Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie. Thus they are two radically dissimilar nations as unlike as difference of race could make them.34

  The peasantry, if anything, is even further removed from the institutional circuits of symbolic power. Living outside the cities where the agencies of hegemony are quartered, operating largely within an oral tradition that somewhat insulates it from printed media, being an old class (unlike the proletariat) with its own cultural traditions and patterns of resistance, and having its own shadow institutions (for example, informal religious schools, rituals, and festivals), the peasantry is simply less accessible to hegemonic practice. When we add to this the fact that the material and symbolic interests of poor peasants are likely to make them skeptical of a dominant ideology that rationalizes their material deprivation and low status, we can appreciate why they might resist “symbolic incorporation.”

  The fact that the penetration of official reality by the poor is so apparent in the case of Sedaka is reason to wonder how it could escape notice in any other comparable situation. It could, however, be overlooked if one observed only the public encounters between rich and poor (“the partial transcript”) and ignored entirely the insinuations beneath the surface, the discussion outside the context of power relations, and the anonymous, quiet acts of routine practical resistance that occur daily.35 For it is in the immediate interest of most poor villagers to uphold the official realities in nearly all power-laden contexts. The partial transcript, taken alone, therefore would create the impression of mystification. But we would commit the error of not realizing that mystification and impression management are as much a pose of the powerless as ideological domination by [Page 322] the rich. Gramsci is, I believe, misled when he claims that the radicalism of subordinate classes is to be found more in their acts than in their beliefs. It is more nearly the reverse. The realm of behavior-particularly in power-laden situations-is precisely where dominated classes are most constrained. And it is at the level of beliefs and interpretations-where they can safely be venturedthat subordinate classes are least trammeled. The rich in Sedaka can usually insist on conforming public behavior and get it; they can neither insist on private ideological conformity, nor do they need it.36

  Inevitability, Naturalization, and Justice

  There is another more sophisticated and influential argument for mystification and false-consciousness that does not depend upon the presumed ability of dominant classes to impose their own beliefs on subordinate classes. If the idea of hegemony implies something that is done to lower orders by those above them, this second position implies that mystification is something that subordinate classes do, in part at least to themselves, given the force of circumstances. Briefly put, the argument is that a system of social domination often appears to be inevitable. Once it is considered inevitable, the logic goes, it is apt to be considered natural even by those who are disadvantaged by it, and there is a tendency to consider whatever is natural also to be just or legitimate. The most limited statement of this position, one that omits the last step and carefully avoids equating natural with legitimate, is found in Richard Hoggart’s fine analysis of English working-class culture:

  When people feel that they cannot do much about the main elements of their situation, feel it not necessarily with despair or disappointment or resentment, but simply as a fact of life, they adopt attitudes toward that situation which allow them to have a liveable life under its shadow, a life without a constant and pressing sense of the larger situation. The attitudes remove the main elements in the situation to the realm of natural laws, the given and now, the almost implacable material from which a living has to be carved. Such attitudes, at their least adored, a fatalism or plain accepting, are generally below the tragic level; they have too much of the conscript’s lack of choice about them.37

  Barrington Moore, who is more generally concerned with historical patterns of systematic subordination, does not hesitate to take the final step of associating inevitability with justice and legitimacy:

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  In varying degrees and in different ways all these people felt that their sufferings were unavoidable. For some victims such suffering appeared to a degree inevitable and legitimate. People are evidently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise the pain might be intolerable.38

  Piven and Cloward echo Moore’s assessment in their study of poor people’s movements in the United States:

  However hard their lot may be, people usually remain quiescent, conforming to the accustomed patterns of daily life in their community, and believing those patterns to be both inevitable and just.39

  What is described appears to be akin to the “naturalization” of the inescapablea reification of the “dull compulsion of economic relations” that is here to stay.40 Thus, Bourdieu writes of certain beliefs as being “unthinkable” and of the inclination of social “agents” “to make a virtue of necessity,” that is, “to refuse what is anyway refused and to love the inevitable.”41

