Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  Today neither the physical terrain nor the freedom from pursuit provide anything like a favorable setting for bandits with any large ambitions. All the land around Sedaka is flat and cultivated and the police in Kepala Batas and in Yan are far more numerous, mobile, and well armed. Nor is there the class provocation of a mere one or two huge landowners, who have monopolized virtually all of the land, facing a uniformly poor and united peasantry. The sort of theft one finds now in Sedaka reflects all these conditions; it is carried out anonymously under cover of darkness; it appears to be the work of individuals or, at most, pairs; it is what the police records would call “petty larceny.”

  All kinds of things disappear regularly in Sedaka. Fruit regularly disappears from trees and around the houses of wealthier farmers, and few expect to harvest more than half of their small crop of mangoes, papayas, fallen coconuts, or bananas. Those who have the palms whose leaves are required for making mats, baskets, or the traditional attap roofing regularly complain that fronds frequently disappear. Those who keep small livestock, such as chickens, ducks, or geese, complain that both the eggs and the fowl themselves are regularly pilfered. During the dry season, when drinking water is sporadically delivered in government tank trucks, the villagers must leave their plastic or metal water cans (tong ayer) near the main road to take advantage of unpredictable delivery. These containers, typically worth roughly M$5, are often stolen. On a somewhat larger scale there are occasional thefts of bicycles, water buffalo, and even motorcycles (three thefts in the last two years).

  These petty, and not so petty, thefts have a pattern that is inscribed in the very social structure of the village. The targets are, with the possible exception of bicycles, the wealthier inhabitants of Sedaka. This is hardly surprising in view of the fact that it is the relatively well-to-do who are most likely to have the large house lot with fruit trees and palms, who have the largest number of water [Page 267] containers, who have the feed for small livestock, who are most likely to own a water buffalo or a motorcycle. The perpetrators, it is generally agreed, are to be found among Sedaka’s poorer inhabitants. This pattern is not in itself proof that such thefts are conceived by the poor as a means of resistance or some form of “social banditry.” Evidence on this score was simply unobtainable. What is significant, however, is that the class character of theft is built into the very property relations prevailing in Sedaka. The rich, by and large, possess what is worth taking, while the poor have the greatest incentive to take it. One is reminded of the reply of the American bank robber, “Slick” Willie Sutton, when he was asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

  Apart from the disappearance of water buffalo and motorcycles, the other forms of pilfering we have encountered are deplored by well-off villagers, but they are more of a nuisance than a serious threat. Their concern is focused on the main product of this single-crop economy: paddy. For the would-be thief the advantages of stealing paddy are self-evident. It is all about him, it is easily taken in small quantities, and, once taken, it is virtually untraceable.

  Reported Thefts of Threshed Paddy by the Sack in Main Season, 1979–80

  Farmer Reported Losses (no. of gunny sacks)

  Shahnon 1

  Haji Kadir 1

  Samat 1

  Abu Hassan 2

  Ghani Lebai Mat 1

  Amin 2

  Tok Long 2

  Idris 1

  Lebai Pendek 2

  Fadzil 1

  Total

  14

  Approximate cash value = M$532.

  The amount of paddy stolen over a single season, while not large as a proportion of the total harvest, is alarming to large farmers and, what is more, they believe that it is growing. No firm statistics are, of course, available, but I made an effort to record all the losses of paddy reported to me during the 1979–80 main season. By far the largest category of thefts was whole gunny sacks of threshed paddy left in the fields overnight during the harvest. These are listed in the accompanying table. To this total one must add paddy that was spirited away in other ways. At least four gunny sacks of paddy drying on mats in the sun disappeared, two of which were taken from Abu Hassan. Haji Jaafar and Kamil each lost a gunny sack that was stored beneath their respective houses. Something like the same quantity of paddy was reported stolen from rice barns [Page 268] (jelapang) in the course of the season.45 A small amount of paddy was reported taken on the stalk from the fields. How much is difficult to say, but the quantity is not substantial; villagers point out that the sound of threshing and the disposal of the straw would present a problem for the thief, while the rich claim that thieves are too lazy actually to put themselves to the trouble of threshing.46 Finally, a thorough accounting of paddy thefts would have to include some estimate of the grain that threshers are said to stuff in their pockets and inside their shirts at the end of the day’s work. Such pilfering is winked at by most farmers, and I have made no attempt to calculate how much paddy is appropriated in this way.

