James Campbell Scott (1936-2024), advocate of ‘Resistance’ Movement and an outstanding social scientist is no more
James Campbell Scott, was een Amerikaanse politicoloog en antropoloog, gespecialiseerd in vergelijkende politiek. Hij was een vergelijkend onderzoeker van agrarische en niet-statelijke samenlevingen. Opgeleid als politicoloog, besprak Scott boerengemeenschappen, staatsmacht en politiek verzet. Zijn dood is een verlies voor vele antropologen en sociologen in Zuidoost-Azië. Bernard D’Sami geeft aan waarom.
James C Scott (1936-2024) a well-known social scientist, died on 19th July 2024 at the age of 87. Born on December 2, 1936 in New Jersey, lost his father at the age of 9 and studied in a school run by the Quakers. He majored in Economics from a college in 1958 and received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 1967.
He was teaching in the University of Wisconsin for a while and he moved to Yale and taught there for 45 years in the schools of political science and anthropology.
He was an antiwar activist in the campus, and he went to Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia for ethnographic study by basing himself in a small Malay village for two years. He went to Myanmar on a Rotary fellowship in 1958-59 and got involved in the national student movement in Rangoon.
His political ideology has been captured in the book written by him on ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism‘ (2012) he calls for small acts of insubordination (refusal to obey someone of higher rank) so that later they learn to participate in mass protest movements and their activities.
Scott’s path breaking work was on ‘Seeing like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed’ (1988). In this book Scott looks at the State as a doer of good things but most of them end in failure due to the implementation of it by the state machinery through its bureaucrats. Many of the governments (all over) social welfare/uplift programs fail because it has been made complex by the State by ignoring the everyday wisdom of the common people. He became critical of the State when it comes to social protection through social welfare programs.
Scott became a famous academic in the Third World countries by his research in Malay village that resulted in the most popular and widely circulated book ‘Weapons of the Weak. Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance’ (1985) when the Malay peasants were asked rather forced to use machines and with increased tax their resistance was expressed in small acts of sabotage, delay, procrastination that showed that everyday protest.
This was the time (early eighties) when Professor Ranajit Guha was assembling his thoughts on Subaltern studies and in the first volume on ‘Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society’ he spelt out what later known as the ‘Subaltern Manifesto’ on ideologies of the ‘elite’ and ‘subalterns’.
Ranajit Guha and James C. Scott were on the same page when they described the ideology of the oppressed people as one offering ‘resistance’. Both met and interacted with each other in the Australian National University at Canberra. Both of them had the same sympathy and concern on peasant resistance to domination. Scott was convinced that the absence of protest does not mean the acceptance of oppression.
Several other books he wrote like ‘Domination and the Arts of Resistance’ and ‘Against the Grain’ is about “why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states”?
A scholar who in his career tried his best to understand the peasants and farmers. He captured their resistance to domination in various forms and methods.
Bernard D’Sami
Dr. Bernard D’Sami is als Senior Fellow verbonden aan het LISSTAR, Loyola College (Autonomous), Chennai, India.
Lees verder (inhoud oktober 2024)
