Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance

by James C Scott

  The justification for such an enterprise must lie precisely in its banality—in the fact that these circumstances are the normal context in which class conflict has historically occurred. By examining these circumstances closely, it may be possible to say something meaningful about normal class consciousness, about everyday resistance, about commonplace class relations where, as is most often the case, neither outright collective defiance nor rebellion is likely or possible.

  1. A list of dramatis personae for this study, together with a map of the village and its environs, may be found in chapter 4.

  2. Habuan dia, nasib tak baik. Here and elsewhere in the text, when it seems important or where reasonable people might differ on the translation, I have included the original Malay in the footnotes. A brief glossary of local Kedah dialect terms that may be unfamiliar to speakers of standard, urban Malay is also provided in appendix D.

  3. Papa-kedana.

  4. Long, rectangular “shingles” stitched together from the stems and leaves of the nipah palm, which constitute the roofs and occasionally the walls of poor houses.

  5. Called Hari Raya Puasa or simply Hari Raya.

  6. Derma kilat.

  7. The two-story building built with government help some fifteen years ago is generally referred to as the madrasah, since the ground floor is used regularly for religious classes as well as for village meetings. The upper floor is used exclusively as a prayer house (surau), especially during the fasting month. See in photo section following p. 162.

  8. Called the Ranchangan Pemulihan Kampung (Village Improvement Scheme), the program made grants available to selected villages throughout the country. In this village, the assistance was distributed along strictly partisan lines. An account of this episode may be found in chapter 6.

  9. Apa pasal bikin jamban, rumah pun tak ada.

  10. Razak claims, with some justice, that he is too weak and ill to cultivate and that, in any case, he does not have the money for tractor charges, fertilizer, or seed.

  11. Tak pandai pusing. The implication of this phrase is that Razak does not take pains, does not hustle.

  12. Dia buat susah. Abdul Majid went on to describe many local Chinese families who had begun with nothing and were now rich. One might possibly translate this phrase as: “He is pretending to be hard up,” since the verb for “shamming” (membuatbuat) is occasionally abbreviated.

  13. Lekeh. This word in Kedah carries the meaning of “vulgar, common, shabby, not refined,” and is much like the use of kasar in standard Malay. It is variously applied to people, feasts, commodities, music, cloth, personal behavior, and so forth.

  14. Makanan tak jenuh, kena tumpang kenduri orang.

  15. The generic term for such vegetables, which can be eaten raw with rice, is ulam. Some of the locally available ulam include kangkong, daun cemamak, daunpegaga, bebuas, daun putat, and the banana spadix. Both Razak and his wife would also occasionally catch rice-paddy fish with line and hook. Since the beginning of doublecropping and the increased used of pesticides, however, such fish have become less plentiful and may in fact have serious long-run health consequences for the poor who continue to eat them.

  16. Selalu cari jalan pendek.

  17. These prayers after burial are called Doa Talkin, and the gift to those who pray varies, depending on the status of the deceased. This traditional practice is under attack by Islamic fundamentalists, who wish to purify Malay religious practice by banning pre-Islamic practices. In the adjacent state of Perlis, Doa Talkin are officially forbidden.

  18. Kenduri arwah are normally celebrated on the first, second, third, seventh, fourteenth, fortieth, and hundredth days after a death in the family. Kenduri arwah may be celebrated at other times as well (often after harvest) and are sometimes combined with feasts of thanksgiving as well. The kenduri, much like the selametan in Indonesia, is clearly a pre-Islamic custom that has been thoroughly integrated with Islam.

  19. I should add that much of this was conscience money in the sense that I felt guilty for having been out of the village the day before, when I might have driven the child to the hospital. Another reason for discretion was that such a large sum, given openly, would, I felt, have demeaned the smaller contributions on the plate, which represented a more than comparable sacrifice for others, and would have publicly placed Razak in my permanent debt.

