Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

Weapons of the Weak is a provocatively framed book about how peasants survive under systems that would exploit and oppress them, which loses its way in an exhaustively detailed ethnographic case study of a Malaysian village, and a dense mass of Marxist analysis leavened with Gramsci. As Scott argues, peasant rebellions are rare events, but outbreaks of revolt are interspersed with a dense array of survival techniques, most unmarked by histories which are perforce written by elites for other elites. Despite their foundational role in human history, and prominence in the dueling literatures of People’s War/Counter-Insurgency from the 1950s onwards, peasant voices are rarely heard.

Scott focuses his study on Sedaka, a rice-farming village in Malaysia which in the years just prior to his case study saw the effects of the Green Revolution. Irrigation meant two rice crops a year, a chance for doubled incomes for all, but in practice the now more capital intensive farming strategies benefited rich farmers, who could most benefit from the combine harvester, fertilizer supplied by partisan corrupt rural development agencies, and most key, could manipulate the basic structure of field rents and leaseholding in their favor.

Against this, the poorer quartiles of Sedaka have few weapons. Derision and scorn are most prominent, as they use tradition and Muslim norms of charity to castigate the rich as stingy and greedy. There are moments of solidarity and sabotage, which fail to stop the combine harvester or their decline in real wages. But the sense that I get is one where in all the terms that matter, the rich farmers of Sedaka have won all the benefits from the Green Revolution, and talk about “counter-hegemonies” is so much air.

I admire Scott most as a synthesist, so seeing this careful case study shows another side of his ability. But unless you specifically care about rural Malaysia circa 1980, this is a tedious work that does not generalize well.