74. Saya ingat, saya orang susah. Saya kira lagu ini: Kalau musuk Kati [UMNO}, boleh menumpang kerja orang kaya, boleh ambil upah sama dia. Kalau masuk sebelah susah, depa tak boleh panggil kerja. Saya punya rumah, kena jaga. Pasal itu saya berkawan semua.
75. I am indebted here to the discussion of gossip in John Beard Haviland, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977).
76. Ibid., 160.
77. The decisive rupture of appearances can, in many contexts, amount to a declaration of war. Three brief examples from other settings are instructive. One of the most effective and inflammatory techniques used by opponents of Indira Ghandhi in the last general elections before her death was for thousands of her opponents in an audience silently to turn their backs to her when she began to address the crowd. In Java, during the 1965 massacres of alleged communists, it is reported that peasant women occasionally lined the roads as trucks carrying soldiers and their squads of civilian supporters passed and, in a gesture of total contempt, lifted their sarongs to display their backsides. Not a few of them paid for their gesture with their lives. In Lodz, Poland, following the declaration of martial law and the outlawing of Solidarity, thousands of angry citizens showed their contempt for the government television news broadcast by placing their television in the window, with the screen facing outside, at precisely 7:30 P.M. when the official news began.
78. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977).
79. See, for example, Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967), 30, 106-07.
80. Emile Guillaumin, The Life of a Simple Man, ed. Eugene Weber, rev. trans. Margaret Crosland (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1983).
81. Ibid., 83. See also 38, 62, 64, 102, 140, 153 for other instances.
82. Ibid., 48, emphasis added.
83. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” 307.
84. See, for example, Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; and Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion. Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972).
85. Howard Newby, “The Deferential Dialectic,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 2 (April 1975): 146.
86. Some qualifications should be noted here. In situations where power is balanced but each party can do considerable damage to the other, much of the full transcript will also be concealed. Superpowers, each of which can destroy the other, play their cards very close to the vest. Thus, unhindered communication may be most likely between two actors who are not only equal in power but who cannot appreciably affect each other with their power. The rule is also less applicable to situations where the exercise of power is firmly institutionalized and law regarding. In such cases the weaker party may not be so constrained to conceal those parts of his transcript that fall clearly outside the defined domain of power. Finally, one may also wish to exclude from this rule situations of normally benevolent power such as a parent-child relationship. The secure knowledge that the parent will act in the child’s interest may permit the child to reveal his or her full transcript without fear of victimization. In the case of unrequited love, however, the weaker party is led to conceal those parts of his or her transcript that are unlikely to win the love of the prized person.
87. See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971), and “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 360-75.
88. How much of the full transcript is withheld cannot be simply deduced from the labeling of the power relationship. Different forms of slavery or serfdom, for example, are likely to vary considerably in this respect. Within a given form of subordination, moreover, a particular individual, say a blacksmith-slave with scarce and valuable skills, may enjoy a greater relative autonomy. In addition, most forms of subordination may permit a good deal of unconstrained communication in areas that are defined as neutral to the power relationship. Finally, in a more speculative vein, it would seem that, where the power situation drives most of the transcript of subordinates underground, the culture may often provide authorized ritual occasions when it is possible to break the rules. The Roman Saturnalia, the court jester, the Christian tradition of Carnival, the Hindu Feast of Holi are all rituals that allow subordinates, momentarily, to turn the tables. See, along these lines, James C. Scott, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4, no. 1 (1977): 1-38, and 4, no. 2 (1977): 211-46.
89. To the extent that the backstage transcript confirms and reinforces the onstage behavior, of course, the case for ideological hegemony is strengthened. The real interest, however, lies in the detailed analysis of the relationship between the two transcripts, which are likely to be neither perfectly identical nor perfectly contradic tory. I do not, in this analysis, mean for a moment to imply that the anthropologistoutsider is privy to the entire concealed transcript of various villagers. While outsider status confers some advantages, it surely blocks access to other information. I was, for example, always aware that most villagers were rather reluctant to talk about healing and magical practices that they imagined I might regard as superstitions.
90. See, for example, chapter 2 of George Kelly, Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press), 54-74; and G. W. F Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, with analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 111-19, 520-23.
91. It is at least plausible that there is something of a guilty conscience at work here that knows the poor must resent their marginalization from the village’s economic and social life. This interpretation is very much in keeping with I. M. Lewis’s analysis of possession by spirits among women and low-status men in a variety of cultures. In the context of a low-caste cult among the Nayar in India, he concludes, “Thus as so often elsewhere, from an objective viewpoint, these spirits can be seen to function as a sort of ‘conscience of the rich.’… Their malevolent power reflects the feelings of envy and resentment which people of high caste assume the less fortunate lower castes must harbour in relation to their superiors.” Ecstatic Religions: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 115.
