Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  13. See, for example, Howard Newby, “The Deferential Dialectic, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 2 (April 1975): 161-64, and Brian Harrison, “Philanthropy and the Victorians,” Victorian Studies 9, no. 4 (June 1966): 353-74. In another penetrating analysis of agrarian “patronage” by landowners, Ronald Herring suggests that the resources devoted to such activities be termed a “legitimacy fund.” “Landlordism as a Social System: Quiescence and Protest in Kerala” (Paper presented to Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Francisco, March 23-27, 1983).

  14. See, for example, Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Advisor to the Kedah Government for each year. The pattern extends well back into the period of Thai control at the very least.

  15. This is the import of the Kedah Perlis Development Study: Interim Report, by Economic Consultants Ltd. (Alor Setar: 1977), although the consultants expect an outmigration pattern similar to past experience to continue unabated. Even during the colonial period the need for urban workers and plantation labor was met largely by migrants from China and India rather than from the Malay population.

  16. I do not doubt for a moment that, if this political domination were seriously threatened at the polls, the already hedged-about electoral system would be quickly dismantled, as it was following the riots of 1969.

  17. Antoni Gramsci, Selections fronm the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quinten Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). Ironically, Anderson writes that “hegemony” was first used by the Bolsheviks to refer to the domination the proletariat must establish over the peasantry to defeat the enemies of the revolution. As such it implies political control but not necessarily consent. Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (1976): 6.

  18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), 61.

  19. Gramsci, Selections, 12.

  20. See the excellent discussion by Joseph Femia, “Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci,” Political Studies 23, no. 1 (March 1975).

  21. Gramsci, Selections, 326-27, 419.

  22. Femia, “Hegemony,” 35.

  23. Gramsci, Selections, 57, 207. This implies, among other things, that the revolutionary party will somehow be able to create its own separate institutions, which will resist incorporation by the ruling class prior to the revolution. It was never clear how Gramsci tought this could occur.

  24. See, for example, Philip Carl Salzman, “Culture as Enhabilments,” in The Structure of Folk Models, ed. Ladislav Holy and Milan Stuchlik, ASA Monograph No. 20 (New York: Academic, 1981), 233-56.

  25. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that intellectuals further removed from political combat and from the working class itself have fastened on analysis that ascribes a nearly coercive influence to the product of their own class, that is, ideology!

  26. I am indebted for parts of the following analysis to the excellent general critique of hegemony in its various guises by Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), as well as to the more polemical-and entertaining-broadside against Althusser in E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 1-210.

  27. The term penetration as used here is borrowed from two sources: Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), and Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977). I am indebted particularly to Willis’s study of working-class school culture, which is a remarkable combination of careful ethnography and subtle ideological analysis grounded securely in class experience.

  28. Willis, Learning to Labour, 175. Giddens writes that one of his “leading theorems” is that “every social actor knows a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member.” Central Problems, 5 and see also 72.

  29. The failure to link ideology with actual class experience is often responsible for unwarranted conclusions. As Abercrombie et al., Dominant Ideology Thesis, 141, analyzing the research of others, concludes, “Workers will often agree with dominant elements, especially when these are couched as abstract principles or refer to general situations, which is normally the case in interview surveys using standardized questionnaires, but will then accept deviant values when they themselves are directly involved or when these are expressed in concrete terms which correspond to everyday reality.” They go on to note that the “confusion” in working-class ideology is no more than one may find among dominant groups. P. 144.

  30. For slave society, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974). For the process in general, see my “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977), and “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4, nos. 1 and 2 (1977). For other works that bear directly on this theme, see R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People. French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); McKim Marriott, “Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization,” in Village India, ed. McKim Marriott (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955); and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972).

  31. “In general, the fewer the rewards a society offers to a particular group… the more autonomous that group will prove to be with reference to the norms of the society.” Lee Rainwater, “Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower Class Family,” Daedalus 95 (1966): 212, cited in Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 283.

  32. Abercrombie et al., Dominant Ideology Thesis, 50.

  33. Religion is perhaps an exception, but here we have only to look at the way both the early working class and the peasantry create their own sects and religious understandings outside official orthodoxy, including revolutionary millennial beliefs. For example, see the fascinating discussion of “peripheral spirits” and forms of possession that characterize women and also men of low status in many societies in I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

  34. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 162-63. The cultural gulf was noted by conservatives as well, for example by Disraeli in Sybil: or the Two Nations, which Engels cites approvingly.