  20. Orang susah, lagi susah; orang kaya, lagi kaya. The fact that he should use the term susah, which might be translated as “hard up,” for his class rather than the term miskin (poor) and the term kaya (rich) for those who are well-to-do rather than the term senang (comfortable), which would make a logical pair with susah, is significant. For further discussion, see chapter 5.

  21. Figures on the loss of wages due to combine-harvesters may be found in chapters 3 and 4. Razak, however, is frail—many would say lazy too—and can thresh paddy for piece-work wages only half as fast as his younger brother, Hamzah.

  22. La ’ni, katok pun tak boleh buat. Gleaning was a traditional means for those with little or no land (rented or owned) to thresh paddy a second time for the grains left on the stalk from the first threshing. The machines now cut up the stalks and scatter them all over the field, eliminating the piles of paddy stalks that used to be left beside the threshing tubs when harvesting was done by hand.

  23. Bawa balik kenduri depa.

  24. Lima duit pun tak bagi sama orang susah.

  25. Defined as “an income sufficient to purchase a minimum food basket to maintain a household in good nutritional health and the minimum needs for clothing, household management, transport, and communication.” Cited in International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Malaysia: Selected Issues in Rural Poverty, World Bank Report 2685-MA, vol.2 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1980), 4.

  26. The words Razak used were tak betul, which is hard to render exactly in this context. A person who is betul would be honest and good-hearted.

  27. Sombong. Along with the charge of being stingy, this is probably the most serious personal charge that is commonly heard in village society. People who are sombong have, in effect, removed themselves from the community by acting superior to their fellows. The opposite of sombong is merendahkan diri, “to act modestly” or “to lower oneself.”

  28. One wonders how much Razak would have gotten had he behaved less aggressively. I suspect much less, but I have no way of knowing

  29. Hari Raya Haji, when pilgrims leave for Mecca. Donations of rice on this occasion are normally given by the quarter gallon (cupak).

  30. Minta sedekah. The social definition of what Razak is doing is important. As Simmel understands: “no one is socially poor until he has been assisted…. And this has general validity: sociologically speaking, poverty does not come first and then assistance… but a person is called poor who receives assistance.” Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), 175. In the same sense no one is a beggar in Sedaka until he is perceived to have asked for alms.

  31. Erving Goffman has captured the strange power that those without shame can exercise. “Too little perceptiveness, too little savoir-faire, too little pride and considerateness, and the person ceases to be someone who can be trusted to take a hint about himself or give a hint that will save others embarrassment…. Such a person comes to be a real threat to society; there is nothing much that can be done with him, and often he gets his way.” Ritual Interaction: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967), 40, emphasis added.

  32. Usung rumah is meant literally here. The entire house is detached from its pillars and moved to a new location by a crowd sometimes approaching 120 men.

  33. Johan zakat.

  34. Kita ta’ mau bagi sedekah sama Razak, dia bohong, mau bagi saja sama orang miskin yang betul, macham Hamzah.

  35. Mau makan orang yang ada. The verb means literally “to eat” but is used here, as it often is, in the sense of “to exploit,” to “l
ive off of.”

  36. Sebelah orang ramai, banyak. Sebelah sikit, lagi susah. Kita punya fikir otak, kita mau sebelah orang banyak. Kita, literally “we,” is often used in the sense of “I” or “my family” in the local dialect.

  37. The word Razak used for “shabby,” “vulgar,” is lekeh, the same word usedto describe Maznah’s coffin and Razak’s behavior. The word used here for slander is mengumpat.

  38. Orang kaya sombong. Kita tabik, depa tak tabik balik. Tak chakap, tak tengok pun. Kalau orang senang dengar kita sembang, depa marah (I find it impossible todetermine whether Razak’s use of kita here means “I” or whether he wishes to includeother poor people like himself in the statement). Just how deeply humiliating it isto be beneath notice, to be invisible, not to have one’s greeting returned is at thecore of Hegel’s notion of the dialectic of self-consciousness. It is in an act as banalas a greeting that it becomes clear that one’s own self-esteem is dependent on beingaccorded recognition by another, even if this greeting, as in Hegel’s famous exampleof the duel, must come at the cost of life. See, for example, Hans Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), chap. 3.

