Resumo de Weapons Of The Weak

In Weapons of the Weak Scott looks at ordinary,
everyday peasant resistance and the reasons open revolts are so rare. One of
his main goals is to resolve empirically debates within political science over
the concepts of false consciousness and hegemony. Scott himself is a political
scientist by training, but his study is based on fourteen months
anthropological fieldwork carried out in the late 1970s in the small village of Sedaka

The first chapter introduces us to Sedaka, with a brief description of two
individuals at extreme ends of the social spectrum and a look at the roles they
play in the ideological conflict between rich and poor in the village. The
second presents the basic motivation for the study; Scott feels that inordinate
attention has been paid to the rare occurrences of open revolt by peasants, and
too little to ordinary, everyday forms of resistance and their symbolic and
ideological underpinnings. He also stresses the importance of placing
individual agents, in their particular settings, at the center of analysis.

The third and fourth chapters provide the economic and political background
to the study. Scott begins with Malaysia,
and then narrows in on Kedah State, the Muda plain and the village of Sedaka
itself. He then recounts its economic and social history over the decade or so
preceding, concentrating on such things as land tenure and ownership, income
distributions and the effects of the Green Revolution. This is set within the
background of national politics.

With the next chapter we move into the ethnography proper; Scott now
describes the different interpretations placed by the inhabitants of Sedaka on
the history he has just described. While the villagers still share a common
universe of discourse and have access to the same cultural materials, class
divisions are intensifying, largely as a result of the divergent effects of the
Green Revolution on rich and poor; the two groups tell very different histories
of the village. Particular changes that are the subject of dissension include a
move to rents paid before rather than after the harvest, the introduction of
combine harvesters, a decline in the availability of land and the frequency and
generosity of zakat peribadi and feast-giving. It is significant that the poor
villagers blame their richer neighbors for what is happening, not absentee
Chinese landlords or the government; they have no claims of community and
obligation on the latter.

In the last chapter Scott presents his main
theoretical theses. material base and normative superstructure in Sedaka are
inextricably interwoven. The rich expend effort and material in molding the
latter to suit their own ends at the expense of the poor, who oppose them with whatever
means are available. And, at least in Sedaka, it is political power that
underlies exploitation, not the relations of production. As a result, Scott
suggests that the ideological superstructure must always be seen as a product
of struggle, not as something preexisting. As for hegemony, Scott argues that:
elite values do not really penetrate into the lower classes; inevitability is
not seen as implying legitimacy; hegemonic ideas are always the subject of
conflict, and are continually being reconstructed; and resistance is rooted in everyday material goals
rather than in a revolutionary consciousness. If anything, in
Sedaka it is the rich who are busy breaking the ideological hegemony of the poor. He suggests that this analysis applies to the
working class as well as to peasants, and that there is a clear need to rethink
concepts of hegemony and ideological domination.

In Weapons of the Weak Scott draws on an impressively wide range of
material, both theoretical and comparative. As well as studies of other peasant
communities within Malaysia
and Southeast Asia, he also uses historical work on European peasants
(following historians such as Bloch, Hobsbawm and Thompson) and slaves in the United States.
Here, as well as the historians, Scott also draws on sources such as folk songs
and novels, managing to quote from Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Disraeli, George
Eliot and Brecht. The principal theoretical source is, of course, the running
debate within Marxism over the concepts of false consciousness and hegemony,
following thinkers such as Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser and Habermas.

Weapons of the Weak is not just a political study, however; it is
also an outstanding work of ethnography. Based on thorough research and
careful, perceptive fieldwork, it manages to avoid some of the failings of
traditional ethnography by its emphasis on the centrality of individual human
beings in their particular situations. Whether or not it offers definitive
answers to the questions it investigates, it certainly provides some solid
ground to stand on in looking for them.

More generally, Weapons of the Weak is an example of how much
anthropology has to contribute to history and political science. To historians
it offers one way around the problem - almost paradox - of how to reconstruct
the unwritten history of the illiterate from written records . To political
scientists it offers the essential corrective of empirical evidence, without
which their theorizing tends to lose contact with reality. Weapons of the
Weak is beautifully written and eloquently argued, and fully deserves its
place as a classic alongside The Moral Economy of the Peasant.

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