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... Thus, indigenous knowledge is seen as pivotal in discussions of sustainable resource use (Anderson & Grove, 1987). The new agency of the underprivileged tending to promote sustainable development fits in with emergent themes in development studies (Scott, 1985). ...
... Some practitioners of development now argue that development from below should be seen as a participatory experience. 7 At the same time, the agency of the subaltern actors, directed against the manipulative strategies of the elites, has come to occupy a significant place (Scott, 1985). It is realized that indigenous people want to be part of decisions concerning their future. ...
In this article, “indigenous knowledge” and its relationship to tradition and to reinvented religion are explored. Indigenous people around the world have a rich body of knowledge about the ecology of the local flora and fauna and of ecosystem processes, accumulated and applied through many generations of observation and experience. But this knowledge extends to the entire process of “dwelling” ( Ingold, 2000 ) in their habitat, including particular ways of thinking and acting that may be seen to constitute a “habitus” in Bourdieu’s sense.
... Although students alone are in an unequal power relationship with teachers, they know that tables can be turned around if they join their forces with other students. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) have mentioned this phenomenon of agency emerging from unequal power relationships referring to Scott's (1985) research about oppressed people or groups who exercise agency by subverting rules perceived as unjust. Mameli et al. (2019b) found in their study of Italian high school students that perceived interpersonal justice positively predicts responsibility and indirectly, through the student responsibility for their learning, also the career decision-making self-efficacy. ...
... This may be the case if resistance is seen as only reactionary, or from teachers' point of view, pointless disruptive behaviour. Most resistance theorists see resistance as a reaction to structural domination and oppression (De Certeau 1984;Giroux, 1983;Scott, 1985) which students often experience in school. However, resistance also has a transformative potential for student agency which can be used by skilful teachers to advance dialogic forms of pedagogy where students' voices are heard and also negative emotions are allowed. ...
This article explores how teacher agency support, students’ perseverance and work experience outside of school are related to student agency in the context of Estonia, where Estonian and Russian-speaking students are often educated separately in schools with either Estonian or Russian instructional language. The student-level data (n = 9060) were collected after piloting the survey instrument in 2022. To ascertain the factors and common causes that correlate with student agency, which is measured in a scale constructed by factor analysis, a structural equation modelling analysis was conducted. Besides the main positive effects of teacher agency support, students’ perseverance and work experience on student agency, other statistically positive covariates were found to be Estonian instructional language, male gender, higher school stage and students’ socio-economic background as measured in number of books at home. Among different types of work experience, working on holidays, in student work camps, doing other paid work (i.e., working in their own business), and voluntary unpaid work were significantly positively correlated with the agency. Therefore, students learned many specific and generic skills while working. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of teacher support and work experience in fostering student agency. The type of agency measured in this scale, which combines agentic engagement in the classroom with capacity for resistance to perceived injustice, is more articulated by male students in higher school stages.
... Para captar las prácticas de resistencia que no son tan dramáticas y visibles como las rebeliones, manifestaciones, revoluciones u otras formas organizadas de resistencia colectiva y de confrontación, Scott (1985) desarrolló el concepto de la resistencia cotidiana. Este concepto señala que esta también puede ser silenciosa, disfrazada o aparentemente invisible. ...
... Un miembro de una OSC feminista aborda las prácticas cotidianas de resistencia (Scott, 1985) describiendo que "básicamente [...] crecer y convertirse en un adulto consciente es pura resistencia, pensar que estamos viviendo el día a día". En ese sentido, los talleres educativos organizados por las OSC para abordar el racismo en el contexto local con el objetivo de aumentar consciencia pueden clasificarse como una práctica de resistencia cotidiana. ...
Desafiando el régimen migratorio en Iquique: prácticas de resistencia desde la sociedad civil Resumen En la ciudad de Iquique, ubicada al norte de Chile, el fenómeno migratorio en la actualidad tiene características renovadas, debidas al ingreso de migrantes por pasos fronterizos no habilitados, principalmente desde el cierre de las fronteras legitimado durante la pandemia de Covid-19. Considerando que los regímenes migratorios globales tienen dinámicas similares en diferentes lugares geográficos, pero encuentran procesos locales diferentes, este artículo busca analizar la materialización específica del régimen migratorio en este contexto local. Se explora cómo las organizaciones de la sociedad civil desafían el régimen migratorio a nivel local y qué prácticas de resistencia se pueden identificar. Para este estudio, se realizaron seis entrevistas centradas en el problema a personas ligadas a organizaciones de la sociedad civil que participan en las luchas de los migrantes en la ciudad. Los testimonios permiten sugerir que el régimen migratorio es desafiado a nivel local a través de diversas prácticas de resistencia solidaria y colectiva por parte de la sociedad civil desde abajo, y que * Los resultados de este artículo se basan en el trabajo de campo de la tesis de magíster de la autora, financiada por el proyecto de investigación Fondecyt N°11200244: "Abriendo y cerrando fronteras: análisis de los procesos de securitización en la región de Tarapacá (2010-2020) y su impacto en la construcción de la irregularidad migratoria", dirigido por la Dra. Romina Ramos Rodríguez. Cómo citar este artículo: Groos, M. (2023). Desafiando el régimen migratorio en Iquique: prácticas de resistencia desde la sociedad civil. Si Somos Americanos. Revista de Estudios Transfronterizos, 23, 1-23.
... Importantly, the politico-affective ethics and praxis of refusal, which this edited collection foregrounds, is different from "resistance", which has monopolized theoretical interest across the social sciences for decades now ) -ranging from Scott's (1985) account on "everyday" or "invisible" acts of resistance to Foucault's (2009) theorization of "counterconduct". Despite considerable disagreements as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander and Einwohner 2004), resistance is generally understood as an oppositional act (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016). ...
... The notion of "resistance" has monopolized theoretical interest across the social sciences for decades now -ranging from Scott's (1985) account on "everyday" or "invisible" acts of resistance to Foucault's (2009) theorization of "counter-conduct." Despite considerable disagreements as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004), resistance is generally understood as an oppositional act (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). ...
... Para Scott (61,62) , por ejemplo, la migración o las violencias e incluso el crimen organizado pueden ser resistencias, pero la cuestión es ver qué sentido tienen estos actos y qué generan en los actores hegemónicos y en los subalternos. Y todo indica que, por lo menos, respecto de los procesos de salud-enfermedad-atención-prevención, se pueden generar resistencias como el rechazo a la mala y racista atención médica o se pueden proponer e impulsar concepciones contrahegemónicas como las del buen vivir, pero lo que observamos es que en el primer caso sigue expandiéndose la biomedicina, y reduciéndose la medicina tradicional; mientras que, en el segundo, solo queda, en el caso de México, como proyecto intelectual. ...
Toda una serie de procesos conducen a la disminución del uso de la medicina tradicional por los pueblos indígenas de México, incluyendo la reducción del número de curadores tradicionales y la expansión directa e indirecta de la biomedicina. En este ensayo se aborda el papel nuclear que tienen estos procesos en las relaciones de hegemonía/subaltenidad que se dan en los diferentes campos de la realidad y, especialmente, en los procesos de salud-enfermedad-atención-prevención, dado que no se generan procesos contrahegemónicos o, los que surgen, han sido ineficaces para enfrentar la hegemonía social en general y biomédica en particular.
