James C. Scott, "Behind the Official Story"

How do oppressed peoples survive under repressive regimes? When oppression becomes unbearable, what makes revolution possible? At a time when governments have become awesomely powerful, and awesomely effective at controlling the behavior of the governed, is resistance a meaningful act? These are some of the questions that James C. Scott, Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University and Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, has spent his professional life trying to answer. By working across the disciplines of political science, anthropology, ecology, and cultural studies, Scott is expressing his conviction that "the only way to loosen the nearly hegemonic grip of the separate disciplines on how questions are framed and answered is to concentrate on themes of signal importance to several disciplines."

The author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), Scott has described his most recent book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1997), as the result of an "intellectual detour that became so gripping" it forced him to abandon "his original itinerary altogether." Having set out to understand why the state has always cracked down so hard on nomadic peoples, Scott ended up seeing state efforts to foster sedentary lifestyles as part of a larger project of making society "legible." With this insight, Seeing Like a State then evolved into an exploration of the ways that state planners have tended to take "exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices . . . and created a standard grid whereby [these practices] could be centrally recorded and monitored."

"Behind the Official Story," the opening chapter of Domination and the Arts of Resistance, records Scott's abiding interest in the unruliness of the masses and his commitment to providing alternate understandings of the words and actions of the disempowered. Is it possible to know the story "behind" the official story? Or is this story, which Scott terms "the hidden transcript," forever out of reach of those who are in power? By exploring questions about power in these terms, Scott invites his readers to consider the possibility that reading itself might be a form of resistance.  

Scott, James. "Behind the Official Story." Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 1-16.
Initial quotation drawn from the Yale Agrarian Studies Web site; final quotation drawn from James Scott's introduction to Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Digital image drawn from Yale Bioethics Web site.

Links to Explore:

The Whistlebower: a review essay by Mark Hayes that draws on James Scott's work to explore the social significance of whistleblowing. Published by the Brisbane Institute, an nonpartisan, nonprofit Australian organization committed to encouraging "a unique, informal learning network which crosses the boundaries of traditional learning and business networking."

The Harvard Living Wage Campaign: provides information about the ongoing efforts of students at Harvard to improve the working conditions of the university's service workers.

Forbes: home page for the magazine dedicated to "adventures in capitalism."

Search Google to find examples of hidden and public transcripts.

Questions for Learning:

• In his review of The Whistleblower's Handbook and Deadly Disclosures, Mark Hayes is quite troubled by the fact that the authors of these two books seek to discourage whistleblowing. What is the argument for encouraging whistleblowing? What would Scott make of Hayes public call for resistance? And what would he make of the Brisbane Institute's charter, which seeks to establish an independent forum for airing public debates?
  
  
• When students at Harvard stage a sit-in to protest the wages paid to the university's service workers, has the university's public transcript been ruptured or reinforced? Is The Harvard Living Wage Campaign one of the rare moments when truth has spoken to power? In formulating your answer, make certain to consider the statements made by Matthew Abelson and Faisal Chaudhry and Matthew Daniels.
  
  
• One could argue that Forbes provides what Scott terms elsewhere in Domination and the Arts of Resistance "the flattering self-image of elites." Here we have a magazine dedicated to financial success and excess: what else does the magazine tell its readers that they might find flattering? One might also argue that the magazine gives access to the nation's hidden transcript, for beneath the descriptions of company profits there is a world of information about unequal economic relations, vulnerability, and failure. If you wanted to learn more about the hidden transcript of the readers of Forbes, what would you have to do? Where would you go? Who would you talk to? What kind of questions would you ask?
  
  
• Does the web provide access to "the hidden transcript"? Can a public web site serve as a meeting place for subordinate members of society? Using Google or some other search engine, find examples of sites that you feel provide assess to the hidden transcript of a subordinate or dominant group. How can you distinguish between a significant finding and an insignificant one?

Questions for Connecting:

• In "How to Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien insists that the story he has to tell is true, even though that story comes from O'Brien's collection The Things They Carried, which he explicitly labels a work of fiction. Is O'Brien providing "the public transcript" or "the hidden transcript" of what it means to go to war? If one accepts Scott's terminology, is it possible to speak definitively of "truth" and "fiction," or do all accounts become subject to the charge that their authors are interested, biased, or invested in a certain point of view? In fact, is it even possible "to tell a true war story"?

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