The Legacy of James C. Scott
Photo by Mette Kostner on Unsplash
James C. Scott is dead at 87. A Yale anthropologist and political scientist, Scott was an “organic scholar,” i.e., his research and writing were linked to real and urgent socio-economic political issues. He came to exercise immense influence across many academic disciplines. Outside of my own discipline, I reckon that I have learned more from Scott than any other contemporary scholar. While I offer a salute to him and his work, he will receive better salutes from others at his death. I write about him because if you do not know his work, this is an urgent prompt that you should usefully attend to his scholarship. Scott did much of his research in Burma and Malays, but of course his work has pertinence well beyond these arenas. Scott’s work also illuminates the Bible because so many of these texts emerge from the underside of history.
I first read Scott in his book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985). In this book Scott attends to the many small ways in which seemingly powerless peasants carefully engage in resistance to the dominant economic forces in society. Such peasant resistance is practiced just short of getting into trouble or being punished, and consists in small gestures of stubbornness that refuse to acknowledge the authority or leverage of the ruling class:
Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimilation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth. These Brechtian forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand what much of the peasantry does “between revolts” to defend its interests as best it can…Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly noteworthy...And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination (pp. 29, 36).
In our society, one example of such resistance is an instance of a minoritized person walking across the street very slowly in order to make a handsome limousine driven for the rich and the powerful wait while she crosses the street. The slow walker cannot be punished or arrested for slowness, but her effort is enough to interrupt the swift pace of the ownership class. For an instant, the slow walker dominates the relationship. Scott is able to observe and report on such actions by the peasant population he has studied. He was led to see that such small gestures are indeed “weapons” of the economically weak and the politically disempowered to make their presence and impact felt and noticed, even in a society that wants to disregard their existence.
In his later book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) Scott will go on to identify the “hidden transcript” that is widely shared in the peasant community to which the dominant class has no access and, for the most part, does not know exists. That “hidden transcript” functions as a way in which the vulnerable population understands, interprets, and performs their life in ways that are unaccommodating to the visible narrative of the ruling class. That hidden transcript, inflected through time amid suffering and humiliation, is oral and may be partly coded. But its intent is clear; it may, moreover, empower and sustain the dignity of the peasant community and its insistent claim upon the rights essential to the existence and wellbeing of the community. Much depends upon the dominant class having no access to that transcript, or even awareness of its existence and staying power.
In a third book I have studied closely, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017), Scott notices that from the beginning of organized state power in the third millennium BCE, the ruling elite gained a monopoly of grain, its production, distribution, and consumption. He concludes that such regimes focused on grain as a mode of wealth and power because grain, unlike most other agricultural produces, can be stored, shipped, traded, bought and sold and leveraged as a durable long-lived commodity. With their great accumulation of state power, the regimes could mobilize peasant labor in the production of grain in order to enhance the wealth and influence of the regimes. In the biblical narrative, we can notice that Joseph, prime minister to Pharaoh, accomplished a monopoly of grain for Pharaoh who could then manage, as he chose, the administration of grain for needy peasants amid famine (Genesis 47). And just after Joseph, in the Book of Exodus, the Hebrew slaves were given the task of building “supply cities” where Pharaoh’s grain could be stored (Exodus 1:11).
Scott’s study is regularly focused on the monopolistic tendency of state power and on the future and prospect for non-state alternatives. As a consequence, Scott’s work is permeated by an appreciation for some measure of anarchy that opposes and impedes state power, and that precludes state power from absolutism. In his classic book, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (1998), Scott offers a standard account of the ways in which state power tends toward monopoly and absolutism at the expense of the rights and wellbeing of peasant populations. Scott regards non-state action as an important check on such monopolistic propensity.
In the Old Testament, the Elisha narrative is an articulation of non-state power in which this uncredentialed actor is remembered and shown to be a source of life in circumstances where the state (the king) is unable to give life (II Kings 2-9).
-In II Kings 5:1-19, Elisha heals a foreign leper after the king of Israel has been unable to do so; more than that, he refuses any fee for the healing.
-In II Kings 6:8-23 Elisha foils a Syrian military threat and concludes the fearful confrontation with a feast of abundance. He does so in defiance of his king who wants to kill the Syrians.
-In II Kings 6:24-7:20 Elisha presides over an inscrutably given supply of food after the king was shown to be unable to provide such essential food. In the end the royal official who tried to preempt the food supply was trampled to death by the charging crowd.
These several narratives attest to the generative force of Elisha that is completely absent in the royal household. Thus these narratives are a compelling example and embodiment of non-state sustenance with a capacity for life-giving resources that the state is unable to muster. The contrast of the incapable king and the inscrutable capacity of Elisha is a compelling example of Scott’s contrast of state power and non-state generativity. We may indeed imagine that the community gathered around these narratives of Elijah and Elisha had just such a “hidden transcript” (as Scott has identified), that was quite in contrast to and deep in tension with the royal narrative of state power. Perhaps we get a glimpse of that alternative rendering of social reality in the lines from the Song of Deborah:
Tell of it, you who ride on white donkeys,
who sit on rich carpets
and you who walk by the way.
