22 July, 2024
James C. Scott, the political scientist, anthropologist and anarchist thinker, whose work has had an increasing footprint in the artworld, has died.
A professor of political science at Yale University, much of Scott’s work has involved looking at historical models of how ‘powerless’ or subaltern groups achieve agency and the strategies they use to pursue it. His breakthrough came in 1985 when, against all advice from colleagues worrying that such an unglamorous move would be detrimental to his academic career, Scott decamped to a Malaysian village of 70 families. The result was his acclaimed Weapons of the Weak (1985), which examined everyday forms of resistance.
‘On the basis of my year and a half in a Malay village,’ he recently reflected in the Annual Review of Political Science. ‘I discovered that resistance was ubiquitous, but it almost always took the forms that were least dangerous and were designed to evade any dangerous retaliation from the authorities.’
