From ArtReview
James C. Scott, the political scientist, anthropologist and anarchist thinker, whose work has had an increasing footprint in the artworld, has died.
A professor of political science at Yale University, much of Scott’s work has involved looking at historical models of how ‘powerless’ or subaltern groups achieve agency and the strategies they use to pursue it. His breakthrough came in 1985 when, against all advice from colleagues worrying that such an unglamorous move would be detrimental to his academic career, Scott decamped to a Malaysian village of 70 families. The result was his acclaimed Weapons of the Weak (1985), which examined everyday forms of resistance.
‘On the basis of my year and a half in a Malay village,’ he recently reflected in the Annual Review of Political Science. ‘I discovered that resistance was ubiquitous, but it almost always took the forms that were least dangerous and were designed to evade any dangerous retaliation from the authorities.’
‘Let me give an example in Malaysia. There was widespread resistance to the Islamic tithe… There was opposition but there was no open protest. There were no marches; there were no petitions to the government. The opposition to the tithe took the form of surreptitiously undermining it by emptying it of substance. For example, rice handed over to local officials was almost always the worst rice, and the bags of rice were contaminated with stones in order to increase their apparent weight.’
A decade later Scott examined how states coerced uniform behaviour from their citizens or subjects. Seeing Like a State (1998) argued that state attempts to make a people legible (by categorising them) makes them more easily manipulable; The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) looked at resistance to cultural assimilation in the uplands of Southeast Asia, arguing that minority groups used vernacular knowledge and ‘their culture… to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them’.
His work has been quoted by writers such as Legacy Russell, curators such as Anselm Franke, and artists including Amar Kanwar, Liu Chuang, and Ho Tzu Nyen, as well as protest movements worldwide.
Scott was the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale and the co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program. He was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded resident fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT.
He is survived by his children and his partner, Anna Tsing, the American anthropologist.
There are 11 Comments
You've gotta be kidding
If only there was any further information on whether or not he was an anarchist
https://anarchistnews.org/content/was-james-c-scott-anarchist
I believe he said he wasn't
I believe he said he wasn't in the introduction to Seeing Like a State. I wouldn't say he is anyway, as he has said he believes states can work. Great research however and really useful for anarchists.
1) Did you click the link in
1) Did you click the link in the comment you replied to?
2) There are numerous people, anarchist & otherwise, who've produced research of use to anarchists, whose lives, work, & deaths haven't received anywhere near the same warm reception as that of JCS.
Maybe their work should have
Maybe their work should have been more interesting and/or useful.
Ah yes, the "work is popular
Ah yes, the "work is popular & well-received due to merit, not mass communication & related power structures" theory of "anarchist" literature.
other obituaries / texts about James C. Scott
What James C. Scott Taught Us About Liberty, Authority, Surveillance, and Resistance
https://reason.com/2024/07/23/what-james-c-scott-taught-us-about-liberty...
James C Scott showed new ways of studying resistance
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/james-c-scott-showe...
Malaysia’s PM Anwar mourns passing of influential anthropologist James C. Scott
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3271591/malaysias-pm-anwar...
He worked for the CIA:
He worked for the CIA:
"So I had also, not knowing what to do, I applied to join the CIA. I had applied to Harvard Law School and had been accepted, and on a kind of flash of Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley daring, I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to Burma, and I got the Rotary Fellowship to Burma. I thought to myself, I can postpone Harvard Law School, I can always go to law school, but when am I going to get a chance to go to Burma? And so, I decided to go to Burma and spent a year there, and in the meantime—this is not in a lot of my stuff—the CIA people asked me to write reports on Burmese student politics and so on, which I did.
So, it’s an experience that many people didn’t have. And then, I actually went to Jakarta to interview students for a fellowship program that the National Student Association had. I went to Jakarta and Bandung, so I had a little Indonesian experience, and then I went to what was then East Pakistan, Dhaka, and I went to Singapore. In Singapore, I got to know the Socialist student union people, the sort of so-called Dunham Road Hostel, many of whom became very important politicians later on, and personal friends in some cases. So at the end of my Burma year, I saw, if you like, student politics in three or four different places, and including—we’re talking ’60, and so I met the sort of Communist leaders of the CGMI, which was the Communist student union in Indonesia, most of whom were killed after ’65, and so on."
Not an anarchist, but...
As others have noted, Scott was not an anarchist (and said so) but his writings are of interest to anarchists and they have an anarchist element to them -- see my review of one of his books. Seeing Like a State is well worth reading as well. So a definite loss.
Two more obituaries
James C. Scott (1936-2024)
by James Birmingham via Freedom News UK
"The prolific scholar had a monumental influence on Southeast Asian, agrarian, and anarchist studies"
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/07/25/james-c-scott-1936-2024/
and
James Scott, pathbreaking scholar in the social sciences
"Scott, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, professor emeritus of anthropology, and author of 10 pioneering books, was also a galvanizing teacher."
https://news.yale.edu/2024/07/24/james-scott-pathbreaking-scholar-social...
New obituary from Myanmar
New obituary from Myanmar/Burma of James' time there over the years. Interesting stuff.
"Mourning James C. Scott, a Sterling anarchist and friend of Myanmar"
https://www.frontiermyanmar.net/en/mourning-james-c-scott-a-sterling-ana...