Scott - Weapons of The Weak PDF

Weapons of the Weak
EVERYDAY FORMS OF
PEASANT RESISTANCE
James C. Scott
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Contents
List of Tables xu
Preface xv
1. Small Arms Fire in the Class War 1

Razak 1
Haji "Broom" 13
The Symbolic Balance of Power 22
2. Normal Exploitation, Normal Resistance 28
The Unwritten History of Resistance 28
Resistance as Thought and Symbol 37
The Experience and Consciousness of Human Agents 41
3. The Landscape of Resistance 48

Background: Malaysia and the Paddy Sector 50
Middle Ground: Kedah and the Muda Irrigation Scheme 59
Landownership • Farm Size • Tenure • Mechanization • From Exploitation
to Marginalization • Income • Poverty • Institutional Acc~:rs
4. Sedaka, 1967-1979 86
The Village 86
Rich and Poor 91
Village Composition 100
Land Tenure 100
Changes in Tenancy 103
Changes in Rice Production and Wages 110
Local Institutions and Economic Power 125
The Farmers' Association • The Ruling Party in Sedaka
5. History according to Winners and Losers 138

Class-ifying 138
Ships Passing-and Signaling-in the Night 141
Two Subjec.tive Class Histories of the Green Revolution 147
Double-cropping and Double Vision 148
From Living Rents to Dead Rents 15 1
Combine-Harvesters 154
Losing Ground: Access to Paddy Land 164
Rituals of Compassion and Social Control 169
The Remembered Village 178
ix
x • CONTENTS
6. Stretching the Truth: Ideology at Work 184

Ideological Work in Determinate Conditions 184
The Vocabulary of Exploitation 186
Bending the Facts: Stratification and Income 198
Rationalizing Exploitation 204
Ideological Conflict: The Village Gate 212
Ideological Conflict: The Village Improvement Scheme 220
Argument as Resistance 233
7. Beyond the War of Words: Cautious Resistance and

Calculated Conformity 241
Obstacles to Open, Collective Resistance 242
The Effort to Stop the Combine-Harvester 248
"Routine" Resistance 255
Trade Unionism without Trade Unions • Imposed Mutuality • Self-
help and/or Enforcement • Prototype Resistance
"Routine" Repression 27 4
Routine Compliance and Resistance that Covers Its Tracks 278
ConfOrmity and the Partial Transcript 284
What Is Resistance? 289
8. Hegemony and Consciousness: Everyday Forms of

Ideological Struggle 304
The Material Base and Normative Superstructure in Sedaka 305
Rethinking the Concept of Hegemony 314
Penetration • Inevitability, Naturalization, and justice • Conflict
within Hegemony • Trade Union Consciousness and Revolution •
Who Shatters the Hegemony?
Appendixes
A. A Note on Village Population, 1967-1979 351
B. Farm Income Comparisons for Different Tenure and Farm
Size Categories: Muda, 1966, 1974, 1979 355
C. Data on Land Tenure Changes, Net Returns, and
Political Office 356
D. Glossary of Local Terms 361
E. Translation of Surat Layang 362
Bibliography 364
Index 375
Photographs following page 162

CONTENTS • xi
Maps
1. The Muda Irrigation Scheme Area in Peninsular Malaysia 60
2. Kedah and the Muda Scheme Area 61
3. Kampung Sedaka 88
Tables
3.1 Size Distribution of Paddy-Land Holdings, Muda Irrigation

Scheme, 1975-1976 69
3.2 Size Distribution of Farms, 1966 and 1975-1976 70
3.3 Land Tenure in Muda, 1966 and 1975-1976 71
3. 4 Family Income Comparisons fur Different Tenure Groups and
Farm-Size Categories in Muda, 1966, 1974, 1979 78
3.5 Income Comparisons between Tenure Categories, 1966, 1974,
1979 80
3. 6 Net Income of Various Tenure and Farm-Size Categories as
Percentage of Rural Poverty-Line Income 82
3. 7 Relationship of Distribution of Farm Sizes, Farmers'
Association Membership, and Production Credit Recipients 83
4.1 Village Data by Households-Identified by Household Head
and Ranked from Poorest to Richest according to Per Capita
Annual Net Income 92
4.2 Distribution of Ownership of Paddy Land in Sedaka, 1967-
1979 96
4. 3 Distribution of Paddy Farm Size in Sedaka, 1967-1979 99
4.4 Frequency Distribution of Farm Holding in Sedaka, 1967-
1979 101
4. 5 Classification of Tenancy Agreements in Sedaka by Timing of
Rental Payment, 1967, 1979 103
4. 6 Classification of Tenancy Agreements in Sedaka by
Negotiability of Rents, 1967, 1979 104
4. 7 Rental Rates fur Tenancies Classified by Degree of Kinship
between Landlord and Tenant in Sedaka, 1979 106
4.8 Proportion of Total Net Income Derived from Paid Paddy-Field
Labor by Households in Sedaka: Main Season, 1977-1978 112
4.9 Reported Losses of Net Household Income in Sedaka due to
the Mechanization of Rice Harvesting: Irrigated Season, 1977,
Compared with Irrigated Season, 1979 116
4.10 Village Me~bers of Farmers' Association, with Shares Owned,
Land Claimed fur Loan Purposes, Land Actually Farmed,
Political Affiliation, and Income Rank, June 1979 127
4.11 Political Affiliation of Households in Sedaka by Income Level,
in Percentages 13 3
xii
TABLES • xiii
Appendix Tables
Cl Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1967 356
C2 Land Tenure in Sedaka, 1979 357
C3 Net Returns per Relong for Various Classes of Cultivators in
Sedaka, Depending on Size of Yield, 1979 358
C4 Officers and Members of the Village Development Committee
(JKK) of UMNO in Sedaka, with Income Rank of Family, 1979 360
BLANK PAGE
Preface
The limitations of any field of study are most strikingly revealed in its shared
definitions of what counts as relevant. A great deal of the recent work on the
peasantry-my own as well as that of others-concerns rebellions and revolu-
tions. Excepting always the standard ethnogmphic accounts of kinship, ritual,
cultivation, and language-it is fair to say that much attention has been devoted
to organized, large-scale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily,
to pose a threat to the state. I can think ofa host of mutually reinfOrcing reasons
why this shared understanding of relevance should prevail. On the left, it is
apparent that the inordinate attention devoted to peasant insurrections was stim-
ulated by the Vietnam war and by a now fading left-wing, academic romance
with wars of national libemtion. The historical record and the archives-both
resolutely centered on the state's interests-abetted this romance by not men-
tioning peasants except when their activities were menacing. Otherwise the
peasantry appeared only as anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription,
crop production, taxes, and so fOrth. There was something fur everyone in this
perspective. For some, it emphasized willy-nilly the role of outsiders-prophets,
radical intelligentsia, political parties-in mobilizing an otherwise supine, dis-
organized peasantry. For others, it fOcused on just the kinds of movements with
which social scientists in the West were most familiar-those with names,
banners, tables of organization, and formal leadership. For still others, it had
the merit of examining precisely those movements that seemed tO promise large-
scale, structural change at the level of the state. .
What is missing from this perspective, I believe, is the simple fact that most
subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been affurded the
luxury of open, organized, political activity. Or, better stated, such activity was
dangerous, if not suicidal. Even when the option did exist, it is not clear that
the same objectives might not also be pursued by other stratagems. Most sub-
ordinate classes are, after all, far less interested in changing the larger structures
of the state and the law than in what Hobsbawm has appropriately called
"working the system . . . to their minimum disadvantage." 1 Formal, organized
political activity, even if clandestine and revolutionary, is typically the preserve
of the middle class and the intelligentsia; to look fur peasant politics in this
realm is to look largely in vain. It is also--not incidentally-the first step toward
concluding that the peasantry is a political nullity unless organized and led by
outsiders.
And fur all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebellions-let alone
1. Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1

(1973): 3-22.
XV
xvi • PREFACE
revolutions-are few and far between. The vast majority are crushed uncere-
moniously. When, more rarely, they do succeed, it is a melancholy fact that the
consequences are seldom what the' peasantry had in mind. Whatever else revo-
lutions may achieve--and I have no desire to gainsay these achievements-they
also typically bring into being a vaster and more dominant state apparatus that
is capable of battening itself on its peasant subjects even more effectively than
its predecessors.
For these reasons it seemed to me more important to understand what we
might call everyday forms of peasant resistance--the prosaic but constant struggle
between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, fuod, taxes, rents,
and interest from them. Most furms of this struggle stop well short of outright
collective defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively
powerless groups: fuot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pil-
fering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on. These Brechtian-
or Schweikian-furms of class struggle have certain features in common. They
require little or no coordin!ltion or planning; they make use of implicit under-
standings and infOrmal networks; they often represent a furm of individual self-
help; they typically avoid any direct, symbolic confrontation with authority. To
understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to understand much of
what the peasantry has historically done to defend its interests against both
conservative and progressive orders. It is my guess that just such kinds of
resistance are often the most significant and the most effective over the long
run. Thus, Marc Bloch, the historian of feudalism, has noted that the great
millenia! movements were "flashes in the pan" compared to the "patient, silent
struggles stubbornly carried on by rural communities" to avoid claims on their
surplus and to assert their rights to the means of production-for example,
arable, woodland, pastures. 2 Much the same view is surely appropriate to the
study of slavery in the New World. The rare, heroic, and foredoomed gestures
of a Nat Turner or a John Brown are simply not the places to look fur the struggle
between slaves and their owners. One must look rather at the constant, grinding
conflict over work, fuod, autonomy, ritual-at everyday furms of resistance. In
the Third World it is rare fur peasants to risk an outright confrontation with
the authorities over taxes, cropping patterns, development policies, or onerous
new laws; instead they are likely to nibble away at such policies by noncompli-
ance, foot dragging, deception. In place of a land invasion, they prefer piecemeal
squatting; in place of open mutiny, they prefer desertion; in place of attacks on
public or private grain stores; they prefer pilfering. When such stratagems are
abandoned in favor of more quixotic action, it is usually a sign of great desper-
ation.
Such low-profile techniques are admirably suited to the social structure of the
2. Marc Bloch, French Rural History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: Univ. of
CalifOrnia Press, 1970), 170.
PREFACE • xvii
peasantry-a class scattered across the countryside, lacking fOrmal organization,