  35. Giddens, writing of the working class, notes, “To mistake pragmatic, ironic (for example, working to rule), humorous, distanced participation in the routines of alienated labour for normative consensus, was one of the great errors of the orthodox academic sociology of the 1950’s and 60’s.” Central Problems, 148.

  36. Juan Martinez Alier’s analysis of Andalusian agricultural laborers is quite detailed and convincing on this score. Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, Publications, No. 4 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), chap. 1.

  37. The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954), 77-78, emphasis added.

  38. The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 458-59. Elsewhere Moore notes, “What is or appears to be unavoidable must also somehow be just.” Ibid., 64. As usual, Moore is so scrupulous about disconfirming evidence that his bold position is somewhat qualified in his case studies. The addition of “some” and “to a degree” in the second sentence of the citation is a more accurate reflection of his position than the final sentence. It is worth noting that the only reason he gives for the transformation of the inevitable into the “just” is similar to Hoggart’s, namely, the desire of victims to somehow escape the constant psychological pain of living in an intolerable situation that must nevertheless be endured.

  39. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), 6.


  40. One might expect these conclusions from scholars of a conservative bent except for the fact that the problem itself requires a prior recognition of situations that could be described as exploitive. I have quoted from these writers especially because they could all be described as left-wing scholars working on socialist issues, broadly defined. This general process is very much what Bourdieu had in mind when he wrote that “every established order tends to produce… the naturalization of its own arbitrariness”-an effect produced in part by “a sense of limits” and a “sense of reality.” Bourdieu, Outline, 164.

  41. Ibid., 77.

  42. See, for example, Maurice Godelier, “Fetishism, Religion and Marx’s General Theories Concerning Ideology,” in his Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, trans. Robert Brain, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology, No. 18 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 169-85.

  43. Thus Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, in their analysis of the “quiescence” of the English working class in the decades just after 1850, find no evidence of effective indoctrination or normative approval, but rather a “factual” acceptance of “the economic order of capitalism and its class based social organization.” Dominant Ideology Thesis, 122). John Gaventa, in his study of Appalachian coal miners, also finds an attitude of resignation and even demoralization. But this attitude, far from being evidence of ideological hegemony or approval, “is not irrational…. It has been instilled historically through repeated experiences of failure.” Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), 254. Finally, Alier’s detailed analysis of Andalusian farm workers carefully distinguishes compliance from legitimacy. “Andalusian labourers choose conduct which is compatible with the maintenance of latifundismo and the social structure based upon it; but they also have values which would result in conduct incompatible with its maintenance. If they do not adopt these forms of conduct, it is because of controls, which are not social sanctions derived from the agro-town’s value system, but rather political controls exercised from the provincial capital and from Madrid, and because they remember with fear the period after 1936.” Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, 314-15.

  44. It is just such attention to the quotidian that gives rise to the notion that traditional social structures are accepted as a matter of fatalism-in Malay, rezeki. There is surely no doubt that, as a practical matter, adaptation to circumstances that cannot be changed, at least in the short run, imposes itself coercively. To conclude that this is the end of the matter, however, is not warranted, as we shall see below.

  45. I recognize that no social context is entirely free from power relations. The opinions expressed by the powerless are often constrained as well by the opinions of their peers. There is no “true” transcript in the sense of a transcript that is entirely unconstrained. What I am comparing here are relative degrees of constraint.

  46. Andalusian workers, similarly, do not often speak of reparto, or land distribution, although it was at one time long ago a real option and is still considered the only just solution to inequity.

  47. Here I bracket temporarily the fact that it is often the action of subordinate classes that may be influential in creating new possibilities, including often those not foreseen by the actors themselves.

  48. Another way of phrasing this issue is to focus on the unavoidable dualityor multiplicity-of subordinate class consciousness. Much of the daily struggle to make a living, as we have seen in the case of Hamzah and others, necessarily involves appeals to the normative system of the dominant class-flattery, deference, obsequious polite forms of address, and so forth. There will almost invariably be other offstage values as well that may contradict such poses. And yet, we are not entirely justified in treating the former as merely insincere poses and the latter as the truth. In situations where the exercise of power is quite pervasive, the offstage discourse may be confined to the nooks and crannies of social life, thereby making the formulas for action imposed by elites hegemonic in practice. Arnold Strickon, writing of an Argentine agro-town, notes that the gauchos have two sets of stratification terms: one is cast entirely in patron-client terms, the other is class based. The first, however, dominates daily life in the local context; it is both explanatory and strategic for lowerclass action. The second is more appropriate to the rare occasions of provincial and national elections. An observer might plausibly conclude that traditional, clientelist consciousness dominated, but this conclusion would merely amount to the observation that the situational context relevant to that style of action was dominant. If the situational context relevant to class discourse were to become more frequent, so would class terminology and action. What one would be observing then would be not so much a change in consciousness per se as a shift in the relative frequency of situational contexts relevant to one style of action as opposed to another. “Folk Models of Stratification, Political Ideology, and Socio-cultural Systems,” Sociological Review Monographs, No. 11(1967), 93-117.

