Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  13. Broadcasting (tabor kering) only began to pose a serious threat to hand transplanting by 1979 or 1980.

  14. Rosni, as we have noted, is a widow, while Rokiah’s husband is considered rather weak-minded, so that Rokiah is normally seen as the head of her household, making all the basic decisions. Such women, especially if they are past child-bearing age, are treated virtually as “honorary” males and are exempt from many of the customary requirements of modesty and deference expected of women in Malay society.

  15. Not all farmers in Sedaka that season could be neatly classified either as combine hirers or share-group hirers, since at least four farmers had used the combine for one plot and hand labor for another. In two cases, these were decisions based on the ripeness of the crops in each field when the combine was available or the inability of the machine to harvest a given plot (because it was on soft, waterlogged land or because it was surrounded by plots or unripe paddy). In the remaining two cases, the decision was almost certainly an attempt by the farmer to hedge his bets and avoid the threatened boycott.

  16. He then concluded by saying padi tumpah, which, literally, means “spilled paddy,” but its idiomatic sense would perhaps best be expressed by the English “just chaff” (as opposed to wheat).

  17. Marah sama nasi, tauk, bagi ayam makan.

  18. The fact that the paddy field they were planting belonged to the brother of one of the women in the share group further complicated matters.

  19. This serves as a salutary reminder of the limitations of local or village studies that treat only local fragments of class which stretch over wider areas and whose members are unknown personally to one another. A more accurate view of class would in fact include not only a spatial dimension but a temporal one as well, as the class of tenants as a concept must include those who have ever had this status in the past as well as those who are tenants today. The spatial dimension of class by itself may, in this context, seem to argue for the role of an elite or intelligentsia to coordinate and unify its fragmented action. As we shall see later, this conclusion is not necessarily warranted.

  20. Rosemary Barnard, “The Modernization of Agriculture in a Kedah Village, 1967–1978” (Paper presented at Second National Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, May 15-19, 1978), 33.

  21. The salaried head of the MADA branch office in Kepala Batas explicitly emphasized this when he explained to me why the attempted boycott had “no effect” (tak ada kesan) and added that the improvement in surfaced roads now permitted large farmers to bring in labor from much farther away.

  22. Teratur might in this context be translated also as “disciplined.”

  23. Kalau berpakat, kalau mogok, tak berani masuk. The term mogok is the standard Malay word for “strike.”

  24. Boleh jadi perang.

  25. This is especially the case if the season is a busy one and other threshing jobs are available when the current one is finished. Frequently threshing work is in fact morning work rather than day-long work, since the job is so physically demanding that the day begins at dawn and ends early in the afternoon. If the moon is bright, threshing is occasionally done in the evening to take advantage of the cool temperatures.

  26. There is also, to be sure, an element of competition among the threshers as well if we see each pair competing to thresh as much as possible of the paddy in a given field.

  27. When a close relative of the farmer is threshing, a certain amount of this behavior is overlooked, and the relative, if poor, may take full advantage of the leeway. A number of farmers have told me that they thus prefer to hire non-kinsmen (or, for that matter, to have non-kin tenants), since it is then easier to insist on careful work. Kinsmen who are threshing, they add, make it that much easier for the other threshers to emulate their performance. Since it is difficult to deny relatives gleaning rights on one’s land, that is another reason to avoid hiring them for threshing whenever possible.

  28. Satu kali dapat, lain kena turut.

  29. Whether this is due to their greater and more diversified wealth, or, more likely, to their desire as outsiders to be absolutely certain of labor when they require it is uncertain, but they are looked to as the pace setters for wage rates.

  30. Hang punya padi susah, rugi.

  31. The women’s attitude is perhaps best captured by the English expression, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

  32. Members of the share group frequently point out that both transplanting and reaping have become more time-consuming since double-cropping because the density of plants per relong has increased appreciably. If transplanting and reaping fees are higher than they were in 1969, the women claim that this only reflects inflation and the additional work required.

  33. Compare this with the description of Russian harvest workers’ more explosive reaction to standard piece-rates when the crop had been beaten down by hail, thus requiring much longer to reap. The greater violence of the labor gangs in this case seems particularly attributable to the fact that they were outsiders and strangers. Timothy Mixter, “Of Grandfather Beaters and Fat-Heeled Pacifists: Perceptions of Agricultural Labor and Hiring-Market Disturbances in Saratov, 1872–1905,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 7, Pts. I & II (1980): 139-68.

  34. In this context, it is notable that there is only one man in the village, the “adopted” son of Haji Salim, Abdul Rahim, who could be considered a “tied” laborer working almost exclusively for one wealthy man. His position is regarded with disdain by other poor villagers, who call him a “slave” (hamba), in part because he must accept whatever terms his employer imposes.

  35. There is some indication that the threshers were less exacting when they were dealing with a relatively poor farmer who enjoyed a reputation as a good man and more exacting when they were dealing with the rich and stingy.

