Weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance

James Scott’s ethnography Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance is a detailed account of both the culture and history of the Malay people living in the isolated village of Sedaka in Malaysia. The book illustrates the central ideologies and traditions of the population, as well as problems facing the Malay in the future as the Green Revolution reinvents the main industry of agriculture.
The first two chapters introduce two key characters in the book, named Rajak and Haji “Broom”. Each is equally despised by the rest of the community, even though Rajak is one of the poorest men and Haji Broom was one of the richest. There is a symbolic significance to both men that Scott insinuates at the beginning of the book. They both represent the class struggle and the clash of ideologies in Sedaka and other areas of rural Malaysia at this time. Chapter 2 focuses on the everyday forms of resistance – “the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them” (Scott 29). Scott also writes of the importance of the human experience in understanding “everyday resistance”, a concept upon which he expounds later in the ethnography.
Chapter 3 provides the background for the Malay people. Scott describes the farming of rice-paddies as the central industry, as well as the “political machine” that is UMNO (United Malay Nationalists’ Organization). Next, the author goes over the fundamental organization of the village of Sedaka itself. About seventy households line both sides of the one path bisecting the small village. There are also two coffee shops where villagers can socialize and gossip, a fact that illustrates, especially to Westerners, how similar people everywhere around the world really are.
The fifth chapter is where Scott recounts the invasion of the Green Revolution and the “winners and losers” directly after its implementation. New technologies such as combine-harvesters ultimately put many villagers out of work, while making the rich villagers even richer as they more effectively harvested from the paddies. Chapter 6, named “Stretching the Truth: Ideology at Work” focuses on the Marxian theory of worker exploitation. Scott writes about how this exploitation can be “rationalized” by the workers who are being exploited, as well as by the richer villagers who are actually doing the exploiting.
The final two chapters, 7 and 8, wrap up the ethnography with accounts of open and organized resistance, such as “the effort to stop the combine-harvester” (248). Also, Scott returns to the central question, “What is resistance?” (289) With all of the ideologies and motives in the shadows of the actual forms of resistance, whether they be open, organized, or everyday routines, it is difficult to arrive at a generic, all-encompassing definition of what resistance is just in Malaysia, not to mention the rest of the world. Finally, Scott addresses the idea of hegemony, meaning the collective thoughts and ideals of a group. Scott also raises the question of who or what factors are responsible for breaking the hegemony among a group of people.
Although a bit dense with theory and ideology at points, Scott has written a relevant and fascinating ethnography that truly captures the spirit of the Malay people in all of their victories and struggles.