92. For an interesting account of this process as applied to both class and gender relations, see also Elizabeth Janeway, The Powers of the Weak (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1981), chaps. 9-10.
93. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 35, emphasis added.
94. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 598.
95. See Allan Wildman, “The February Revolution in the Russian Army,” Soviet Studies 22, no. 1 (July 1970): 3-23; Marc Ferro, “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary,” Slavic Review 30, no. 3 (September 1971): 483-512; Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice, 364, and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 135-38. There is a consensus that Bolshevik propaganda at the front was not instrumental in provoking these desertions.
96. One may wish to call the land seizures and sacking of gentry property a revolutionary act, and it was certainly revolutionary in its consequences in 1917. But it was a largely spontaneous affair out of the control of any party, and it is extremely unlikely that those seizing the land self-consciously saw themselves as bringing about a revolutionary government, let alone a Bolshevik one. See Skocpol, States, 135, 138.
97. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution: 1917–1923, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 103. If we wished to extend this account of Russian peasant “selfdemobilization” back into history, we might plausibly include the massive and persistent flight of serfs to the frontier in the eighteenth century. The effort to retain the
serfs and their labor was perhaps the key to domestic statecraft throughout this period. Jerome Blum reminds us that “There were more laws about runaways and their recovery than any other subject-a fact that in itself bears witness to the proportions of peasant flight.” Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the 9th to the 19th Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), 553.
98. The initial successes of Solidarity in Poland can in a similar fashion be attributed largely to the fact that the unpopular regime could not count on its own army actively to suppress the rebellious civilian population and was instead forced to rely on the hated paramilitary police, the Zomos.
99. Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family (New York: Vintage, 1964), 102.
100. More farfetched, but still possible, is the opposite situation, where an act that we would not, by any stretch of the imagination, wish to call an act of resistance (for example, a completely inadvertent setting on fire of an aristocrat’s crop land or a hunting accident in which a peasant kills the provincial governor) may set off a chain of events that weakens the class domination of rural elites. Any definition of resistance thus requires at least some reference to the intentions of the actors.
101. Again, such resistance is not the monopoly of lower classes. Tax evasion and the so-called black economy in advanced capitalist countries are also forms of resistance, albeit pursued with most vigor and success by middle and upper classes.
102. Utsa Patnaik, “Neo-Populism and Marxism: The Chayanovian View of the Agrarian Question and Its Fundamental Fallacy,” Journal of Peasant Studies 6, no. 4 (July 1979): 398-99.
103. In a factory or in “state farms” the “self-interested core of class struggle” may involve the reappropriation of time for one’s own use in forms that appear quite trivial. Thus, Alf Ludke and Shelby Cullam argue that “horse-play” in the German factory and other examples of “the articulation and assertion of individual needs” ought to be seen as “political behavior.” They add that the resistance to discipline and hierarchy found expression not only on the factory floor but in resistance to the socialist party itself “corresponding to a massive dis-interest in any sort of formal and state-centered politics.” “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horse-Play: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Late 19th and Early 20th Century,” Davis Center Seminar, Princeton University, April 2, 1982, mimeo.
104. “Eighteenth-Century English Society,” 149.
105. Tax evasion is evident from the steady reports of land tax arrears from Kedah and from indications of systematic misreporting of yields. Thus, Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Advisor to the Kedah Government, 1921 (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1922), 38, notes, “The padi planter regards with suspicion the collection of statistics as a possible basis for further taxation and minimizes his harvest.” The Report for May 1930 to May 1931 puts the underreporting between 15 and 18 percent (p. 8), in some districts at nearly 50 percent (p. 55). For evasion of the rubber restriction schemes from 1913 until World War II, see Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants and Their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya, 1874–1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), and Donald M. Nonini, Paul Diener, and Eugene E. Robkin, “Ecology and Evolution: Population, Primitive Accumulation, and the Malay Peasantry” (Typescript, 1979).
106. “Whatever the intellectual sources of error, the effect of equating movements with movement organizations-and thus requiring that protests have a leader, a constitution, a legislative program, or at least a banner before they are recognized as such-is to divert attention from many forms of political unrest and to consign them by definition to the more shadowy realms of social problems and deviant behavior. As a result such events as massive school truancy or rising worker absenteeism or mounting applications for public welfare or spreading rent defaults rarely attract the attention of political analysts. Having decided by definitional fiat that nothing political has occurred, nothing has to be explained, at least not in terms of political protest.” Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements. Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), 5.
107. See in this context the fine article by William M. Reddy, “The Textile Trade and the Language of the Crowd of Rouen 1752–1871,” Past and Present 74 (February 1977): 62-89. Reddy argues that it was precisely the lack of organization in crowd behavior that was enabling and that the crowd came to value and use spontaneity in the knowledge that it was the most effective and least costly means of protest. The cultural understandings were so well developed that any just grievance could, he says, bring together a crowd without any planning or organization, let alone formal leadership.
