James C. Scott

James C. Scott (born December 2, 1936) is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics.

He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism.

His primary research has centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination.

The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic".

Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD in political science from Yale.

Scott was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1936.

He attended the Moorestown Friends School, a Quaker Day School, and in 1953 matriculated at Williams College in Massachusetts.

On the advice of Indonesia scholar William Hollinger he wrote an honors thesis on the economic development of Burma.

Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1958, and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 1967.

Upon graduation, Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma, where he was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Scott agreed to do reporting for the agency, and at the end of his fellowship, took a post in the Paris office of the National Student Association, which accepted CIA money and direction in working against communist-controlled global student movements over the next few years.

Scott began graduate study in political science at Yale in 1961.

His dissertation on political ideology in Malaysia, which was supervised by Robert E. Lane, analysed interviews with Malaysian civil servants.

In 1967, he took a position as an assistant professor in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His early work focused on corruption and machine politics.

As a Southeast Asia specialist teaching during the Vietnam War, he offered popular courses on the war and peasant revolutions.

He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he is Sterling Professor of Political Science.

In 1976, having earned tenure at Madison, Scott returned to Yale and settled on a farm in Durham, Connecticut, with his wife.

During the Vietnam War, Scott took an interest in Vietnam and wrote The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976) about the ways peasants resisted authority.

His main argument is that peasants prefer the patron-client relations of the "moral economy", in which wealthier peasants protect weaker ones.

When these traditional forms of solidarity break down due to the introduction of market forces, rebellion (or revolution) is likely.

To research his third book, Weapons of the Weak, Scott spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia between 1978 and 1980.

When he had finished a draft, he returned for two months to solicit villagers' impressions of his depiction, and significantly revised the book based on their criticisms and insight.

Samuel Popkin, in his book The Rational Peasant (1979), tried to refute this argument, showing that peasants are also rational actors who prefer free markets to exploitation by local elites.

Scott and Popkin thus represent two radically different positions in the formalist–substantivist debate in political anthropology.

They started with a small farm, then purchased a larger one nearby in the early 1980s and began raising sheep for their wool.

In Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) Scott expanded his theories to peasants in other parts of the world.

Scott's theories are often contrasted with Gramscian ideas about hegemony.

Against Gramsci, Scott argues that the everyday resistance of subalterns shows that they have not consented to dominance.

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) argues that subordinate groups employ strategies of resistance that go unnoticed.

He terms this "infrapolitics."

Since 1991 he has directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies.

He lives in Durham, Connecticut, where he once raised sheep.

Since 2011, the pastures on the farm have been grazed by two Highland cattle, named Fife and Dundee.

Scott's first books were based on archival research.

He is an influential scholar of ethnographic fieldwork.

He is unusual for conducting his primary ethnographic fieldwork only after receiving tenure.

In 2011, Scott, along with other Burmese and Western scholars, convened at Yale University with the goal of re-establishing the Journal of the Burma Research Society for scholars.

The journal's successor, named the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship (IJBS), published its first issue in August 2016.

James Scott's work focuses on the ways that subaltern people resist domination.