and best equipped fur extended, guerrilla-style, defensive campaigns of attrition.
Their individual acts of fuot dragging and evasion, reinfOrced by a venerable
popular culture of resistance and multiplied many thousand-fOld, may, in the
end, make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-be
superiors in the capital. Everyday fOrms of resistance make no headlines. But
just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do the
multiple acts of peasant insubordination and evasion create political and economic
barrier reefs of their own. It is largely in this fashion that the peasantry makes
its political presence felt. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state
runs aground on such reefs, attention is usually directed to the shipwreck itself
and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. For these
reasons alone, it seems important to understand this quiet and anonymous welter
of peasant action.
To this end, I spent two years (1978-80) in a Malaysian village. The village,
which I call Sedaka, not its real name, was a small (seventy-household), rice-
farming community in the main paddy-growing area ofKedah, which had begun
double-cropping in 1972. As in so many other "green revolutions" the rich have
gotten richer and the poor have remained poor or grown poorer. The introduction
of huge combine-harvesters in 1976 was perhaps the coup de grace, as it elim-
inated two-thirds of the wage-earning opportunities fur smallholders and landless
laborers. In the course of two years I managed to collect an enormous amount
of relevant material. My attention was directed as much to the ideological struggle
in the village--which underwrites resistance-as to the practice of resistance
itself. Throughout the book I try to raise the larger issues of resistance, class
struggle, and ideological domination that give these issues their practical and
theoretical significance.
The struggle between rich and poor in Sedaka is not merely a struggle over
work, property rights, grain, and cash. It is also a struggle over the appropriation
of symbols, a struggle over how the past and present shall be understood and
labeled, a struggle to identify causes and assess blame, a contentious effort to
give partisan meaning to local history. The details of this struggle are not pretty,
as they entail backbiting, gossip, character assassination, rude nicknames, ges-
tures, and silences of contempt which, fur the most part, are confined to the
backstage of village life. In public life--that is to say, in power-laden settings-
a carefully calculated conformity prevails fur the most part. What is remarkable
about this aspect of class conflict is the extent to which it requires a shared
worldview. Neither gossip nor character assassination, for example, makes much
sense unless there are shared standards of what is deviant, unworthy, impolite.
In one sense, the ferociousness of the argument depends on the fact that it appeals
to shared values that have been, it is claimed, betrayed. What is in dispute is
not values but the facts to which those values might apply: who is rich, who is
poor, how rich, how poor, is so-and-so stingy, does so-and-so shirk work? Apart
xviii • PREFACE
from the sanctioning power of mobilized social opinion, much of this struggle
can also be read as an effurt by the poor to resist the economic and ritual
marginalization they now suffer and to insist on the minimal cultural decencies
of citizenship in this small community. The perspective adopted amounts to an
implicit plea fur the value of a "meaning-centered" account of class relations. In
the final chapter I try to spell out the implications of the account fur broader
issues of ideological domination and hegemony.
The fOurteen months I spent in Sedaka were filled with the mixture of elation,
depression, missteps, and drudgery that any anthropologist will recognize. As
I was not a card-carrying anthropologist, the whole experience was entirely new
to me. I do not know what I would have done without the very practical lectures
on fieldwork sent to me by F. G. Bailey. Even with this wise advice, I was not
prepared fur the elementary fact that an anthropologist is at work from the
moment he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night. In the
first few months, perhaps half my trips to the outhouse were fur no purpose
other than to find a moment of solitude. I fuund the need for a judicious
neutrality-that is, biting my tongue-to be well-advised and, at the same
time, an enormous psychological burden. The growth of my own "hidden tran-
script" (see chapter 7) made me appreciate fur the first time the truth of Jean
Duvignaud's comment: "For the most part, the village yields itself to the in-
vestigator and often he is the one to take refuge in concealment.'' 3 I also fuund
neighbors who were fOrgiving of my inevitable mistakes, who were tolerant-
to a point-of my curiosity, who overlooked my incompetence and allowed me
to work beside them, who had the rare ability to laugh at me and with me at
the same time, who had the dignity and courage to araw boundaries, whose
sense of sociability included talking literally all night if the talk was animated
and it was not harvest season, and whose kindness meant that they adapted
better to me than I to them. What my time among them meant fur my life
and my work, the word gratitude cannot begin to cover.
Despite a determined effurt to trim the manuscript, it remains long. The
main reason fur this is that a certain amount of storytelling seems absolutely
essential to convey the texture and conduct of class relations. Since each story
has at least two sides, it becomes necessary to allow also fur the "Roshomon
effect" that social conflict creates. Another reason fur including some narrative
has to do with the effort, toward the end, to move from a dose-to-the-ground
study of class relations to a fairly high altitude. These larger considerations
require, I think, the flesh and blood of detailed instances to take on substance.
An example is not only the most successful way of embodying a generalization,
but also has the advantage of always being richer and more complex than the
principles that are drawn from it.
3. Jean Duvignaud, Change at Shebika: Report From a North African Village (New
York: Pantheon, 1970), 217.
PREFACE • xix
Wherever the translation from Malay was not straightfOrward, or where the
Malay itself was of interest, I have included it in the text or fOotnotes. As I
never used a tape recorder, except fur fOrmal speeches given by outsiders, I worked
from fragmentary notes made while talking or immediately afterward. The result
is that the Malay has something of a telegraphic quality, since only the more
memorable fragments of many sentences were recoverable. Early in my stay, as
well, when the rural Kedah dialect was strange to my ears, quite a few villagers
spoke to me in the simpler Malay they might use at the market. A glossary of
specific Kedah dialect terms that appear in the text and notes will be fuund in
appendix D.
This book is fur a special reason, I suspect, more the product of its subjects
than most village studies. When I began research, my idea was to develop my
analysis, write the study, and then return to the village to collect the reactions,
opinions, and criticisms of villagers to a short oral version of my findings. These
reactions would then comprise the final chapter-a kind of "villagers talk back"
section or, if you like, "reviews" of the book by those who should know. I did
in fact spend the better part of the last two months in Sedaka collecting such
opinions from most villagers. Amidst a variety of comments-often reflecting
the speaker's class-were a host of insightful criticisms, corrections, and sugges-
tions of issues I had missed. All of this changed the analysis but presented a
problem. Should I subject the reader to the earlier and stupider version of my
analysis and only at the end spring the insights the villagers had brought fOrward?
This was my first thought, but as I wrote I fuund it impossible to write as ifi
did not know what I now knew, so I gradually smuggled all those insights into
my own analysis. The result is to understate the extent to which the villagers
of Sedaka were responsible fur the analysis as well as raw material of the study
and to make what was a complex conversation seem more like a soliloquy.
Finally, I should emphasize that this is, quite self-consciously, a study of local
class relations. This means that peasant-state relations, which might easily justify
a volume on resistance, are conspicuously absent except as they impinge on local
class relations. It means that issues of ethnic conflict or religious movements or
protest, which would almost certainly become important in any political crisis,
are also largely bracketed. It means that economic origins of the petty class
relations examined here, which might easily be traced all the way to the board
rooms of New York City and Tokyo, are not analyzed. It means that fOrmal
party politics at the provincial or national level is neglected. From one point of
view all these omissions are regrettable. From another perspective the effort here
is to show how important, rich, and complex local class relations can be and
what we can potentially learn from an analysis that is not centered on the state,
on fOrmal organizations, on open protest, on national issues.
The unseemly length of the acknowledgments that fOllow is indicative of how

much I had to learn and of the patience and generosity of those who taught me.
xx • PREFACE
To the families of "Sedaka," whose names are disguised for obvious reasons, I
owe a great personal debt-a debt that is the heavier because more than one
would feel their hospitality abused by what I have written. That is, of course,
the human dilemma of the professional outsider, and I can only hope that they
will find what fOllows an honest effOrt, by my own dim lights, to do justice to
what I saw and heard.
My institutional affiliation while in Malaysia was with the School of Com-
parative Social Sciences at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. I could not
have been more fOrtunate as a guest or scholar. At the School, I want particularly
to thank Mansor Marican, Chandra Muzaffar, Mohd Shadli Abdullah, Cheah
Boon Kheng, Khoo Kay ]in, Colin Abraham, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor-
then Dean-Kamal Salih, and Assistant Dean Amir Hussin Baharuddin fur
their advice and kindness. Nafisah bte. Mohamed was an exceptional tutor of
the Kedah dialect who helped me prepare fur the fieldwork. The Centre fur
Policy Research at USM has conducted much of the finest research on the Muda
Scheme in Kedah and, fur that matter, on agrarian policy anywhere. Lim Teck
Ghee and David Gibbons of the Centre not only helped me plan the research
but became valued friends and critics whose effOrts are evident throughout the
book-even when I decided to go my own way. Thanks are also due Sukur
Kasim, Harun Din, Ikmal Said, George Elliston, and, of course, the Director
of the Centre, K. J. Ratnam. Officials of the Muda Agricultural Development
Authority's headquarters in Teluk Chengai near Alor Setae were unfailingly gen-
erous with their time, their statistics, and above all their great experience. One
would look long and hard in any development project to find officials whose
learning, rigor, and candor would match that of Affifuddin Haji Omar and
S. Jegatheesan. Datuk Tamin Yeop, then General Manager of MADA, was also
very helpful.
Members of the "invisible college" working and writing on rural Malaysian
society whose paths crossed my own contributed enormously to my understand-
ing. They are numerous and I shall undoubtedly overlook a few. Some might
well prefer not to be implicated at all. But I should mention Syed Husin Ali,
Wan Zawawi Ibrahim, Shaharil Talib, Jomo Sundaram, Wan Hashim, Rosemary
Barnard, Aihwa Ong, Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, Diana Wong, Donald Non-
ini, William Roff, Judith and Shuichi Nagata, Lim Mah Hui, Marie-Andre
Couillard, Rodolfe de Koninck, Lorraine Corner, and Akira Takahashi. Two staff
members from Universiti Sains who came to Yale fur graduate work, Mansor
Haji Othman and S. Ahmad Hussein, were important sources of advice and
criticism. Finally, I should single out the generosity of Kenzo Horii of the
Institute of Developing Economies in Tokyo, who conducted a study of land
tenure in Sedaka in 1968 and made the results available to me so that I could
establish what a decade of change had meant.
The final manuscript was much changed thanks to the detailed criticism of
PREFACE • xxi
colleagues. I made painful cuts; I dropped arguments they thought ludicrous or

irrelevant-or both; I added historical and analytical material they thought nec-
essary. Even when I spurned their wisdom, I was often driven to strengthen or
shift my position to make it less vulnerable to a direct hit. Enough is enough,
however; if they had had their way completely, I would still be at work revising
and trying to reconcile the confusion they unwittingly sowed. I cannot wait to
return the favor. Thanks to Ben Anderson, Michael Adas, Clive Kessler, Sam
Popkin (yes, that's right), Mansor Haji Othman, Lim Teck Ghee, David Gib-
bons, Georg Elwert, Edward Friedman, Frances Fox Piven, Jan Gross, Jonathan
Rieder, Diana Wong, Ben Kerkvliet, Bill Kelly, Vivienne Shue, Gerald Jaynes,
and Bob Harms. There ate unnamed others who agreed to read the manuscript-
or even solicited it-and who, perhaps on seeing its bulk, had second thoughts.
They know who they are. Shame!
A good many institutions helped keep me and this enterprise afloat since
1978. In particular, I should like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Me-
morial Foundation, the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SOC 78-
02756), and Yale University for support while in Malaysia. Most recently a post-
doctoral Exxon Fellowship awarded by the Science, Technology, and Society
Program of Massachusetts Institute of Technology made it possible to complete
the final draft and most of the revisions. Carl Kaysen was tolerant of my preoc-
cupation with the manuscript and, together with Martin Kreiger, Kenneth
Kenniston, Charles Weiner, Peter Buck, Loren Graham, Carla Kirmani, Leo
Marx, and Emma Rothschild, helped make my stay intellectually rewarding. A
symposium on "History and Peasant Consciousness in Southeast Asia" sponsored
by the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan, and arranged by Shi-
geharu Tanabe and Andrew Turton helped sharpen my perspective. Another and
more contentious workshop organized with the help of the Social Science Resctarch
Council and held at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague was responsible
for the analysis of resistance in chapter 7. I doubt if any of the participants of
either exchange would want to subscribe fully to the argument I advance, but
they should at least know how valuable their own writing and criticism have
been for this work.
Thanks are due the following publications in which small portions of an earlier
draft have appeared: International Politir;al Science Review (October 1973); History
and Peasant Comciousness in Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew Turton and Shige-
haro Tanabe, Senri Ethnological Studies, No. 13 (Osaka: National Museum of
Ethnology, 1984); Political Anthropology (1982); and, in Malay, Kajian Malaysia
1:1 (June 1983).
There ate a good many typists, processors of words, and editors who are
delighted that this manuscript is now out of their hands. Among the most
delighted are Beverly Apothaker, Kay Mansfield, and Ruth Muessig; I do want
to thank them for their fine work.
xxii • PREFACE
The relationship between this book and my family life is complex enough to
rule out any of the banalities that usually appear in this space. Suffice it to say
that, try though I may, I have never remotely persuaded Louise and our children
that their function is to help me write books.
1 • Small Arms Fire
in the Class War
This is, exactly, not to argue that "morality" is some "autonomous region" of
human choice and will, arising independently of the historical process. Such a
view of morality has never been materialist enough, and hence it has often
reduced that fOrmidable inertia-and sometimes fOrmidable revolutionary
fOrce--into a wishful idealist fiction. It is to say, on the contrary, that every
contradiction is a conflict of value as well as a conflict of interest; that inside
every "need" there is an affect, or "want," on its way to becoming an "ought"
(and vice versa); that every class struggle is at the same time a struggle over
values.
E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory
RAZAK
The narrow path that serves as the thoroughfare of this small rice-farming village
was busier than usual that morning. Groups of women were on their way to
transplant the irrigated crop and men were bicycling their children to the early
session of school in the nearby town of Kepala Batas. My children were all
gathered, as usual, at the windows to watch as each passerby gazed our way
from the moment the house came into view until it passed from view. This scene
had become, in the space of a few weeks, a daily ritual. The villagers of Sedaka
were satisfying their curiosity about the strange family in their midst. My
children, on the other hand, were satisfying a more malevolent curiosity. They
had come to resent mildly their status of goldfish in a bowl and were convinced
that sooner or later someone would fOrget himself while craning his neck and
walk or bicycle straight into the ditch alongside the path. The comic possibility
had caught their imagination and, when it inevitably happened, they wanted to
be there.
But something was amiss. A small, quiet knot of people had fOrmed in front
of the house next door and some passersby had paused to talk with them.
Hamzah and his older brother, Razak, were there, as was Razak's wife, Azizah,
and the village midwife, Tok Sah Bidan. 1 The tone was too subdued and grave
to be casual and Azizah, along with other women from poor families, would
normally have already left fur work with her transplanting group. Before I could
1. A list of dramatis personae fur this study, together with a map of the village
and its environs, may be found in chapter 4.
2 • SMALL ARMS FIRE IN THE CLASS WAR
leave the house, Haji Kadir, the well-to-do landlord with whose family we shared
the house, walked in and told me what had happened. "Razak's little child is
dead, the one born two seasons ago." "It's her fate; her luck wasn't good. " 2
The details were straightfOrward. Two days ago the child had come down
with a fever. It was the end of the dry season in Kedah when fevers are expected,
but this seemed to be more than the ordinary fever, perhaps measles, someone
suggested. Yesterday she had been taken to Lebai Sabrani, a highly venerated
religious teacher and traditional healer in the adjoining village of Sungai Tong-
kang. He recited verses of the Koran over her and suggested a poultice fur her
forehead. I am implicated in this too, Razak told me later. Had I not been
visiting another village, he would have asked me to drive the child to a clinic
or to the hospital in the state capital, Alor Setar. As it was, he did ask Shamsul,
the only other automobile owner in the village, and was told that it would cost
M$15 fur gas. Razak did not have any money or, I suspect, enough confidence
in hospitals to press the matter, and his. daughter died shortly befOre dawn the
next day.
Instinctively, I started fur Razak's place, behind Hamzah's house, where the
body would customarily be on view. Razak stopped me and said, "No, not there.
We put her in Hamzah's house; it's nicer here." His embarrassment was evident
from the way he avoided meeting my eyes.
Razak is the "down-and-out" 3 of the village, and his house was not only an
embarrassment to him; it was a collective humiliation fur much ofSedaka. When
I had arrived in the village, Razak and his family were living under the house,
not in it. Two walls of attap4 and bamboo had fallen away and much of the
roof had collapsed. "They live like chickens in a henhouse, a lean-to, not like
Malays," villagers said with derision. Not long after that, the local leader of the
ruling party, Basir, mindful of the fact that Razak had joined his party and
embarrassed that any Malays in his village should live on the ground like the
beasts of the field, got the subdistrict chief to provide a modest sum from his
discretionary funds fur lumber to repair the house. A small voluntary work party,
all members of the ruling party, then repaired three walls, leaving the last wall
and the roof fur Razak to finish. After all, Razak and Azizah made attap roofing
fur a living. The roof remains as it was, however, and the boards to repair the
last wall are gone. Razak sold them twice--once to Rokiah and once to Kamil,
2. Habuan dia, nasib tak baik. Here and elsewhere in the text, when it seems
important or where reasonable people might differ on the translation, I have included
the original Malay in the footnotes. A brief glossary of local Kedah dialect terms
that may be unfamiliar to speakers of standard, urban Malay is also provided in
appendix D.
3. Papa-kedana.
4. Long, rectangular "shingles" stitched together from the stems and leaves of
the nipah palm, which constitute the roofs and occasionally the walls of poor houses.
SMALL ARMS FIRE IN THE CLASS WAR • 3
but only Kamil got the lumber; Rokiah calls Razak an "old liar" and says he
would sell his own children. She swears she will never buy anything from him
again unless she takes delivery first.
As we mounted the ladder to Hamzah's house, I realized that this was the
first time I had actually entered his family's one-room living and sleeping quar-
ters. I never did enter Razak's house or the houses of six of the other poorest
families in the village. They chose instead always to receive me outside, where
we squatted or sat on simple benches. We remained outside because they were
embarrassed about the condition of their houses and because actually entering
the house would imply a level of hospitality (coffee, biscuits) that would strain
their meager resources. When possible, I made an effort to meet on neutral
grounds-in the rice fields, on the path-or perhaps in one of the two small
shops in the village or at the twice-weekly nearby market, where I could legit-
imately play host. For the rich people of the village the problem never arose;
they never went to the homes of the poor. Visiting, except between equals, was
always done up the status ladder in the village, and particularly so during the
ritual visits following the end of the Moslem fasting month. 5 In fact, the pattern
of visits served to define the village status hierarchy. This pattern was broken
significantly only in the case of grave illness or death in a poor household, when
the normal rules of hospitality were suspended out of respect for a more universal
human drama.
Thus it was that the death of Maznah (Razak's daughter) had opened
Hamzah's house to me and to many others. She was lying on a tiny mattress
surrounded by mosquito netting strung from the rafters. Her body was wrapped
in a new white cloth, and her face was barely visible beneath a lace shawl of the
kind women wear for prayer. Beside the netting was incense and a tin plate.
Each new visitor would, after lifting the netting to look at the child, place
money on the plate: as little as 50¢, or as much as M$2. The contributions to
funeral expenses, known as "lightening" or "instant donations, " 6 were especially
necessary in this case since neither Razak nor many of the other very poor
villagers subscribed to a death benefit society that "insures" for funeral expenses.
The money on the plate at the end of the day would provide for at least the
minimal decencies.
There were perhaps twenty-five villagers, mostly women, sitting on the floor
of the bare room talking quietly in small groups. A few men remained to talk
among themselves, but most left quickly to join the other men outside. Razak,
sitting by the door, was ignored, but his isolation was not a c:ollective act of
respect for his private grief. At feasts, at other funerals, at the village shops,
and even at market stalls, the other men always sat somewhat apart from Razak.
He did not intrude himself. His daughter's death was no exception; the men
5. Called Hari Raya Puasa or simply Hari Raya.

