Domination and the Arts of Resistance (eBook)

Hidden Transcripts

James C. Scott (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
194 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-103154-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'A splendid study, surely one of the most important that has appeared on the whole matter of power and resistance.'-Natalie Zemon Davis
 
Confrontations between the powerless and powerful are laden with deception-the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery. Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power. These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant. At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule that cannot be openly avowed.
 
In this book, renowned social scientist James C. Scott offers a penetrating discussion both of the public roles played by the powerful and powerless and the mocking, vengeful tone they display off stage-what he terms their public and hidden transcripts. Using examples from the literature, history, and politics of cultures around the world, Scott examines the many guises this interaction has taken throughout history and the tensions and contradictions it reflects.

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Acknowledgments

Too many people helped me in too many ways with this manuscript. The result was an aggregation of individual acts of exemplary generosity and large-spiritedness that produced, on my part, an intellectual gridlock that lasted for some time. I began to think of this as a kind of perverse mirror-image of Adam Smith's invisible hand. Unsnarling the traffic meant shooting several drivers, burying their vehicles, and resurfacing the road as if they had never existed. Executions and burials were held with all the necessary decorum, and the victims might take comfort in the fact that three of my own children (chapters 2, 3, and 5) were blindfolded, led to the wall, and shot without much ceremony but with much gnashing of teeth. The result, I think, is a reinvigorated intellectual traffic that moves along fairly briskly. Its briskness, I understand, comes at the considerable cost of eliminating intersections that would have permitted travel in different directions to new destinations. The costs can be weighed only against a judgment about whether we have, in the end, gotten to a place worth going to, and it is for the reader to decide that.

Among the tempting destinations left off the itinerary were those that would have integrated my enterprise here more closely with contemporary theoretical work on power, hegemony, and resistance. There is an implicit dialogue between this work and, for example, the work of Jürgen Habermas (particularly his theory of communicative competence), that of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault where it touches the normalization or naturalization of power, that of Steven Lukes and John Gaventa on the various “faces of power,” that of Fredric Jameson on “the political unconscious,” and, most recently, that of Susan Stanford Friedman on the “repressed in women's narrative.” My argument is carried out in the knowledge of these works. But to have stopped and carried out a full-fledged exchange with any of them would have, I thought, interrupted the logic of my presentation and, more seriously, made the result more forbidding to a less theoretically oriented audience.

I owe the origin of this book to Zakariah Abdullah, a teacher of rare patience and a friend of rare generosity, who taught me most of what I understand about Malay village life.

The members of an informal lunch seminar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Science, Technology, and Society Program, where I was an Exxon Fellow in 1984, should be thanked for responding to the first crude version of the idea behind this book. In its various guises the idea was inspected, used, criticized, elaborated, and ridiculed by the undergraduates who have been in my seminar “Powerlessness and Dependency.’’ Their perspectives and papers about slavery, serfdom, concentration camps, prisons, homelessness, old-age homes, and women were more of an education than I had bargained on. I learned to discount their praise and amplify their criticism, since I was giving them grades.

During the summer of 1987, with the intellectual stimulation (not to mention room and board) of the Pacific and Southeast Asian History Department of the Research School of Pacific Studies of the Australian National University, I began pursuing the ideas here in earnest. Tony Reid not only arranged the visit but organized a seminar on which my still preliminary argument was subjected to such an array of well-aimed and high explosive projectiles that I had virtually to begin again. Although I would not have said so at the time, the experience was intellectually bracing, and I want to thank particularly Gyanendra Pandey, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, Tony Milner, Clive Kessler, Jamie Mackie, Brian Fegan, Lea Jelinek, Ken Young, and Norman Owen. This was my first encounter with the intellectual energy of the Subaltern Studies group that had transformed South Asian historiography in fundamental ways. At the center of this group stands Ranajit Guha, whose original and sweeping work is of fundamental importance. If I had been able to revise my manuscript in more of the ways his discerning eye suggested, it would have been a better book and would have better repaid the friendship he and Mechthild extended. Other friends in Canberra who contributed in one way or another to this book were Tony Johns, Helen Reid, Harjot S. Oberoi, Susan B. C. Devalle, Claire Milner, and Kenny Bradley, who did his best to teach me to shear sheep like a real Aussie.

