Scott, James C.

James c. scott is co-founder of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University and the author of a series of influential monographs. These works are concerned with different aspects of power and resistance, especially in contexts related to nature, agriculture, development, and environmental planning. A political scientist and South Asianist originally working on Malaysian elites, his work spans anthropology, history and sociology. In the The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), a seminal text in peasant studies, Scott argues that the need to assure minimal livelihoods is central to subsistence peasants' morality and underlies patron-client relations and communal redistribution; but that this social fabric is eroded through the expansion of Western capitalism and the modern state in Southeast Asia.

For his next book, Weapons of the Weak (1985), Scott conducted 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Malaysian village in which a new agrarian capitalist class was emerging as a result of a green revolution irrigation project. He explored the ways in which peasants were increasingly marginalized, but also their everyday forms of resistance, including calls on the moral obligations of the “winners.” The central role of discursive strategies in resistance is examined further by Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), in which, using wide-ranging examples from literature and history, he contrasts the “public transcripts” of encounters between the powerful and the powerless with the “hidden transcripts” of what both say away from each other.

Challenging Gramscian understandings of hegemony and false consciousness, Scott argues that the hidden transcripts of the powerless present forms of resistance that undermine the powerful in many ways. In Seeing Like a State (1998), his most recent monograph, Scott takes a rather different approach by focusing on the state itself. He examines both the ways in which the state simplifies complex local realities in order to make them legible and therefore administrable, and how “high modernist” projects resulting from this tunnel vision have failed. This is explored through a series of case studies, ranging from scientific forestry in 18th century Germany, over Soviet collectivization, to Tanzanian ujamaa villages. One reason for the failure of such projects, Scott argues, is that they invariably ignore local communities' knowledge and practices (metis).

Scott has at times been accused of generalization and simplification, but the great sweep of material he engages with, the clarity of his statements, and the analytical vocabulary he provides mean that his books have made significant contributions to debates on power and resistance throughout the social sciences. They have also become cornerstone texts in those fields concerned with the environment, such as political ecology and environmental history. An influential contribution to subaltern studies, Scott's earlier work on resistance has informed many environmental historians and anthropologists working on South Asia, such as Guha, Bryant, Sivaramakrishnan and Peluso. At the same time, Seeing Like a State has become a seminal text in political ecology throughout the world, as one of the most powerful descriptions and condemnations of the effects of state planning on the environment.