108. In his interpretation of nineteenth-century working-class history, Francis Hearn finds in just such informal structures of ritual and community the heart and soul of direct action by the working class. Their erosion by midcentury was the key, he believes, to the “domestication” of the working class. “In all societies, formal organizations which significantly threaten the stability of the existing arrangements are, if not directly banned, subject to legal sanctions which restrict the scope of their activity…. For this reason the informal, often opaque, structures and institutions of the viable community are indispensable to sustained collective action.” Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance. The Interpretation of the 19th Century English Working Class, Contributions in Labor History, No. 3 (Westport: Greenwood, 1978).
109. For an extended argument along these lines, see Scott, “Protest and Profanation,” and “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977): 267-96.
110. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 81.
111. For a suggestive and detailed analysis of how folk beliefs and ritual may be mobilized to serve political and social class objectives, see the fine discussion in Maurice Agulhon, La Republique au village. Les populations du Var de la Revolution a la Seconde Republique (Paris: Plon, 1970).
112. Eric Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 7.
113. Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1980). Also relevant is Issa Shivji, Class Struggles in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1976). For a similar account of Algeria’s state-created agricultural organization and attempts to evade it, see Peter Knauss, “Algeria’s Agrarian Revolution: Peasant Control or Control of Peasants,” African Studies Review 20, no. 3 (1977): 65-78. As one member of a state cooperative said, “Before we were khames [tenants] of the great landowner…. Now we are the khames of the State…. All workers know it.”
114. See, for example, the forthcoming articles by Christine White and Adam Fforde in Journal of Peasant Studies.
8 • Hegemony and Consciousness: Everyday Forms of Ideological Struggle
[Page 304]
And as to the causes of social change, I look at it in this way—ideas are a sort of parliament, but there’s a commonwealth outside, and a good deal of commonwealth is working at change without knowing what the parliament is doing.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
No one who looks even slightly beneath the fairly placid official surface of class relations in Sedaka would find it easy to argue that the poor are much mystified about their situation. Their account of the green revolution and its social consequences is widely divergent from that of the rich. Seemingly straightforward social facts about who is rich and who is poor—and how rich and how poor—are contested in this community. The poor, when they may do so with relative safety, display an impressive capacity to penetrate behind the pieties and rationales of the rich farmers and to understand the larger realities of capital accumulation, proletarianization, and marginalization. They emphasize and manipulate those values that will serve their material and symbolic interests as a class. They reject the denigrating characterizations the rich deploy against them. And within the narrow limits created by the fear of repression and the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” they act to defend their interests by boycotts, qu
iet strikes, theft, and malicious gossip.
In this final chapter, I hope to bring these rather homely insights from Sedaka in touch with the larger issues of the social experience of class and the typical contexts of class struggle. It should be possible also to say something meaningful about class-consciousness, mystification, and ideological hegemony. The objective is a deeper appreciation of everyday forms of symbolic resistance and the way in which they articulate with everyday acts of material resistance. Just as peasants—Zola and many others notwithstanding—do not simply vacillate between blind submission and homicidal rage, neither do they move directly from ideological complicity to strident class-consciousness. If, behind the facade of behavioral conformity imposed by elites, we find innumerable, anonymous acts of resistance, so also do we find, behind the facade of symbolic and ritual compliance, innumerable acts of ideological resistance. The two forms of resistance are, of course, inextricably joined. Examining these issues in more analytical detail, though it requires us to step back a few paces from Sedaka, should allow us to clarify the debate about the extent to which dominant classes are able to impose their own 304 [Page 305] vision of a just social order, not only on the behavior of subordinate classes, but on their consciousness as well. Before addressing these larger issues, however, it will be helpful first to clarify the nature of the ideological struggle in Sedaka.
THE MATERIAL BASE AND NORMATIVE SUPERSTRUCTURE IN SEDAKA
There is no doubt whatever that the ideological conflict now under way in Sedaka is a reaction to the massive transformation of production relations made possible by double-cropping and mechanization backed by the state. It is these exogenous changes in the material base that have allowed large landowners and farmers to change the tenure system, raise rents, dismiss tenants, replace wage workers with machinery, and either to lease out large plots for long periods or to resume cultivation themselves. This shift in the balance of economic power has also allowed rich farmers to eliminate or curtail a host of social practices that were part and parcel of the earlier scheme of production relations: feast giving, Islamic charity, loans and advance wages, and even much of the social recognition and respect previously accorded to poorer villagers. What has occurred, in short, is that those facets of earlier relations of production that are no longer underwritten by the material interests of wealthy farmers are being abandoned piecemeal or wholesale.
Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Page 49
