James C. Scott (1936-2024)

The prolific scholar had a monumental influence on agrarian, anarchist and Southeast Asian studies.

Researcher and author James C. Scott died at his home in Connecticut on July 19. He was 87. His seminal works include The Moral Economy of the Peasant, The Weapons of the Weak, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Seeing as a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, Long Live Anarchism, And Against a current.

Scott grew up in New Jersey and was raised a Quaker. The Quaker social gospel and weeklong work camps in homeless shelters, prisons, and elsewhere had a profound effect on his worldview and politics. At Williams College, he studied political economy with a concentration in economics, but fell in love in his senior year and was distracted from his studies. When he went to defend his bachelor’s thesis, his advisor rejected his work. Forced to find a new sponsor, he stumbled upon the economist William Hollinger, who was interested in the economic development of Burma (Myanmar). He became Scott’s advisor, who, after completing his bachelor’s degree, applied to Yale’s graduate program in economics. Scott had the opportunity to visit North Africa that summer, which led to his transfer to the political science department.

Scott decided that in order to call himself a “peasant,” he had to actually engage in ethnographic fieldwork—a move that his political scientist colleagues considered career suicide at worst, and a waste of time at best. He spent fourteen months in a village in Malaysia that became the backbone of his research. The weapons of the weak. This work attracted the attention of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson; at the time it was virtually unknown for a political scientist using ethnography in his methodology. critical by Edward Said – who believed that revealing and analyzing the “hidden” strategies of the subaltern undermined their capacity to resist. This opens up a larger question about the very nature of radical research: when we dissect and make legible the mechanisms and tactics of resistance and rebellion, are we tempering their potential? Are we ourselves obstructing our research?

Scott may not have publicly identified himself as an anarchist, but he certainly was one. anarchist. In Two cheers for anarchism He employs what he calls an “anarchist squint” – a positioning that allows him to derive information from “forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody the principle of mutuality without hierarchy” (Proudhon). Another useful concept from this work is that of “anarchist gymnastics” – the idea that we should remain flexible in engaging in routine violations of minor laws: crossing the street, shoplifting, loitering, and the like – because one day it will be necessary to break major laws. goodbye by Jared Diamond The world until yesterday is highly recommended — a pleasure to read and useful for the anarcho-primitivist in your life.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge the controversy surrounding Scott’s candidacy for join the CIAfirst by willingly reporting on Burmese student activism, then later refusing to do so, but apparently by accident He continues to provide reports. Knowing this history is important, but I disagree with the claims that it somehow pollutes his scholarship and contributions. Kropotkin was shaped by his interactions with the serfs belonging to his aristocratic family. Chelsea Manning was able to leak these documents because she was in the US Army. Returning to Burma, George Orwell developed his hatred of imperialism after serving in the Indian Imperial Police there. People are shaped by the things they do – including the things they regret doing.

I met Scott once at the first North American Anarchist Studies Network conference in Hartford, Connecticut, in 2009. We chatted a bit—at the time, I had just finished my senior thesis on the transition from communism to capitalism in Mongolia and its impacts on nomadic herders, so we had agrarian studies as our common vernacular. I think philosophically, Scott felt very much anarchist. From our brief conversations, I gather that he avoided using that label because his studies did not draw on the work of classical anarchist authors—a condition that most self-proclaimed anarchists would avoid themselves.

Scott is survived by his children and his partner, the anthropologist Anna Tsing.

~James Birmingham

The author is a member of the board of directors of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and founding member of the Black Trowel Collective.