Decoding Subaltern Politics

Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics

James C. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136210983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Asie

James C. Scott has researched and written on subaltern groups, and, in particular, peasants, rebellion, resistance, and agriculture, for over 35 years. Yet much of Scott's most interesting work on the peasantry and the state, both conceptually and empirically, has never been published in book form. For the first time Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics, brings together some of his most important work in one volume.

The book covers three distinct yet interlinked bodies of work. The first lays out a framework for understanding peasant politics and rebellion, much of which is applicable to rural areas of the contemporary global south. Scott then goes on to develop his arguments regarding everyday forms of peasant resistance using the comparative example of the religious tithe in France and Malaysia, and tracing the forms of resistance that cover their own tracks and avoid direct clashes with authorities. For much of the world's population, and for most of its history, this sort of politics was far more common than the violent clashes that dominate the history books, and in this book one can examine the anatomy of such resistance in rich comparative detail. Finally, Scott explores how the state's increasing grip on its population: its identity, land-holding, income, and movements, is a precondition for political hegemony. Crucially, in examining the invention of state-mandated legal identities, especially, the permanent patronym and the vagaries of its imposition on vernacular life, Scott lays bare the micro-processes of state-formation and resistance.

Written by one of the leading social theorists of our age, Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics is an indispensible guide to the study of subaltern culture and politics and is essential reading for political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and historians alike.

1

INTRODUCTION

Ideology, disguise, and resistance in agrarian society

The organization of this small volume traces at least three trajectories in my own work and perhaps also in the work of many of my fellow social scientists and ethnographers who have tried to understand agrarian society.

The first trajectory is one of disillusionment and dashed hopes in revolutionary change. This was a common enough experience for those who came to political consciousness in the 1960s in North America. For me and for many others, the 1960s were the high tide of what one might call the romance with peasant wars of national liberation. Given that much of the last half century has been a graveyard of dashed hopes for democracy, true national self-determination, and economic justice in most agrarian states, it is not easy to recapture the heady optimism that many felt at the time. The grip of the major colonial powers on their far flung empires was broken by the ravages of the Second World War; the meeting of the non-aligned powers in Bandung had proclaimed a Wilsonian future of new sovereign nations dealing with one another as equals; and revolutionary movements throughout the world seemed bent on erasing the crushing inequalities in land, wealth, and power (and hence in life-chances) that had blighted the lives of much of the world’s population. The civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States as well as the social and cultural revolutions in France and Germany seemed part and parcel of a new political opening and possibilities for emancipation in the West as well.

I was, for a time, fully swept up in this moment of utopian possibilities. I followed with some awe and, in retrospect, a great deal of naiveté, the referendum for independence in Sekou Toure’s Guinea, the pan-African initiatives of Kwame Nkrumah, the early elections in Indonesia, the independence and first elections in Burma where I had spent a year, and, of course, the land reforms in revolutionary China and nationwide elections in India.

The intellectual and political context of the disillusionment is worth recalling briefly. I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin at the end of the 1960s. Madison was the scene of constant campus-wide demonstrations against the Vietnam War, beginning with the efforts to prevent Dow Chemical, manufacturer of napalm, from recruiting on campus. With my colleague and mentor Edward Friedman I was teaching a large lecture course on “peasant revolutions.” The class was packed with nearly 400 students for whom the stakes were not trivial, as the draft had begun in 1965. For much of the class, our lectures were insufficiently progressive. After each lecture there was a minor skirmish among the students for the microphones to question us, and dozens of students would huddle after each lecture to prepare a four or five page rebuttal of the lecture which would be distributed to all students as they arrived for the next class. Politics mattered and lecturing under these conditions was both exhilarating and, it seemed at the time, intimidating. It was, for both instructors and students, a “crash” course on revolution, with the emphasis on “crash.”

The disillusionment took two forms: historical inquiry and current events. It dawned on me, as it should have earlier, that virtually every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from the very populations whom it was designed to serve. The French Revolution led to Thermador and then to the precocious and belligerent Napoleonic state. The October Revolution in Russia led to Lenin’s dictatorship of the vanguard party and then to the repression of striking seamen and workers at Kronstadt, collectivization, and the gulag. If the ancien regime had presided over a feudal inequality with brutality, the record of the revolutions made for similar melancholy reading. Not only was the revolutionary state able to batten itself more firmly than its predecessor on the society it ruled, but the popular aspirations that provided the energy and courage for the revolutionary victory were, on any long view, almost inevitably betrayed. The Mexican Revolution was a striking exception in the sense that the peasantry managed to hang on to the land they had seized from the haciendas.