... IL CANCELING COME ATTO POLITICO: UNA BREVE GENEALOGIA Diverse genealogie della cancellazione, intesa come atto affermativo o rivendicativo (come claim), simbolico e culturale, ci mostrano in modo piuttosto evidente che tale pratica si è costituita come una delle diverse «weapons of the weak» (Scott 1987), e cioè come una delle diverse armi a disposizione di gruppi e soggetti storicamente oppressi o subalterni (Cfr. Nakamura 2015Nakamura , 2021Nagle 2017). ...
In recent decades, the intense development of feminist, anti-racist and indigenous peoples’ movements has given rise to a profound struggle as much for the reconstitution in a more egalitarian sense of traditional material relations of domination as for the political and cultural dissolution and resignification of those colonial, racial and patriarchal hierarchies that have shaped single spheres of modern social life since the rise of western capitalist modernity. The dimension of such a global movement could not but raise the question of the existence of a centuries-old white privilege underlying the very linguistic and cultural signification of the modern social world and its dominant systems of classification and representation. Our paper will attempt to highlight three issues, which we feel are important in order to understand the real stakes behind the accusation of ‘cultures of erasure’ levelled at these movements: (a) the existence of a modern white privilege to be understood as a ‘total social fact’, (b) the symptomatic nature of the very emergence of the ‘cancel culture’ paradigm, i.e. its constitution as a reaction of that same white privilege to the emergence of other positionings, knowledge, narratives and systems of representations that are entirely external to its historical, economic, ontological and political grammar.
... Tindakan kriminalitas pencurian yang terjadi di Lamongan rata-rata dilakukan oleh orang-orang yang mendapatkan pendapatan kecil dan para petani yang kehilangan panennya. Salah satu bentuk penentangan terhadap para penguasa setempat adalah dengan melakukan pencurian dan perampokan barang-barang penduduk setempat dibanding menyatakan pemberontakan terhadap penguasa setempat atas rasa kecewannya (Scott, 1985). ...
This paper aims to explain the natural disaster of drought which influenced the decline in the economy and high crime in Lamongan. This paper uses historical research methods which include the stages of topic selection, heuristics, verification, interpretation, and historiography by paying attention to the focus of the study on urban issues, especially environmental and social history. Based on research results, it is known that the drought in Lamongan was caused by climate anomalies and erratic climate change. This drought has had various impacts, ranging from a lack of water supply for agriculture, scarcity of food to the rise of crime such as theft. The efforts to overcome drought were carried out by the colonial government with the cooperation of local residents, such as carrying out repairs to reservoirs, holding prayer events, and joint celebrations to ask God for help. Even though this drought disaster cannot be avoided, its impact can be minimized with mitigation efforts.
... For me, this deep regard for moral character and fiber are present in all John's work, demonstrating a courage and an integrity to speak out against injustice and social harm both large and small. As James Scott (1985) reminds us, socio-political resistance comes in many forms, from sabotage on the shop floor to disruption of capitalist production relations to fighting for a moral economy against the diktats of rural landlords. Today we face many threats in our respective institutions of higher learning to freedom of speech both in and outside the classroom, with this moral imperative to speak out never more important. ...
... While our findings memorialize our journey in creating a counterspace [52], these findings also describe a resistance-based framework in navigating and confronting Niceness in academia. Our everyday acts of resistance are enacted through the politics of refusal-refusing the practices of the colonial and processes of the neoliberal university [49,63,64] through Whisper Care. We contribute to the literature with a specific call to move beyond a culture of Niceness [7] and towards re-envisioning an academic world oriented around Kindness. ...
While the current literature on Niceness in higher education has examined the discourses and practices of Niceness in academic spaces, making it more identifiable, less is known about how minoritized faculty navigate and disrupt the culture of Niceness. The purpose of this article is to offer a resistance-based framework to combat academia’s Niceness culture through the lens of the authors. Using theory in the flesh as theory and methodology, we use collaborative autoethnography to conceptualize Whisper Care to give language and articulate an orientation and philosophy rooted in Kindness. Our findings present a process to confront Niceness while guiding, supporting, and protecting each other in higher education institutions. We conclude with implications for future research and practice for faculty and higher education leaders.
... This framework holds that everyday discrimination experienced by non-dominant minority groups leads them to resist society's central values and institutions. In order to express their dissatisfaction with the social order, individuals from these groups actively engage in "everyday resistance" (Scott 1986)practices that contradict the dominant group's values. These acts include, among other things, risky and delinquent behaviours (Factor et al. 2013). ...
Previous studies have identified diverse risk and protective factors of youth involvement in delinquency. However, less is known about the causes of this phenomenon in the context of political conflict. Drawing from theoretical frameworks emphasizing the notion of social resistance, in the current study we examine the risk and protective factors of juvenile delinquency in the context of majority–minority political conflict. Applying multilevel analysis to survey data provided by a representative sample of 814 Arab youth from East Jerusalem, we find that, although this behaviour shares similar lines with juvenile delinquency in regular contexts, in the context of political conflict it bears a unique core of resistance to the social order. Specifically, we find that a strong predictor of juvenile delinquency is attitudes towards political violence, whereas, surprisingly, attitudes towards general violence do not have a significant effect. Our findings suggest that juvenile delinquency in the context of social conflict stems, at least partially, from a unique mechanism of resistance towards political order.
... Los hombres campesinos en las agencias municipales se convirtieron en fuertes aliados de Sofía. El proyecto implicaba que sus hijos e hijas no tendrían que irse de la comunidad para estudiar; disminuiría la migración de jóvenes y ofrecería una posibilidad de mantener sus tradiciones, incrementar la población y mantener la comunidad (Scott, 1985). ...
... Resistance can be defined as 'a response to power, a practice that can challenge, and undermine power' (Vinthagen and Lilja, 2007). The individual form of opposition performed by parents in contact with the CWS can further be grasped by the concept of everyday resistance (Scott, 1985;Johansson and Vinthagen, 2020). Everyday resistance is largely disguised or hidden (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2020), but some scholars argue that it should be considered a process that happens along a continuum, and can also be more visibly performed (Murru, 2020). ...
Sensibility to stigma in child welfare systems is important to prevent harmful acts
against marginalised groups in society. This case analysis centres around one family in
the child welfare service (CWS) that could be considered marginalised across several
dimensions. The empirical material consists of three separate in-depth interviews with
the child, their parents and their caseworker. We explore how the stigma attributed
to the family was enhanced through the relationship with the CWS and the role stigmatisation played in the interactions between the family and the CWS. The analysis
showed how the parents were constructed as ‘outsiders’, compared to the ideal; they
lacked money, good looks, and character. Although the parents were somehow subjugated and the caseworker perceived them as submissive, they also resisted stigma in
both open and subtle ways. However, this was not always sensed by the CWS. We discuss the importance of addressing stigma in all its forms and acknowledge that stigma
is power, which is also intertwined with the broader policy. This is crucial knowledge
to mitigate the role of the CWS in the stigma machine and in turn reduce structural
bias within the CWS
... This, alongside the potency of the systematic divide-and-rule tactic that companies use in collusion with the state, makes it unsurprising that many, perhaps even most, local communities negatively affected by land grabs do not engage in overt, structured and organised resistance. Instead, affected social groups engage in individual, covert everyday forms of resistance -what James Scott (1986) calls the 'weapons of the weak': foot dragging, diversion of energy and resources and so on (Alonso-Fradejas 2015; Hall 2015; Moreda 2015; Sändig 2021). Resistance may highlight cultural representations of associations with land and resources through songs, poems and storytelling, while activists may work with those organising resistance to develop forms of counter-mapping encouraging the local assertion of rights to land (Chapin and Threlkeld 2001;Suhardiman, Keovilignavong, and Kenney-Lazar 2019). ...
