James C. Scott (1936-2024)

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

Researcher and author James C. Scott passed away in his Connecticut home on July 19. He was 87 years old. His seminal works include The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Weapons of the Weak, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, Two Cheers for Anarchism, and Against the Grain.

Scott grew up in New Jersey, receiving a Quaker education. The Quaker social gospel and week-long work camps at homeless shelters, prisons and the like made a deep impression on his worldview and politics. At Williams College he was studying Political Economy with a focus in Economics but fell in love in his senior year and was distracted from his studies. When he went to defend his baccalaureate thesis his advisor rejected his work. Forced to find a new sponsor, he happened upon the door of economist William Hollinger, who was curious about the economic development of Burma (Myanmar). He became an advisor to Scott, who after finishing his BA applied to the Graduate Program in Economics at Yale. Scott had an opportunity to visit North Africa that summer which conflicted with taking the calculus course, causing his transfer to the Political Science department.

Scott decided that in order to call himself a ‘peasantist’ he needed to actually engage in ethnographic fieldwork — a move his fellow political scientists thought was career suicide at worst, and a waste of time at best. He spent fourteen months in a village in Malaysia which became the backbone research for Weapons of the Weak. This work caught the attention of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson; a political scientist using ethnography in their methodology was all but unheard of at the time. The book was also criticised by Edward Said – who thought that exposing and analysing the ‘hidden’ strategies of the subaltern undermined their ability to resist. This opens up a larger question about the nature of radical scholarship itself: when we dissect and make legible the mechanisms and tactics of resistance and rebellion, do we temper their potential? Do we get in our own way with our research?

Scott may not have identified publicly as an Anarchist but he certainly was an anarchist. In Two Cheers for Anarchism he employs what he calls an “anarchist squint” — positioning to gain insights from “forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody [Proudhon’s principle of] mutuality without hierarchy”. Another useful concept from that work is of “anarchist calisthenics” — the idea that we should stay limber by engaging in routine violations of minor laws: jaywalking, minor shoplifting, loitering and the like — because someday it will be necessary to break major laws. His review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday is highly recommended — a delight to read, and useful for the anarcho-primitivist in your life.

It would be remiss to fail to acknowledge the controversy around Scott having once applied to join the CIA, at first willingly reporting on Burmese student activism, and later refusing to do so any longer but seemingly accidentally still providing reports. Knowing this story is important, but I disagree with assertions that it somehow pollutes his scholarship and contributions. Kropotkin was shaped by interactions with serfs his aristocratic family owned. Chelsea Manning was able to leak those documents because of being in the US Military. Circling back to Burma, George Orwell developed his hatred of imperialism after serving with the Indian Imperial Police there. People are shaped by the things they do — including things they regret doing.

I met Scott once at the first North American Anarchist Studies Network conference in Hartford, CT in 2009. We chatted some — at the time I had just finished my honours thesis on the transition from communism to capitalism in Mongolia and its impacts on nomadic pastoralists, so we had agrarian studies as a common vernacular. I think philosophically Scott very much felt like an anarchist. From our brief conversations I surmise he avoided using that label because his scholarship wasn’t grounded in the work of classical anarchist writers — a condition most self-described anarchists would themselves eschew.

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

~ James Birmingham

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