  Except for very rare and special circumstances to which I shall return later, I believe all of these closely related arguments for mystification to be either misleading or wrong-or both. First, they provide no convincing logic for the process by which the inevitable becomes just. Second, they ignore the great variety of ways in which the notion of inevitability itself can be, and is, negated by the historical practice of subordinate classes. I shall take up each issue in turn. [Page 324] The inherent plausibility of the argument for this particular form of falseconsciousness rests on the plain fact that the larger contours of the stratification system within which most subordinate classes have lived out their lives must surely have seemed inevitable and hence natural. It is unlikely, the reasoning goes, that the untouchables in nineteenth-century India, the serfs in thirteenthcentury France, or perhaps even the tenants in Sedaka today could seriously entertain the possibility of raising their basic status, let alone of living in a world without castes, lords, or landords. And even if they could, they would be unlikely to devote much time or thought to possibilities that appear to be entirely excluded as practical goals. This argument, as I understand it, asks us to believe that, for subordinate classes, the larger structure of domination is typically experienced in the same way a peasant might experience the weather. If we accept this analogy for the sake of argument, it is not at all clear why the weather, which is surely inevitable, unavoidable, and even fated should, on this basis alone, be considered either just or legitimate. It is far more plausible to assume that the concepts of justice or legitimacy are simply irrelevant to something that is inescapably there, like the weather. There is no logical warrant for equating justice and inevitability virtually as a matter of definition; in the absence of further evidence, whatever is inevitable is simply that and no more. In fact, the analogy with the weather is instructive at another level. The inevitability of the weather has not prevented every group of traditional cultivators from personifying this natural force or from developing rituals to influence its course or, when their efforts have failed, from cursing their fate. Thus, far from removing it to the realm of the inevitable, the peasantry has historically considered even the weather to be amenable to human manipulation. If there is any “mystification” of natural laws in traditional societies, it is in the direction of bringing them under human control, not the reverse.42

  I shall return to the critique of inevitability later, but first it is worthwhile to consider why inevitability should be so frequently confounded with legitimacy. Appearances, of course, nearly always seem to confirm the legitimacy of the inevitable. No matter how conscious members of a subordinate class may be of having gotten a raw deal, the daily pressure of making a living and the risks of open defiance are usually enough to skew the ethnographic record systematically in the direction of complia
nce, if not acceptance, of the inevitable. Here again, however, resignation to what seems inevitable is not the same as according it legitimacy, although it may serve just as efficiently to produce daily compliance. A certain tone of resignation is entirely likely in the face of a situation that cannot, in the short run, be materially altered. When the poor in Sedaka talk about combine-harvesters and say, “It doesn’t matter whether you protest or not, [Page 325] nothing comes of it,” they are merely expressing a realistic, pragmatic, view of the situation as they experience it. They have tried to stop the combines and have failed. They certainly must adapt to the consequences, but this hardly implies approval. In this respect their situation is no different from that of most subordinate classes most of the time. Except for those comparatively rare moments when a political opening or a revolutionary situation creates new possibilities or revives old aspirations, an attitude of pragmatic resignation is likely to prevail.43

  Compliance can of course flow either from grudging resignation or from active ideological support. What we should not do, however, is to infer ideological support even from the most apparently faithful compliance. To prove the case for ideological support-for hegemony-one would have to supply independent evidence that the values of the subordinate class are in fact largely in accord with those of the dominant elite. Such evidence, to be credible, would have to come from social contexts in which members of the subordinate class were least constrained by power relations.

  There is another reason why the ethnographic record, even where it is collected with a view to minimizing the constraints of power, may be skewed in the direction of apparent acceptance. This is because the record is invariably oriented toward the quotidian and rarely contains much discussion of options that seem out of reach.44 The smallholders in Sedaka, for example, do not talk about land reform. When I raised the subject with them, however, they were almost uni [Page 326] formly enthusiastic, as one might expect, often suggesting that 10 relong of paddy land was sufficient to provide the well-off with a comfortable living. Put it was not a subject that ever arose spontaneously, since it was purely academic; it had never been broached by either of the political parties with which they are familiar nor by agricultural officials. Their attention was, instead, more realistically focused on the possibility of securing a reasonable tenancy within the existing system of landownership.45 However desirable, it is simply not a realistic goal under present circumstances.

  From a much more modest view of what hegemony is all about, it might be said that the main function of a system of domination is to accomplish precisely this: to define what is realistic and what is not realistic and to drive certain goals and aspirations into the realm of the impossible, the realm of idle dreams, of wishful thinking. There is surely a good deal to be said for this limited construction of hegemony, since it recognizes the vital impact of power on the definition of what is practical. If we adopt this more plausible notion of hegemony, however, at least two qualifications are in order. First, we are no longer speaking of justice and legitimacy, but only of the more or less rational understanding of what is achievable in a given situation. Second, and more important, this view is decidedly static, as it systematically excludes from our analysis just how the realm of the possible might, in new circumstances, be expanded.46 While it is true that the poor in Sedaka do not now consider land reform a real option, it is also true that their view of current inequities, their resentment of large landowners, and their off-the-record bitterness all suggest powerfully that they might well become enthusiastic supporters of land reform if it were to become a historical option. What is nothing more than idle speculation today may become a realistic goal tomorrow, and we will best infer the possible response of the peasantry not from what they now consider possible but rather from their overall evaluation of the social order within which they live.47 One would not expect, for example, to find French peasants talking, in 1788, about the chateaux they would be sacking in 1789 or Russian peasants discussing, in 1916, the land seizures they would be carrying out the following year. What one could have found in all likelihood, however, were attitudes about the aristocracy and land rights that were entirely consistent with their later actions.