... Through a skilful and expressive use of "irony" (Reis, 2007) the duo exposes those very processes of repression and social hypocrisy while recovering repressed data and contents that had been condemned to oblivion by the historical processes (Marques, 2022). João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira rescue, decontextualize and recontextualize forms of resistance (Foucault, 1994(Foucault, [1976; Scott, 1985;Godinho, 2011), possible practices (Godinho, 2017) at the experiential and cultural level, albeit still without history (D'Emilio, 1983, p. 101) or almost forgotten by time (Godinho, 2012, p. 17), to bring back repressed contents and set in motion new connections. Throughout the film some parts of the book are read in voice-over, namely the excerpts suggested by Jennifer Doyle in her essay "Moby-Dick's Boring Parts", which attest to the typical boredom of a sea voyage (Amado, 2011), while the set and props include paintings and sculptures that evoke a 19th century fishing vessel. ...
As same sex marriage emerged at centre of the social and political debate in Portugal, the film Hero, Captain, and Stranger (2009), by João Pedro Vale (JPV) and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira (NAF), intersected art, identity politics and pornography in a manner hitherto unseen in Portugal. A homoerotic adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the film confronts a series of aesthetical and political taboos (and prejudices) which have never been analysed in depth despite their topicality. Initially conceived to survey the references to Portuguese seaman from Massachusetts in Herman Melville’s novel, the project by JPV and NAF is an irreverent provocation to a ‘semi-peripheral’ milieu, which still denied juridical recognition of homosexual marriage thirty-five years after the demise of the dictatorial regime (1926-1974).Basing itself on the overcoming of the incompatibility between art and pornography, and the specific nexus between the concept of democratic eros and the model of a more egalitarian gay pornography, this article will address the following questions: what are the political implications of de-metaphorizing homoerotic sexuality in the Great American Novel? And how does gay pornography serve this affirmative purpose?
... Neomezuje se přitom pouze na zdůraznění Romů jako plnohodnotných aktérů (de)sekuritizačních procesů, ale usiluje o širší konceptualizaci takového aktérství. Vymezuje se vůči chápání romského aktérství v logice konceptu rezistence, tak jak jej rozpracoval Scott (1985Scott ( , 1990, který podle ní vede k esencializaci zavedených mocenských hierarchií (k diskuzi viz též Ort [v přípravě]). ...
The text defines the issue of the journal with the theme of securitization and security of the Roma. In doing so, it emphasizes the agency of the Roma themselves, i.e. their reactions to securitization discourses and practices, as well as their ways of understanding their own security. The author of the editorial presents the contributions contained in the thematic issue and selectively discusses the literature that has been published on related topics in the context of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
... Communities are not static, but constantly changing and adapting concerning how they connect with the territory (Grey 2011). Moreover, the organisation of space may allow for certain forms of passive resistance to state power (Scott 1985). The temporal aspect of habitation (Bowes 2020: 435), whether seasonal or constant, affects consumption patterns, as do post-depositional processes at archaeological sites. ...
This research investigates the consumption patterns of Roman non-elite rural communities in Central Hispania from the 1st to the 3rd century AD. Using similarity metrics, specifically Brainerd-Robinson analyses in artefact type co-presence networks, the study delves into the consumption patterns among these settlements, providing new insights into their local integration. A notable pattern emerges, revealing marked consumption similarities among these communities, suggesting access to shared trade networks and a common cultural framework. Yet, amidst these commonalities, instances of resilience against total cultural homogenisation are noted, exemplifying the local cultural adaptations in response to Roman homogenisation.
... Collaborative fire management, if genuinely implemented as a bottom-up approach, has the potential to address forest fires effectively. This strategy could also be effective against arson, which, to a certain extent, can be seen as 'the weapon of the weak' (see Scott, 1995). Nevertheless, further research is needed to eliminate ambiguities concerning fire management. ...
The forest-based bioeconomy plays an important role in the transition towards a bio-based economy, also offering solutions for mitigating global climate change. Tanzania has seen a swift expansion of commercial tree growing, especially in the Southern Highlands, since the early 2000s. The increasing demand for timber has attracted both resident inhabitants and small and medium-scale investors from elsewhere to exploit this new investment opportunity. The spread of highly fire-sensitive eucalyptus and pine plantations has radically altered the fire regime in the landscape. The underlying driving forces of forest fires are related to ambiguous and conflicting social processes in land management. We conducted field data collection in the Iringa and Njombe regions to study these uncertainties, mapping a wide array of interpretations related to small and medium-scale plantation forestry in general and to forest fires specifically. Our research methods incorporated individual interviews , focus group discussions (FGDs) and direct observations. The smallholder farmers, urban-based investors , large forest companies and other actors share a common interest in mitigating the impacts of destructive forest fires, yet ambiguity exists in how to manage these fires. This results in a scenario in which both interest in and resources for firefighting are limited. We encourage the co-creation of well-defined, transparent village fire management committees and village fire funds to ensure localised and efficient fire management.
... A multi-sited transnational ethnography follows workers to the 'backstages' (Scott 1985) of the workplace, namely a large dormitory complex housing several hundred construction workers from Romania. Participant observation was also carried out in workers' negotiations with their employers, during consultations with doctors or in bars and restaurants in Germany as well as in the workers' villages in Romania. ...
Tens of thousands of Romanian migrants work in the German construction sector. Their work is often characterised by unpaid wages, long working days and the withholding of sick or holiday pay. The risky and exploitative nature of the conditions under which they work is reflected in their negative evaluation of their engagements as ‘slave labour’. Starting from such a clearly negative evaluation, this article asks how such workers classify their work and what role such classifications have within the context of labour exploitation. Based on qualitative interviews with and participant observation among Romanian construction site workers in Germany and in Romania, the article reconstructs four work classifications, each of which offers a different reason to make hard work plausible in the eyes of workers, while employers actively turn such interpretations into a mechanism of vulnerability. Without direct physical coercion, these ideas motivate workers to take on work that they themselves criticise as ‘slave labour’. The paper concludes by arguing that the recognition of such classifications and their social effects are crucial for an understanding of labour exploitation.
... TPM recognizes that expertise in areas of Education, Health and Development certainly exist beyond the university borders, and The Campus welcomes a wide cross section of, what we call, "members" who work collaboratively on our collective AR project. Since its inception, a yearly regular presence on The Campus are university students (studying in one of the fields of Education, Health or Development) who are expected to engage with local community in their mutual areas of interest, while expanding their understandings of the human condition as it relates to colonialism, decolonization, care, exploitation, social justice, etc. Readings that accompany their time in Malawi include Friere's (c2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Fanon's (c2004) The Wretched of the Earth, Scott's (1987) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, and, of course Caplan's (2008) The Betrayal of Africa. We usually begin with Caplan's book in our first week in Malawi, as it gives both undergraduate and graduate students an initial foray into the sub-Saharan context. ...
University standards for attaining tenure-track positions, tenure, advancement of rank, and successful periodic evaluation in universities in the Global North primarily center on attainment of research grants and publications. This article considers the ethical implications of these values when action research projects are carried out with impoverished communities in the Global South. Simultaneously, when impoverished communities in the Global South work with Global North universities, they often do so with the experiences of universities and other foreign organizations (religious charities, non-government-organizations, not-for-profits, etc.) having timeframes and funding allocations set to standards of the usual two to five years, along with the knowledge that the “foreign-researcher” will, more than likely, be transient in their lives. Understandably, this relationship of competing needs and dedication will shift moralities of the impoverished community and “local-researcher” given the growing understanding that the foreign-researcher’s commitment is often tied to institutionally required outputs that give them little benefit. This article uses reflexivity to expose the often-challenging experiences of three Action Researchers in different situations as they work on a liberation, emancipation and social-justice based project focusing on Education, Health and Development in a rural region of central Malawi.