  Certain facts about the pattern of theft are worth noting. The first is that, with the exception of Samat and Fadzil, who are only modestly well-off, all of the victims are among the wealthiest third of Sedaka’s households. This may indicate nothing more than the obvious fact that such households are likely to have more paddy lying in the field at harvest time and that smallholders, who can ill afford the loss, take pains to get threshed paddy to their house quickly. It is certainly true that large farmers with plots far from their houses that cannot be threshed (and hence stored) in a single day are the most prone to such losses. But here again the observation made earlier still applies; the pattern of theft is an artifact of the distribution of wealth-in this case indicated by farm size. No one doubts either that poor men, local poor men at that, are responsible for the vast majority of the paddy thefts.

  The total amount of paddy stolen, perhaps twenty to twenty-five gunny sacks, is less than one hundredth of the paddy harvested in a season by all village farmers. By this measure, the losses are fairly trivial and are borne largely by those who produce a substantial surplus.47 If, however, we measure its significance by what it may add to the food supply of a few of the poorest families in the village, then it may be quite significant. It is of some interest that these [Page 269] twenty to twenty-five gunny sacks of paddy are more than half the quantity of grain given voluntarily by farmers as zakat peribadi after the harvest. The comparison is apt precisely because I twice heard poor men refer smilingly to paddy thefts (curian padi) as “zakat peribadi that one takes on his own” (zakat peribadi, angkat sindiri). This evidence is certainly not conclusive, but it is likely that some of the poor, at any rate, consider such acts as not so much theft as the appropriation of what they feel entitled to by earlier custom-a kind of forcible poor tax to replace the gifts and wages they no longer receive. In this connection, two other items of circumstantial evidence are relevant. Only one of the farmers who lost paddy (Samat) was among those ever praised by the poor for their reluctance to hire the combine. All the others have used the machine whenever possible. There is also some indication that paddy thefts may be used as a sanction by disgruntled laborers. Thus, Sukur once told me that farmers were careful to hire the threshers they had customarily invited, since anyone who was omitted might, in his anger, steal paddy from the fields. If, indeed, the theft of paddy has a certain element of popular justice to it, the scope for such resistance has been considerably narrowed by the use of combines, which make it possible to gather and store.(or sell) a farmer’s entire crop in a single day. Combines thus not only eliminate hand reaping, hand threshing, in-field transport, and gleaning; they also eliminate theft.

  The attitude of wealthy farmers toward such thefts is a combination of anger, as one might expect, and fear. Haji Kadir, for example, was furious enough over his loss to consider spending the following night in the fields guarding his paddy with his shotgun.48 He did not follow through, because he reasoned that the mere rumor that he might l
ie in wait would be sufficient to deter any thief. The element of fear can be gauged, in part, by the fact that no police report of a paddy theft has ever been made in Sedaka.49 Wealthy farmers explained to me that, if they made such a report and named a suspect, word would get around quickly, and they feared that they would then become a target for more thefts. Haji Kadir, in fact, once spied someone stealing a gunny sack at night from a neighbor’s field. Not only did he fail to intervene to stop the theft, but he would not even inform his neighbor, though he was certain about the identity of the thief. When I asked him why, he replied that the thief had seen him too, would know he was the informer, and would steal his paddy next. In an earlier season, Mat Sarif lost two gunny sacks but told me that he did not want to know who [Page 270] did it. Old and quite frail, he added simply, “I’m afraid of being killed (takut mampus).” For a handful of the more daring village poor, it would appear that something of a small balance of terror has been struck that permits such limited pilfering to continue.50

