Resumo de Weapons Of The Weak

In The Moral Economy of the Peasant Scott looked at
the causes of peasant revolts, focusing on those in Burma
and Vietnam
in the early 1930s. He argued that peasant rebellions can only be understood in
the light of a peasant system of values which is irrevocably linked to their
subsistence requirements. In Weapons of the Weak he takes up a similar
subject, this time looking 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 (seventy household) village
of Sedaka (Kedah state, Malaysia).

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. (It might have been interesting to compare these with Malay
writers writing about modern Malay peasants, but Scott appears to have left
this for a more recent book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.)
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 (something which
appears very clearly in a work like Hobsbawm and Rude''s Captain Swing).
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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