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  Having shown how pragmatic resignation and the relative absence of currently implausible objectives from class discourse might mimic the effects of hegemony, it remains to consider one final argument for linking inevitability to hegemony. This is the case that Barrington Moore makes on the basis of accounts from Nazi concentration camps and, to a lesser extent, accounts of the Hindu caste system. He contends that there are situations in which oppression is exercised so totally and so pervasively that the poses so often necessary to the powerlessflattery, deference, and so forth-represent the whole reality, the whole transcript, of subordinate groups. Noting that “it is very difficult to act a mask or a role continually without acquiring the character that goes with the role,” he asks, in effect, what happens when the mask must be worn at all times.48 The question of legitimacy and justice, he implies, hardly arises at all, since the realm of necessity exhausts the whole of human conduct. At this extreme it is possible to show, as Moore does, that some victims do indeed come to identify with the oppressor and to copy both his behavior and his values.49 But the very extremity of the measures required to achieve this end make it, for my purpose, precisely the exception that proves the rule. As the most total of institutions, the Nazi concentration camp systematically set about destroying every vestige of independent social life. The victims, before they were murdered, were stripped of all possessions and family, worked to the extremes of exhaustion, underfed to [Page 328] the point of starvation, brutalized both systematically and capriciously, while their waking life was minutely controlled by the guards. No effort was spared to destroy all networks of informal solidarity and thoroughly to atomize the prisoners. Virtually the only autonomous choice left was that of suicide. What is remarkable is not that such extremity produces a certain “identification with the oppressor” but rather that only “some concentration camp inmates came to accept the moral authority of their oppressors.”50

  One might, in this context, compare different forms of oppression by the degree to which they allow their victims some semblance of an autonomous social existence. By this criterion, the concentration camp would lie at one extreme, followed perhaps by mental asylums and civilian and military prisons. Here one might plausibly expect that atomization and nearly total control might achieve a perverse moral authority.51 The fact is, however, that all of the “routine” and historically common patterns of social subordination and exploitationslavery, serfdom, sharecropping, or even wage labor-are unlike the concentration camp in that their “victims” retain considerable autonomy to construct a life and a culture not entirely controlled by the dominant class.52 In other words there are, for each of these groups, situations in which the mask of obsequiousness, deference, and symbolic compliance may be lifted. This realm of relatively “safe” discourse, however narrow, is a necessary condition for the development of symbolic resistance-a social space in which the definitions and performances imposed by domination do not prevail.53 This social space is, moreover, defined not only by the absence of vertical power relations but by the presence of sanctions and influence exercised by others who find themselves in the same boat.54 Thus, [Page 329] when Pak Yah gathers on his steps with a few other laborers and smallholders who belong to PAS, the discourse is not only different from what one would hear if Basir or Haji Kadir were present, but its content is influenced by the social fact that the men gathered are both poor and opposed to UMNO. This influence is stronger by virtue of the fact that these men also depend on one another for a wide array of petty favors and exchanges; there are power relations here too, although they are more nearly reciprocal and balanced. If the exercise of domination depends upon a social context for its creation and maintenance, so does the exercise of resistance.55

  It is, of course, theoretic
ally possible for the discourse found even in “nonmask” situations to conform in most or all particulars with the dominant ideology. But whenever we are dealing with any of the large-scale structures of social subordination, which invariably imply both the appropriation of labor and the assignment of inferior, if not degrading, status to its subjects, this is unlikely. Thus, there is some evidence that the untouchable castes in India, when they may do so safely, reject much of the stigmatized identity assigned to them by the caste system.56 The work of Genovese and others reveals that, in the slave quarters of the antebellum South, one encountered a set of values very different from those that officially prevailed.57 There was a religious emphasis on liberation and equality drawn from Old Testament texts, a profane view both of the masters and of slavery, justifications for resistance in the form of theft, pilfering, flight, and shirking. Not all of these attitudes were incompatible, as Genovese notes, with the continuation of slavery as a system, but they were decidedly different from the dominant ideology. The subculture created in the slave quarter was normally hidden from the master’s view. It might, however, occasionally intrude onto the public stage when strong drink temporarily overcame the slaves’ normal caution. As Mullin notes in his study of slavery in nineteenth-century Virginia:

  While drunkenness tends to leave most people either quiet and withdrawn, or out-going and loud-spoken, acculturating slaves when drunk and addressing their masters-with no exceptions-were always “bold,” “obstinate,” “daring,” “impudent,” or “turbulent.”58