  There is, however, a more subtle means of naming the suspect that amounts to a traditional form of “letting it be known” (cara sembunyi tau). This consists of consulting one of the medicine men (bomoh) in the district who have acquired a reputation for finding lost property or identifying the thief.51 After learning the particulars, the bomoh will use incantations (jampi) and conjure up the face of the thief in water prepared especially for the occasion. Not surprisingly, the visage thus called forth is typically seen to be that of the man whom the client had all along suspected. In the case of stolen paddy, the purpose is not so much to recover the paddy as to identify the thief. The farmer, when he returns to the village, will tell his friends that the bomoh saw someone who looked like so-andso. News will spread and the suspected thief will learn that he is being watched, without a direct accusation, let alone a police report, ever having been made. Thus Haji Kadir said that the bomoh had, in his case, seen Taib and another unidentified man in the water. If, indeed, Taib was the culprit, Haji Kadir hoped that this roundabout accusation would prevent any subsequent thefts from that quarter. On at least two occasions, however, villagers recall that some or all of the paddy taken has mysteriously reappeared after a bomoh has been consulted. The kind of circumspection employed by those few farmers who actually resort to the bomoh is another indication that an open confrontation is considered dangerous.

  The larger farmers in the village think they know who is to blame for most thefts. Three names are most frequently mentioned, always in guarded way that implies secrecy: Taib, Midon, and Dullah. The last of these three is the only “certified” thief in the village, having spent two months in prison for the theft of paddy from a household in nearby Sungai Bujur. Five or six years ago, it [Page 271] appears that he had stolen two gunny sacks of paddy from beneath a farmer’s house and was returning for the third when the farmer called on his neighbors for help and grabbed him. In this case the police were called and Dullah was convicted. Neither of the other two have ever been caught red-handed but they know they are under suspicion. Razak himself was once in the same category, but because of his bad health villagers say he is no longer up to the arduous work of hauling full gunny sacks from the fields. All four men are, as we have seen, “charter” members of the “undeserving,” “disreputable” poor, so far as the rich farmers are concerned. They pay heavily for their reputation in terms of a kind of social and economic embargo: no one wants to rent them land; they are rarely invited to kenduri, they are seldom hired, they are never given loans, and they are typically denied any zakat peribadi. It is ironic, of course, that, if the suspicions of the rich are correct, they appear to be helping themselves clandestinely to the zakat peribadi they are openly denied.52

  There is one final dimension to what may be termed clandestine and anonymous resistance in Sedaka. It finds expression in the killing of small and, more rarely, large livestock by the poor. Most of the village’s ragtag collection of chickens, ducks, geese, goats, water buffalo, and three beef cattle are owned by well-to-do households. They pose a considerable nuisance to the poor in many ways. Although barriers and chicken wire are often used to bar them, they frequently forage into the nursery beds, paddy fields, and small gardens of the poor, doing considerable damage. The poor are, of course, not the only ones affected (the livestock have, as yet, no class loyalties themselves), but they are the ones most deeply angered. Their anger does not merely stem from the fact that they can least afford the loss; it grows from something that might be called a “moral economy of diet.” What is at stake can be captured from Hamzah’s complaints about Haji Kadir’s chickens next door, which he frequently finds in his kitchen pecking rice through the small holes in the bags of rice stacked there. As Hamzah puts it, “His meat is eating my rice.” Once we recall that Hamzah’s family and many other poor families eat meat only when they are invited to a kenduri, the injustice is palpable. After a warning or two the recourse of the poor man is to kill the animal, as happens with some regularity. The fact that the animal is killed, not stolen, is an indication that this is a protest and not a theft.53 Two of Haji Kadir’s goats broke down the fence around Rokiah’s small vegetable garden on the canal bund behind her house and ate everything except the watermelon. Her anger was put in nearly the same terms [Page 272] as Hamzah’s: “Pak Haji’s meat is eating my vegetables.” One or two goats and quite a few chickens (more rarely ducks and geese) are found slashed or beaten to death annually.54 Six years ago, Tok Long’s water buffalo was found slashed with a parang and dying in a poor man’s paddy field after having broken its tether. The “murderer” was never identified, but that particular water buffalo had been infamous for breaking loose and grazing in the ripening paddy. Doublecropping has, in this context, made matters appreciably worse by eliminating the long, dry off-season when livestock could roam the stubble without fear of damage. The fairly regular killing of livestock is, like the theft of grain, a petty affair that hardly touches the overall structure of property relations and power. But both of these acts of token resistance are among the few, relatively safe, methods of resistance open to peasants seeking to protect their hold on the means of subsistence.55

