still in the presence of a “contest for symbolic authority.” By rewarding, if only symbolically, those whose conduct is more nearly in accord with their values and by slandering those whose conduct most blatantly transgresses their values, the village poor undercut the moral authority of their enemies by allocating virtually [Page 236] the only resources over which they have some control: reputation and social prestige. In the process, they help unite most of those disadvantaged by doublecropping behind a particular version of the facts, behind a particular set of claims, behind a particular worldview-or perhaps “villageview” would be a more appropriate term. This symbolic barrier is hardly insurmountable, but it is nonetheless a real obstacle to the designs of the rich.75

  The symbolic resistance of the poorer villagers is as important for what it rejects as for what it asserts. It rejects, nearly wholesale, the characterizations the rich give to themselves and their actions. Haji Kadir may be called Pak Haji to his face, but he is called Pak Ceti behind his back. Rich farmers may explain their use of the combine-harvester by their inability to find local labor on time, but this account is rejected by those most affected, who see it as an avaricious desire for quick profits. Landlords may plead poverty when raising the rent, but the poor “know” it is a ruse and mock the performance. The list could be extended indefinitely but the point is clear; at virtually every turn the selfcharacterizations and justifications of the rich are contested and subverted.

  Above all, the symbolic resistance of the poor rejects the categories the rich attempt to impose upon them. They know that the large farmers increasingly see them as lazy, unreliable, dishonest, and grasping. They know that, behind their backs, they are blamed as the authors of their own victimization and that, in daily social encounters, they are increasingly treated with little consideration or, worse, ignored. Much of what they have to say among themselves is a decisive rejection of the attempt to relegate them to a permanently inferior economic and ritual status and a decisive assertion of their citizenship rights in this small community.

  To understand what is at stake here, we must begin with a far broader and more penetrating appreciation of the meaning of poverty in this context. I fear that I may have thus far contributed to a narrow view both by emphasizing the economic losses of mechanization and tenure shifts and by continually referring to “the poor” of Sedaka.

  Poverty is far more than a simple matter of not enough calories or cash. This is particularly the case in Sedaka, where no one is in imminent danger of actually starving. For most of the village poor, poverty represents a far greater threat to their modest standing in the community. It is possible in any peasant community [Page 237] to identify a set of minimal cultural decencies that serve to define what full citizenship in that local society means. These minimal cultural decencies may include certain essential ritual observances for marriages and funerals, the ability to reciprocate certain gifts and favors, minimal obligations to parents, children, relatives, and neighbors, and so on. Barrington Moore, Jr., places such cultural requirements at the core of his analysis of popular conceptions of justice:

  If we confine our attention to the lower classes, who of course have less favorable property rights…, we find very frequently the notion that every individual ought to have “enough” property rights to play a “decent” role in the society. Both “enough” and “decent” are defined in traditional terms. A peasant should have enough land to support a household and enable its head to play a respectable role in the village community… Whenever an increase in commercial relationships has threatened this type of independence, it has produced an angry sense of injustice…. It is important to realize that there is much more to this anger than straightforward material interest. Such people are morally outraged because they feel that their whole way of life is under unfair attack.76

  All of these decencies, as Moore indicates, assume a certain level of material resources necessary to underwrite them. To fall below this level is not merely to be that much poorer materially; it is to fall short of what is locally defined as a fully human existence. It is as much a socially devastating loss of standing as it is a loss of income.

  In Sedaka, the cultural and ritual standing of many poor peasants was seriously compromised even before double-cropping. For example, the village has more than its share of poor women who have married late or not at all. Men sometimes refer to them as “unmarketable maidens” (anak dara tak laku), but they will also add that their parents can promise no farming land to the groom. During the feast of Ramadan (Hari Raya Puasa), a good many men from poor households remain at home rather than visit wealthier neighbors. A few will admit that they are absent because they are “embarrassed” (malu), since they “cannot afford to reciprocate” (tak boleh membalas) the sweets and cakes that are expected for this major Muslim feast day.77 The feasts that the village poor do manage to [Page 238] celebrate are often abbreviated versions with less than the standard ritual, entertainment, and food. Their shabbiness is typically seized upon by the betteroff as a mark of the host’s inability to acquit himself honorably. The poor find it difficult or impossible to contribute food for the moreh [evening meals after prayer] during the fasting month. They actually avoid promising a feast in their prayers for recovery from an illness or in their prayers for a child of a certain sex (usually male) during a pregnancy, because they know they will be unable to fulfill that sacred vow. Kenduri that are frequently held by wealthier villagersfor example, kenduri berendul (or buaian) for a young child, kenduri cukur kepala (or rambut) also for a young child, kenduri to thank Allah for some good fortune or to pray for ancestors-are rarely celebrated by the poor. Aside from the obligatory ceremonies for the dead, there are at least seven families who have held no feasts whatever for the past six years. All are among the poorest
twenty families in the community. Their loss of status in a culture where feast giving is perhaps the main coin of exchange is severe.78 The poor are largely excluded, by their penury, from both the death-benefit associations and the groups that buy and share the crockery necessary for any substantial feast. It is extremely rare for a poor peasant family to be able to send any of their children beyond primary school, given the expenses involved. Their children, as we have seen, are far more likely to leave early and permanently, since there is no paddy land to hold them in the village.