  39. From Juan Martinez Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, Publications, No. 4 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), 206.

  40. The condition of his house is often the first remark about Haji Ayub. In contrast, one of the very first investments that even modest peasants made with the first proceeds of double-cropping in 1971 was to repair or make additions to their houses.

  41. It is a poor peasant indeed in Sedaka who does not buy (for 10¢) a bundle of nipah cigarette wrappers in the market.

  42. The miser is the symbol of pure accumulation in the sense that he acquires money and property as an end in itself, not as a means to the pleasures they may provide. In this respect, Haji Ayub’s three wives, one short of the maximum allowed by the Koran, may have represented simply another aspect of accumulation. On this subject, see Simmel’s essay “Miser and Spendthrift,” in Georg Simmel, 179-86.

  43. The Malay verb “to sweep” (sapu, menyapu) carries the same metaphorical force. Thus when someone wished to describe how a rich man had rented up all the available land in the area, he would say, Dia sapu semua (He swept it all up).

  44. See, for example, Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Advisor to the Kedah Government, December 11, 1912, to November 30, 1913, W. George Maxwell (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1914), 23; Annual Report of the Advisor to the Kedah Government, 1914, L. E. D. Wolferston (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1915), 14; and Government of Malaysia, Report of the Rice Production Committee, 1953 (Kuala Lumpur: 1954), vol. 1, p. 82. The Rice Production Committee describes the system as follows: “a man borrows, say M$50 for the purpose of obtaining credit over the planting season and promises to pay a kunca (160 gallons) of padi at harvest worth $102 at current government guaranteed minimum price, but $140 at the market average.” It is worth noting here there is no necessary symmetry between the gain of the moneylender and the distress of the borrower. High interest rates in rural Southeast Asia have often reflected the actual cost of money and the high risk of debtor default. Thus, while these interest terms may have been punishing to smallholders, they do not imply a fabulous return to the lender.

  45. Haram here means “forbidden by Islamic law,” but the force of the word as it is actually used conveys the deep sinfulness of taking interest; makan bunga (literally to “eat” interest).

  46. One of the many relevant passages in the Koran reads as follows: “They who swallow down usury, shall arise in the resurrection only as he ariseth whom Satan hath infected by his touch. This, for that they say, Selling is only the like of usury, and yet God hath allowed selling, and forbidden usury. He then who when this warning shall come to him from his Lord, abstaineth, shall have pardon for the past, and his lot shall be with God. But they who return [to usury], shall be given over to the fire; therein shall they abide forever.” Surah 11:275. The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (London: Everyman’s Library, 1977), 369.

  47. Analogous practices could be found throughout colonial Southeast Asia, for example in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Burma.

  48. There are variants in the actual timing of the formal transfer of property and in the use rights to the land while it is thus “mortgaged,” but the basic arrangements remain the same.

  49. While in theory a borrower could have deposited the required amount in an escrow account and informed the court, thereby saving his land, it was a rare peasant indeed who knew about, let alone exercised, this option.

  50. Politik hidup. The term is not easy to translate; it also implies that Haji Broom is concerned solely with getting ahead in this world at the expense of his immortal soul.

  51. Bukan lokek, haloba.

  52. As Moroccan peasants put it succinctly: “Those who have no shame do as they please.” Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 158. This folk wisdom makes its tortuous way back to social science in the following guise: “to ostracize a man is to remove him from social controls…. He has nothing to lose by conformity and perhaps even something to gain by vexing them.” George C. Homans, “Status, Conformity, and Innovation,” in The Logic of Social Hierarchies, ed. Edward O. Lauman et al. (Chicago: Markham, 1970), 599.