To the sound of musicians at the watering places,
there they repeat the triumphs of the Lord,
the triumphs of his peasantry in Israel (Judges 5:10-11).
The poetry portrays the women of the village at the village water well remembering, repeating, and enjoying tales of YHWH’s triumph over Israel’s enemies. It is worth noting, moreover, that the phrase “triumphs (sdq) of YHWH” is exactly parallel to the phrase “triumphs of his peasantry,” so that the poetry equates YHWH’s dominance and peasant dominance, a correlation surely not credited in the royal house.
It is evident that Scott’s categories of “weapons of the weak” and “hidden transcript” are useful resources through which to read the church’s memory of Jesus more knowingly. In his ministry and in his trial before Rome, Jesus refused to engage in the power categories of the empire. In his “weakness” he appealed to a very different kind of power that was sure to offend and violate those who counted singularly on state power. Thus Scott’s analysis of state power and counter power provides a set of categories through which to understand the emancipatory power of YHWH in the Exodus narrative and the emancipatory power of Jesus and his movement in the face of official power. We may judge, moreover, that in the Samuel narrative these two modes of power collide. On the one hand, the people demand a king in order to “be like all the other nations” (I Samuel 8:5, 20). To the contrary, Samuel is an advocate for the old notion of the rule of YHWH; he agrees only reluctantly to the establishment of monarchy in Israel. It is no doubt correct to observe that these two modes of power, and therefore these two modes of self-understanding, have occupied Jewish tradition and continue in a powerful tension. And of course it is not different in the church. The church began as a disciplined movement amid the Roman Empire. Over time, up until the Empire of Constantine, the church continued in its more modest mode. With Constantine, however, church faith signed on as a force with imperial legitimation. Or in an alternative scenario of the same development, Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealthy, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (2012), has shown how the early church was devoted to the care for and relief of the poor, so much so as to say that the church “invented the poor.” As Brown shows, that passion for the poor in the church slackened as the church was populated by the wealthy and powerful, so that the church turned away from this “singular passion.” By the time of Constantine, the church had learned to “see like a state.”
That same double-mindedness has much beset the US Church. On the one hand, we in the church are concerned for the memory, tradition, and mandate from the poor man of Nazareth whose natural habitat is with the “weak” in society. On the other hand, much of the US church has been readily allied with state power or at least with moneyed power. Thus the old traditions of Congregationalism, Episcopalianism, and Presbyterianism were all allied with state power. And now it is reiterated in the evangelical movement, some of which is aligned with white nationalism. It is all of a piece. And in the midst of it, the church continues to confess that it follows the way of the Crucified One who defeated the power of the empire through its generative exercise of vulnerability. On its good days, the church is able to recall and affirm:
…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength (I Corinthians 1:24-25).
To the foolishness and weakness of Christ we may add the poverty of Christ that is richer than all the wealth in the world:
For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor so that by his poverty you might become rich (II Corinthians 8:9).
Through the course of his generative career Scott has seen, from many different angles, how state power disrupts and impedes the force of practical, relational human action. We may be grateful indeed for the courage and steadfastness of his scholarship, and for the way in which he has permitted and required us to see how great consolidations of wealth and power have guaranteed indifference to the human condition. At a time when so much scholarship is confined to the safer questions of one’s discipline, or is preoccupied with punctilious detail, Scott has addressed the big picture of human power and human possibility. We may hope that his potent example of serious, relevant scholarship may evoke the same from those who follow after him. Such indispensable work permits us to see ourselves in the large drama of human hope, human possibility, and human responsibility. Scott was in every way “against the grain.” Such a witness to the contrary is a sine qua non for our common future and our common wellbeing. Scott concludes his book, Weapons of the Weak, with an honest pessimism about such evocative action. But then he adds in his final sentences, a statement that itself is a call to resilient hope:
All the more reason, then, to respect, if not celebrate, the weapons of the weak. All the more reason to see in the tenacity of self-preservation—in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of noncompliance, in foot dragging, in dissimulation, in resistant mutuality, in the disbelief in the elite homilies, in the steady, grinding efforts to hold one’s own against overwhelming odds—a spirit and practice that prevents the worst and promises something better (p. 350).
As long as “something better” is in purview, these actions continue to be restless, insistent hope that refuses regimentation and works, as best it can, to bring such promises to fruition. The weak can practice hope that both resists and anticipates. Scott’s work is a durable gift to which attention must be paid, not least for the way it embraces its version of a “more excellent way.”