  49. Moore, Injustice, 464.

  50. In his analysis, Moore (Injustice, 64) relies heavily on Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960). For an account of how various forms of moral and organized resistance can grow in only slightly less draconian conditions, see Emmanuel Rigelblum, Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken, 1974).

  51. Especially, perhaps, in mental institutions and civilian prisons where there is at least an ideology claiming that they are operated for the ultimate benefit of their inmates. Even here, however, control is not total and resistance is evident. See, for example, Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1961), and Jack Henry Abbot, In the Belly of the Beast (New York: Vintage, 1982).

  52. Such autonomy, it is often pointed out, is not simply a failure of control but is necessary to the very functioning of the institution.

  53. The dominant class may make efforts to infiltrate this social space with spies. The effect of such spies may be less the information they carry back than the way in which the fear of spies itself may neutralize a possible realm of autonomous discourse.

  54. The monoclass village under the domination of a single outside landlord thus has marked advantages for class mobilization that are not confined to the fact that the material situation of all villagers is more or less the same. They also have a realm of autonomous discourse that is coterminous with the village itself.

  55. We know enough from ingenious psychological experiments to conclude that resistance to domination increases markedly once there is the slightest possibility of social support for it from peers. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 116-21.

  56. Joan P. Mencher, “On Being an Untouchable in India: A Materialist Perspective,” in Beyond the Myths of Culture: Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Eric B. Ross (New York: Academic, 1980), 261-94.

  57. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll.

  58. Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), 100.

  59. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), 434-35, quoted in Bourdieu, Outline, 74.

  60. “Protest and Profanation,” 224-42.

  61. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), 169.

  62. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London: Seecker & Warburg, 1957), 32.

  63. For examples from Burma and Indonesia, see E. Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), and Sartono Kartodirdjo, Protest Movements in RuralJava: A Study of Agrarian Unrest in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1973).

  64. Not a few millennial sects have historically settled into the social fabric as more or less permanent, district communities that a
im either to live their own lives in relative isolation from the rest of society or to transform the world merely by their example of piety, etc. A peaceful outcome seems to depend at least as much on how the sect is treated by the state as on its initial beliefs.

  65. Judith Nagata, The Reflowering of Islam: Modern Religious Radicals and Their Roots (Vancouver: Univ. of British Columbia Press, forthcoming), chaps. 3, 6.

  66. A. J. Stockwell, British Policy and Malay Politics during the Malayan Union Experiment, 1945–48, Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Monograph No. 8 (Kuala Lumpur: Art Printing Works, 1979), 151-61.

  67. Rarely a month goes by without a newspaper account of the prosecution of a religious teacher accused of propagating false doctrines. In 1979 one such teacher, a Cambodian Muslim, led an attack of his disciples on a police station in the state of Pahang.

  68. The belief in invulnerability, produced both by magic and by the aid of divine sanction, is a standard feature of most millennial practices. It also illustrates a final, key element of the negation of inevitability. The effect of millennial ideology is not only to negate the social order itself but also to negate the very power that serves to keep that social order in place. Of course, the conquest of inevitability at the level of religious ideology is, alas, not the same as its conquest in practice, as the fate of the vast majority who have joined such rebellions tragically attests.

  69. There is a problem with the term hegemony itself since it often implies that a hegemonic ideology is the sole creation of an elite, whereas in fact it is always the creation of prior struggle and compromises that are continually being tested and modified. See, in this connection, the illuminating discussion of “counterpoints” in W. F Wertheim, Evolution or Revolution (London: Pelican Books, 1973).

  70. Gramsci, Selections, 161.

  71. Writing of the state in particular, later in the same essay, Gramsci makes a similar observation about dominant ideologies:

  [The winning party bringsl about a unison of economic and political aims, but also, intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the hegemony of fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups…. In other words, the dominant group is coordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria… between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups-equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest.