James C. Scott

James C. Scott (born December 2, 1936)

Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD in political science from Yale. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he is Sterling Professor of Political Science. Since 1991 he has directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies.^[5] He lives in Durham, Connecticut.^[3][6]

Early life and career

Scott was born in

Scott's first books were based on archival research. He is an influential scholar of ethnographic fieldwork.^[11] He is unusual for conducting his primary ethnographic fieldwork only after receiving tenure. To research his third book, Weapons of the Weak, Scott spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia between 1978 and 1980.^[12] When he had finished a draft, he returned for two months to solicit villagers' impressions of his depiction, and significantly revised the book based on their criticisms and insight.^[10][12]

In 2011, Scott, along with other Burmese and Western scholars, convened at Yale University with the goal of re-establishing the Journal of the Burma Research Society for scholars.^[13][14] The journal's successor, named the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship (IJBS), published its first issue in August 2016.^[13][14]

Major works

James Scott's work focuses on the ways that subaltern people resist domination.

The Moral Economy of the Peasant

During the

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) argues that subordinate groups employ strategies of resistance that go unnoticed. He terms this "infrapolitics." Scott describes the public interactions between dominators and oppressed as a "public transcript" and the critique of power that goes on offstage as a "hidden transcript." Groups under domination—from bonded labor to sexual violence—thus cannot be understood merely by their outward appearances. In order to study the systems of domination, careful attention is paid to what lies beneath the surface of evident, public behavior. In public, those that are oppressed accept their domination, but they always question their domination offstage. On the event of a publicization of this "hidden transcript", oppressed classes openly assume their speech, and become conscious of its common status.^[16]

Seeing Like a State

Scott's book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) saw his first major foray into political science. In it, he showed how central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. Scott argues that in order for schemes to improve the human condition to succeed, they must take into account local conditions, and that the

The Art of Not Being Governed

Main article:

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott addresses the question of how certain groups in the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia managed to avoid a package of exploitation centered around the state, taxation, and grain cultivation. Certain aspects of their society seen by outsiders as backward (e.g., limited literacy and use of written language) were in fact part of the "Arts" referenced in the title: limiting literacy meant lower visibility to the state. Scott's main argument is that these people are "barbaric by design": their social organization, geographical location, subsistence practices and culture have been carved to discourage states to annex them to their territories. Addressing identity in the Introduction, he wrote:

... All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them ... To the degree that the identity is stigmatized by the larger state or society, it is likely to become for many a resistant and defiant identity. Here invented identities combine with self-making of a heroic kind, in which such identifications become a badge of honor ...

— (pp. xii-iii.)

Against the Grain

Main article: Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

Published in August 2017, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is an account of new evidence for the beginnings of the

unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and non subject peoples.^[18]

Other works

In

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play from 2012 Scott says that "Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any case wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint. What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle. It will also become apparent that anarchist principles are active in the aspirations and political action of people who have never heard of anarchism or anarchist philosophy."^[19]

Awards and fellowships

Scott is a Fellow of the

M.I.T.^[20] He has also received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1997. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.^[21]

Selected bibliography

(Note: excludes edited volumes.)

• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. 2017
• Decoding subaltern politics. Ideology, disguise, and resistance in agrarian politics. Routledge, 2012 (Critical Asian scholarship; 8)
  ISBN 978-0-415-53975-3
• ISBN 978-0-691-15529-6
• ISBN 978-0-300-15228-9
• ISBN 978-0-300-07016-3
• Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press, 1990
  ISBN 978-0-300-04705-9
• ISBN 978-0-300-03336-6
• ISBN 978-0-300-01862-2
• Comparative Political Corruption. Prentice-Hall, 1972
  ISBN 978-0-13-179036-0

See also

• Societal collapse
• Zomia

References

1. ISBN 978-0-8018-8464-1
   .
2. ^ "James C. SCOTT". Secretariat of the Fukuoka Prize Committee. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
3. ^
   New York Times
   . Retrieved February 24, 2015.
4. ^ Schuessler, Jennifer (December 4, 2012). "James C. Scott, Farmer and Scholar of Anarchism". The New York Times. Retrieved August 20, 2018.
5. ^ "Academic Prize 2010, Award Citation". Fukuoka Prize. 2010. Retrieved February 24, 2015.
6. ^ ^{a b c} Scott, James C. (March 26, 2009). "James Scott interviewed by Alan Macfarlane" (Interview: video). Vol. 1. Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane. Cambridge, England. Retrieved November 26, 2014.
7. ^
   ISBN 978-0-8018-8464-1
   .
8. ^ Paget, Karen M. (2015). Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 235, 395, 407–408. Retrieved April 22, 2015.
9. ISSN 1094-2939
   .
10. ^ ^{a b c} Scott, James C. (March 26, 2009). "James Scott interviewed by Alan Macfarlane" (Interview: video). Vol. 2. Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane. Cambridge, England. Retrieved November 26, 2014.
11. ISSN 1094-2939
    .
12. ^
    ISBN 978-0-300-03641-1
    .
13. ^ ^{a b} "About အကြောင်း". Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship. Retrieved March 25, 2023.
14. ^ ^{a b} "Professor's mission to launch scholarly journal in Burma now a reality". YaleNews. November 8, 2016. Retrieved March 25, 2023.
15. ISBN 978-0-300-18555-3
    .
16. ISBN 978-0-300-05669-3
    .
17. ^ Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
18. ^ "Against the Grain". yalebooks.yale.edu. Yale University Press. Retrieved September 12, 2017.
19. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
    . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
20. ^ "James Scott | Department of Political Science". Archived from the original on 9 November 2012. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
21. ^ "The American Philosophical Society Welcomes New Members for 2020". American Philosophical Society. May 5, 2020.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to James C. Scott.

• Homepage at Yale
• James Scott explores governance in the Southeast Asian highlands at Asia Society, November 2010 (w/ video)
• interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 26th March 2009 followed by his Mellon Lecture given in Cambridge
• Interview with James Scott by Theory Talks, May 2010
• Interviewed by Benjamin Ferron and Claire Oger 20th June 2018 (The Conversation)