Current events were no less disquieting when it came to what contemporary revolutions meant for the largest class in world history: the peasantry. The Viet Minh, rulers in the northern half of Vietnam following the Geneva Accords of 1954, had ruthlessly suppressed a popular rebellion of smallholders and petty landlords in the very areas that were the historical hotbeds of peasant rebellion. In China, it became clear that the Great Leap Forward during which Mao, his critics silenced, forced millions of peasants into large agrarian communes and dining halls was having catastrophic results. Scholars and statisticians still argue about the human toll between 1958 and 1962, but it is unlikely to have been less than 35 million people (roughly the current population of Canada). While the human toll of the Great Leap Forward was being recognized, ominous news of starvation and executions in Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge completed the picture of peasant revolutions going lethally awry.

The disillusionment was thus not so much with the peasantry as with those who had seized power, often in their name and with their support, and then proceeded to impose utopian forms of collectivization upon them by force. Both the peasantry and revolutionary elites may have entertained utopian expectations of the new order but it was clear that their ideas of utopia were radically divergent.

Those familiar with this period will recall that it also represented the early high tide of development studies and the new field of development economics. If revolutionary elites imagined vast projects of social engineering in a collectivist vein, development specialists were no less certain of their ability to deliver economic growth by engineering property forms, promoting public health, investing in the infrastructure of markets, providing credit, and, when necessary to compete with left-wing revolutionaries, even (modestly) redistributing land. Practitioners of the development craft, though often personally animated by a desire to improve human well-being, were deployed in a worldwide Cold War counter-insurgency effort aimed at halting the spread of communism. The redistribution of land, the key to subsistence in poor countries, is normally anathema to liberal economies and was only resorted to in extremis in the Cold War. It is diagnostic that once the Berlin Wall was breached and the socialist bloc crumbled, land reform disappeared completely from the agenda of USAID and the World Bank. Having been under few illusions, at the outset, about the purpose and limits of development economics, it would be hard to say that I was disillusioned.

What do peasants want?

Having hurled myself at understanding peasant wars of national liberation, I found myself reading more and more about peasant life, village organization, folk beliefs, feudalism, smallholder agriculture, kinship, land tenure, share-cropping and tenancy, and peasant religion. In a sense, I then drew the logical conclusion traced by my intellectual trajectory. Having little faith in the revolutionary state or the development establishment to serve the interests and aspirations of peasants, I concluded that I might devote my time to a close study of the peasantry in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

It seemed a worthy aim: a scholarly career centered on an understanding of peasants and farmers. Not only were they, then, the majority of humankind but even today they represent the most numerous class in virtually every poor country. Despite unprecedented rates of urbanization, there are more peasants alive today than there were a half century ago. The peasantry, even when referred to by revolutionaries as the peasant “masses,” as if all that mattered was their sheer numerical weight, were presumed to represent the soul of the nation, the carrier of its culture, its spirit, and its future. Rhetoric aside, if revolutions failed to meet their aspirations and needs, then there wasn’t much to be said for them. The welfare and dignity of the peasantry, I reasoned, ought to be the basic point of departure for the evaluation of any economic and political order. On this premise, I set out to understand rebellions and revolutions, as nearly as I could, from the perspective of the peasantry. Happily, help was at hand from many great scholars of agrarian life and peasant movements at whose feet I continue to sit. Among them are Marc Bloch, A. V. Chayanov, Barrington Moore, Jr., E. P. Thompson, Eric Wolf, Fei Xiaotung, Eric Hobsbawm, Clifford Geertz, Carl Landé, R. H. Tawney, and Charles Tilly. Much of my work is deeply indebted to their insight and the questions they posed.

