Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The pressures for deference, compliance, and political conformity in Sedaka are palpable and self-evident to all concerned. In view of the rewards of compliance, it is little wonder that quite a few villagers have chosen to live up to the stereotype of the “reputable poor.” What is perhaps more surprising is that so many others have held themselves rather aloof and distant, remaining in PAS, rarely currying favor with the JKK or rich farmers and, in some cases, becoming examples of the “disreputable” poor. Even for those who comply, however, the compliance is routine in the sense that it is calculating and without illusions.

  In this respect, there is a striking analogy between routine compliance and routine resistance. If routine compliance is conducted with a calculating eye to the structure of power and rewards in the village, so is routine resistance. If routine compliance avoids unnecessary risks, so does routine resistance. Nearly all the resistance we have encountered in Sedaka is the kind of resistance that rather effectively “covers its own tracks.” A snub on the village path can be excused later by haste or inattention. What appears to be a boycott of trans [Page 282] planting can be rationalized as a delay or difficulties in assembling the work force. And, of course, acts of theft, sabotage, and vandalism have no authors at all. Thus, while there is a fair amount of resistance in Sedaka, there are virtually no publicly announced resisters or troublemakers.

  Even the more purely symbolic resistance-malicious gossip, character assassination, nicknames, rumors-we have examined follows the same pattern.75 Gossip, after all, is almost by definition a story told about an absent third party; once launched, it becomes an anonymous tale with no author but many retailers. Although it is by no means a respecter of persons, malicious gossip is a respecter of the larger normative order within which it operates. Behind every piece of gossip that is not merely news is an implicit statement of a rule or norm that has been broken. It is in fact only the violation of expected behavior that makes an event worth gossiping about. The rule or norm in question is often only formulated or brought to consciousness by the violation itself. Deviance, in this sense, defines what is normal. Thus, no one may pay attention to the prevailing code of dress until it is breached and thereby provokes a statement of what is proper.76 Rules of grammar, only implicitly known, pass unnoticed until a speaker or writer makes an obvious misstep. Much of the gossip and character assassination that are relevant to class relations in Sedaka are an appeal by the poor to norms of tenancy, generosity, charity, employment, and feasts that were taken for granted before double-cropping. At the same time that a reputation is slandered by gossip, a rule that was once generally accepted is being affirmed and promoted. Gossip is never “disinterested”; it is a partisan effort (by class, faction, family) to advance its claims and interests against those of others. But this manipulation of the rules can only be successful to the extent that an appeal is made to standards of conduct that are generally accepted. Gossip thus accomplishes its malicious work as an admittedly weak social sanction by remaining more or less within the established normative framework. In this respect the use of gossip by the poor also manifests a kind of prudence and respect, however manipulative, of its own.

  As a form of resistance, then, gossip is a kind of democratic “voice” in conditions where power and possible repression make open acts of disrespect dangerous. The rich, of course, are far freer to show openly their contempt for the “undeserving poor.” For the poor, however, gossip achieves the expression of opinion, of contempt, of disapproval while minimizing the risks of identification and reprisal. Malicious gossip symbolically chips away at the reputations of the rich in Sedaka in the same fashion that anonymous thefts in the night materially chip away at the property of the rich. The overall impact on the structure of power of this nibbling away is not very appreciable. But it is one of the few [Page 283] means available to a subordinate class to clothe the practice of resistance with the safe disguise of outward compliance.