6. Derma kilat.
who left shuffled around him as if he were a piece of furniture. On the rare
occasions when he was addressed, the tone was unmistakable. A group of men
sitting in one of the village stores having ice drinks and smoking would hail
his arrival with "Here comes Tun Razak" followed by knowing smiles all around.
"Tun Razak" was the aristocratic title of Malaysia's second prime minister, and
its application to this ragtag, frail, obsequious village pariah was intended to
put him in his place. Whoever was treating that day would pay fur his drink,
and Razak would help himself to the tobacco and cut nipah leaves used to make
peasant cigarettes. He was extended the minimal courtesies but otherwise ig-
nored, just as today the village was burying his daughter but he himself might
as well have been invisible.
Directly across the path, outside the combination village hall, religious school
(madrasah), 7 and prayer house, a few young men had begun measuring the spare
boards they had rounded up fur a coffin. Yaakub thought the boards were far
too long and Daud, the son of the village headman, was sent back to Hamzah's
house with string to measure. Meanwhile Basir arrived with hot tea and the
special canvas used for the bottom of the casket. The talk turned, as it often
did in the coffee shops, to an ex-change of stories about Razak's many capers,
most of which were established staples of village gossip. Amin shared the most
recent installment having to do with the subsidies given by the government fur
house improvement and permanent outdoor toilets. 8 Razak, along with other
member~ of the ruling party-and only them-was the recipient of a porcelain
toilet bowl. Despite explicit warnings against selling such material, Razak had
exchanged his fur Amin's plastic bowl and cash and in turn sold the plastic toilet
to Nor fur M$15. Yaakub, to the g,.neral merriment, asked why Razak should
build a toilet anyway, when he did not even have a house. 9
Yaakub then wondered whether anyone else had seen Razak dig into the curry
at the wedding feast fur Rokiah's daughter two days before, a feast to which he
had not been invited. Shahnon added that only yesterday, when Razak turned
up at the coffee stall in the town market, he invited him to have some coffee,
it being understood that Shahnon would pay. The next thing he noticed, Razak
had left after having not only drunk coffee but taken three cakes and two
cigarettes. Others recalled, partly for my benefit, how Razak took payment fur
7. The two-story building built with government help some fifteen years ago is
generally referred to as the madrasah, since the ground floor is used regulatly fur
religious classes as well as fur village meetings. The upper floor is used exclusively
as a prayer house (surau), especially during the fasting month. See in photo section
fOllowing p. 162.
8. Called the Ranchangan Pemulihan Kampung (Village Improvement Scheme), the
program made grants available to selected villages throughout the country. In this
village, the assistance was distributed along strictly partisan lines. An account of
this episode may be fuund in chapter 6.
9. Apa pasal bikin jamban, rumah pun tak ada.
attap roofing from Kamil and never delivered it and how Kamil gave him cash
for special paddy seed that Razak said he could get from a friend in a nearby
village. Accosted a week later, he claimed his friend with the seed had not been
at home. Accosted again the fOllowing week, he claimed his friend had already
sold the seed. The money was never returned. On various occasions, they
claimed, Razak had begged seed paddy fur planting or rice fur his family. In
each case, the gift had been sold for cash, not planted or eaten. Ghazali accused
him of helping himself to nipah fronds from behind his house fur roofing without
ever asking permission and of having begged for a religious gift of paddy (zakat)
even befure the harvest was in. "I lost my temper," he added as many shook
their heads.
When the well-to-do villagers lament, as they increasingly do, the growing
laziness and independence of those they hire fur work in the fields, the example
of Razak is always close at hand. They have other illustrations, but Razak is by
far the most serviceable. Any number of times, they claim, he has taken advance
wages in cash or rice and then failed to show up fur work. As for his poverty,
they are skeptical. He has, after all, half a relong (.35 acre), which he rents out
like a landlord rather than farming himself. 10 The general verdict is that he is
simply not capable of getting ahead. 11 When the subdistrict chief (penghulu),
Abdul Majid, confides to me that the poor are reluctant to work anymore and
now insist on unrealistic wages, he seizes the example of Razak. "He has made
himself hard up, it's his own doing." 12
By now the simple coffin was nearly finished and Amin, the best carpenter
in the village, began to add some small decorative touches at the ends. "No
need to add decorations," put in Ariffin, and Amin left off. As they carried the
coffin across to Hamzah's house, where Maznah lay, someone sized up the work
and said, "shabby. " 13
Returning to my house I encountered a small group ofPak Haji Kadir's wife's
friends talking about the child's death. They all seemed to agree that Razak
and Azizah were largely to blame. After all, they took their sick daughter to
Rokiah's feast the day befure yesterday, fed her fuod she should not have had,
and kept her up to all hours. "They don't eat at all well," said Tok Kasim's
10. Razak claims, with some justice, that he is too weak and ill to cultivate and
that, in any case, he does not have the money for tractor charges, fertilizer, or seed.
11. Tak pandai pusing. The implication of this phrase is that Razak does not take
pains, does not hustle.
12. Dia buat susah. Abdul Majid went on to describe many local Chinese families
who had begun with nothing and were now rich. One might possibly translate this
phrase as: "He is pretending to be hard up," since the verb for "shamming" (membuat-
buat) is occasionally abbreviated.
13. Lekeh. This word in Kedah carries the meaning of "vulgar, common, shabby,
not refined," and is much like the use of kasar in standard Malay. It is variously
applied to people, feasts, commodities, music, cloth, personal behavior, and so forth.
wife, "they have to tag along at other people's feasts." 14 At my urging, the
details of the family's scant cuisine emerged. For breakfast, if there was any
money in the house, coffee and perhaps cassava or a bit of cold rice left over
from the day before. Otherwise, only water. And Razak's family, someone added,
drank water from the same ditch used for bathing. Rarely any porridge, never
any milk, and almost never any sugar unless j\.zizah brought some back from
her relatives in Dulang. By contrast, the village headman, Haji Jaafar, usually
took his morning meal in the town coffee shop, where he had porridge or fried
flat bread with sugar or curry, assorted cakes and sweets made with sticky rice,
and coffee with sweetened condensed milk. The midday meal, the main one in
the village, for Razak's family would typically include rice, vegetables that could
be gathered free in the village, 15 and, if finances permitted, some dried fish or
the cheapest fish from the market. No one had ever seen Razak buy vegetables.
Fresh fish, when they had it, was normally cooked over an open fire, for it was
rare that they could afford the 30¢ minimum purchase of the cheapest cooking
oil. Haji Jaafar's midday meal, on the other hand, reflected both his wealth and
his rather sumptuous tastes: a tasty curry made from the most expensive fish
and market vegetables and, at least twice a week, a luxury that Razak never
bought-meat.
Razak's household, like its food, was distinguished less by what it had than
by what it lacked. The couple had no mosquito netting, which helped explain
why their children's arms and legs were often covered with the scabs of old
bites. Maybe once a year they bought a bar of the cheapest soap. They had to
share three tin plates and two cups when they ate. They lacked even the tra-
ditional mats to sleep on, using instead an old cast-off plastic sheet Razak found
at the ~ket. As for clothes, Azizah had not bought a sarong since her wedding,
making do instead with worn-out cloth given her by Basir's wife. Razak's one
pair of pants and shirt were bought three years ago when there was a sale of
secondhand clothing that had not been redeemed at the pawnbrokers. As Cik
Puteh pointed out, the responsibility for this deplorable situation rested squarely
with Razak. "He has land but he doesn't want to plant it." "He's always looking
for short cuts." 16 "He takes the money first but doesn't want to come thresh
paddy." "Now, those who are hard up are getting cleverer; there's more cheating
these days."
14. Makanan tak jenuh, kena tumpang kenduri orang.
15. The generic term for such vegetables, which can be eaten raw with rice, is
ulam. Some of the locally available ulam include kangkong, daun cemamak, daun pegaga,
bebuas, daun putat, and the banana spadix. Both Razak and his wife would also
occasionally catch rice-paddy fish with line and hook. Since the beginning of double-
cropping and the increased used of pesticides, however, such fish have become less
plentiful and may in fact have serious long-run health consequences for the poor who
continue to eat them.
16. Selalu cari }alan pendek.
The sound of motorcycle engines next door told us that the body had been
prepared for burial and the funeral procession was about to begin. Normally, in
the case of an adult, the coffin would have been carried the two miles to the
mosque with a cortege of men following on foot, on bicycle, and on motorcycle.
Since Maznah was so small and light, Hamzah, her uncle, carried her wrapped
in a new batik cloth slung over his shoulder like a bandolier as he rode pillion
behind Basir on his Honda 70. The plain coffin \\-.:S carried athwart Amin's
motorcycle by Ghani Lebai Mat. Counting Razak and myself, there were only
eleven men, and it was the first entirely motorcycle-born cortege I had ever seen.
The villagers and later the Chinese shopkeepers in Kepala Batas paused briefly
to watch us pass.
In the graveyard next to the mosque, Tok Siak (caretaker of the mosque) and
his assistant were still digging the grave. Maznah, covered with a cotton winding
sheet, was taken gently from the batik cloth and placed in the coffin on her side
so that she would be facing Mecca. A large clod of clay from the grave was
lodged against her back to prevent her position from shifting. Tok Siak was now
bailing water from the grave with an old biscuit tin; the burial plot was on
reclaimed paddy land and the seasonal rains had begun. The prayers, led by
Lebai Sabrani, took less than ten minutes and it was over. Most of the men then
entered the mosque to pray for Maznah's soul. When they emerged, Basir handed
them envelopes containing a dollar, as is the custom. 17 The six men who had
prayed returned the envelopes. Villagers believe that these prayers help lighten
the burden of sin and speed the soul on its way to heaven; the more who pray,
the more rapid the soul's progress. On the way back to the village, I asked
Amin why there were so few people at the burial. He replied that, since Maznah
was so young, her sins were few, and thus it was not so important that many
people pray on her behalf. But it was a sensitive question, for we both remem-
bered the burial ofTok Sah's infant granddaughter a month earlier when two or .
three times that number had come to the graveyard.
That night, again at Hamzah's house, there was a small funeral feast. 18 Not
more than fifteen men came, and Haji Kadir led the brief Islamic prayers and
chants. The expenses, for coffee, flat bread with sugar, and the makings of
17. These prayers after burial are called Doa Talkin, and the gift to those who
pray varies, depending on the status of the deceased. This traditional practice is
under attack by Islamic fundamentalists, who wish to purify Malay religious practice
by banning pre-Islamic practices. In the adjacent state of Pedis, Doa Talkin are
officially forbidden.
18. Kenduri arwah are normally celebrated on the first, second, third, seventh,
fourteenth, fortieth, and hundredth days after a death in the family. Kenduri arwah
may be celebrated at other times as well (often after harvest) and are sometimes
combined with feasts of thanksgiving as well. The kenduri, much like the selametan
in Indonesia, is clearly a pre-Islamic custom that has been thoroughly integrated
with Islam.
peasant cigarettes carne to less than M$12 and were partly defrayed by minute
donations of coins. Razak, as usual, was ignored, invisible. Later, as Yaakub
and I walked back home along the village path, he asked if I had noticed how
the tobacco had run short because Razak had pocketed some fur later use.
"Shabby," was his summary.
Early in the morning, three or fOur days later, Razak appeared at the foot of
my steps waiting to be asked up. Whenever he carne to see me it was always
early enough so that no one else was about; if someone else did happen by, he
would fall silent and take the first opportunity to leave. Despite the fact that
the gossip about him had long aroused my curiosity, I had already round myself
avoiding much talk with him in public, having sensed that it could only set
village tongues wagging. Was he taking advantage of me? What tales and
slanders would he put in my ear? Did I actually approve of this good~fur-nothing?
Razak had come to thank me fur my large contribution to the funeral expenses.
I had made a discreet donation directly into Razak's hands the day his daughter
died, knowing that if I had put M$20 directly on the plate near the body, I
would have received no end of scolding. 19
BefOre long we passed on to the topic I had been raising recently in conver-
sations with villagers: the enormous changes that have come to Sedaka since the
beginning of double-cropping eight years ago. It was clear to Razak that things
. were generally worse now than befure irrigation. "Befure it was easy to get work,
now there's no work in the village and the estates (rubber and oil palm) don't
want anyone." "The poor are poorer and the rich are richer. " 20 The trouble, he
added, is mostly because of the combine-harvesters that now cut and thresh
paddy in a single operation. BefOre, his wife could earn over M$200 a season
cutting paddy and he could earn M$150 threshing, but this last season they
only managed M$150 between them. 21 "People weren't happy when the rna-
19. I should add that much of this was conscience money in the sense that I felt
guilty fur having been out of the village the day befure, when I might have driven
the child to the hospital. Another reason fur discretion was that such a large sum,
given openly, would, I felt, have demeaned the smaller contributions on the plate,
which represented a more than comparable sacrifice fur others, and would have publicly
placed Razak in my permanent debt.
20. Orang susah, lagi susah; orang kaya, lagi kaya. The fact that he should use the
term susah, which might be translated as "hard up," fur his class rather than the
term miskin (poor) and the term kaya (rich) fur those who are well-to-do rather than
the term senang (comfOrtable), which would make a logical pair with susah, is sig-
nificant. For further discussion, see chapter 5.
21. Figures on the loss of wages due to combine-harvesters may be fuund in
chapters 3 and 4. Razak, however, is frail-many would say lazy too-and can thresh
paddy fur piece-work wages only half as fast as his younger brother, Hamzah.
chines came." "You can't even glean anymore." 22 What distressed him about
the machine as well was how it removed money from the village and gave it to
outsiders. Money that might have gone to paddy reapers and threshers from the
village and in turn been used partly for local feasts within Sedeka was now paid
directly to the owners of these expensive machines. As Razak put it, "They
carry it away for their own feasts. " 23
Not only was wage work harder and harder to come by, but it was almost
impossible now to find land to rent. In the old days, he said, landlords wanted
you to take land and hardly bothered about the rent. Today, they farm all the
land themselves or else rent out large plots under long-term leases to wealthy
Chinese contractors with machinery. "They won't give (land) to their own
people." "They won't even give five cents to someone who is hard up. " 24
Razak has begun to warm up to one of his favorite laments, one he shares
with many of the other village poor: the growing arrogance and stinginess of
the rich. It is reflectOO. iO<what.he ..sees as their attitude toward charity. Little
wonder that Razak-with a tiny patch of rice land, four (now three) young
children, and a frail physique (and many would say a reluctance to work)-
should be concerned about charity. The official povqrty-level ~come for a family
ofRazak's size would be M$2,400. 25 Their actual income, not counting charity,
last year was less than M$800, by far the lowest in the village. It would'be
misleading to say they get by, for Maznah's death may be evidence that they do
not. Without the small amount of charity they receive, without Azizah's fre-
quent flights with the children back to her parents' village of Dulang when the
food gives out, and perhaps without Razak's capers, which offend the village,
it would be hard to imagine the rest of them surviving at all. \
If others blamed Razak's situation on his own moral failings, he hurled the
charge back at them. "There are lots of Malays who are not honest. " 26 "Now,
Malays who get wages of even three or four hundred dollars have become arro-
22. La 'ni, katok pun tak boleh buat. Gleaning was a traditional means for those
with little or no land (rented or owned) to thresh paddy a second time for the grains
left on the stalk from the first threshing. The machines now cut up the stalks and
scatter them aU over the field, eliminating the piles of paddy stalks that used to be
left beside the threshing tubs when harvesting was done by hand. ··
23. Bawa batik kenduri depa.
24. Lima duit pun tak bagi sama orang susah.
25. Defined as "an income sufficient to purchase a minimum food basket to
maintain a household in good nutritional health and the minimum needs for clothing,
household management, transport, and communication." Cited in International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development, Malaysia: Selected Issues in Rural Poverty, World
Bank Report 2685-MA, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1980), 4.
26. The words Razak used were tak betul, which is hard to render exactly in this
context. A person who is betul would be honest and good-hearted.
gant. " 27 "They don't help others out. In the village, they don't even give you
a single cup of coffee." The charge is not strictly true. As nearly as I could
calculate over a year, Razak's family received enough gifts of paddy and rice
(milled paddy) to feed them for perhaps three months. At the end of Ramadan
it is the duty of each Moslem to make a religious gift of rice, called fitrah. In
addition to the customary gifts to the mosque, the imam, and the village prayer
house, rice is often given, one gallon at a time, to poor relatives and neighbors,
particularly those who have worked during the season for the farmer making the
gift. Razak was given nearly ten gallons of rice as fitrah, although not without
a residue of bitterness. Rather than waiting politely to be summoned to collect
his fitrah as is customary, Razak went from house to house asking for it. Only
a few refused; 28 after all, a family ought to be able to eat rice on the major
Islamic feast day, and such gifts are seen as a way of cleansing one's own
possessions. Razak collected smaller gifts, in the same fashion, on the second
major Islamic feast day a month later. 29 The third occasion for religious gifts is
at harvest time, when all Muslims are enjoined to tithe 10 percent of their
harvest (the zakat). Despite thefact that official responsibility for zakat collection
has recently been taken over by the provincial authorities, informal zakat pay-
ments along traditional lines persist. It is given in paddy, not rice, and is an
important supplement to the income of poor, landless families. Razak received
a gunny sack of paddy from his eldest brother in Yan, for whom he had threshed,
and four or five gallons from within the village, by using his usual aggressive
methods. From time to time, Razak also asks for small gifts of rice from likely
prospects. Usually, he puts it in terms of advance wages, using language that
masks the nature of the transaction, but the fiction is paper thin. Those who
are importuned say he is "begging for alms. " 30
Being pushy has its rewards. Razak receives a good deal more food than many
27. Sombong. Along with the charge of being stingy, this is probably the most
serious personal charge that is commonly heard in village society. People who are
sombong have, in effect, removed themselves from the community by acting superior
to their fellows. The opposite of sombong is merendahkan diri, "to act modestly" or
"to lower oneself."
28. One wonders how much Razak would have gotten had he behaved less ag-
gressively. I suspect much less, but I have no way of knowing.
29. Hari Raya Haji, when pilgrims leave for Mecca. Donations of rice on this
occasion are normally given by the quarter gallon (cupak).
30. Minta sedekah. The social definition of what Razak is doing is important. As
Simmel understands: "no one is socially poor until he has been assisted .... And
this has general validity: sociologically speaking, poverty does not come first and
then assistance ... but a person is called poor who receives assistance." Georg Simmel
on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1971), 175. In the same sense no one is a beggar in Sedaka until he is
perceived to have asked fur alms.
of the other poor in the village-more than Mansur, Dullah, Mat "halus"
("Skinny" Mat), Pak Yah, or Taib. The additional cost to his reputation is
minimal; his standing is already virtually the definition of rock bottom. 31 On
the other hand, he does not do nearly so well as his younger brother, Hamzah,
who is often held up as an example of the deserving poor. Hamzah is an
acknowledged hard worker, as is his wife; he serves as caretaker of the madrasah
and he unfailingly appears to help with the cooking at feasts, to assist in house
moving, 32 and to help repair the village path. Mter last season's harvest, and
partly out of sympathy fur a month-long illness that prevented him from working
as usual, he received eight gunny sacks of paddy from villagers and relatives.
Basir calls him the "zakat champ," 33 contrasting the results with the meager
return from Razak's more aggressive style. "We don't want to give alms to
Razak, he's a liar-only to honest poor like Hamzah. " 34 Fadzil, another influ-
ential villager, echoed these sentiments. "There are lots of poor who lie, cheat,
and are lazy." "They look fur a shady tree to perch on." "They want to gobble
up the well-to-do." 35 In a reflective moment, however, he noticed the potential
fur a vicious cycle here. "If we don't give them alms because they steal, then
maybe they have to keep stealing. " This was as close as anyone I spoke with
ever came to recognizing explicitly the importance of charity fur the social control
of the village poor.
On the political front, Razak has done what a prudent poor man might do
to safeguard his and his family's interests. Four or five years ago he paid the
M$1 subscription to join the village branch of the ruling party, which dominates
politics and the division of whatever loaves and fishes filter down to the village
level. "If you go with the crowd, there's a lot to be had. With the minority, it
would be difficult. I used my head. I want to be on the side of the majority. " 36
31. Erving Goffman has captured the strange power that those without shame
can exercise. "Too little perceptiveness, too little savoir-faire, too little pride and
considerateness, and the person ceases to be someone who can be trusted to take a
hint about himself or give a hint that will save others embarrassment . . . . Such a
person comes to be a real threat to society; there is nothing much that can be done
with him, and often he gets his way." Ritual Interaction: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior
(Garden City: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967), 40, emphasis added.
32. Usung rumah is meant literally here. The entire house is detached from its
pillars and moved to a new location by a crowd sometimes approaching 120 men.
33. Johan zakat.
34. Kita ta' mau bagi sedekah sama Razak, dia bohong, mau bagi saja sama orang
miskin yang betul, macham Hamzah.
35 . .Mau makan orang yang ada. The verb means literally "to eat" but is used
here, as it often is, in the sense of "to exploit," to "live off of."
36. Sebelah orang ramai, banyak. Sebelah sikit, lagi susah. Kita punya fikir otak, kita
mau sebelah orang banyak. Kita, literally "we," is often used in the sense of "I" or
"my family" in the local dialect.
Razak's logic, shared by some but by no means all of the village poor, has paid
the expected dividends. When a drought, a year earlier, forced the cancellation
of the irrigated paddy season, the government created a work-relief program.
Politics weighed heavily in the selection of workers· and Razak was a winner.
The local Farmer's Association office hired him to take care of their poultry for
forty days at M$4.50 a day, and he was paid M$50 to help clear weeds from a
section of the irrigation canal. None of the poor villagers who were on the wrong
side of the political fence did nearly as well. The wood with which his house
was partly repaired came through the political influence ofBasir. More free wood
and the toilet bowl that Razak sold were part of a subsidy scheme that, in
Sedaka at least, was available only to followers of the ruling party. If the figure
of speech were not so inappropriate to the Malay diet, one might say that Razak
knew which side his bread was buttered on.
As a beneficiary of local patronage and charity, however reluctantly given, one
might expect Razak to entertain a favorable opinion of his "social betters" in
the village. He did not. He also sensed what they said behind his back. "I don't
go to the houses of rich people; they don't ask me in. They think poor people
are shabby (vulgar) people. They think we are going to ask for money as alms.
They say we're lazy, that we don't want to work; they slander us." 37 What
offended Razak as much as anything was that these same rich people were not
above calling on the poor when they needed help. But when it came to reci-
procity, there was none. "They call us to catch their (runaway) water buffalo or
to help move their houses, but they don't call us for their feasts."/
It has not escaped his notice either that he and many others like him are
invisible men. "The rich are arrogant. We greet them and they don't greet us
back. They don't talk with us; they don't even look at us! If the rich could hear
us talking like this, they'd be angry." 38 Razak is special in some respects, but
he is not unique. Compare what he has to say with this couplet from the
agricultural laborers of Andalusia:
37. The word Razak used for "shabby," "vulgar," is lekeh, the same word used
to describe Maznah's coffin and Razak's behavior. The word used here for slander is
mengumpat.
38. Orang kaya sombong. Kita tabik, depa tak tabik batik. Tak chakap, tak tengok
pun. Kalau orang senang dengar kita sembang, depa marah (I find it impossible to
determine whether Razak's use of kita here means "I" or whether he wishes to include
other poor people like himself in the statement). Just how deeply humiliating it is
to be beneath notice, to be invisible, not to have one's greeting returned is at the
core of Hegel's notion of the dialectic of self-consciousness. It is in an act as banal
as a greeting that it becomes clear that one's own self-esteem is dependent on being
accorded recognition by another, even if this greeting, as in Hegel's famous example
of the duel, must come at the cost of life. See, for example, Hans Georg Gadamer,
Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1972), chap. 3.
I was a rich man and I became poor

