Indispensible to anyone interested in social change | Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant...

An Anthropology book - not a Sociology book | Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance | James C. Scott

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	• Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance James C. Scott Yale University Press, 1987 - 392 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Important Work for Understanding Real Rebellion

In understanding Chinese political violence in my Master's thesis I tried to show political power as it actually exists and functions in real life. To do this I used Scott's work, whose focus on orthopraxy over orthodoxy, miniture rebellion and slander began in this work and was continued in "Domination and the Arts of Resistance". Scott is insightful, clear and important: he shows how the elite try to raise the stakes of rebellion past what is acceptable to the subordinate and how the subordinate use the lowest risk, yet highly effective, tools of rebellion at their disposal. Required reading for those trying to understand politics without becoming mired in gross oversimplification.

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Indispensible to anyone interested in social change

I picked this book up in order to write my Master's thesis on dissidence and collective action in rural China. The last thing I expected to be was entertained, but most of this book is actually very good and fun reading. True, the other part is highly academic, but still accessible and absolutely essential to understanding the dynamics of change in authoritarian societies.

Before Scott published his book, the dominant model for understanding participation in authoritarian societies did not extend far beyond institutional and client-patron models. Scott breaks away from this mode and demonstrates how ordinary, powerless people in repressive societies can still manage to influence policies, through such actions as sabotage, foot-dragging, and gossip. This model makes it much easier to understand, for example, how China reformed its agricultural system (although this book is about a Malaysian village, it is easily applied to most any country one wishes to study).

Essential reading for political scientists and sociologists alike. After reading this book, you will have a whole different view of how change is affected, and a more sophisticated frame of analysis.

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An Anthropology book - not a Sociology book

This book is a specific case study. Its dense. Not a fun read. Not particularly interesting. Written in typical college dense format. Nothing really redeeming about the book that a reader can take away with as a general understanding of "everyday forms of peasant resistance" because again, its a case study.

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Useful Whever You Go...

I read this book in college and loved it because it was informative and readable, a rare combination. I didn't appreciate the value of its insights until many years later, though, when I became a corporate consultant tasked with driving organizational change. When people talk about getting buy-in, empowerment, and other workplace democracy concepts, they are all about avoiding the negative dynamics that top-down command-and-control micro-management so often elicits. Those dynamics are the same ones documented in this book.

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Good work

Through an observation of a peasant community in Malaysia, Scott maintains that traditional and classic theories on forms of resistance and protest are actually wrong. In proving this, he also proves that class-consciousness and labor relations are not universal and are not similar to one another. Scott believes however that these forms of resistance are common in all peasant societies and take the same shaping. Scott supports his main argument by stating that although is widely believed that peasants cannot struggle or resist oppression because of their "false conciseness" the peasants do indeed resist but not through what we have learned to accept and know what traditionally has been defined as resistance.

Peasants, Scott argues, have their own forms of resistance which have not until now been looked into. The resistance or protest of peasants in the Malaysian village of Sedaka may not be collective and organized but they certainly exist. Simply because the Sedaka villagers do not protest in what we have come to know as "protest" that does not prove that there is no resistance or opposition to authority, change in labor relations, or social changes. Instead of revolution, the peasants choose what the author calls "the weapons of the poor:" silent non-compliance, gossip, character murder, petty sabotage, small theft and pilferage. The common characteristics in these acts of resistance are almost invisible and non-coordinated. The reasons behind these acts are not straightforward: do the poor steal in order to feed their families or do they do so in order to hurt the rich in the village?

Scott goes further into predicting that the weapons of the poor may not directly create a new order, they are effective in mitigating the process of marginalisation and therefore have made impact overtime in social changes and history.

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