A year at the Institute for Advanced Study, funded in part also by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, represented the oasis that made possible the broad reading and tranquility necessary to begin writing. The minimal routines of the Institute's School of Social Sciences together with the smart neighbors it provides were a nearly ideal combination. Some of those neighbors should be singled out for making my stay rewarding: Clifford Geertz, Albert Hirschman, Joan Scott, Michael Walzer, Valentine Daniel, Elliot Shore, Harry Wolff, Peg Clark, Lucille Allsen, Barbara Hernstein-Smith, Sandy Levinson, and Paul Freedman. Nor can I resist giving public thanks to the “unknown nonbureaucrat” who interceded with the apparatchiks to allow my April Fools' hens to remain in the well-groomed Institute courtyard for a few days.

Bits and pieces of my first draft were imposed on various academic audiences with results that were, at least to me, beneificial if occasionally sobering. Thanks, then, to those who listened and occasionally spilled blood at the University of Washington, Seattle, Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins, the University of Minnesota's Center for Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, the Davis Center at Princeton University, Boston University, University of the South—Sewanee, Washington University, St. Louis, Trenton State University, Trinity College—Connecticut, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin—Madison, St. Lawrence University, University of California—Irvine, Northern Illinois University, University of California—Los Angeles, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Oslo, and Göteberg University.

A few intellectual debts embedded in this book merit special recognition. Barrington Moore's work is a looming presence here even when he is not cited, and much of my argument could be read as a conversation with the more provocative sections of his book Injustice. The same could be said for Murray Edelman's work, with which I've been grappling, I've only recently fully realized, for a long time. Even if our answers diverge, Moore and Edelman have asked most of the questions I've set myself to. I also owe a debt to Grant Evan's arresting description of the ceremony in Vientiane appropriated in chapter 3. Daniel Field's Rebels in the Name of the Tsar contains the basis of the argument about naive monarchism at the end of chapter 4.

As I wrote earlier, so many people had so many divergent things to say about my argument in its oral or written form that, while they almost certainly improved it, they can hardly have been said to have sped me on my way. Some of them thought I was barking up the wrong tree; others thought I had the right tree but was not going about it right; others wondered why I was barking at all; and still others, thank God, associated themselves with the hunt and worked on improving my bite so it might come up to the level of my bark. I can think of nothing else to do but to list them all more or less indiscriminately so any of them can disavow any affinity with the position I've staked out. They are (deep breath): Edward and Susan Friedman, Jan Gross, Grant Evans, Tony Reid, Don Emmerson, Leonard Doob, Joseph Errington, Joseph LaPalombara, Helen Siu, Susanne Wofford, Deborah Davis, Jean Agnew, Steven

Smith, David Plotke, Bruce Ackerman, George Shulman, Ian Shapiro, Rogers Smith, Jonathan Rieder, Bob Lane, Ed Lindblom, Shelley Burtt, Marc Lendler, Sherry Ortner, Mary Katzenstein, Jack Veugelers, Bob Harms, Ben Kerkvliet, Bill Klausner, Chuck Grench, Joan Scott, Michael Walser, Vivienne Shue, Cheah Boon Keng, Helen Lane, Peter Sahlins, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Leppert, Stuart Hall, Maurice Bloch, Teodor Shanin, Catherine Hall, Denise Riley, Ivan Kats, Louise Scott, Jeffrey Burds, Jim Ferguson, Dan Lev, Michael McCann, Susan Stokes, Ellis Goldberg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Lawrence Stone, Ezra Suleiman, Ben Anderson, Don Scott, David Cohen, Susan Eckstein, John Smail, Georg Elwert, Leslie Anderson, John Bowen, Rodolphe de Koninck, Marie-Andrée Couillard, Jonathan Pool, Judy Swanson, Fritz Gaenslen, Lloyd Moote, Grace Goodell, Andrzej Tymowski, Ron Jepperson, Tom Pangle, Margaret Clark, Phil Eldridge, Viggo Brun, Nancy Abelmann, John Bryant, Melissa Nobles, and Russell Middleton.

A far smaller number of colleagues went through the entire manuscript with a fine-toothed comb and sent me suggestions I could act on as well as searching critiques that occasionally left me at a loss. Their help and criticism have certainly improved the book, and I believe have made me a bit smarter. It may well not have brought the final version up to their expectations. I'll take the rap for that, as if I had any choice. These good colleagues are Murray Edelman, Clifford Geertz, Crawford Young, Jennifer Hochschild, Ramachandra Guha, Michael Adas, Fran Piven, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Lila Abu-Lughod, Aristide Zolberg, and Claire Jean Kim. I assure them that I will never make the mistake of seeking so much advice again—at least as much for my sake as for theirs.

A somewhat different version of chapter 3 has been published under the title “Prestige as the Public Discourse of Domination,” in a special issue of Cultural Critique on the “Economy of Prestige,” edited by...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.8.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 0-00-103154-6 / 0001031546
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-103154-8 / 9780001031548