... It works as follows: people who are convinced that under a democratic regime, certain selfish minorities, such as pharmaceutical corporations or anti-natalists, can easily push through solutions that are beneficial to themselves, but contrary to the needs of the people, believe that these tricks and behind-the-scenes games must be resisted in two ways: (1) through a search for real people's tribunes, who will resolutely represent the people through their actions, and (2) through the open and covert sabotage of policies, these sinister interest groups advance in criminal cooperation with the national government. In this form, vaccine hesitancy is a modern manifestation of what the anthropologist James Scott calls the "weapon of the weak" (Scott, 1985), that is, the invisible everyday resistance of politically and socially weak players to the norms and rules imposed by dominant actors. Examples of such resistance range from sabotage and delaying the completion of a task to pilfering the oppressor's wealth and covert ridicule. ...
Using data collected in Ukraine during the COVID-19 crisis, the research tested whether vaccine-hesitant actors tend to harbor populist opinions more pronouncedly than vaccine enthusiasts.
... Scott sees the micro level of veiled resistance and the macro level of social revolutionary change as interdependent and argued that infrapolitics are the "foundational form of political action" and provide "the building block for more elaborated institutionalized political action" (Scott, 1990, p. 325). In line with the French philosopher Michel De Certeau (1990), Scott (1983) celebrated the disguised and undeclared form of resistance found in everyday life and practices by seeing the hidden transcript as the "weapon of the weak." It is these small-scale, highly creative, and subversive forms of resistance that we need to grasp to understand the ways in which host communities express their views of and experiences of volunteer tourism. ...
Central to the volunteer tourism experience is the encounter with the host community. Much of the existing literature privileges the voices of volunteers and organizations, with the perspectives of the local communities poorly represented. This study on the host–guest relationships of orphanage volunteer tourism in Nepal challenges the understanding of the stable and hierarchical configuration of power. It reflects on the multiplicity and particularity of political action and how this action is not only found in the grand narratives of historical social change, but often unfolds in the small, fragile, and repetitive actions of touristic daily lives. By focusing on the acts of performing volunteer tourism, this paper questions the victimization of those who are at the edges of traditional power structures.
... In societal spaces that expect women to be passive and uneducated, the performance of incompetence may serve to accomplish challenging movement goals, such as cross-national rescue work. Such performances fit under what James Scott calls "feigned ignorance", a term he uses to describe everyday resistance peasants used to push back against restrictions posed by dominant classes (Scott, 1985). Focusing on women specifically, Silvia Gherardi and Barbara Poggio relatedly look at the "tactical use of 'female' stereotypes" in male-dominant organizational settings and find that women may act clueless and conceal how much they know "to survive and, perhaps, get ahead in settings, which tended to be hostile towards them, or at any rate, treated them with suspicion" (Gherardi & Poggio, 2001, 254). ...
This article argues that college-educated women play a crucial part in successful resistance against genocide because they are more likely to forge secure interregional networks and, consequently, better able to shelter victims of mass-persecution than their male peers. We develop our argument through a study of Jewish rescue networks in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. College-educated women were especially valuable during rescue efforts due to their ability to operate as defiant conformists. These women – a small minority who were anything but traditional – could more fully exploit their biographical availability and university networks by concealing interregional resistance work through the strategic performance of traditional feminine roles. Statistical analyses of geocoded rescue networks reveal that rescue networks involving college-educated women were more successful because they funneled Jews across the country without getting exposed. More in-depth exploration of distinct networks identifies three dramaturgical strategies that college-educated women deployed to facilitate clandestine and geographically expansive rescue work: 1) strategic coquetry; 2) strategic self-devaluation; 3) strategic motherhood and wedlock. Taken together, our findings suggest we should focus on how gender and other forms of social status interact to produce the relational and dramaturgical underpinnings of civilian agency in times of emergency.
... Menurut Farina So perempuan Cham mempunyai kekuatan sendiri yang disebutnya sebagai "hidden struggle". Pandangan itu didasarkan kepada kenyataan yang disebut oleh Scott (1985) tentang kekuatan pihak yang lemah pada kaum tani. Menurut Scott, sungguhpun mereka tidak mempunyai kekuatan fizikal, tetapi mereka mempunyai kekuatan emosi dan kekuatan itulah menjadi senjata bagi mereka mempertahankan diri dan keluarga. ...
It's about status and role of Cham women in Cambodia and Malaysia.
... However, research has consistently indicated that "employee silence is generally undesirable, even potentially destructive", especially in situations where employees are forced into silence in the midst of perceived injustice (Pinder & Harlos, 2001). It has also been argued that strict aversion and crackdowns on employee strikes might push employees into adopting latent forms of resistance which might not necessarily be more desirable (Gall, 2014;Gall & Hebdon, 2008;Gentile, 2015;Milkman, 2013;Scott, 1985;Vandaele, 2016). Indeed, even at the height of the industrial conflict of the 1970s, Hyman (1972, p. 55) argued that any "attempts to suppress specific manifestations" of employee expression of voice would "merely divert the conflict into other forms". ...
In this article, I explore the rising waves of workplace militancy in the public sector in sub-Saharan Africa. As a purely qualitative study, the research involved in-depth interviews with Ugandan teachers at public schools and lecturers at public universities who have been persistently involved in a series of strike activities. It also included a detailed documentary analysis and a review of related empirical literature. The findings indicated that strike activity is not only shifting from the private to the public sector, but also that the repertoire of strike tactics available to public employees has become so diverse that some actions might not be easily discernible as industrial action. These included actions similar to what has been described in German as “Innere Kündigung” (inner resignation) and “Dienst nach Vorschrift” (work to rule). Interestingly, the findings also suggested that public employee strikes have some positive value that could be harnessed for the greater good of public service delivery and that strict restrictions on public sector strikes could be counterproductive.
In order to resolve structural imbalances in their economies, most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa sought loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other financial institutions to combat the economic stagnation and crises that characterized the 1980s. As part of IMF Articles of agreement since the 1970s, borrowing governments are expected to unequivocally commit to implement curative policies that the IMF deems apposite for the improvement of the borrowing country’s external payments problems. These remedial policies known as “conditionalities” have become the most contentious feature of IMF lending. This chapter examines Ghana’s loan programs with the IMF in the Fourth Republic and the extent to which compliance and agency exist in negotiating and implementing loan conditionalities.
The body of research examining the welfare systems of the Global South has expanded, yet there remains a lack of knowledge regarding the implications of modernising the welfare system in rural agrarian societies. A research gap in this area led us to conduct a live-in observation and 17 interviews with peasants in Merjosuro village—a rural area in Central Java, Indonesia—to examine how farmers’ rationality affects the perception of social risks and the decision-making process regarding health risks management. The study has two key findings. The first finding reveals that differences in the rationality of risk between policymakers and the Merjosuro community are the reason why the community does not participate in the National Health Insurance (JKN). The second finding indicates that the monthly contributory system promoted by JKN is incompatible with the livelihoods in an agrarian society characterised by unstable and irregular income depending on harvest time. Overall, the case in Merjosuro highlights the understudied phenomena of expanding modern-formal social policies within more traditional community-based informal welfare arrangements, which were found to have limited the pace of transformation of the welfare state expansion in the examined case. Additionally, the study has practical implications for rethinking contextualised designs of welfare state policies and practices for the Global South.