  36. Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Jack Cohen, with an Introduction by E. J. Hobsbawm (London: London & Wishart, 1964), 133.

  37. Thus, for example, while a share group will not agree to replace its “striking” colleagues, it will accept work the following season from a large farmer who wishes to hire a new group to replace those who gave him trouble the previous season.

  38. What prevails in Sedaka is a variant of what Alier has called “union” in Southern Spain. As he describes it, “Labourers use the word union when trying to explain the existence of norms which make obligatory-or at least commendableways of behaving which aim at maintaining or increasing wages, or at reducing unemployment. These ways of behaving are, on many occasions opposed to the individual workers interest, and they may even entail some risk or sacrifice.” While such norms are occasionally violated, they appear to work best in small villages. Thus a laborer told Alier, “It is very rare to work for less than the prevailing wage, in this village, because it is small and people know each other. They do not do it; they would be badly looked upon.” Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, 122, 136.

  39. The shop finally failed and was closed the year after I left, when Samat could no longer get supplies on credit, because of his outstanding debts.

  40. The rule in question is one of a larger category of rules that dominated classes typically develop to limit their exploitation. As Barrington Moore has noted, “A challenge to the moral authority of precedent, to accustomed ways of behaving that subordinates have created to protect their own interests, vis-a-vis superiors as well as the integrity of their own social group, will generally produce a reaction of moral outrage. (That is also true when the challenge comes from a member of the subordinate group itself, as in the case of the worker who is a rate-buster and exceeds informally set norms of output).” Injustice, 30-31. Samat is, in this case, the agrarian equivalent of a “rate-buster” who has breached one of those petty but vital rules the poor have fashioned to afford themselves some protection.

  41. The episode related in the previous chapter in which Tok Mah
switched the tenancy for 3 relong from Lebai Hussein and his son Taha to Pak Yah is an ambiguous one. It appears that Pak Yah approached Tok Mah for the land only after she had said that Lebai Hussein no longer wanted to rent it at her proposed new rent. Lebai Hussein and Taha made it clear that they did not hold Pak Yah at fault but rather their landlady, who chose to interpret their initial grumbling over the new rent as an outright refusal. The norm is every bit as strong as the norm that tenants should not try to undercut one another, and it is the former, not the latter, that was apparently violated in this instance.

  42. Emile Zola, The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 317. For additional literary evidence from rural France, see Honore de Balzac, Les Paysans (Paris: Pleiades, 1949). For English material, see Douglas Hay, “Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 189-253.

  43. Marx is said to have told Engels that “it was the study of the law on the theft of wood and the situation of the Mosell peasantry that led him to pass from a purely political viewpoint to the study of economy and from that to socialism.” Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, The Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice 6 (Fall-Winter, 1976): 5-16.

  44. See Cheah Boon Kheng’s excellent account of Nayan and Saleh Tui in “Social Banditry and Rural Crime in Kedah, 1910–1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions” (Paper presented to Conference of International Association of Historians of Asia, Kuala Lumpur, 1980).

  45. This is a crude estimate. Such paddy is stolen by prying apart the boards of the granary or by making a hole through which paddy can be collected. Although many farmers mark the level of paddy inside the jelapang periodically, it is difficult to know precisely how much has been taken. As a rule, only well-off farmers have such rice barns; the poor keep their paddy in a corner of the house. One such attempted theft was thwarted when Ishak was awakened by noise beneath his house and rushed down to find two abandoned pairs of slippers and two filled gunny sacks.

  46. A majority of the six or seven cases of this description that reached my ears were thefts from Chinese landowners or tenants who lived outside the village. The problem of concealment and secret threshing would not be so severe in such thefts.

  47. The 1978–79 main-season losses to theft were, from all reports, considerably greater than the thefts for the season examined here. The reason for this, they suspect, is that the previous irrigated season had been canceled by drought and the poor families in the village were more destitute than they had been since the beginning of double-cropping.

  48. He is the only person in the village who owns a firearm. The use of firearms in Malaysia has been rigorously controlled since at least the time of the “Emergency” in the 1950s. When purchasing new ammunition, for example, the owner must produce all the expended cartridges to prove that ammunition has not been given to a third party.

  49. Such reports have been made elsewhere, but in each of the three cases I learned about the thefts were of three gunny sacks and more.

  50. Compare this with Georges Lefebvre’s description of the sanctions of mauvais gre (ill will), by which poorer peasants enforced a continuation of a communal view of property. They evidently “began with warnings (grave dug in the front yard, bullet on the doorstep, unlit torch in the thatch, then if necessary resorted to more violent expressions of ‘ill will’ (animals crippled, crops devastated, barn burned) with the aim of driving off tenants who had consented to rent increases.” Those familiar with Irish agrarian history will be struck by the parallels. David Hunt, “Charting the Peasant Route in the French Revolution” (November 1982, mimeo.). Hunt is discussing Lefebvre’s Les Paysans du nord pendant la revolution franfaise (Paris: F. Rieder, 1972), 93ff.

