Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
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A further justification for a close analysis of class relations is that in the village, and not only there, classes travel under strange and deceptive banners. They are not apprehended as ghostly, abstract concepts but in the all-too-human form of specific individuals and groups, specific conflicts and struggles. Piven and Cloward capture the specificity of this experience for the working class:
First, people experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete setting, not as the end product of large and abstract processes, and it is the concrete experience that molds their discontent into specific grievances against specific targets. Workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foremen, the spies, the guards, the owner, and the pay check. They do not experience monopoly capitalism.33
In the same fashion the Malay peasant experiences increasing land rents, stingy [Page 44] landlords, ruinous interest rates from moneylenders, combine-harvesters that replace him, and petty bureaucrats who treat him shabbily. He does not experience the cash nexus or the capitalist pyramid of finance that makes of those landlords, combine-harvester owners, moneylenders, and bureaucrats only the penultimate link in a complex process. Small wonder, then, that the language of class in the village should bear the birthmarks of its distinctive origin. Villagers do not call Pak Haji Kadir an agent of finance capital; they call him Kadir Ceti because it was through the Chettiar moneylending caste, which dominated rural credit from about 1910 until World War II, that the Malay peasant most forcibly experienced finance capital. The fact that the word Chettiar has similar connotations for millions of peasants in Vietnam and Burma as well is a tribute to the homogenization of experience which the capitalist penetration of Southeast Asia brought in its wake. Nor is it simply a question of recognizing a disguise and uncovering the real relationship that lies behind it. For the disguise, the metaphor, is part of the real relationship. The Malays historically experienced the moneylender as a moneylender and as a Chettiar—that is, as a foreigner and a non-Muslim. Similarly, the Malay typically experiences the shopkeeper and the rice buyer not only as a creditor and wholesaler but as a person of another race and another religion. Thus the concept of class as it is lived is nearly always an alloy containing base metals; its concrete properties, its uses, are those of the alloy and not of the pure metals it may contain. Either we take it as we find it or we abandon the empirical study of class altogether.
That the experienced concept of class should be found embedded in a particular history of social relations is hardly to be deplored. It is this rootedness of the experience that gives it its power and its meaning. When the experience is widely shared, the symbols that embody class relations can come to have an extraordinary evocative power. One can imagine, in this context, how individual grievances become collective grievances and how collective grievances may take on the character of a class-based myth tied, as always, to local experience. Thus, a particular peasant may be a tenant of a landlord whom he regards as particularly oppressive. He may grumble; he may even have fantasies about telling the landlord what he thinks of him or even darker thoughts of arson or homicide. If this is an isolated, personal grievance, the affair is likely to stop there—at fantasy. If, however, many tenants find themselves in the same boat, either because they share the same landlord or because their landlords treat them in comparable ways, there arises the basis for a collective grievance, collective fantasy, and even collective acts. Peasants are then likely to find themselves trading stories about bad landlords and, since some landlords are likely to be more notorious than others, they become the focus of elaborate stories, the repository of the collective grievances of much of the community against that kind of landlord in general. Thus, we have the legend of Haji Broom, which has become a kind of metaphorical shorthand for large-scale landlordism in the region. Thus, [Page 45] we have poems about Haji Kedikut, which are not so much stories about individuals as a symbol for an entire class of Haji landlords.
If there had ever been (and there has not) a large-scale movement of rebellion against landlords in Kedah, we can be certain that something of the spirit of those legends would have been reflected in action. The way was already symbolically prepared. But the central point to be emphasized is simply that the concept of class, if it is to be found at all, is to be found encoded in concrete, shared experience that reflects both the cultural material and historical givens of its carriers. In the West, the concept of food is expressed most often by bread. In most of Asia, it means rice.34 The shorthand for capitalist in America may be Rockefeller, with all the historical connotations of that name; the shorthand for bad landlord in Sedaka is Haji Broom, with all the historical connotations of that name.
