James Scott

Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 1967

Bio

James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and is Director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations and anarchism. He is currently teaching Agrarian Studies and Rebellion, Resistance and Repression.

Recent publications include “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed”, Yale University Press, 1997; “Geographies of Trust: Geographies of Hierarchy,” in Democracy and Trust, 1998; “State Simplifications and Practical Knowledge,” in People’s Economy, People’s Ecology, 1998 and “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist  History of Upland Southeast Asia” (Yale  Press, 2009).

Video/Audio

• 2014-12-11 - SOAS Food Studies Centre Distinguished Lecture - “How Grains Domesticated Us”
• 2014-04-13 - University of New England - On the Topic of The Art of Not Being Governed”
• 2013-09-14 - Yale University - Food Sovereignty:  A Critical Dialogue.
• 2013-11-16 - Virginia Tech Scholars Lunch - High Modernism and his book Seeing like A State
• 2010-12-01 - Asia Society - The Art of Not Being Governed
• 2010-11-03 - MacMillan Report - The Art of Not Being Governed
• 2010-06-17 - Interview of the Anthropologist James Scott - Part 1 - Part 2
• 2009-03-26 - Mellon Lecture - Introducing Zomia

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