to see what the world gave them.
And now I see that nobody
looks at the face of a poor man. 39
A week after the funeral, I returned to my house from the market to find a
land-rover on the path in front of Hamzah's house. The emblem on the door
said "Ministry of Health." Presently, two nurses emerged from behind Hamzah's
house where Razak lived. They had instructions, they said, to make an inquiry
whenever a young child's death was reported and to try to help the family with
nutritional advice. They had left some powdered milk, but they seemed pro-
roundly discouraged by what they had seen and learned. "What can you do with
people like that?" they asked no one in particular as they climbed into the land-
rover for the trip back to the capital.
HAJI "BROOM" .
Before considering the significance of Razak fur class relations in Sedaka, it is
instructive to introduce his symbolic, mirror-image twin, his fellow outcast from
the opposite end of the social pyramid, Haji Broom. My stories about him are
all secondhand, for he died some five or six years befOre I arrived in the village,
but they are plentiful.
Not long after I moved to Sedaka, Lebai Hussein invited me to attend a
wedding feast for his son Taha, who was marrying a woman from a village near
the town of Yan Kechi!, six miles to the south. To accommodate the large
number of guests, the bride's family had built a covered pavilion outside their
house where the male guests sat. Talk centered on the prospects fur the current
main-season crop and on how the cancellation of the previous irrigated-season
crop due to the drought had postponed many marriages until the main-season
crop could be harvested.
Noticing what seemed to be a huge new warehouse on the horizon, I idly
asked my neighbor what it was. He told me that it was a rice m~ll being built
by Haji Rasid and his brother Haji Ani. At the mentio11 of these two names
most of the other conversations in the pavilion stopped. I had somehow; it was
clear, stumbled on a subject of lively interest. For the next hour or so the men
regaled one another with stories about the two brothers and especially about
their father, Haji Ayub. In fact, as I quickly learned, the name of Haji Ayub
was a sure-fire conversational gambit in any company, sufficient to set off a small
avalanche of tales.
39. From Juan Martinez Alier, Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain,
St. Anthony's College, Oxfurd, Publications, No. 4 (London: Allen & Unwin,
1971), 206.
There is little doubt that Haji Ayub became in his lifetime the largest owner
of paddy land that the state of Kedah (and perhaps the whole country) had ever
known. At the time of his death, he was reputed to have owned more than 600
relong (426 acres) of paddy fields in addition to his other holdings of rubber and
orchard land. The magnitude of his feat must be viewed against an agrarian
setting in which the median holding is less than three relong and a farmer who
owns twenty relong is considered to be quite rich. Alarmed at the astonishing
speed with which Kedah's rice land was passing into the hands of Haji Ayub,
the State Assembly at one point actually fOrbade him to acquire more.
The stories that swirl around the career and exploits of Kedah's rice-land
baron, however, touch less on his fabulous holdings per se than on his style of
life and the manner in which he built his empire. What makes Haji Ayub such
a conversational staple is his legendary cheapness. To judge from the popular
accounts I was introduced to that afternoon, Kedah's richest landowner main-
tained, by choice, a style of life that was hardly distinguishable from Razak's.
Like Razak, he lived in a broken-down house that had never been repaired or
rebuilt. 40 Rather than buy manufactured cigarettes, he continued till the end of
his life to roll his own peasant cigarettes, using the cheapest tobacco and nipah
wrappers he cut from his own plants. 41 Like the poorest of the poor, Haji Ayub
bought only a single sarong cloth a year and, if you passed him, you would have
thought he was the village beggar. Surpassing even Razak, he was said to have
eaten nothing but dried fish, except on feast days. Although he could have
afforded a luxurious car, and a surfaced road passed near his house, he traveled
by fuot or on bicycle. Haji Kadir, at this point, brought down the house with
a pantomime of Haji Ayub on his ancient Raleigh, weaving back and furth,
accompanied by an approximation of the loud squeaking noises only the rustiest
bicycles could possibly have made. It was in this fashion that Kedah's rice baron
issued furth to collect rents from scores of tenants who had not already come of
their own accord. The spirit of self-denial touched all aspects of his life save
one: he had allowed himself three wives. 42
The humor of Haji Ayub's tight-fisted ways depended of course on their
contrast with his fabulous wealth. He had clearly become a legend because he
represented the apotheosis of the rich miser, the unapproachable standard by
40. The condition of his house is often the first remark about Haji Ayub. In
contrast, one of the very first investments that even modest peasants made with the
first proceeds of double-cropping in 1971 was to repair or make additions to their
houses.
41. It is a poor peasant indeed in Sedaka who does not buy (for 10¢) a bundle of
nipah cigarette wrappers in the market.
42. The miser is the symbol of pure accumulation in the sense that he acquires
money and property as an end in itself, not as a means to the pleasures they may
provide. In this respect, Haji Ayub's three wives, one short of the maximum allowed
by the Koran, may have represented simply another aspect of accumulation. On this
subject, see Simmel's essay "Miser and Spendthrift," in Georg Simmel, 179-86.
which all other rich misers might be. judged. In this respect, he was Razak's
precise opposite number. But while Razak's fame was purely local, Haji Ayub
was the pacesetter for the district if not the state of Kedah.
When it came to describing how Haji Ayub acquired all this land, the
conversation was just as animated but not nearly so jovial. The whole process is
perhaps best captured in the nickname by which he is widely known: Haji
"Broom." Peasants prefer the English word in this case because, I suspect, its
sound suggests a single, vigorous sweeping motion. Quite literally, Haji Broom
swept up all the land in his path. The force of the word also connotes something
akin to what is meant by saying that one has "cleaned up" at poker (that is,
swept up all the chips on the table) or "cleaned out" one's opponents. 43 The
image is more powerful precisely because it is joined with "Haji," a term of
respect for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Thus the nickname
"Haji Broom" accomplished for Haji Ayub more or less what the nickname "Tun
Razak" accomplished for Razak.
Haji Broom's name came up not long afterward when I was asking a few
villagers gathered under Pak Yah's house about moneylending and credit practices
before double-cropping. Nor was explaining to me the notorious padi kunca
system of credit and began his account with, "This is the way Haji Broom
would do it." It involved an advance of cash roughly six months before harvest,
repayable by a fixed quantity (a kunca) of paddy at harvest time, which typically
amounted to an effective annual rate of interest approaching 150 percent. For
at least half a century, until 1960, it was the standard form of seasonal credit
extended by shopkeepers, rice millers, moneylenders, and not a few wealthy
landlords. Virtually all observers of rice farming cited it both as a major reason
for persistent poverty in the paddy sector and as the cause of defaults that further
concentrated land ownership. 44 It was clear, moreover, that in this area Haji
Broom and padi kunca were nearly synonymous.
43. The Malay verb "to sweep" (sapu, menyapu) carries the same metaphorical
force. Thus when someone wished to describe how a rich man had rented up all the
available land in the area, he would say, Dia sapu semua (He swept it all up).
44. See, fur example, Unfederated Malay States, Annual &port rf the Advisor to the
Kedah Government, December 11, 1912, to November 30, 1913, W. George Maxwell
(Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1914), 23; Annual &port rf the Advisor to the Kedah
Government, 1914, L. E. D. Wolferston (Alor Setar: Government Printer, 1915), 14;
and Government of Malaysia, Report of the Rice Production Committee, 1953 (Kuala
Lumpur: 1954), vol. 1, p. 82. The Rice Production Committee describes the system
as fOllows: "a man borrows, say M$50 fur the purpose of obtaining credit over the
planting season and promises to pay a kunca (160 gallons) of padi at harvest worth
$102 at current government guaranteed minimum price, but $140 at the market
average." It is worth noting here there is no necessary symmetry between the gain
of the moneylender and the distress of the borrower. High interest rates in rural
Southeast Asia have often reflected the actual cost of money and the high risk of
debtor default. Thus, while these interest terms may have been punishing to small-
holders, they do not imply a fabulous return to the lender.
If the practice of padi kunca skirts perilously close to the strong Islamic
injunction against interest, it appears that Haji Broom also became a money-
lender pure and simple. Mat "halus" said that Haji Broom regularly lent money,
usually in M$100 amounts, for six months, requiring repayment of M$130 or
M$140. "His sons, Haji Rasid and Haji Ani, do the same thing. It's sinful. 45
They've been doing it fur seven generations. They only care about this world."
Part of this lending, they said, was secondhand. That is, Haji Broom would
take money from large Chinese moneylenders at 40 percent interest and relend
it to peasants at 80 percent interest, pocketing the difference. In the eyes of
these villagers,. the fact that he worked hand-in-glove with the Chinese creditors
in town made fur an even worse transgression than if he had operated alone. The
Chinese practice oflending cash at interest, on the other hand, occasions virtually
no commentary; it is expected. Mter. all, it is their normal business practice
and nothing in their religion fOrbids it. For a Malay-a member of their own
community, their own religion, and in this case aHaji-to practice usury despite
its explicit denunciation in the Koran is to call furth the most profOund censure. 46
But the keystone of Haji Broom's fOrtune, the means by which most land fell
into his hands, was the practice of jual janji (literally, promised sale). 47 Nor, Pak
Yah, and Mat "halus" can each tick off easily the names of families in the area
who lost land to Haji Broom in this fashion. The practice worked as fOllows:
Haji Broom would lend a man a substantial sum in return fur which the title
to all or a part of the borrower's land would be transferred to Haji Broom. The
written contract of sale provided that if, by a specified date, the borrower repaid
the initial sum (nearly always less than the market value of the land), he could
recover his land. 48 For the borrower, the loss of the land was, in principle at
least, not irrevocable. In practice, of course, it often was, and most of the large
landholdings in Kedah were acquired in this fashion. Haji Broom and a few
45. Haram here means "fOrbidden by Islamic law," but the furce of the word as
it is actually used conveys the deep sinfulness of taking interest; makan bunga (literally
to "eat" interest).
46. One of the many relevant passages in the Koran reads as fullows: "They who
swallow down usury, shall arise in the resurrection only ,as he ariseth whom Satan
hath infected by his touch. This, fur that they say, Selling is only the like of usury,
and yet God hath allowed selling, and fOrbidden usury. He then who when this
warning shall come to him from his Lord, abstaineth, shall have pardon fur the past,
and his lot shall be with God. But they who return {to usury}, shall be given over
to the fire; therein shall they abide furever." Surah II:275. The Koran, trans. J. M.
Rodwell (London: Everyman's Library, 1977), 369.
47. Analogous practices could be fuund throughout colonial Southeast Asia, fur
example in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Burma.
48. There are variants in the actual timing of the furmal transfer of property and
in the use rights to the land while it is thus "mortgaged," but the basic arrangements
remain the same.
others, Nor adds, devised a new wrinkle to the procedure. A few days befOre
the final date, he would go into hiding so that a peasant who was lucky enough
to have amassed the cash to redeem his land could not find him. Once the date
had passed, he would then immediately ask the court to award him the land of
the defaulting borrower. 49 By such stratagems, Haji Broom turned nearly all his
jual janji loans into land sales. As if to dramatize the finality of a loan from
Haji Broom, Pak Yah noted that a visitor to the land baron's house would have
fuund him seated in front of a large cupboard filled from top to bottom with
land titles.
Something of a lighthearted competition had developed among the three men
to tell the most outrageous stories about Haji Broom. Nor provided the finale
by describing how the man treated his own sons. He would come to visit his
son Haji Ani, Nor said, bearing a sack of one hundred sapodilla fruits (an
inexpensive brownish fruit from the same tropical evergreen that produces chi-
cle), ostensibly as a gift. BefOre leaving, he would ask Haji Ani to give him one
hundred duck eggs in return. "Which is more expensive?" Nor asked me rhe-
torically. This is not just another story of Haji Broom's sharp dealing. Here he
had violated the spirit of a gift to make a profit, he had actually asked fur a
return, and he had, above all, exploited his own family fur his private gain.
Mat "halus" summarized it all by describing his behavior as "the politics of
getting ahead. " 50
When I remarked that I had never heard of a man so "stingy," Pak Yah
corrected me, "Not stingy but greedy," 51 thereby emphasizing that Haji Broom
was not so much husbanding what he already had as plundering others. "He is
without shame." In a sense, this last is the ultimate accusation, one that I have
heard applied to Razak as well. For it is shame, that concern fur the good
opinion of one's neighbors and friends, which circumscribes behavior within the
moral boundaries created by shared values. A man without shame is, by defi-
nition, capable of anything. 52
49. While in theory a borrower could have deposited the required amount in an
escrow account and informed the court, thereby saving his land, it was a rare peasant
indeed who knew about, let alone exercised, this option.
50. Politik hidup. The term is not easy to translate; it also implies that Haji
Broom is concerned solely with getting ahead in this world at the expense of his
immortal soul.
51. Bukan lokek, haloba.
52. As Morocc-an peasants put it succinctly: "Those who have no shame do as
they please." Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (Berkeley: Univ. of
CalifOrnia Press, 1977), 158. This fOlk wisdom makes its tortuous way back to social
science in the fOllowing guise: "to ostracize a man is to remove him from social
controls . . . . He has nothing to lose by confOrmity and perhaps even something to
gain by vexing them." George C. Homans, "Status, ConfOrmity, and Innovation,"
in The Logic of Social Hierarchies, ed. Edward 0. Lauman et al. (Chicago: Markham,
1970), 599.
Nor finally makes it clear that it is not Haji Broom's wealth per se that is
offensive but rather the way in which he came by it and subsequently deployed
it. "No matter if a person is rich, if he is a good man, the villagers will help
him. If he had a feast, villagers would bring gifts of rice, even if he had a
hundred gunny sacks in his granary already. But if he is not good-hearted, we
don't want to help him at all." 53 Neither the fortune of Haji Broom nor the
poverty of Razak would have become so notorious were it not for the shame-
lessness of their behavior, a shamelessness that breaks all the rules and makes of
them virtual outcasts: the one becoming the symbol for the greedy rich, the
other the symbol of the grasping poor.
Only in Haji Broom's case, however, does the condemnation take on a some-
what mythical, religious dimension. More than once I was told that, when Haji
Broom fell ill, his body was so hot that he had to be moved beneath the house,
where it was cooler. And when he was borne to the cemetery, they said, smoke
(some say fire) was already rising from the freshly dug grave. When I once asked
Ghazali, with deliberate naivete, whether this had really happened, he replied,
"Maybe, but it could be a fairy tale too." 54 The point of course does not depend
on the actual truth value of such reports, but rather on the social fact that
villagers should conjure up the fires of hell waiting to consume Haji Broom
even before he was finally laid to rest.
Most of that class of wealthy landowners of which Haji Broom is simply the
most blatant and therefore serviceable example are also Hajis. That is, they are
also men who have fulfilled the fifth "pillar" of Islam by making the pilgrimage
to Mecca. Some have in fact made more than a single pilgrimage. The pattern
of association between religious status and landowning wealth evidently has its
origins in the late nineteenth century when much of the Kedah rice plain was
settled by migrants led by respected religious teachers. Land grants, voluntary
gifts, and the Islamic tithe allowed much of this class to become something of
a landed gentry, while strategic marriage alliances with officials and the lower
aristocracy solidified their position. 55 By 1916, the Acting British Advisor was
53. Compare this with the comment made by Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie in the
course of his portrait of a thirteenth-century Albigensian village in southern France:
"Wealth in itself was not the real object of attack. What the people of Montaillou
hated was the unhealthy fat of the undeserving rich, clerics, and mendicants who
exploited the village without giving in return any spiritual aid or even those services
of help and protection habitually provided by a well-to-do domus or by wealthy local
nobles." Montaillou: Promised Land of Error, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Braziller,
1978), 341.
54. Dongeng could be variously translated as "legend," "fairy tale," "myth," all
of which call into question its truth value.
55. See Afifuddin Haji Omar, Peasants, Institutions, and Development in Malaysia:
The Political Economy of Development in the Muda &gian, MADA Monograph No. 36
(Alor Setar: MADA, 1978), 50-56.
complaining about fraud on the part of the larger landholders who had applied
fur several smaller land grants, using bogus names in order to avoid the risks of
applying openly to the State Council for a large grant. 56 Class barriers have,
however, remained quite permeable, as Haji Ayub's case illustrates, and a good
many wealthy Hajis in the region are comparative newcomers.
The fact that most of the larger Malay landowners, paddy traders, rice millers,
and owners of agricultural machinery are also Hajis, 57 having amassed sufficient
capital to make the pilgrimage, lends the title a highly ambiguous status. On
the one hand, there is a genuine veneration for the act of pilgrimage itself and
fur the religious charisma that pilgrims thereby acquire. On the other hand, not
a few of these pilgrims have accumulated the necessary capital fur the Haji only
by decades of sharp practices (fur example, moneylending, taking jual janji land
mortgages, renting land at the highest possible rates, being tightfisted with
relatives and neighbors, minimizing ceremonial obligations), which most of the
community judges abhorrent. Small wonder that villagers should be less than
completely worshipful of a returning Haji whose trip to Mecca was financed by
their land, their labor, and their rents.
Perhaps this is why the term Haji is often joined in popular parlance to
adjectives that are anything but complimentary. Haji Sangkut' 8 refers literally to
a man who wears the cap and robe of a Haji without having made the pilgrimage,
but it is also used to describe, behind their backs, actual pilgrims whose sub-
sequent behavior continues to violate what the community would expect of a
religious man. Haji Merduk and Haji Karut' 9 refer to "false" or "fake" Hajis who
have made the voyage to Mecca but whose conduct is anything but saintly. Since
one of the main purposes of the Haj in village terms is to cleanse oneself of sin
and prepare for Allah's judgment, it is an especially grave transgression-a sign
of bad faith-to persist in sinful ways. As Basir says, "God will not accept
Hajis like that. They have just wasted their money. There's no benefit. It's
useless." The sins of such a Haji are worse than those of ordinary Muslims,
Fazil adds, because "He knows it's wrong but he does it anyway. A false Haji
is the very worst. 60 He goes to Mecca to wash his sins clean but ... God
doesn't like signs like that."
56. Unfederated Malay States, Annual Report of the Acting Advisor to the Kedah
Government, 1916, G. A. Hall (Alar Setar: Government Printer, 1917), 2.
57. The reverse is not necessarily the case. That is, a good many Hajis are men
of fairly modest financial means who have made considerable sacrifices, including the
sale of land, to make the pilgrimage. Some never recover financially.
58. From the verb sangkut meaning "to hang something up on a peg," hence "to
drape clothes on oneself." It is also possible that sangkut is a corruption of songkok,
the Malay cap, thereby implying an imposter who wears the small skullcap of a Haji
without having made the pilgrimage.
59. Merduk means "a thing or possession of no value" and karut means "false or
untrue."
60. Haji karut yang teruk sekali.
Once, as a few of us sat around Samat's small village store, I asked Tok Kasim
whether Haji Ani was like his father. We had just been discussing a well-known
minister who had been dismissed, ostensibly for corruption, and Tok Kasim
chose to draw the parallel. "A Haji who cheats and steals is just like a minister
who does the same. Muslim punishment is more severe (than civil punishment). 61
It's worse because the rich are enjoined to help the poor. Those who don't are
not afraid of God, they only want to take (not give). When a Muslim does this,
it's the worst possible."
The title Haji is often heard in conjunction with other adjectives as well,
most of them having to do with miserliness. Much as the Eskimos are said to
have a great wealth of words to describe varieties of snow that would pass
unnoticed in other cultures, the Malay tongue offers a sumptuous linguistic feast
of terms to describe every possible degree and variety of tightfistedness. 62 Nearly
all of them I have heard used at one time or another to modify the noun Haji.
The terms most in vogue are Haji Kedekut and Haji Bakhil, each of which means
stingy or miserly Haji. One Malay author remembers a chant with which she
and her childhood friends used to bait a tightfisted Haji:
Haji Kedekut gets up at night
To count his money on the sly
He eats his rice with only salt
Sleeps on the floor without a mattress. 63
It was some time before I realized that Haji Kadir, the well-to-do landlord
in whose house I was staying, was the butt of similar jokes and fell i~to the
same folk category. I was visiting a nearby village with Sedaka's ragtag soccer
team, 64 and after the game some of our hosts asked where I was staying. When
I replied that we stayed in the front of "Pak" Haji Kadir's house, I was greeted
by blank stares of nonrecognition. I tried to describe the location of the house,
61. Hukuman melayu lagi teruk. Here the literal translation is "Malay punish-
ment," but the reference is to religion, since the two are synonymous. Thus the
phrase masuk melayu, which means literally "to become a Malay" and is used to
describe people of other races who marry a Malay, is more appropriately translated
as "to become a Muslim."
62. A by no means exhaustive list would include the following: kedekut, kikir,
bakhil, berkira, lokek, tamak, tangkai jering (noun), keras hati (also means "stubborn").
63. Haji Kedekut, bangun malam
Kira duit, diam-diam
Makan nasi, !auk garam
Tidur lantai, tak ada tilam
Sri Delima, As I ~s Fhssing, vol. 2 (Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing, 1978).
64. Team record fur dry season of 1979: two wins, five losses, and one draw-a
perfOrmance attributable only in part to the author's goal keeping.
thinking that he must surely be well known in these parts. The confusion
continued until someone said, "Oh, that must be Kadir Ceti" and the smiles
around then reflected both recognition and some embarrassment. Ceti refers to
the notorious southern Indian Chettiar moneylending caste which, in Malaya
and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, provided much of the finance capital for agrarian
production from 1900 until the Second World War. As a caste specialized entirely
to a profession forbidden by the Koran, they became, and remain, a symbol of
usurious exploitation and debt bondage.
Although Haji Kadir was the only man with the nickname Pak Ceti in
Sedaka, other villages in the vicinity had their own-Haji Lah Ceti and Pak
Ali Ceti to name just two. 65 Once it became known that I had learned my
landlord's nickname, the ice was broken and the stories came thick and fast.
Muah of the nearly twenty relong of paddy fields that he owned locally were
acquired by default on money he had lent out, that is by jual janji. Abu Hassan's
father had lost three relong to Pak Haji Kadir in this fashion, which explained
why he occasionally, and to no avail, asked to rent back this plot ofland. Villagers
said that, like Haji Broom, Haji Kadir had re-lent money borrowed from one
of the wealthy Chinese shopkeepers in Kepala Batas. Hamzah, his poor neighbor,
complained that he would charge 20¢ for a coconut from his yard rather than
simply make a gift of it as others would. Hamzah had another complaint. Last
season he had worked as a laborer more often for Haji Kadir than for anyone
else in the village and thus expected a gift of paddy (zakat) after the harvest.
He got absolutely nothing, although far poorer farmers for whom he had worked
had been quite generous.
The diet of Kadir Ceti, like that of the Haji Kedekut in the ditty, was the
object of popular derision. Rather than buying fish from the market, he would,
by choice, eat the same tiny, bony fish from the paddy fields that the poorest
villagers ate of necessity. Even his brother-in-law, Pak Kasim, did not think he
had changed since making the pilgrimage. "Even the Chinese in town call him
Ceti. He alV.:ays sits in the same chair. How could he change?"
Although Haji Broom and Kadir Ceti dominated the conversational landscape
of miserly Hajis in Sedaka, there was no shortage of stories about other Hajis,
living and dead, in the district. The torrent of abusive accounts was such that
I eventually tired of them, although the villager~ never did. There were Hajis
who stole water buffalo; Hajis who boldly took things from stores without
paying; Hajis who harvested crops planted in good faith by their tenants; Hajis
who rented all their land to Chinese rather than to their own people; Hajis who
65. It appears that the term is widespread, at least in northeast Malaysia. On