For all these reasons, the study of class relations in Sedaka, as elsewhere, must of necessity be as much a study of meaning and experience as it is of behavior considered narrowly. No other procedure is possible inasmuch as behavior is never self-explanatory. One need cite only the famous example of a rapid closing and opening of a single eyelid, used by Gilbert Ryle and elaborated on by Clifford Geertz, to illustrate the problem.35 Is it a twitch or a wink? Mere observation of the physical act gives no clue. If it is a wink, what kind of wink is it: one of conspiracy, of ridicule, of seduction? Only a knowledge of the culture, the shared understandings, of the actor and his or her observers and confederates can begin to tell us; and even then we must allow for possible misunderstandings. It is one thing to know that landlords have raised cash rents for rice land; it is another to know what this behavior means for those affected. Perhaps, just perhaps, tenants regard the rise in rents as reasonable and long overdue. Perhaps they regard the rise as oppressive and intended to drive them off the land. Perhaps opinion is divided. Only an inquiry into the experience of tenants, the meaning they attach to the event, can offer us the possibility of an answer. I say “the possibility of an answer” because it may be in the interest of tenants [Page 46] to misrepresent their opinion, and thus interpretation may be tricky. But without that information we are utterly at sea. A theft of grain, an apparent snub, an apparent gift—their import is inaccessible to us unless we can construct it from the meanings only human actors can provide. In this sense, we concentrate at least as much on the experience of behavior as on behavior itself, as much on history as carried in people’s heads as on “the flow of events,”36 as much on how class is perceived and understood as on “objective class relations.”
The approach taken here certainly relies heavily on what is known as phenomenology or ethnomethodology.37 But it is not confined to that approach, for it is only slightly more true that people speak for themselves than that behavior speaks for itself. Pure phenomenology has its own pitfalls. A good deal of behavior, including speech, is automatic and unreflective, based on understandings that are seldom if ever raised to the level of consciousness. A careful observer must provide an interpretation of such behavior that is more than just a repetition of the “commonsense” knowledge of participants. As an interpretation, it has to be judged by the standards of its logic, its economy, and its consistency with other known social facts. Human agents may also provide contradictory accounts of their own behavior, or they may wish to conceal their understanding from the observer or from one another. Hence, the same standards of interpretation apply, although the ground is admittedly treacherous. Beyond this, there simply are factors in any situation that shed light on the action of human agents, but of which they can scarcely be expected to be aware. An international credit crisis, changes in worldwide demand for food grains, a quiet factional struggle in the cabinet that affects agrarian policy, small changes in the genetic makeup of seed grain, for example, may each have a decided impact on local social relations whether or not they are known to the actors involved. Such knowledge is what an outside observer can often add to a description of the situation as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the description that human agents themselves provide. For however partial or even mistaken the experienced reality of the human
agents, it is that experienced reality that provides the basis for their understanding and their action. Finally, there is no such thing as a complete account of experienced reality, no “full verbal transcript of the conscious experience.”38 The fullness of the transcript is limited both by the empirical and analytical interests of the transcriber—in this case, class relations broadly construed—and by the practical limits of time and space.
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What is attempted here, then, is a plausible account of class relations in Sedaka that relies as much as possible on the evidence, experience, and descriptions of action which the participants have themselves provided. At numerous points I have supplemented that description with interpretations of my own, for I am well aware of how ideology, the rationalization of personal interest, day-today social tactics, or even politeness may affect a participant’s account. But never, I hope, have I replaced their account with my own. Instead I have tried to validate my interpretation by showing how it “removes anomalies within, or adds information to, the best description which the participant is able to offer.” For, as Dunn argues,
What we cannot properly do is to claim to know that we understand him or his action better than he does himself without access to the best description which he is able to offer…. The criterion of proof for the validity of a description or interpretation of an action is the economy and accuracy with which it handles the full text of the agent’s description.
1. See, for example, Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975); Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976); Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979).
2. For an example of such temporary gains, see the fine study by E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 281-99.
3. Some of these issues are examined in James C. Scott, “Revolution in the Revolution: Peasants and Commissars,” Theory and Society 7, nos. 1-2 (1979): 97-134.
4. See the fine account and analysis by Michael Adas, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (April 1981): 217-47.
5. R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 96-97. For a gripping account of self-mutilation to avoid conscription, see Emile Zola, The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).
6. See the excellent study by Armstead L. Robinson, “Bitter Fruits of Bondage: Slavery’s Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–65” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, forthcoming), chaps. 5, 6.
7. This issue centered on the much resented “Twenty-Nigger Law,” as it was known, which provided that a white man of draft age could be excused from military service if he was needed to supervise twenty or more slaves. This law, coupled with the hiring of substitutes by wealthy families, encouraged the widespread belief that this was “a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.” Ibid., chap. 5.
8. Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (London: Heinemann, 1980), 231.
9. The best, most complete account of this may be found in Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants and Their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya, 1874–1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977). See also the persuasive argument in Donald M. Nonini, Paul Diener, and Eugene E. Robkin, “Ecology and Evolution: Population, Primitive Accumulation, and the Malay Peasantry” (Typescript, 1979).
