Harald reads reviewed Weapons of the Weak by James C. Scott
A good book for these times
5 stars
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 …
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.