Mokhzani's list of Malay moneylenders in Pedis (the state immediately to the north
of Kedah and fOrming part of the same rice (plain), half the entries bear the nickname
Ceti. Mokhzani bin Abdul Rahim, Credit in a Malay Peasant Society (Ph.D. diss.,
University of London, 1973), 393-94.
insisted that tenants pay them a zakat tithe (reversing the usual direction of
charity); and at least one Haji who was said to have kicked a woman while she
was praying. And, of course, there were many good, pious, modest Hajis (per-
haps a majority) whose pilgrimage and conduct were a great credit to Islam.
The fact remains, however, that a vast majority of the rich landlords who had
earned the animosity of the community were also Hajis. It was impossible to
tell whether the cascade of stories was due simply to the inherent richness of the
source material or to its social value as a cautionary tale for the rich and would-
be rich who had not yet gone astray. Both, I suspect.
Two things were clear, though. First, nearly everyone thought that the prob-
lem of the shameless, greedy rich in general, and of shameless, greedy, rich Hajis
in particular, was worse now than in the past. Even rich Hajis concurred, while
excepting themselves from the charge. Sukur spoke for most when he said: "The
old Hajis were real Hajis. These days, they aren't real Hajis. They only wear
the robes. They just took a trip to Mecca (not a real pilgrimage). When they
came back from Mecca they should be true, but they even practice padi kunca.
They just want more money; the sky's the limit." 66 Second, it is clear that,
when such Hajis die, their transgressions will earn them the most exquisite
punishment their God can prepare. What that punishment will be precisely is
a matter for conjecture. But Abdul Rahman captured the flavor of this specu-
lation by concluding: "When they enter hell, they will swim in blood."
THE SYMBOLIC BALANCE OF POWER