One cannot immerse oneself in this literature without concluding that there is a great gulf between the politics of urban elites on the one hand and rural cultivators on the other. Even when they share a language and a broad culture, it is as if they speak mutually unintelligible dialects. Even when they nominally come together in a nationalist movement, a religious faith, a political party, or a revolution, their stakes, interests, and understandings are likely to diverge widely. Historians and journalists, for the most part, write history from the large urban centers and from the perspective of literate elites. The rural population is generally treated as the more-or-less passive recipient of projects hatched and implemented from above. They otherwise pop into view only when they breach the thin veneer of presumed tranquility in the form of rebellion, millennarian movements, land invasions, arson, and the like. Over the past twenty years or so there has been a great narrowing of the urban—rural “cosmopolitan gap” by massive domestic and international labor migration throughout the global south. When this new rural cosmopolitanism is openly politically mobilized as it was in the July 2011 victory of the rural-based opposition in Thailand, it serves only to highlight the tensions between the popular rural and urban classes on the one hand and the elites of the capital city on the other.

The second trajectory of my work was to try to draw out carefully the actual differences in style, practice, values, and interests between the sphere of village politics and the sphere of urban elites. No two places are alike, just as no two cultures are the same, and therefore sketching the precise contours of rural politics, broadly considered, requires careful ethnography. There are, however, some generic differences between agrarian, village communities and urban conglomerations. Specifying a few of these major differences sensitizes us to their texture and why many of the conceptual tools of social analysis that serve well enough in industrialized societies may mislead us when applied to rural villages.

Villages are face-to-face communities and, as such, resist abstractions. Class relations, which are painfully real enough in most rural settings, are experienced less as categories—e.g., the landlords and the peasants—than as persons with unique histories, families, values, quirks, and physiques. The peasants well know that there are other landowners who have class interests in common, but this particular landlord is unique and his relationship with his tenant or laborer is likely to be particular as well. They know his entire family including parents and grandparents, who are likely to have a collective reputation in the village; they know his past deeds and misdeeds; they know how he regards them; he is far more a personality (however liked or disliked) than a representative of his class. They may have nicknames for him and make fun of him behind his back. The landlord as well, of course, knows his tenants “in the round” and not as abstractions. Mutually, they know far more about one another than factory hands and mill owners. Like the French villagers depicted in Zola’s La Terre, they are likely to know how much someone is worth down to the last piece of bed linen. One cannot talk about class relations and conflict in such a community without reckoning that class relations are profoundly inflected by deep personal histories that have shaped them.

In much of the global south, agriculturalists live perilously close to the margin of subsistence. They have little or nothing in the way of reserves or savings that could serve as insurance against a run of bad luck. The death of a plough animal, an incapacitating illness during the work season, a crop failure, or a large drop in the price of the crop they grow can send them over the edge. At worst it meant malnutrition and perhaps starvation; at best it traditionally meant the loss of land and falling into an often lifetime dependence on a relative, a landlord, a patron for subsistence and protection. Misfortune, then as today, also threatened the temporary or permanent breakup of the family. Today it often means migration to another continent.

The potentially catastrophic results of a bad season mean that the situation of much of the rural population is, in Tawney’s memorable phrase, like “that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”¹ This means, in brief, that farmers in this situation are particularly risk averse; they strive to minimize the danger of a life-threatening economic failure. The consequences for their social and economic behavior are pervasive. They are likely to plant several different crops in different fields to minimize the effects of the failure of one; they will choose crops that have a steady if modest yield rather than those whose yields are higher on average but prone to failure; they ordinarily prefer crops that can be eaten as well as sold. They would rather be smallholders than tenants and, similarly, tenants rather than day laborers as each step down represents a loss of subsistence security even though, in a good year, it might pay better. Socially, this subsistence ethic means trying to stay on the good side of kin, neighbors, landlords, patrons, and friends who might, in a pinch, come to your aid. Conversely it means, when possible, extending such assistance to others and recognizing that, the next time, the shoe might be on the other foot.

