EVENT
Sedaka
The Malaysian village in the Muda region of Kedah where
Scott conducted the 1978-1980 fieldwork that produced Weapons of the Weak — the empirical ground from which his theory of everyday resistance emerged.
Sedaka is a pseudonymous name for a real rice-farming village in the Muda region of the Malaysian state of Kedah, where Scott lived and conducted ethnographic fieldwork for two years
between 1978 and 1980. The village had been transformed by
the Green Revolution: new irrigation infrastructure had made double-cropping of rice possible, high-yield varieties had boosted productivity, combine harvesters had been introduced to handle the larger crop. From above, the transformation was a success — yields doubled, national rice self-sufficiency approached. From within Sedaka, the transformation looked different. The combine harvesters eliminated the manual harvesting work that had sustained the village's poorest families. The wealthy farmers who could afford the new inputs captured the productivity gains. The tenants and landless laborers who could not afford them were squeezed out. The village's informal economy of reciprocal obligation — the understanding that the wealthy farmer would hire his poorer neighbors for harvest work, that the surplus would be shared through customary arrangements — was dismantled not