The tales about Razak and Haji Broom-suitably embroidered, elaborated, and
retold-have far more than mere entertainment value. They amount to an ex-
change of small arms fire, a small skirmish, in a cold war of symbols between
the rich and poor of Sedaka. Hostilities, in this war as in most, are conducted
over a shifting terrain in which there are many neutrals, bystanders, and reluctant
combatants with divided loyalties. For the time being, at least, it remains a cold
war both because many of the potential participants have important shared
interests that would be jeopardized in an all-out confrontation and because one
side, the poor, is under no illusions about the outcome of a direct assault. Thus,
the "war news" consists almost entirely of words, feints, and counterfeints,
threats, a skirmish or two, and, above all, propaganda.
The stories that circulate about Razak and Haji Broom are perhaps understood
·in this sense as propaganda. Like effective propaganda, they signify-they em-
body-an entire argument about what is happening in this small place. The
mere mention of Razak's name by rich villagers conjures up a vision of the
66. The last phrase in Malay, Banyak mana pun tak boleh cukup, is difficult to
render in English, and I have translated it rather freely. A more literal translation
would be, "No matter how much, it wouldn't be enough."
grasping, dishonest poor, who violate the accepted standards of village decorum.
In their view Razak is the negative model toward which the poor in general are,
alas, heading. The mere mention ofHaji Broom's name by poor villagers conjures
up a vision of the greedy, penny-pinching rich, who likewise violate the accepted
standards of village conduct. In their view, Haji Broom is the negative model
toward which the rich in general are heading.
Haji Broom and Razak gain much of their power as symbols by virtue of
their reality as concrete human examples of the behavior they have come to
signify. Everyone in the village can observe Razak as he adds daily to his own
legend. For Haji Broom, the experience is only slightly less direct. Nearly
everyone has seen or met him and every adult has heard firsthand stories about
his land grabbing and moneylending. Given the availability of palpable, local
legends that villagers can check against their own experience, this kind of
propaganda does not have to rely much on mere credulity to state its case. What
one chooses to make of these living legends-precisely what they signify-is of
course another matter. But they originate in social facts.
The value of Razak and Haji Broom as social bariners, however, stems as
much from the extravagance of their conduct as from their palpability. It is this
extravagance that not only makes the tales engrossing 67 but makes them effective
vehicles of propaganda. Even the poor of Sedaka agree that Razak's capers place
him beyond the pale. Even Kadir Ceti will agree that Haji Broom's fOrtune was
gotten by breaking the commands of Allah and of village society. The rich and
the poor have each availed themselves of precisely the extreme examples that will
best serve their case, examples that will have to be conceded by the "other side."
The stories that swirl around these two men must also be recognized as
cornerstones of an ideological edifice under construction. They embody, as ide-
ology, a critique of things as they are as well as a vision of things as they should
be. They are attempts to create and maintain a certain view of what decent,
acceptable human behavior ought to be. As negative examples of totally unac-
ceptable behavior, they accomplish their purpose in the same way that any socially
sanctioned account of deviance helps to define what is normal, correct, preferred
behavior. Such stories can thus be read as a kind of social text on the subject of
human decency. They are necessary precisely because the maintenance of a given
symbolic order is always as problematic as its change. The ideological work of
repair and renovation is never-ending.
The implicit purpose of these competing ideologies is not just to convince
but to control; better stated, they aim to control by convincing. To the extent
that they succeeded in shaping behavior, they achieve a class purpose as well.
67. In conversation as in literature the bizarre and the evil are always more
gripping than the commonplace and the saintly. How else to explain the content of
popular newspapers? Caliban is always more interesting than Ariel, Mephistopheles
more interesting than the Angel of Light.
Should the rich be chastened by the tales about Haji Broom, they would not
lend money at high interest, they would not make designs on the land of others,
they would be generous with religious charity and feasts, and they would take
on more tenants and workers. The benefits fur the poor of such an arrangement
are obvious. Should the poor, on the other hand, take the infamous example of
Razak to heart, they would not importune the rich fur gifts, they would not
come to feasts uninvited, they would be faithful workers, and they would be as
good as their word. The advantages fur the rich of such an arrangement are
equally obvious. There is a kind of symbolic equilibrium here. The message to
the rich is: If you behave like Haji Broom, you can count on being villified as
he is. To the poor, the message is: If you behave like Razak, you will be despised
as he is. And if wishes became deeds, if ideology became practice, Sedaka would
be a small utopia peopled by generous, sympathetic landlords and honest, hard-
working tenants and laborers.
Alas, the equilibrium is only symbolic. These cautionary tales, after all, adjure
the rich and the poor to furgo their immediate material interest in order to
protect their reputation. But how important is a good name? Or, to put it the
other way around, what is the cost of a bad name? The answer unfOrtunately
depends a great deal on who you are, for the cost of a bad name hinges directly
on the social and economic sanctions that can be brought into play to punish
its bearer. In class terms, one must ask how dependent the poor are on the good
opinion of the rich and vice versa. The politics of reputation is, in this respect,
something of a one-sided affair. 68 It amounts to this: The rich have the social
power generally to impose their vision of seemly behavior on the poor, while the
poor are rarely in a position to impose their vision on the rich. A good name
is something like a social insurance policy fur the poor against the thousand
contingencies of agrarian life. It is built by a record of deferential behavior,
service at feasts and house movings, a willingrwss1:o work without quibbling
too much about wages, and tacit support fur the village leadership. It brings
tangible rewards in terms of employment, charity, help at times of death or
illness, and access to whatever subsidies the ruling party in the village has to
distribute. It brings intangible rewards in terms of inclusion both in the infOrmal
pleasantries and in the ritual of village life. Razak, having fOrfeited his good
name, thereby acquires a certain freedom to breach the etiquette of village life. 69
But he pays heavily fur that freedom in work and public scorn. His only conces-
sion to furm is his calculated membership in the ruling party. Hamzah, by
contrast, has established and maintained a good name. It costs him the time
68. For an analysis of "the politics of reputation" and empirical studies, see F. G.
Bailey, Gifts and Poison: The Politics of Reputation (New York: Schocken, 1971).
69. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" is quite apt in this
instance. See also A. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New
York: Bantam, 1968), 96.
and labor he devotes to village projects, cooking at feasts, and taking care of
the village prayerhouse (surau) and assembly hall (balai). It also costs him a certain
amount of swallowed up bile, as we shall see, to feign a respect for his social
betters that he does not always feel. But his reputation pays dividends in em-
ployment, zakat gifts, help when he is ill, and a public show of respect and
consideration. Such rewards are significant; they are sufficient to ensure that all
but three or four of the poor in Sedaka choose to conform in most respects to
the standard of seemly behavior that is defined and imposed by the village elite.
The Haji Brooms and Kaclir Cetis of this small world are heavily insulated
from the effects of a bad name. They need little or nothing from the poor. It
is ironic that their insulation-land and the income and power it provides-
was acquired only by violating precisely those rules of generosity and
consideration70 that might have given them a good name. Now they are virtually
beyond sanction.
There is one exception, however. The rich, while they may be relatively
immune to material sanctions, cannot escape symbolic sanctions: slander, gossip,
character assassination. But even on this small terrain, the contest is an unequal
one. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that Razak is demeaned to
his face, while Haji Broom and Kadir Ceti are invariably demeaned behind their
backs. Thus Kadir Ceti is always addressed "Pak Haji" to his face, and I would
be surprised if he was even aware of his popular nickname. The scorn inwhich
he is held need never reach his ears nor trouble his sleep.
Of course, much of the public deference shown to Haji Kadir is "false"
deference. 71 Poor villagers, and not only they, choose to dissemble, knowing full
well the penalties of any other course. Thus when an old villager, Ishak, ventures
to talk disparagingly about Haji Broom, he ends by asking me not to breathe
a word of it to anyone in Yan or Mengkuang for fear of retaliation. What we
have here is a difference between "onstage" and "offstage" behavior; to the extent
that the deference expressed in public, power-laden situations is negated in the
comparative safety of offstage privacy, we can speak unambiguously of false
deference.
But even false deference is an unmistakable exhibition of the social power of
the well-to-do. It is no small matter that the village elite continues to control
the public stage. The public symbolic order is maintained through outward
deference, to which there is no open challenge. On this largely symbolic plane,
as well as in the sphere of material exchange, then, the social imbalance of power
70. The equivalent for "consideration" in Malay is timbang rasa, which means
literally "to weigh feelings" (of others).
71. This brief analysis of "deference" benefits from the analyses of Howard Newby,
"The Deferential Dialectic," Comparative Studies in Society and History 17, no. 2 (April
1975): 139-64, and Erving Goffman, "The Nature of Deference and Demeanor,"
American Anthropologist 58 (June 1956): 473-503.
allows public insults of Razak but prevents public insults of Haji Kadir or Haji
Broom.
Those with power in the village are not, however, in total control of the
stage. They may write the basic script for the play but, within its confines,
truculent or disaffected actors find sufficient room for maneuver to suggest subtly
their disdain for the proceedings. The necessary lines may be spoken, the gesture
made, but it is clear that many of the actors are just going through the motions
and do not have their hearts in the performance. A banal example, familiar to
any motorist or pedestrian, will illustmte the kind of behavior involved. The
traffic light changes when a pedestrian is halfway across the intersection. As long
as the pedestrian is not in imminent danger from the oncoming traffic, a small
dmmatization is likely to ensue. He lifts his knees a bit higher for a step or
two, simulating haste, thereby implicitly recognizing the motorist's right-of-
way. In fact, in nearly all cases, if my impression is correct, the actual progress
of the pedestrian across the intersection is no faster than it would have been if
he had simply proceeded at his original pace. What is conveyed is the impression
of compliance without its substance. But the symbolic order, the right of the
motorist to the road, is not directly challenged; indeed, it is confirmed by the
appeamnce of haste. 72 It is almost as if symbolic compliance is maximized precisely
in order to minimize compliance at the level of actual behavior.
It is with analogous forms of minimal compliance that poor villagers are able
to insinuate the insincerity of their ,performance. They may come to the feast of
a rich villager but stay only longc'ep.ough to eat quickly and leave. They have
compiled with the custom of accepting the invitation, but their compliance
skirts the edge of impropriety. They may also bring a gift in cash or kind that
is less than what might be expected but not so little as to constitute a direct
insult. They may, as "required," greet a big landowner on the village path, but
their greeting is abbreviated and not as warm as it might be. All these and
other forms of reluctant compliance stop short of overt defiance and at least
conform to the minimal standards of politeness and deference that the rich are
normally in a position to require. And yet they also signal an intrusion, however
slight, of "offstage" attitudes into the performance itself, an intrusion sufficient
to convey its meaning to the directors but not so egregious as to risk a con-
frontation. 73
72. The opposite case, in which the pedestrian openly reufses to make even an
appearance of haste (or actually slows down) also occurs. Here there is a direct defiance
of the motorist's right to the road, an open breach of the symbolic order. The
community of pedestrians in effect announces its prior right to the road. Such an
open dare invites a game of "chicken" in which the motorist, alas, is usually best
equipped to prevail.
73. A good deal of attention, as one might expect, has been devoted to such
fOrms of "protest within compliance" under slavery. For two fine examples, see Eugene
Genovese, Roll, jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974),
and Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: OxfOrd
Univ. Press, 1977).
The kind of conflict with which we are dealing here is singularly undramatic.
At one level it is a contest over the definition of justice, a struggle to control
the concepts and symbols by which current experience is evaluated. At another
level it is a struggle over the appropriateness of a given definition of justice to
a particular case, a particular set of facts, a particular behavior. Assuming the
rich ought to be generous, for example, is a certain landowner's refusal to make
a gift a violation of that principle or is it a legitimate rebuff to a man who is
only feigning poverty or who has, by his comportment, forfeited his right to
charity? Finally, at a third level, of course, it is a struggle over land, work,
income, and power in the midst of the massive changes brought about by an
agricultural revolution.
The resources the different contestants bring to this contest hardly bear com-
parison. The local elite nearly always has its own way in the economic life of
the village. Given its sway over resources, it can also largely control public ritual
life-that is, the "onstage" conduct of most of the poor in the community. Only
"backstage," where gossip, tales, slander, and anonymous sabotage mocks and
negates the public ritual order, does elite control fall away. To return to the
military metaphor, it is only here that the terrain is relatively favorable to the
meager arsenal of the disadvantaged.
One might well ask: Why are we here, in a village of no particular signifi-
cance, examining the struggle of a handful of history's losers? For there is little
doubt on this last score. The poor of Sedaka are almost certainly, to use Bar-
rington Moore's phrase, members of "a class over whom the wave of progress is
about to roll. " 74 And the big battalions of the state, of capitalist relations in
agriculture, and of demography itself are arrayed against them. There is little
reason to believe that they can materially improve their prospects in the village
and every reason to believe they will, in the short run at least, lose out, as have
millions of peasants before them.
The justification for such an enterprise must lie precisely in its banality-in
the fact that these circumstances are the normal context in which class conflict
has historically occurred. By examining these circumstances closely, it may be
possible to say something meaningful about normal class consciousness, about
everyday resistance, about commonplace class relations where, as is most often
the case, neither outright collective defiance nor rebellion is likely or possible.
74. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston:
Beacon, 1966), 505.
2 • Normal Exploitation,
Normal Resistance
Almost invariably doomed to defeat and eventual massacre, the great insur-
rections were altogether too disorganized to achieve any lasting result. The
patient, silent struggles stubbornly carried on by rural communities over the
years would accomplish more than these flashes in the pan.
Marc, Bloch, French Rural History
As the editor of Field and Garden once wrote, great men are always unpopular
with the common people. The masses don't understand them, they think all
those things are unnecessary, even heroism. The little man doesn't give a shit
about a great era. All he wants is to drop into a bar now and then and eat
goulash fur supper. Narurally a statesman gets riled at bums like that, when
it's his job to get his people into the schoolbooks, the poor bastard. To a
great man the common people are a ball and chain. It's like offering Baloun
here, with his appetite, a small Hungarian sausage fur supper, what good is
that. I wouldn't want to listen in when the big shots get together and start
griping about us.
Schweyk, in Bertolt Brecht, Schweyk in the Second World w:rtr, Scene I
THE UNWRITTEN HISTORY OF RESISTANCE