When it comes to understanding the politics of agriculturalists living near the knife edge of subsistence, the subsistence ethic means that social and economic arrangements are judged more by how well they protect against the most catastrophic outcomes than by how quantitatively exploitive (e.g., how much of the harvest a landlord takes) they are. Thus, an onerous system of land tenure that, in a bad year, lowers the rent and extends credit is likely to be more stable than a tenure system that is less onerous in a good year but implacable in a crop failure. Thus, a tax system that calibrates its take according to the varying crop yield and income of the population is likely to be less resented than a tax system, such as a fixed head-tax, that makes no allowance for a bad year. Any form of appropriation, other things being equal, that violates the subsistence ethic is more politically explosive than forms of extraction, however burdensome, that moderate their take in a poor season and thereby avoid the worst social consequences. One of the reasons why colonial states were often confronted with peasant rebellions was precisely because they fostered capitalist relations of production and fixed-revenue fiscal policies that replaced an exploitive, but necessarily (owing to the weakness of the pre-colonial state) more supple, system of extraction with one that made no allowance for subsistence needs.

The importance of the subsistence ethic in poor agrarian settings is a theme I developed in some detail in my The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. It would be misleading, however, to leave the reader with the sense that we understand the political implications of dire poverty as purely a matter of calories and cash and the calculations of risk that they impel. We cannot, I think, successfully understand subaltern politics of this kind unless we see them also as a local claim for dignity and respect.²

Just as there is no purely abstract experience of class in a small face-to-face community, there is no experience of poverty that is not socially and culturally embedded. In every community there are rituals that mark one’s standing and that of one’s family. For weddings, funerals, coming-of-age rituals, annual religious ceremonies there are minimal standards of culturally acceptable conduct. To fall short of this minimum is not merely to reveal one’s poverty; it is to fall below the minimum level of cultural citizenship and standing. It is, in a sense, a loss of face and of full membership in the community. In the Malay rice-farming community in which I lived, the most important collective holiday was the celebration of the end of the Islamic fasting month, marked, in comfortable households, by lavish feasts to which all relatives and neighbors were invited. The deepest humiliation for the poorest villagers was that they could never afford to hold such a feast, that they were perpetually guests, never hosts, and could not reciprocate. Many of them stayed at home rather than face the humiliation of accepting food on these terms. Marriages and especially funerals, because they were unpredictable, were occasions of potential status building or social despair. There was, everyone understood, a minimally decent wedding, a minimally acceptable funeral ceremony, casket, and feast. To fall below this standard was to be publicly shamed and quietly ridiculed—or, alternatively, to take out a ruinous loan or to sell land in order to live up to expectations. One understands why, therefore, in Christian settings where Christmas gifts are a mark of standing, poor families will often go deeply into debt in order to provide their children with presents that are an assertion of cultural standing even though ruinous economically. In a larger sense, owning some land, being economically independent are, like culturally acceptable feasts, not just an index to one’s income but a mark of standing, dignity, and of non-servile status. The goal of economic action for most of the poor is a modicum of comfort and, above all, cultural dignity and self-respect, not maximizing the return on each transaction.

The purpose of “The ‘way’ of peasant politics—agrarian revolt and the little tradition” is to examine the particularity of class, culture, and economy in poor agrarian settings. Understanding some of the basic differences between rural subaltern politics and urban elite politics, I try to show, also helps us grasp what happens when elites and the peasantry come into contact as allies or enemies in political movements.

2

THE “WAY” OF PEASANT POLITICS—AGRARIAN REVOLT AND THE LITTLE TRADITION

The religious dimension

Introduction

Missionaries of “great traditions,” whether that tradition be religious or political, commonly find themselves in a poignant dilemma when they attempt to carry the message to the peasantry. If the message and its bearer are accepted at all, they are assimilated into an existing set of meanings, symbols, and practices which frequently do great violence to the message as understood by its high priests in the capital city. This cognitive abyss may be inconsequential so long as “body counts” are more important than ideological orthodoxy. After all, the social power of a church or a political party may well rest as much on the number of its nominal adherents as on the success with which they have absorbed its catechism. But when it comes to the quality of beliefs—that is to say, their orthodoxy as measured by formal doctrine—the peasantry has sorely tried the patience of archbishops and commissars alike.

Much of the history of Catholicism, for example, could be written in terms of the tension between ecclesiastical orthodoxy and folk heterodoxy, not to say heresy, to which its expansion gave rise. Cries of despair at what has happened to the faith in the course of its propagation would be a part of that history. Typical of the tone is this complaint about the use of Catholic prayers and sa...