  53. Compare this with the comment made by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in the course of his portrait of a thirteenth-century Albigensian village in southern France: “Wealth in itself was not the real object of attack. What the people of Montaillou hated was the unhealthy fat of the undeserving rich, clerics, and mendicants who exploited the village without giving in return any spiritual aid or even those services of help and protection habitually provided by a well-to-do domus or by wealthy local nobles.” Montaillou: Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Braziller, 1978), 341.

  54. Dongeng could be variously translated as “legend,” “fairy tale,” “myth,” all of which call into question its truth value.

  55. See Afifuddin Haji Omar, Peasants, Institutions, and Development in Malaysia: The Political Economy of Development in the Muda Region, MADA Monograph No. 36 (Alor Setar: MADA, 1978), 50-56.

  56. Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Acting Advisor to the Kedah Government, 1916, G. A. Hall (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1917), 2.

  57. The reverse is not necessarily the case. That is, a good many Hajis are men of fairly modest financial means who have made considerable sacrifices, including the sale of land, to make the pilgrimage. Some never recover financially.

  58. From the verb sangkut meaning “to hang something up on a peg,” hence “to drape clothes on oneself.” It is also possible that sangkut is a corruption of songkok, the Malay cap, thereby implying an imposter who wears the small skullcap of a Haji without having made the pilgrimage.

  59. Merduk means “a thing or possession of no value” and karut means “false or untrue.”

  60. Haji karut yang teruk sekali.

  61. Hukuman melayu lagi teruk. Here the literal translation is “Malay punishment,” but the reference is to religion, since the two are synonymous. Thus the phrase masuk melayu, which means literally “to become a Malay” and is used to describe people of other races who marry a Malay, is more appropriately translated as “to become a Muslim.”

  62. A by no means exhaustive list would include the following: kedekut, kikir, bakhil, berkira, lokek, tamak, tangkai jering (noun), keras hati (also means “stubborn”).

  63. Haji Kedekut, bangun malam

  Kira duit, diam-diam

  Makan nasi, lauk garam

  Tidur lantai, tak ada tilam

  Sri Delima, As I Was Passing, vol. 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing, 1978).

  64. Team record for dry season of 1979: two wins, five losses, and one draw—a performance attributable only in part to the author’s goal keeping.<
br />
  65. It appears that the term is widespread, at least in northeast Malaysia. On Mokhzani’s list of Malay moneylenders in Perlis (the state immediately to the north of Kedah and forming part of the same rice (plain), half the entries bear the nickname Ceti. Mokhzani bin Abdul Rahim, Credit in a Malay Peasant Society (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1973), 393-94.

  66. The last phrase in Malay, Banyak mana pun tak boleh cukup, is difficult to render in English, and I have translated it rather freely. A more literal translation would be, “No matter how much, it wouldn’t be enough.”

  67. In conversation as in literature the bizarre and the evil are always more gripping than the commonplace and the saintly. How else to explain the content of popular newspapers? Caliban is always more interesting than Ariel, Mephistopheles more interesting than the Angel of Light.

  68. For an analysis of “the politics of reputation” and empirical studies, see F G. Bailey, Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation (New York: Schocken, 1971).

  69. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” is quite apt in this instance. See also A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Bantam, 1968), 96.

  70. The equivalent for “consideration” in Malay is timbang rasa, which means literally “to weigh feelings” (of others).

  71. This brief analysis of “deference” benefits from the analyses of Howard Newby, “The Deferential Dialectic,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 2 (April 1975): 139-64, and Erving Goffman, “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,” American Anthropologist 58 (June 1956): 473-503.

  72. The opposite case, in which the pedestrian openly reufses to make even an appearance of haste (or actually slows down) also occurs. Here there is a direct defiance of the motorist’s right to the road, an open breach of the symbolic order. The community of pedestrians in effect announces its prior right to the road. Such an open dare invites a game of “chicken” in which the motorist, alas, is usually best equipped to prevail.