The idea fur this study, its concerns and its methods, originated in a growing
dissatisfaction with much recent work-my own as well as that of others-on
the subject of peasant rebellions and revolution. 1 It is only too apparent that the
inordinate attention accorded to large-scale peasant insurrection was, in North
America at least, stimulated by the Vietnam war and something of a left-wing
academic romance with wars of national liberation. In this case interest and
source material were mutually reinfOrcing. For the historical and archival records
were richest at precisely those moments when the peasantry came to pose a threat
to the state and to the existing international order. At other times, which is to
1. See, for example, Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Move-
ments and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975);
Eric R. Wolf, Peasant ~rs of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1976); Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: Univ. of CalifOrnia Press,
1979).
28
NORMAL EXPLOITATION, NORMAL RESISTANCE • 29
say most of the time, the peasantry appeared in the historical record not so
much as historical actors but as more or less anonymous contributors to statistics
on conscription, taxes, labor migration, land holdings, and crop production.
The fact is that, for all their importance when they do occur, peasant rebel-
lions, let alone peasant "revolutions," are few and far between. Not only are the
circumstances that favor large-scale peasant uprisings comparatively rare, but
when they do appear the revolts that develop are nearly always crushed uncere-
moniously. To be sure, even a failed revolt may achieve something: a few conces-
sions from the state or landlords, a brief respite from new and painful relations
of production 2 and, not least, a memory of resistance and courage that may lie
in wait for the future. Such gains, however, are uncertain, while the carnage,
the repression, and the demoralization of defeat are all too certain and real. It
is worth recalling as well that even at those extraordinary historical moments
when a peasant-backed revolution actually succeeds in taking power, the results
are, at the very best, a mixed blessing for the peasantry. Whatever else the
revolution may achieve, it almost always creates a more coercive and hegemonic
state apparatus-one that is often able to batten itself on the rural population
like no other before it. All too frequently the peasantry finds itself in the ironic
position of having helped to power a ruling group whose plans for industriali-
zation, taxation, and collectivization are very much at odds with the goals for
which peasants had imagined they were fighting. 3
For all these reasons it occurred to me that the emphasis on peasant rebellion
was misplaced. Instead, it seemed far more important to understand what we
might call everyday forms of peasant resistance-the prosaic but constant struggle
between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents,
and interest from them. Most of the forms this struggle takes stop well short of
collective outright defiance. Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of rel-
atively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfer-
ing, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so forth. These Brechtian
forms of class struggle have certain features in common. They require little or
no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help;
and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with
elite norms. To understand these commonplace forms of resistance is to under-
stand what much of the peasantry does "between revolts" to defend its interests
as best it can.
It would be a grave mistake, as it is with peasant rebellions, to overly ro-
manticize the "weapons of the weak." They are unlikely to do more than mar-
2. For an example of such temporary gains, see the fine study by E. J. Hobs-
bawm and George Rude, Captain Swing (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 281-99.
3. Some of these issues are examined in James C. Scott, "Revolution in the
Revolution: Peasants and Commissars," Theory and Society 7, nos. 1-2 (1979): 97-
134.
30 • NORMAL EXPLOITATION, NORMAL RESISTANCE
ginally affect the various forms of exploitation that peasants confront.