The Doyang Reserved Forest, situated at the Assam-Nagaland border in the Golaghat district of Assam in India’s Northeast, is a story of enclosures and enclaves-border, reserve forest, and socially contesting boundaries in between. The dichotomy of ‘inside-outside’ and, thereby ‘insider–outsider’—be it within the forest enclaves, over the disputed border or over who should have how much control over land and resources features in the everyday experiences of the peasants occupying the forest lands. The essay seeks to unearth the multiple layers factored in the making of the peasantry and peasant politics in Doyang. In the process, it situates the intrinsic relationship between the peasantry and the State and the structural changes the latter seeks to force on the former. The paper proffers a more inclusive understanding of forest dwellers in Northeast India, informed by the collective histories of primitive accumulation, migration and peasantisation of forest lands. The idea is to go beyond the traditional understanding of forest dwellers as people dependent solely on forest produce, and hence ‘backward’, but to look at the integral component of an agricultural landscape in forests.
Scholars have proposed several underlying mechanisms to explain the relationship between economic inequality and crime. However, these mechanisms have not been empirically tested. This study empirically tests the causal paths offered by three salient mechanisms through which economic inequality may affect crime: negative emotions, social distance, and social resistance. We applied a randomized controlled trial with an experimental-causal-chain design in two studies. In Study 1 we manipulated economic inequality and examined its effect on both the mediating variables and crime, operationalized as cheating behavior. In Study 2 we manipulated the mediating variable found to be associated with economic inequality in Study 1 (social resistance), and examined its effect on cheating. Our findings support the social resistance mechanism, while there is no evidence supporting the negative emotions (operationalized here as anger) and social distance mechanisms. These findings suggest that economic inequality breeds crime by producing perceptions of discrimination and alienation, leading individuals to actively express their dissatisfaction through crime.
This article explores how Indonesian factory workers in Taiwan strive to regain control over time, space, meaning, and dignity in the face of their exploitation, precarity, and racialisation. Drawing on ethnographic insight, I investigate migrant workers’ subjective practices both inside and outside their workplaces. The major contribution to labour mobility regime analysis lies in conceptualising how migrant workers exert agency on an everyday level, beyond formal labour organising. The focus on the everyday brings me, on the one hand, to labour processes at different Taiwanese workplaces that employ migrant workers. On the other, it brings me to the sphere of daily reproduction, that is, time outside waged labour. The article speaks to the central concern of this themed issue, namely theorising the role of social reproduction within labour mobility regimes, as I address the inseparable spheres of production and reproduction as sites of control and agency. I show that, on the shopfloor, Indonesian migrant workers’ practices of regaining control often remain individualised. It is in the sphere of daily reproduction where Indonesian factory workers organise collectively. The workers’ practices are rich and creative, but at the same time they are ambiguous and can result in consent, compliance, or conflict with capital’s attempt to seek profit from migrant labour. Nevertheless, they reveal migrant workers’ interests and desires as well as a (subtle) refusal of their conditions and of the control over their work and lives. This refusal defies victimising representations of migrant labour and paternalistic approaches to migrant workers’ protection.
En los últimos años son múltiples los estudios académicos que dieron cuenta de las características sociodemográficas de la emigración española contemporánea hacia diversas capitales europeas y latinoamericanas. Este artículo analiza desde una perspectiva etnográfica a un grupo específico que participa activamente en dicho fenómeno, hombres y mujeres entre 20 y 40 años nacidos en España con formación universitaria, que migraron a la ciudad de Edimburgo en el periodo 2010-2019. A partir del entramado, tanto de factores subjetivos como de reflexiones teóricas antropológicas sobre el tema, nos proponemos analizar las circunstancias sociohistóricas que motivaron el traslado de este sector social a la ciudad de Edimburgo, así como las diversas formas de «ganarse la vida». Para ello, durante el año 2018 y 2019 hemos utilizado varios itinerarios de investigación —observación participante, entrevistas en profundidad— con el fin de adquirir cierta profundidad diacrónica sobre sus prácticas, disposiciones, valoraciones, trayectorias migratorias y laborales. Este análisis nos permite indagar en las experiencias de trabajo de dicho sector en la ciudad de Edimburgo y en las redes de solidaridad y las tramas colectivas que generan en un determinado tiempo y espacio, para realizar reivindicaciones en torno a las condiciones restrictivas en las que sostienen su vida cotidiana en dicha ciudad. A su vez, esto nos abre la posibilidad de explorar dos procesos organizativos —como trabajadores y migrantes— atendiendo a las dificultades y contingencias particulares —transformaciones, reconfiguraciones— que atraviesan en su conformación política y cultural como grupo de lucha.
IIlegal Wildlife Trade (IWT) is ranked as the fourth biggest illegal activity worldwide after arms, drugs and human trafficking. While it has been intensively explored to date, theoretical approaches grounded in economic sociology remain nascent. This article starts by reviewing the interdisciplinary approaches to IWT, with a special focus on whether organized crime can be associated with IWT. After сhoosing the pipeline model to examine the structure of the illegal market, the author consistently reviews the following stages of IWT: extraction, intermediation, and consumption. The research identified organized poaching and deliberate by-catch in marine illegal activities as two interchangeably developed phenomena that have given rise to the IWT commodity chains worldwide since the 1980s-1990s. Deliberate bycatch has been reviewed for the first time. The author connects the origins of the present-day large-scale IWT with the collapse of colonialism and socialism that nevertheless should be treated differently. Intermediary as a key actor in the trade chain is characterized according to functions and roles they play in the IWT: exporter/importer, consolidator, fixer, transporter and craftsman. Sociologists who study IWT primarily examine various aspects of consumption, including household consumption, conspicuous (face) consumption, the social legitimacy of poaching practices, and consumption of goods used as natural remedies for diseases. Based on the literature review, the author offers economic sociologists to look at the IWT as the one of the most socially embedded phenomena among those studied within sociology of markets. First, it would allow us to research the activities of the self-sustaining household as the main actor of IWT. Second, it would give us a chance to understand shifting legal regimes that determine changes in the legality and legitimacy of economic transactions of actors in the market.
The economic and sociological thoughts on deliberate bycatch as an economic and social phenomenon, and as a source of IWT, deserves special attention. How does deliberate bycatch affect the structural dynamics of the IWT of main commercial species, accordingly, changes in the way how actors face intense competition in the market? What are the comparative costs in the market for the both target and deliberately bycaught species ? How do these costs change if legal regimes change?
В статье автор уделяет внимание нелегальному рынку биоресурсов (НРБ) как объекту междисциплинарного исследования, который пока не получил заслуженного внимания в среде экономических социологов. Преимущественно написанная в русле профессионального обзора, статья, однако, также предлагает экономическим социологам подумать над перспективными направлениями исследований процессов НРБ. Для обзора автор выбрал звеньевой подход к нелегальным рынкам (модель «трубопровода», или «конвейера»), который представляется наиболее релевантным с точки зрения характеристики трёх динамических звеньев рынка: изъятия, посредничества и потребления. Автор статьи делает обзор исторической эволюции организованного браконьерства как основного источника изъятия и первого звена НРБ и связывает возникновение явления с процессами постколониализма и постсоциализма, тем не менее проводя различие между явлениями.