10. For a careful and fascinating account of the ways in which China’s production teams and brigades could, until the changes in 1978, have some influence on the definition of “surplus” grain that had to be sold to the state, see Jean C. Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Politics of Grain Procurement (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Michigan, 1983). Nearly all of this resistance was called “soft opposition” by those who practiced it and who made it clear that it was successful only if an “outward manifestation” of compliance was maintained. Ibid., 238.
11. There is an interesting parallel here with some of the feminist literature on peasant society. In many, but not all, peasant societies, men are likely to dominate every formal, overt exercise of power. Women, it is occasionally argued, can exercise considerable power to the extent that they do not openly challenge the formal myth of male dominance. “Real” gains are possible, in other words, so long as the larger symbolic order is not questioned. In much the same fashion one might contend that the peasantry often finds it both tactically convenient as well as necessary to leave the formal order intact while directing its attention to political ends that may never be accorded formal recognition. For a feminist argument along those lines, see Susan Carol Rogers, “Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance,” American Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (November 1975): 727-56.
12. Edward B. Harper, “Social Consequences of an Unsuccessful Low Caste Movement,” Social Mobility in the Caste System in India.’ An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed. James Silverberg, Supplement No. 3, Comparative Studies in Society and History (The Hague: Mouton, 1968): 48-49, emphasis added.
13. Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 184.
14. See, for example, New York Times, Aug. 18, 1983, p. A6, “Polish Underground Backs Call for Slowdown,” in which it is noted that “The tactic of a slowdown, known in Poland as an Italian Strike, has been used in the past by workers because it reduces the risk of reprisal.”
15. Peter Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice (Fall-Winter, 1976): 10. See also the brilliant analysis of piece-work by the Hungarian poet-worker Miklós Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker’s State, trans. Michael Wright (New York: Universe, 1978).
16. Ibid., 13. In 1842, for Baden, there was one such conviction for every four inhabitants. For three centuries poaching was perhaps the most common rural crime in England and the subject of much repressive legislation. See, for example, the selections by Douglas Hay and E. P. Thompson in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
17. Apparently the theft of wood in Germany in this period rarely touched communal forests. It goes without saying that, when a poor man survives by taking from others in the same situation, we can no longer speak of resistance. One central question to ask about any subordinate class is the extent to which it can, by internal sanctions, prevent the dog-eat-dog competition among themselves that can only serve the interests of appropriating classes.
18. As Hobsbawn and Rude point out, it is not only conservative elites who have overlooked this form of resistance, but also the urban left: “The historians of social movements seem to have reacted very much like the rest of the urban left—to which most of them have traditionally belonged—i.e. they have tended to be unaware of it unless and until it appeared in sufficiently dramatic form or on a sufficiently large scale for the city newspapers to take notice.”
19. But not entirely. District-level records are likely to prove rewarding in this respect, as district officials attempt to explain the shortfall in, say, tax receipts or conscription figures to their superiors in the capital. One imagines also that the informal, oral record is abundant, for example informal cabinet or ministerial meetings called to deal with policy failures caused by rural insubordination.
20. The partial exceptions that come to mind are anthropology, because of its insistence on close observation in the field, and the history of slavery and Soviet collectivization.
21. Zola, The Earth, 91.
22. I do not by any means wis
h to suggest that violence born of revenge, hatred, and fury play no role—only that they do not exhaust the subject, as Zola and others imply. It is certainly true, as Cobb (Police and the People, 89-90) claims, that George Rude (The Crowd in History, 1730–1848 [New York: Wiley, 19641) has gone too far into turning rioters into sober, domesticated, bourgeois political actors.
23. Lest this seem implicitly and one-sidedly to treat consciousness as prior to and in some sense causing behavior, one could just as easily recoil one step and inquire about the construction of this consciousness. Such an inquiry would necessarily begin with the social givens of the actor’s position in society. Social being conditions social consciousness.
24. See the argument along these lines by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1954): 77-78.
25. In the Marxist tradition one might cite especially Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quinten Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 123-209, and Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). Marx, to my knowledge, never used the term “falseconsciousness,” although “the fetishism of commodities” may be read this way. But the fetishism of commodities mystifies especially the bourgeoisie, not merely subordinate classes. For a critical view of “hegemony” as it might apply to the peasantry, see James C. Scott, “Hegemony and the Peasantry,” Politics and Society 7, no. 3 (1977): 267-96, and chap. 7 below.