James C. Scott, "Behind the Official Story"

Questions for Making Connections Within the Reading:

1. At the opening of his essay, James Scott offers a "crude and global generalization" that he acknowledges needs further qualification: "the greater the disparity in power between dominant and subordinate and the more arbitrarily it is exercised, the more the public transcript of subordinates will take on a stereotyped, ritualistic cast." Create a chart that maps out this relationship, using one of the examples that Scott has provided: the master and the slave, the tenant and the landlord, the colonizer and the colonized. How might the behavior of the parties involved change as the disparity in power grows? How would the behavior change as the arbitrariness of the exercise of power increased?

2. Scott provides an approach to reading and understanding the elaborate performance that occurs whenever the powerful and the disempowered engage with one another. In putting on this performance, which Scott terms "the public transcript, "[i]t is frequently in the interest of both parties," Scott maintains, "to tacitly conspire in misrepresentation." What is it, exactly, that gets misrepresented by the "public transcript"? How does one distinguish between acts of misrepresentation that warrant study and those that are simply acts of civility?

3. Toward the end of his essay, Scott asserts that "virtually all ordinarily observed relations between dominant and subordinate represent the encounter of the public transcript of the dominant with the public transcript of the subordinate." Provide an example from your own experience that illustrates Scott's assertion. What would it take to gain access to the "private transcripts" of those involved in your example? Does your example confirm Scott's assertion that the analyst of such situations "has a strategic advantage over even the most sensitive participants"?

Questions for Writing:

1. One might argue that in a democracy there is no distinction between the public and the hidden transcript: indeed, in the United States, the freedom of the press guarantees that readers are provided with an unending diet of revelations about the private lives of politicians and ordinary people alike. Would you say that freedom of the press and the advent of modern media serve to eliminate the distinction between the public and the private transcripts that Scott has described? In the United States, has the private transcript been made public and thereby emptied of all its power?

2. Scott is interested in promoting the development of a social science that "uncovers contradictions and possibilities, that looks well beneath the placid surface that the public accommodation to the existing distribution of power, wealth, and status often presents." What is to be gained by developing such a social science? Would it help to promote better forms of government? More effective forms of resistance?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. One of the most frequent complaints that students make about school is that they are "required to say what the teacher wants to hear." With Scott's essay in mind, we might say that this is a complaint about being trained to perform and reproduce "the public transcript." In Peter Ho Davies' short story, "What You Know," however, we get a glimpse of a teacher's complaint about his students. Has Davies given his readers access to a "personal hidden transcript," or is his story about a "collective hidden transcript"? Has Davies, in other words, used his story to articulate a point of personal dissatisfaction, or is the story a vehicle for making a broader critique of social relations?

2. Susan Faludi's "The Naked Citadel" provides an opportunity to explore the explanatory power and the limits of Scott's approach to studying resistance. How does one determine who is dominant and who is subordinate at The Citadel? Which transcripts has Faludi gained access to in her research? Scott argues that, "by assessing the discrepancy between the hidden transcript and the public transcript we may begin to judge the impact of domination on public discourse." What does "The Naked Citadel" reveal about "the impact of domination on public discourse"?

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