Далее автор рассматривает структуру организованного браконьерства и предумышленного прилова, отмечая различия в характеристиках явлений, порождающих формирование НРБ. При этом предумышленный прилов как социально-экономическое явление проанализирован впервые. Институт посредника представлен в статье с учётом исполнения посредником различных функций и ролей. По этому признаку выделяются следующие типы посредников: экспортёр или импортёр; консолидатор; «решала»; перевозчик и ремесленник. Потребление описывается в соответствии с взглядами социологов на НРБ и подразделяется на следующие виды: потребление домохозяйств; «демонстративное» потребление; cоциальная легитимность браконьерских практик и потребление дериватов животного происхождения в медицинских целях. Основываясь на проведённом обзоре литературы и выделении звеньев рынка, автор предлагает экономическим социологам,
желающим исследовать феномены НРБ, исходить из природы НРБ как одного из наиболее социально укоренённых объектов исследования в социологии рынков. В связи с этим представляется важным исследовать, во-первых, социально-экономическую деятельность самообеспечиваемого домохозяйства как основного актора НРБ; во-вторых, cмену правовых режимов, определяющую изменение легальности и легитимности экономических операций акторов на рынке.
Using an inter-sub-disciplinary approach, this chapter puts together the building blocks of the “double-bind regulatory state”: autonomisation of the state power, contradiction in the regulatory objectives, and fragmented authoritarianism. It starts with a critical review of the existing regulatory approaches and discusses their weaknesses in explaining the regulatory practices in contemporary China. It introduces the theory of Michael Mann on the autonomous power of the state. This theory holds important implications for understanding Chinese politics, for, against the views of Marxists and neo-Marxists, autonomisation implies that once institutionalised, a state develops its own agenda and objectives that are independent from or even at odds with those of the ruling elites. This is also true of China. In the last part, this book analyses the sources causing the governance dilemmas of the party-state, and their implications on state-firm power relations in China.
La escasez social del agua presente en Chile ha generado un desplazamiento del agronegocio hacia la región de Ñuble, por la disponibilidad de agua existente. Sin embargo, dicha región no está exenta de problemas hídricos, lo que desencadena la promoción de megaproyectos hidráulicos, con el propósito de asegurar agua para el riego de la agroexportación. Lo anterior, ha generado diversos conflictos con las comunidades afectadas por estos proyectos. Ante este escenario, en este artículo analizamos las transformaciones de las relaciones hidrosociales producidas por el avance de la agroexportación en la región de Ñuble. Para esto se utilizó una metodología mixta, que integra el análisis de información (de fuente primaria y secundaria) cuantitativa y cualitativa, y de variables geográficas e históricas. Como principales resultados obtuvimos que en la región de Ñuble se están configurando una transformación de las relaciones hidrosociales, que se despliegan en cuatro estrategias: 1) La fabricación discursiva de un nuevo “pacto hidrosocial”; 2) el reimpulso de construcción de embalses; 3) concentración de beneficios de riego, y por último; 4) concentración de derechos de aprovechamiento de agua en las cuencas de la región. Estas planificaciones, que alimentan el avance de la agroexportación, entran en disputa con las movilizaciones de resistencia multiescalar que se oponen a la intervención de los ríos y por ende, a la construcción de embalses. A partir de nuevas valorizaciones sobre el agua y el territorio, dichos procesos de resistencias han obstaculizado y frenado los megaproyectos hidráulicos en la región.
El artículo tiene como objetivo reconstruir el impacto que produjo la sanción del Estatuto del Peón en las relaciones laborales de los establecimientos rurales pampeanos. A pesar de ser una de las medidas más emblemáticas y recordadas del primer peronismo, poco se conoce de su implementación concreta y de los conflictos suscitados en torno a su aplicación. Por esta razón, por medio de la exploración de los expedientes judiciales abiertos por peones rurales en el Tribunal de Trabajo de Olavarría entre 1950 y 1955, el artículo indaga en las transformaciones que produjo en los vínculos productivos y en experiencia de la ley y la justicia de los peones rurales con el fin de establecer un balance preciso de los alcances y los límites de las políticas laborales peronistas en el ámbito rural.
Community-Driven Development (CDD) programs compel communities to adopt egalitarian decision-making processes for the duration of the project. However, dominant groups use their power to orchestrate a public performance of social domination and subordinated groups combat social domination via subtle acts of resistance. Rather than conceptualizing social transformation from a holistic perspective that includes subtle acts of resistance and incremental forms of self-empowerment, CDD implementation and monitoring focusses on women’s public performance in community meetings, and this approach generally fails to produce social transformation. We conducted an ethnography of an unconditional direct transfer to a village in Western Mali. We used Bourdieu’s approach to investigate how rural Malian women resist domination and empower themselves in this unfettered CDD project. We observed the women strategically submit to patriarchal forms of domination during the public decision- making processes but resist male domination over their labour. Our results suggest that CDD can better achieve enduring forms of social change when it builds off local women’s self-directed forms of resistance. To better capture women’s resistance and self-empowerment, CDD should adopt a more holistic and open impact assessment approach, such as the Most Significant Change technique and Culturally Responsive Evaluation.
This chapter focuses on the role of territorial stigmatisation for the production of space in the South Shore community on Chicago’s South Side. It draws on Lefebvre’s tripartite dialectics in the production of space to decipher the power of stigma. This chapter develops a critical reading of territorial stigmatisation through the lens of Lefebvre’s writings on language and discourse as well as Critical Discourse Analysis. Moreover, it mobilises Lefebvre’s discussion of everyday life and the production of differential space to theorise everyday practices of resistance against the symbolic violence of territorial stigmatisation.
In Renaissance Italy, the political power of authorities found one of its expressions in material symbols of sovereignty. The placing of inscriptions, sculptures and columns and the commissioning of frescoes in streets, piazzas and public spaces, for example, were essential ways of communicating political or spiritual authority to the populace. Sometimes perceived as representations of a top-down form of communication, in the urban context these same material emblems of power became political objects through which to express dissent, as in the case of public loggias, speaking statues or graffiti on walls and civic palaces. Presenting case-studies from various cities in northern Italy, this article investigates the dialectics between the people and the authorities in the urban fabric, especially in everyday life. Combining a spatial and a material approach to politics, this article reveals the dynamic and relational nature of political public spaces.
En este artículo me propongo analizar el rol actual de las expresiones políticas feministas que han surgido en Argentina por parte de mujeres de sectores rurales en coyunturas de conflicto territorial causadas por el agronegocio. Para ello me centro en el análisis de caso del denominado feminismo campesino y popular que emerge en la década de 1990 y se fortalece durante los últimos años, protagonizado por mujeres campesino-indígenas del Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero (Mo.Ca.SE). En el marco de un trabajo etnográfico que vengo desarrollando desde 2016, me detengo en el análisis de los pronunciamientos realizados en el Segundo Foro Feminista Popular y Latinoamericano que tuvo lugar los días 24 y 25 de junio de 2022 en la localidad de La Banda, Santiago del Estero. Exploro sus discursos en la interlocución con el movimiento feminista más amplio, así como con otras luchas populares a nivel nacional, considerando esta participación como emblemática de las estrategias políticas que han asumido en la coyuntura contemporánea. Sugiero que el feminismo campesino, en el contexto actual de crisis socio-ecológica, ensaya alianzas múltiples y transversales con diferentes sectores del campo popular, procurando ser vocero del reclamo territorial y ambiental e instalar estas demandas en las agendas del feminismo popular y los movimientos sociales más amplios.
1917. A revolution explodes, the most violent in history. Within a few weeks a society rids itself of all its leaders: the monarch and his lawyers, the police and the priests, the landowners and civil servants, the officers and employers. There is no citizen who does not feel free—free to make his own choices and decide his own future. Before long everyone has a plan in his pocket for remaking the country. As the bards of the revolution foretold, a new era in the history of man is beginning.