  There is no doubt that the caution and anonymity of resistance in Sedaka yields control of the “public stage” to the village elite. By steering clear of any direct and open attack-symbolic or material-the elite-controlled pattern of public interaction continues to prevail. One may appreciate the importance of the domination of onstage behavior merely by imagining the tumult that would certainly have ensued if those who attempted an unannounced boycott had openly and publicly committed themselves to that course of action or if those who privately denounced the abuses of the Village Improvement Scheme had openly denounced the JKK at a village meeting. That the poor chose not to burn their bridges is altogether understandable, but their prudence preserves a surface decorum that serves the symbolic interests of the wealthy. Appearances are important77 and, as Bourdieu has aptly noted, “The concessions of politeness always contain political concessions.”78

  The symbolic “dues” that the poor thus pay to the officially constituted village order is, however, not simply a reaction of fear and self-preservation. When, for example, poor men approach richer villagers with an eye to securing land to rent, work, a loan, or charity, they typically proceed very indirectly, so that the question is actually posed only after a favorable reply is virtually assured. If the response is likely to be negative, the line of inquiry is quietly dropped. In this way, the possibility of a decisive and humiliating rebuff is avoided. What is also avoided, however, is the opening that a direct question would provide for the wealthy party to repudiate the legitimacy of the request itself. Since the poor, as we have seen, find themselves defending the justice of older principles of assistance (tolong), it is in their interest to avoid creating situations in which these principles could be publicly and finally renounced.79

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  On a wider view, of course, all those forms of resistance such as gossip and character assassination which involve an appeal to shared normative standards are steadily losing their sanctioning power. The shift in the relations of paddy production that has eroded the value of poor households as suppliers of tenants and laborers has, at the same time, made their opinions count for less. More and more of the rich can now safely ignore what poor villagers think of them, as they are increasingly beyond the reach of social sanctions no longer reinforced by economic power. In this respect, the “politics of reputation” has lost much of its force as a weapon of the poor. It is almost as if part of the social arsenal of the poor consisted of outmoded weapons which, however useful they may have been before double-cropping, are now less suitable to the unfavorable new terrain on which they are fighting.

  CONFORMITY AND THE PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

  The poor of Sedaka nearly always adopt a protective disguise in their relations with more powerful villagers or outsiders. This disguise is apparent both in their conformity and in their resistance. Thus, Hamzah conceals his anger when he is underpaid by Haji Kadir but, in the privacy of his home, vents his anger at being unfairly treated. Thus, Pak Yah goes dutifully to Bashir’s feast though he is seething with anger at having been excluded from the Village Improvement subsidy. An attempted boycott of machine users is presented as a delay in transplanting, which can be abandoned and disavowed. What amounts to a strike over threshing wages is conducted as if the workers had either been taken ill or had suddenly remembered prior commitments. The “full transcript” of class relations in Sedaka is simply not ascertainable from the public interaction between rich and poor, powerful and weak. To move beyond the domain in which poses and dissimulation prevail, it has in fact been necessary to talk to the poor alone or in small groups where they are among friends. Only then does one encounter that part of the full transcript that would, if openly declared in other contexts, jeopardize their livelihood.

  That the poor should dissemble in the face of power is hardly an occasion for surprise. Dissimulation is the characteristic and necessary pose of subordinate classes everywhere most of the time-a fact that makes those rare and threatening moments when the pose is abandoned all the more remarkable. No close accoun
t of the life of subordinate classes can fail to distinguish between what is said “backstage” and what may be safely declared openly. One of the more remarkable oral histories ever collected, that of the French tenant farmer ‘Old Tiennon,’ who lived from 1823 until the beginning of the twentieth century, is literally filled with accounts of swallowed bile.80 Throughout his daily encounters with land [Page 285] lords, overseers, officials, and powerful gentry, he was careful to adopt a public mask of deference and compliance and keep his dangerous opinions to himself:

  When he [the landlord who had dismissed his father] crossed from Le Craux, going to Meillers, he would stop and speak to me and I forced myself to appear amiable, in spite of the contempt I felt for him.81

  Old Tiennon knew at first hand the perils of candor from his own father’s rashness:

  My father, who usually undertook the grooming and such duties, never failed to tell the master how annoying it was to have to stay at home when there was so much to be done elsewhere. He was absolutely ignorant of the art of dissimulation, so necessary in life.82

