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Weapons of the Weak (Book)
Scott's 1985 landmark ethnography of class conflict in the Malaysian village of Sedaka — the book that introduced the concept of everyday resistance and reshaped how political scientists understood the politics of the structurally powerless.
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance is the product of Scott's two years of fieldwork in a Malaysian rice-farming village between 1978 and 1980. The book documents the class conflict that emerged when the Green Revolution's mechanization displaced the manual harvesting work that had sustained the village's poor. Unable to resist openly — they possessed neither the organizational capacity, nor the legal protections, nor the physical safety required for direct confrontation — the poor engaged in the everyday forms of resistance that Scott cataloged: foot-dragging, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, character assassination, and the maintenance of a hidden transcript of critique that contested the dominant ideology in the safe spaces where the landlord and state were not listening. The book's theoretical ambition was to reshape political science's understanding of what counts as politics and where it happens.
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