The neo‐populist viewpoint on the agrarian question, developed in Russia from the late 19th century against Marxist theory, enjoys a modified revival in India today. The theoretical core of the neo‐populist framework consists in the idea of an economically undifferentiated, virtually homogeneous peasantry, which shows extreme stability and viability vis a vis the competition of capitalist production; and is of superior efficiency with respect to yield. There is a basic logical fallacy underlying this view, consisting in the positing of identical conditions of production for units with differing objectives of production—’subsistence’ for peasant holdings and ‘profit’ for capitalist holdings—in a situation where they coexist and are linked through markets. In fact capitalist production cannot emerge at all unless it is accompanied by a rise in output and surplus per unit area compared to petty production, which presupposes technical change. The logical necessity of differing conditions of production, implies that all the neo‐populist propositions are invalid.
This paper discusses the political relations of ‘traditional’ peasants to groups and institutions outside their local community, with special reference to situations in which they encounter the political movements and problems of the twentieth century. It stresses the separation of peasants from non‐peasants, the general subalternity of the peasant world, but also the explicit confrontation of power which is the framework of their politics. The relative isolation of local communities, and their consequent ignorance, does not confine peasant politics only to parish pump or undefined millennial universality. However, it makes certain forms of nation‐wide peasant action without outside leadership and organisation difficult and some, like a general ‘peasant revolution’, probably impossible. The political problems of a ‘modern’ peasantry are briefly touched upon in conclusion.
Although there has been a dramatic broadening of the definition of social protest in recent years to include collective behavior that was once dismissed as criminal, irrational, or insignificant, our attention has continued to be focused on movements involving direct, often violent, confrontations between the wielders of power and dissident groups. Avoidance protest, by which dissatisfied groups seek to attenuate their hardships and express their discontent through flight, sectarian withdrawal, or other activities that minimize challenges to or clashes with those whom they view as their oppressors, has at best remained a secondary concern of students of social protest. Although specific forms of avoidance protest, such as the flight of slaves in the plantation zones of the Americas or the migration or serfs to the towns of medieval Europe and peasants to the frontiers of Tsarist Russia, have merited a prominent place in the historical literature on some societies and time periods, avoidance protest has rarely been systematically analyzed as a phenomenon in itself. There have been few detailed studies of the diverse forms which avoidance protest may take and the ways in which these are shaped by the sociopolitical contexts in which they develop. This neglect is serious because in many societies and time periods (perhaps in most in the preindustrial era), modes of protest oriented to avoidance rather than confrontation have been the preferred and most frequently adopted means of resisting oppression and expressing dissatisfaction.
This examination of what I have, with apologies to Rgis Debray, chosen to call the revolution in the revolution may help us to place the process of peasant rebellion in a new and hopefully more realistic perspective. It implies, above all, that the historical evolution of peasant radicalism is more a process of addition than of substitution. That is, the growth of a radical revolutionary elite espousing modern creeds such as nationalism and communism does not so much displace the older forms of rebellion or the values they embody, so much as it adds a new layer of leadership and doctrine at the revolutionary apex. The degree of interpenetration varies from place to place and over time, but we can expect to find, as we move toward the rank-and-file in the countryside, the expression of beliefs, values, and interests which distinguish the peasantry as an old and distinct, pre-capitalist class. Once again, the revolutionary amalgalm mimics the ritual amalgam which anthropologists have noted.While elements of the great tradition have become parts of local festivals, they do not appear to have entered village festival custom at the expense of much that is or was the little tradition. Instead, we see evidence of accretion and of transmutation of form without apparent replacement and without nationalization of the accumulated and transformed elements.1 What we confront, then, are at least two revolutions which occur simultaneously with a greater or lesser degree of integration. The nature of each would-be revolution is a product of the social location and therefore the concrete interests of its proponents - the revolutionary intelligentsia on the one hand and the peasantry on the other. Here I obviously oversimplify inasmuch as one might distinguish among sub-classes (e.g. small-holders, tenants, farm laborers, subsistence producers, market-oriented producers), each of which fosters a distinct vision of the revolutionary stakes. Thus the Folk variant of the French revolution will vary from region to region and from sub-class to sub-class. And ldthe revolution in the revolution, considered as a whole, will vary depending on whether we are dealing with seventeenth century England, eighteenth century France, or twentieth century Mexico. Despite these critical variations, however, many of the themes I have developed seem remarkably durable, based, as they are, on salient features of the pre- and early capitalist peasantry.This is not to say that the relationship between the two revolutions is one of straightforward conflict. On the contrary, each is likely to share a series of aims on which their de facto coalition is based - eg. opposition to the existing elite, hatred of colonial rule, the redistribution of land and wealth. Beyond this common terrain, however, interests may diverge. This divergence may be a matter of merely separate interests. Thus the momentous issues for the revolutionary elite may be the nationalization of foreign firms and the creation of a strong state, while for the peasantry, the momentous issues may be land reform, subsistence and local justice. Here there is still scope for a coalition since the claims of each revolutionary sector are not necessarily at odds. At another level, however, there may be potential conflict, the revolutionary intelligentsia may envisage a collectivized agriculture while the peasantry may be fighting for its small-holdings; the party elite may want a centralized political order while the peasantry is wedded to local autonomy; the elite may wish to tax the countryside to industrialize while the peasantry is committed to a closed economy with no taxes. There is thus a level of shared interests, a level of divergent but not competing interests, and a level of conflicting interests. The last may not be sufficient to jeopardize the revolutionary coalition but it will find expression both in the revolutionary process and in post-revolutionary politics.To the extent that we accept these differences as the natural consequence of divergent, real interests, to the extent that we view them as an inevitable part of revolutionary praxis, it directs us away from an all too common definition of the revolutionary project. This definition implicitly or explicitly holds that the objective of the revolutionary party is to instruct or to socialize the peasantry (or the proletariat) away from its backward, petty-bourgeois, or adventurist (viz. Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder) tendencies and toward a true, advanced understanding of the revolution. Thus Hobsbawm looks for the replacement of more primitive values and forms of rebellion with the modern secular creeds taught by the party. Thus Migdal elaborates a model of revolution in which peasants move from individual and local interests to an identity with party goals.2 While it is true that some revolutionary parties do create a cadre that does, to some extent, mediate or bridge this gap, they do not by virtue of this mediation eliminate it. The gap remains, in nearly every case, as a permanent structural feature of the revolution. Little tradition politics in the countryside will never live up to the cadre's expectations; it will often continue to be more spontaneous and reflexive than the party's desire for serried ranks implies; it will continue to reflect the durable local interests which arise from the peasantry's location in the social structure. In this context, we would do well to heed E.P. Thompson's analysis of the English naval mutinies of 1797: It is foolish to argue that because the majority of the sailors had few clear political notions, this was a parochial affair of ship's biscuits and arrears of pay, and not a revolutionary movement. This is to mistake the nature of popular revolutionary crises which arise from exactly this kind of conjunction between the grievances of the majority and the aspirations articulated by a conscious minority.3
Barrington Moore has put the matter even more directly in his study of major revolutions: The intellectuals as such can do little politically unless they attach themselves to a massive form of discontent. The discontented intellectual with his soul searchings has attracted attention wholly out of proportion to his political importance, partly because these searchings leave behind them written records and also because those who write history are themselves intellectuals. It is a particularly misleading trick to deny that a revolution stems from peasant grievances because its leaders happen to be professional men or intellectuals.4