  It is probably just this necessary “art of dissimulation” that has been largely responsible for much of the conservative historiography of the peasantry. As the sources are almost invariably created by classes above the peasantry, they are likely, quite apart from ideological intent, to see only that cautious and deferential aspect the peasantry adopts in the presence of power. What they may describe on this basis is not false, but it is at best a partial and misleading truth that takes a necessary pose for the whole reality. When that happens, we get a picture of rural society that is distorted in the way that E. P Thompson described for eighteenth-century England:

  On the surface all is consensus, deference, accommodation; the dependents petition abjectly for favor; every hind is touching his forelock; not a word against the illustrious House of Hanover or the Glorious Constitution breaks the agreeable waters of illusion. Then, from an anonymous or obscure level, there leaps to view for a moment violent Jacobite or levelling abuse. We should take neither the obeisances nor the imprecations as indications of final truth; both could flow from the same mind, as circumstance and calculation of advantage allowed.83

  Even so close an observer as Zola was led in this fashion to a view of the peasantry as a class that oscillated between abject, unquestioning deference and violent outrage. What is missing is the massive middle ground, in which conformity is often a self-conscious strategy and resistance is a carefuly hedged affair that avoids all-or-nothing confrontations. Had Zola taken a closer look at deference, he might have noticed what has become almost the leitmotif of modern studies of slavery: the gap between the beliefs and values that might find expression in the safety of the slave quarters and the typically prudent conduct of these same [Page 286] men and women in the face of power.84 It is just such vital considerations that have led one perceptive sociologist to reject all those conceptions of deference that treat it as if it were an attribute or attitude of persons and to insist that it be seen as “the form of social interaction which occurs in situations involving the exercise of traditional authority.”85

  The fact is that power-laden situations are nearly always inauthentic; the exercise of power nearly always drives a portion of the full transcript underground. Allowing always for the exceptional moments of uncontrolled anger or desperation, the normal tendency will be for the dependent individual to reveal only that part of his or her full transcript in encounters with the powerful that it is both safe and appropriate to reveal. What is safe and appropriate is of course defined rather unilaterally by the powerful. The greater the disparity in power between the two parties, the greater the proportion of the full transcript that is likely to be concealed.86

  Thus it might be possible to think of a continuum of situations ranging from the free dialogue between equals that is close to what Habermas has called the “ideal speech situation”87 all the way to the concentration camp in which most of the victims’ transcript is driven underground, leaving only a virtual parody of stereotyped, stilted deference born of mortal fear. In fact, in the most extreme situations of Caligulan terror, where there are no rules of what is permissible, [Page 287] the entire transcript may be concealed, leaving only paralysis. Ranged in between these extremes are a host of more common conditions in which subordinate classes typically find themselves: the boss and the worker, the landlord and the tenant, the lord and the serf, the master and the slave. In each case, the weaker party is unlikely to speak his or her mind; a part of the full transcript will be withheld in favor of a “performance” that is in keeping with the expectations of the powerholder.88

