Weapons of the Weak

It's no coincidence that I felt motivated to read "Weapons of the Week" in 2025. James C. Scott uses his ethnographic fieldwork from a small village in Malaysia to develop a notion of resistance that goes beyond Marxist conceptions of open acts of revolutionary resistance. He points out that those are rare occurrences in history, but that one would be mistaken to ignore more subtle acts of resistance that characterize the everyday life of peasants, workers in their struggle to get by. He also effectively questions ideas of hegemony or materialist determinism by showing how the upkeep of the current order is an intricate play between local elites, peasants, and their rituals, beliefs, and traditions.

Scott published his book in 1985, and 40 years later at times feels a bit dated. Ideas that Scott develops in the book nowadays have become widely accepted. But for me that does not take away from enjoying his writing and the careful, ethnographically grounded development of those ideas.

In weapons of the weak James C Scott analyzes how the rise of capitalism and new technology has affected ideology between classes in a specific Malaysian village. A book I would recommend even though it meanders in mathematical details in the middle chapters and ends with a conclusion I find less then convincing. It's strength lies in its history from below approach and on how well it communicates what different intersecting groups think about the changes and how that affects both their actions and thoughts and how those often contradict. It's weakness comes primarily though not exclusively from one main point its main thesis that Scott tries to form from this interesting ethnography and that is a critique of the idea of cultural hegemony. Scott's argument boils down to the idea that although action makes appearance of cultural hegemony private thoughts often show this is just a practical move to survive within the system. A large section of the book focuses on the used strategy's of passive resistance such as evasion, sabotage and feigned ignorance. Another interesting idea is his argument that the cultural ideas allow room for the lower classes to us the dominant ideology to improve their lot in ways. The problems with this is Scott often overstates his proof and valorizes these passive resistance actions and seems to disdain more open revolt. He also seems to conflate erroneously in my view the way the lower classes can use the presentation of the dominant ideology to improve the reality with the idea that the dominant ideology isn't there to enforce the values that work for the rich. Despite these problems all in all it was an entertaining history from below book that shows well passive resistance though I think it suffers from Scott's thesis not following from the presented ethnography.