  Prototype Resistance

  My concern with the forms of resistance available to the poor has excluded any consideration of a host of conflicts and strategies that have little or no direct bearing on local class relations. Thus, for example, I have not dealt with the many disputes over water rights or with the ways in which land may be appropriated by moving boundary markers or by gradually shifting the bunds in one’s field to add another row of paddy at the neighbor’s expense. Nor have I examined the resistance of the village as a whole to the Islamic tithe or to other government initiatives affecting all paddy farmers. The resistance of the rich would itself make for a fascinating inquiry that could fill volumes. While I have described some aspects of their resistance as it relates to wages, employment, and tenure, it takes many other forms that contribute to their domination of both local institutions and the local economy.56 Whatever place resistance in this larger sense might justifiably occupy in a full account of social relations in Sedaka, it is marginal to my main objective.

  The diverse forms of resistance by the poor that I have examined bear certain [Page 273] distinguishing marks. Whether it is a matter of resistance to combine-harvesting, wage negotiations, the effort to prevent ruinous competition among the poor, theft, or the murder of livestock, the relative absence of any open confrontation between classes is striking. Where resistance is collective, it is carefully circumspect; where it is an individual or small group attack on property, it is anonymous and usually nocturnal.57 By its calculated prudence and secrecy it preserves, for the most part, the onstage theater of power that dominates public life in Sedaka. Any intention to storm the stage can be disavowed and options are consciously kept open. Deference and conformity, though rarely cringing, continue to be the public posture of the poor. For all that, however, one can clearly make out backstage
a continuous testing of limits. At the very least, one can say that there is much more here than simply consent, resignation, and deference.

  Resistance in Sedaka has virtually nothing that one expects to find in the typical history of rural conflict. There are no riots, no demonstrations, no arson, no organized social banditry, no open violence. The resistance I have discovered is not linked to any larger outside political movements, ideologies, or revolutionary cadres, although it is clear that similar struggles have been occurring in virtually every village in the region. The sorts of activities found here require little coordination, let alone political organization, though they might benefit from it. They are, in short, forms of struggle that are almost entirely indigenous to the village sphere. Providing that we are careful about the use of the term, these activities might appropriately be called primitive resistance, or perhaps ur resistance. The use of primitive does not imply, as Hobsbawm does, that they are somehow backward and destined to give way to more sophisticated ideologies and tactics.58 It implies only that such forms of resistance are the nearly permanent, continuous, daily strategies of subordinate rural classes under difficult conditions. At times of crisis or momentous political change, they may be complemented by other forms of struggle that are more opportune. They are unlikely, however, to disappear altogether so long as the rural social structure remains exploitive and inequitable. They are the stubborn bedrock upon which other forms of resistance may grow, and they are likely to persist after such other forms have failed or produced, in turn, a new pattern of inequity.

  “ROUTINE” REPRESSION

  [Page 274]

  Just as the forms of resistance in Sedaka are “routine,” so also are the forms of repression. One searches in vain for the more depressing excesses of coercion found in much of the rest of Southeast Asia: mass arrests, liquidations, martial law, and paramilitary units with license to abduct and kill. The Malay peasantry, unlike the Indonesian peasantry, does not live with the fearful memory of recent massacres that might intimidate them to utter silence.59 In the place of such large-scale brutality and morbid fear, there is instead the steady pressure of everyday repression backed by occasional arrests, warnings, diligent police work, legal restrictions, and an Internal Security Act that allows for indefinite preventive detention and proscribes much political activity.