Scott - Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

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For Skip, Bernice, and Elinore
and with gratitude to Z and other friends in Sedaka

It is clear that no Herostratus among them has dared to go into the remote countryside to study the permanent conspiracy of those whom we still call the weak against those who believe themselves strongof the peasantry against the rich. is it not critical to portray at last this peasant who thwarts the [legal] Code by reducing private property into something that simultaneously exists and does not exist? You shall see this tireless sapper, this nibbler, gnawing the land into little bits, carving an acre into a hundred pieces, and invited always to this feast by a petite bourgeoisie which finds in him, at the same time, its ally and its prey. Out of the reach of the law by virtue of his insignificance, this Robespierre, with a single head and twenty million hands, works ceaselessly, crouching in every commune bearing arms in the National Guard in every district of France, since by 1830, France does not recall that Napoleon preferred to run the risk of his misfortunes rather than to arm the masses.

Honor de Balzac

Letter to P. S. B. Gavault

introducing Les Paysans

Do not imagine that Tonsard, or his old mother or his wife and children ever said in so many words, we steal for a living and do our stealing cleverly. These habits had grown slowly. The family began by mixing a few green boughs with the dead wood; then, emboldened by habit and by a calculated impunity (part of the scheme to be developed in this story), after twenty years the family had gotten to the point of taking the wood as if it were their own and making a living almost entirely by theft. The rights of pasturing their cows, the abuse of gleaning grain, of gleaning grapes, had gotten established little by little in this fashion. By the time the Tonsards and the other lazy peasants of the valley had tasted the benefits of these four rights acquired by the poor in the countryside, rights pushed to the point of pillage, one can imagine that they were unlikely to renounce them unless compelled by a force stronger than their audacity.

Balzac, Les Paysans

the binary division between resistance and non-resistance is an unreal one. The existence of those who seem not to rebel is a warren of minute, individual, autonomous tactics and strategies which counter and inflect the visible facts of overall domination, and whose purposes and calculations, desires and choices resist any simple division into the political and the apolitical. The schema of a strategy of resistance as a vanguard of politicisation needs to be subjected to re-examination, and account must be taken of resistances whose strategy is one of evasion or defencethe Schweijks as well as the Solzhenitsyns. There are no good subjects of resistance.

Colin Gordon on Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

Tables

Appendix Tables

The limitations of any field of study are most strikingly revealed in its shared definitions of what counts as relevant. A great deal of the recent work on the peasantrymy own as well as that of othersconcerns rebellions and revolutions. Excepting always the standard ethnographic accounts of kinship, ritual, cultivation, and languageit is fair to say that much attention has been devoted to organized, largescale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily, to pose a threat to the state. I can think of a host of mutually reinforcing reasons why this shared understanding of relevance should prevail. On the left, it is apparent that the inordinate attention devoted to peasant insurrections was stimulated by the Vietnam war and by a now fading leftwing, academic romance with wars of national liberation. The historical record and the archivesboth resolutely centered on the states interestsabetted this romance by not mentioning peasants except when their activities were menacing. Otherwise the peasantry appeared only as anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, crop production, taxes, and so forth. There was something for everyone in this perspective. For some, it emphasized willynilly the role of outsidersprophets, radical intelligentsia, political partiesin mobilizing an otherwise supine, disorganized peasantry. For others, it focused on just the kinds of movements with which social scientists in the West were most familiarthose with names, banners, tables of organization, and formal leadership. For still others, it had the merit of examining precisely those movements that seemed to promise largescale, structural change at the level of the state.

What is missing from this perspective, I believe, is the simple fact that most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal. Even when the option did exist, it is not clear that the same objectives might not also be pursued by other stratagems. Most subordinate classes are, after all, far less interested in changing the larger structures of the state and the law than in what Hobsbawm has appropriately called working the system to their minimum disadvantage. Formal, organized political activity, even if clandestine and revolutionary, is typically the preserve of the middle class and the intelligentsia; to look for peasant politics in this realm is to look largely in vain. It is alsonot incidentallythe first step toward concluding that the peasantry is a political nullity unless organized and led by outsiders.

And for all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellionslet alone [Page xvi] revolutionsare few and far between. The vast majority are crushed unceremoniously. When, more rarely, they do succeed, it is a melancholy fact that the consequences are seldom what the peasantry had in mind. Whatever else revolutions may achieveand I have no desire to gainsay these achievementsthey also typically bring into being a vaster and more dominant state apparatus that is capable of battening itself on its peasant subjects even more effectively than its predecessors.