What this perspective suggests is that an appropriate and more historically accurate description of most peasant revolutions would focus on this conjunction of peasant grievances and aspirations and the activities of a revolutionary party. Such a conjunction does not necessarily imply complete integration either of the overall revolutionary forces or of ideological values. In fact, it is quite in keeping with the invariably divergent and contradictory forces at work in any peasant revolution. Party propaganda and Leninist aspirations to the contrary notwithstanding, the revolutionary party may, in a limited sense, make the revolution, but not just as it pleases.Quite apart from the descriptive superiority of this view of revolutionary conjunctions, it has a great deal of merit in normative terms as well. There is more than a trace of unwarranted arrogance in the assumption that only the party embodies true historical consciousness and that the vision of justice and order found among the peasantry are examples of partial or false consciousness. The concept of a vanguard party which has a monopoly on reality not only obviates the need for democracy in the revolution but it overlooks the very real possibility that the consciousness of the rank-and-file may not be inferior but simply different.5 A recognition that the values of a revolutionary peasantry are distinguishable from those of the party can form the basis for collaboration and learning rather than a one-way exercise in consciousness-raising. 6 This appears to be what Mao tse-tung had in mind in his report on the Hunan uprising in 1927 which was not begun at party initiative and which was taking a course of its own. The choice, Mao wrote, was: To march at their head and lead them? Or to follow at their rear, gesticulating at them and criticising them. Or face them as opponents?7 An effective collaboration, a working conjunction, requires the party as much to adapt itself to the demands implicit in peasant action as to socialize the peasantry to its values. For there is no peasant protest that does not implicitly embody a political program. Even the original jacquerie of 1538, led by Jacques Bonhomme, was not at all the directionless madness which the term jacquerie and other self-serving terms applied by elites to peasant rebellions (e.g. tumultos, mobs, riots) are intended to convey. It was based on concrete grievances related to taxation and the failure of the nobility to perform its obligations of protection.8 Similarly, the violent crowds who staged market riots in eighteenth century England were enacting an economic program; they saw themselves as setting the price and called themselves, in one instance, The Regulators.9
I do not mean to ascribe a privileged truth status to the political consciousness of the peasantry. Peasant rebellions, after all, have their full complement of such human weaknesses as opportunism, personalism, and ethnic prejudice. Neither, however, does the consciousness of the party have any necessary claim to superior truth status at the level of values or even at the level of strategy. It is remarkable how often it has been the precipitate action of the peasants or workers, with their limited vision and limited goals, rather than party strategy, that has created a revolutionary situation. Without the rural and sans culottes uprisings, the seizure of power by a revolutionary elite in Paris would have been inconceivable. If the Bolsheviks, weak though they were, found power lying in the street it was largely because the spontaneous action of workers and peasants (i.e. factory and land seizures) had put it there. Despite, or perhaps because, the peasantry operates within a narrower purview, their action can have, and has had, revolutionary consequences. Only when there is a prolonged period of revolutionary warfare does the party's claim to superior strategic vision become plausible. And even then, it may well be that such warfare is better carried out by local units with great autonomy. The argument for the party as the progenitor of revolution is thus most persuasive at the level of the consolidation of the revolutionary state after power has been won. Although locally-based popular revolts have created revolutionary situations they have not, without the leadership and assistance of non-peasant elites, been able to consolidate a revolutionary state. This brings us to the question of how power and initiative are distributed after the revolution.In the interest of collaboration between the two sectors of a peasant revolution, there is something to be said for a revolutionary process in which the party is, initially at least, rather weak. If the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary elites have been particularly attentive to genuine peasant demands, it is in no small measure attributable to the fact that each party was, for an extended period, dependent for its very survival on the peasant enthusiasm it could elicit voluntarily. Learning, like much else, follows power, and both parties had to learn from their rural base or perish. Thus the way in which a revolution is made - whether by a Leninist putsch at the center or by a mass peasant mobilization at the periphery - will influence the character of the post-revolutionary order. An accommodation or partnership in the revolutionary process will favor a post-revolutionary regime that learns as much from its base as it teaches. Party domination or isolation in the revolutionary process will favor a post-revolutionary regime that attempts to impose its will. Just as one might prefer a cultural system in which the little tradition percolates up as much as the great tradition percolates down, so one may prefer a revolutionary process in which peasant values inform the elite vision rather than one in which the elite always has the last word. In terms of Marxist thought, this notion of revolutionary praxis implies that the position of Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky is to be preferred over that of Lenin and applied to the peasantry as well as the proletariat: [Luxemburg and Trotsky] remained faithful to the hypothesis of the revolutionary proletariat, took as its point of departure the dialectical idea of the identity of subject and object and of the spontaneous tendency of the proletariat toward an authentic, non-integrated consciousness and called for a democratic party whose fundamental core must be the proletarian base - even if its revolutionary consciousness was less developed than that of the leading cadres. It was this base that should control the party machine, made up of professional revolutionaries who had more experience and more complete political education, but who were always in danger of becoming bureaucratic, furthering their own interests rather than those of the working class....10
It is well worth remembering that, whatever else they do, successful revolutions almost always issue in a vastly larger and more hegemonic state apparatus. In this context, the continued vitality of the peasant values of localism, egalitarianism and autonomy may well represent a humanizing force. So too may the ancient peasant weapons of scepticism, evasion, and deception prove the best defense in depth against a state which seeks to recast everything in its image. In the Third World, at least, peasants are the main consumers and, presumably, the main beneficiaries of the revolution. The new order thus succeeds or fails to the extent that the needs and values of this vast class are directly incorporated into the revolutionary process. Should it fail, we may well have reason to applaud the fact that peasant resistance and primitive rebellion can frustrate revolutionaries as well as reactionaries.
The Police and the People: French Popular Protest For a gripping account of self-mutilation to avoid conscription
- R C Cobb
R.C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 96-7. For a gripping account of self-mutilation to avoid conscription, see Emile Zola, La Terre, translated by Douglas Parnee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).
Ghee, Lim Teck, 1977, Peasants and their Agricultural Economy in Colonial MalayaPeasants and Politics
- Marc Ferro
- Eric J Hobsbawm
Ferro, Marc, 1971, 'The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary', Slavic Review, Vol.30, No.3, Sept. Genovese, Eugene, 1974, Roll, Jordan Roll, New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Ghee, Lim Teck, 1977, Peasants and their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya, 1874-1941, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. and George Rudé, 1968, Captain Swine, New York: Pantheon Books. Hobsbawm, Eric J., 1965, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York: Norton. Hobsbawm, Eric J., 1973, 'Peasants and Politics', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1.
Flight and Rebellion
- Mullin
- Gerald
Mullin, Gerald, 1972, Flight and Rebellion, New York: Oxford University Press.
The Crowd in History The Moral Economy of the PeasantRevolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commisars Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
- Rudé
- George
Rudé, George, 1964, The Crowd in History, 1730-1848, New York: Wiley and Sons. Scott, James C, 1976, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, James C, 1979, 'Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commisars', Theory and Society, Vol.7, No. 1. Scott, James C., 1984, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press.
La Terre, translated by Douglas Parmée, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Downloaded by
- Zola
- Emile
Zola, Emile, 1980, La Terre, translated by Douglas Parmée, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 16:12 23 December 2012
‘Ecology and Evolution: Population, Primitive Accumulation, and the Malay Peasantry
- Donald M Nonini
- Paul Diener
- Eugene E Robkin
Injustice, 364White Plains
- Barrington Moore