  If we wish to recover more than just the performance, we must move backstage where the mask can be lifted, at least in part. In the case of slaves this means moving from the “big house” to the slave quarters; in the case of the working class it may mean moving from the choreographed encounters between rich and poor to the relative privacy of the house or the company of a few close companions. It is in these “non-mask” situations where some of what is habitually censored finally leaps to view. Much of this material, as we have seen, is in direct and stark contradiction to what takes place in the arena of power relations: Haji Kadir becomes Pak Ceti. The relationship between this non-mask, or backstage, transcript and the center stage transcript bears very directly on the issue of falseconsciousness. Much of the ethnographic material supporting the notion of “mystification” and “ideological hegemony” is, I suspect, simply the result of assuming that thetranscript from power-laden situations is the full transcript. Short of total institutions such as the concentration camp, however, most subordinate classes can repair occasionally to a social setting that is not so confining. To the extent that the transcript found here is markedly different from or else negates what is found in the context of power relations, the case for false-consciousness is weakened.89 [Page 288] The public transcript of the powerful is likely to be rather more in accord with their total transcript than is the case with the weak. After all, they are freer, by virtue of their power, to speak their mind with relative impunity. Razak can be safely and publicly insulted in a way that Haji Kadir or Bashir cannot be. And yet the powerful are also somewhat constrained both by a due regard for their reputation-a commodity of declining but real value-and by the desire to uphold the “theater” of power. Thus they will excoriate many of the village poor in the privacy of their own homes but rarely to their face. This is also not surprising; the transcript of the factory manager speaking with his workers is different from the transcript when he is in the safety of his own club; the transcript of the slave owner dealing with his slaves is different from his unguarded remarks to other slaveholders over dinner. It is only when we compare the “unedited” transcript of elites with the unedited transcript of subordinate classes that we uncover the extent of mutual dissimulation that prevails in the context of power relations. In the usual day-to-day conduct of class relations, these unedited transcripts are never in direct contact. Only at rare moments of historical crisis are these transcripts and the actions they imply brought into a direct confrontation. When they are, it is often assumed that there has come into being a new consciousness, a new anger, a new ideology that has transformed class relations. It is far more likely, however, that this new “consciousness” was already there in the unedited transcript and it is the situation that has changed in a way that allows or requires one or both parties to act on that basis.

  Both the rich and poor in Sedaka are, of course, aware that what takes place in the domain of power relations is not the whole story. They suspect and often know that a good portion of village discourse takes place behind their backs. Their knowledge is not, however, symmetrical. Here, at least, the poor have a slight advantage-if we can call it that-in the realm of information. They know a good deal about what the rich think of them, as we have seen from their comments. Their greater knowledge is due not only to the fact that the village elite is able to speak more freely, and
disparagingly, of them but also to the fact that it is simply more important and vital for the poor to keep their ear to the ground. The rich, by contrast, know less about the unedited transcript of the poor because the poor are more discreet and because the rich can more easily afford not to listen. Knowing less, they are free to suspect the worst. What they do know is that they cannot easily penetrate behind the pose of dissimulation, though they sense that behind the public routines of deference and respect lie contempt and anger. They are in precisely the situation of the [Page 289] lord as described in Hegel’s dialectic of lord and bondsman.90 The very exercise of power precludes the village elite from ever knowing what poorer villagers really think, thereby vitiating the value to the elite of their ritual compliance and deference. It is perhaps for this reason that the most dominant elites have historically so often credited their underclasses with all manner of malevolent powers and intentions emanating from the desire for revenge.91 The situation in Sedaka is not so extreme, but its form is qualitatively similar. The village elites suspect the worst from the poor in terms of anonymous thefts, slander, ingratitude, and dissimulating. Their fear, however, has a real basis in the nature of local power relations.92

  WHAT IS RESISTANCE?

  We have encountered a bewildering array of resistance and compliance within Sedaka. It is no simple matter to determine just where compliance ends and resistance begins, as the circumstances lead many of the poor to clothe their resistance in the public language of conformity. If one takes the dictionary definition of the verb to resist—“to exert oneself so as to withstand or counteract the force or effect of…”—how is one to categorize the subtle mixture of outward compliance and tentative resistance involved in the attempted boycott of combine-using farmers? So far as the public record is concerned, it never happened and yet, at another level, it was a labor strike, albeit one that failed. There are still other problems. Can individual acts such as theft or the murder of livestock be considered resistance even though they involve no collective action [Page 290] and do not openly challenge the basic structure of property and domination? Can largely symbolic acts such as boycotting feasts or defaming reputations be called resistance, although they appear to make little or no dent in the distribution of resources? Behind each of these queries is the prior question, “What is resistance?” More accurately stated-since definitions are analytical tools and not ends in themselves-what, for my purposes, can usefully be considered acts of resistance?