  51. In the classic Malay folktale called Pak Belalang, the bomoh has turned this trade into a lucrative racket. His sons steal villagers’ water buffalo and tether them in the forest, and then Pak Belalang is paid by the anxious owners for his ability to discern where they are located.

  52. Recall in this context that the poor will occasionally refer to paddy thefts as zakat “which one takes oneself” and that Fadzil, among the better-off villagers, has recognized the possible connection between the decline of charity and theft.

  53. Chickens are stolen as well but not in cases like this. When they are stolen they must be sold, for the smell of chicken cooking in a poor man’s compound would be a dead giveway.

  54. Not having been slaughtered by bleeding (sembelih) in the proper way, such animals cannot be eaten by Muslims even if they are discovered immediately after death.

  55. For a fascinating analysis of rural crime and disorder on a much larger, but still uncoordinated, scale, see Neil B. Weissman, “Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905–1914,” Slavic Review 37, no. 2 (1978): 228-40.

  56. The way in which the rich farmers are able to turn government policies and programs-loan programs, the state fertilizer subsidy, development subsidies, school admissions, settlement scheme applications, small-business subsidies, licenses for rice mills and taxis, government employment-to their advantage would constitute the core of any such analysis.

  57. For some interesting parallels, see Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree, by Hay et al., 255-344.

  58. See E. J. Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Norton, 1965). Hobsbawm’s otherwise illuminating account is, I believe, burdened unduly with a unilinear theory of lowerclass history which anticipates that every primitive form of resistance will in due course be superseded by a more progressive form until a mature Marxist-Leninist vision is reached.

  59. See, for example, Ann Stoler, “The Limits of Class Consciousness in North Sumatra” (Mimeo. 1979).

  60. As of that date, only 11 percent of the paddy produced in Kedah was sold directly to the state grain agency (LPN). Most of the rest was sold to private dealers and much of that was sold not for cash but to pay off accumulated debts at the shop of the paddy dealer.

  61. This summary description is based on accounts of villagers in Sedaka, four of whom attended the demonstration (pertunjukan perasaan), officials of MADA near Alor Setar, and newspaper accounts in Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, The Star, and the Straits Times for the period.

  62. “Curfew Sekitar Alor Setar,” Berita Harian, Jan. 24, 1980, p. 1.

  63. “Tunjuk perasaan issue padi bukan politik,” Utusan Malaysia, Feb. 7, 1980, bahagian kedua, p. 4.

  64. “MB: PAS out to create fear, terror,” Straits Times, Mar. 20, 1981, p. 1.

  65. Mustapha, Bakri bin Haji Wahab, and Mehat (son of Haji Kadir) had gone, as well as Ghazali, an UMNO member.

  66. The choice of the sickle (sabit) is deliberate since it also means “the crescent moon,” a symbol of PAS.

  67. John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness, 145. Gaventa provides an interesting analysis of how the miasma of repression and control can become “self-sustaining,” but in my view he never adequately addresses the issue of “false-consciousness.” For a specifically Malaysian view that the quiescence among Malay peasants is rooted in culture and not in “circumstances,” see Chandra Muzaffar, Protector? An Analysis of the Concept and Practice of Loyalty in Leader-Led Relationships within Malay Society (Pulau Pinang: Aliran, 1979).

  68. When Hamzah’s mother died, for example, he had no credit with which to purchase the necessary materials for the funeral. Basir agreed to vouch (sanggup) for him at the shops where the shroud material, the canvas for the bottom of the casket, and food for mourners were purchased. Much, but not all, of the debt was covered by subsequent contributions.

  69. Perry Anderson, in a discussion of the relationship between consent and coercion, has resorted to an analogy that is approp
riate here. Paper currency, he writes, is backed by gold and circulates because of that backing, but in normal times the gold is invisible. Only in a crisis does paper currency collapse and give way to a rush to gold. Consent, like paper money, prevails ordinarily, but it prevails because it is “constituted by a silent, absent force which gives… [it] currency: the monopoly of legitimate violence by the State…. Deprived of this, the system of cultural control would be instantly fragile, since limits of possible action against it would disappear.” “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (1976): 43.

  70. Robert Coles makes much the same point about American blacks when he writes, “Until now nonviolent action has come naturally to Negroes because the only alternative has been to turn their suffering on themselves, converting it to sullen despair. Negroes are not now becoming angry. At some levels of the mind, that are out of both the white man’s sight and often enough his own, the Negro has always been angry.” Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), 322, emphasis in original.

  71. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” 163. For contemporary evidence, see Howard Newby,-“Agricultural Workers in the Class Structure,” Sociological Review 20, no. 3 (1971): 413-39. Much the same argument is made in great detail for American slavery in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), especially Book One.

  72. The verb sembang can be a transitive verb meaning “to chat up someone.”

  73. The success was totally unexpected on my part, since Haji Kadir had clearly implied that Taib had been responsible for thefts of his rice. It crossed my mind that Taib was applying his own version of a protection racket here, but there is no way to verify that possibility.