Furthermore, the peasantry has no monopoly on these weapons, as anyone can
easily attest who has observed officials and landlords resisting and disrupting
state policies that are to their disadvantage.
On the other hand, such Brechtian modes of resistance are not trivial. De-
sertion and evasion of conscription and of corvee labor have undoubtedly limited
the imperial aspirations of many a monarch in Southeast Asia4 or, for that matter,
in Europe. The process and its potential impact are nowhere better captured
than in R. C. Cobb's account of draft resistance and desertion in postrevolu-
tionary France and under the early Empire:
From the year V to the year VII, there are increasingly frequent reports,
from a variety of Departments . . . of every conscript from a given canton
having returned home and living there unmolested. Better still, many of
them did not return home; they had never left it in the first place. . . .
In the year VII too the severed fingers of right hands-the commonest
form of self-mutilation-begin to witness statistically to the strength of
what might be described as a vast movement of collective complicity,
involving the family, the parish 1 the local authorities, whole cantons.
Even the Empire, with a vastly more numerous and reliable rural police,
did not succeed in more than temporatily slowing down the speed of the
hemorrhage which ... from 1812, once more reached catastrophic pro-
portions. There could have been no more eloquent referendum on the
universal unpopularity of an oppressive regime; and there is no more en-
couraging spectacle for a historian than a people that has. decided it will
no longer fight and that, without fuss, returns home ... the common
people, at least, in this respect, had their fair share in bringing down
France's most appalling regime. 5
The collapse of the Confederate army and economy in the course of the Civil
War in the United States is a further example of the decisive role of silent and
undeclared defections. Nearly 250,000 eligible whites are estimated to have
deserted or to have avoided conscription altogether. 6 The reasons appear to have
4. See the fine account and analysis by Michael Adas, "From Avoidance to Con-
frontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative
Studies in Society and History 23, no. 2 (April1981): 217-47.
5. R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820 (Ox-
furd: Clarendon, 1970), 96-97. For a gripping account of self-mutilation to avoid
conscription, see Emile Zola, The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmee (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1980).
6. See the excellent study by Armstead L. Robinson, "Bitter Fruits of Bondage:
Slavery's Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-65" (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, fOrthcoming), chaps. 5, 6.
been both moral and material, as one might expect. Poor whites, especially
those from the nonslaveholding hill country, were deeply resentful of fighting
fur an institution whose principal beneficiaries were often excluded from service
by law. 7 Military reverses and what was called the "subsistence crisis of 1862"
prompted many to desert and return to their hard-pressed families. On the
plantations themselves, the shortage of white overseers and the slaves' natural
affinity with the North's objective, gave rise to shirking and flight on a massive
scale. As in France, one could claim here too that the Confederacy was undone
by a social avalanche of petty acts of insubordination carried out by an unlikely
coalition of slaves and yeomen-a coalition with no name, no organization, no
leadership, and certainly no Leninist conspiracy behind it.
In a similar fashion, flight and evasion of taxes have classically curbed the
ambition and reach of Third World states-whether precolonial, colonial, or
independent. As we shall learn, fur example, the official collection of the Islamic
tithe in paddy is, in Sedaka, only a small fraction of what is legally due, thanks
to a network of complicity and misrepresentation that eviscerates its impact.
Small wonder that a large share of the tax receipts of Third World states is
collected in the furm of levies on imports and exports; the pattern is in no small
measure a tribute to the tax resistance capacities of their subjects. Even a casual
reading of the literature on rural "development" yields a rich harvest of unpopular
government schemes and programs nibbled to extinction by the passive resistance
of the peasantry. The author of a rare account detailing how peasants-in this
case in East Africa-have managed over several decades to undo or evade threat-
ening state policy concludes in the fOllowing tone:
In this situation, it is understandable if the development equation is often

reduced to a zero-sum game. As this study has shown, the winners of
those games are by no means always the rulers. The African peasant is
hardly a hero in the light of current development thinking, but by using
his deceptive skills he has often defeated the authorities. 8
On some occasions this resistance has become active, even violent. More often,
however, it takes the furm of passive noncompliance, subtle sabotage, evasion,
and deception. The persistent efforts of the colonial government in Malaya to
discourage the peasantry from growing and selling rubber that would compete
7. This issue centered on the much resented "Twenty-Nigger Law," as it was

known, which provided that a white man of draft age could be excused from military
service if he was needed to supervise twenty or more slaves. This law, coupled with
the hiring of substitutes by wealthy families, encouraged the widespread belief that
this was "a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight." Ibid., chap. 5.
8. Goran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in 'Ianzania (London: Heinemann, 1980), 231.
with the plantation sector fur land and markets is a case in point. 9 Various
restriction schemes and land use laws were tried from 1922 until 1928 and
again in the 1930s with only modest results because of massive peasant resis-
tance. The effOrts of peasants in self-styled socialist states to prevent and then
to mitigate or even undo unpopular fOrms of collective agriculture represent a
striking example of the defensive techniques available to a beleaguered peasantry.
Again the struggle is marked less by massive and defiant confrontations than by
a quiet evasion that is equally massive and often far more effective. 10
The style of resistance in question is perhaps best described by contrasting,
paired fOrms of resistance, each aimed more or less at the same objective. The
first of each pair is "everyday" resistance, in our meaning of the term; the second
represents the open defiance that dominates the study of peasant and working-
class politics. In one sphere, fur example, lies the quiet, piecemeal process by
which peasant squatters have often encroached on plantation and state fOrest
lands; in the other a public invasion of land that openly challenges property
relations. In terms of actual occupation and use, the encroachments by squatting
may accomplish more than an openly defiant land invasion, though the de jure
distribution of property rights is never publicly challenged. Turning to another
example, in one sphere lies a rash of military desertions that incapacitates an
army and, in the other, an open mutiny aiming at eliminating or replacing
officers. Desertions may, as we have noted, achieve something where mutiny may
fail, precisely because it aims at self-help and withdrawal rather than institutional
confrontation. And yet, the massive withdrawal of compliance is in a sense more
radical in its implications fur the army as an institution than the replacement of
officers. As a final example, in one sphere lies the pil(ering of public or private
grain stores; in the other an open attack on markets or granaries aiming at an
open redistribution of the fuod supply.
What everyday fOrms of resistance share with the more dramatic public con-
frontations is of course that they are intended to mitigate or deny claims made
by superordinate classes or to advance claims vis-a-vis those superordinate classes.
Such claims have ordinarily to do with the material nexus of class struggle-
9. The best, most complete account of this may be fuund in Lim Teck Ghee,
Peasants and Their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya, 1874-1941 (Kuala Lum-
pur: Oxfurd Univ. Press, 1977). See also the persuasive argument in Donald M.
Nonini, Paul Diener, and Eugene E. Robkin, "Ecology and Evolution: Population,
Primitive Accumulation, and the Malay Peasantry" (Typescript, 1979).
10. For a careful and fascinating account of the ways in which China's production
teams and brigades could, until the changes in 1978, have some influence on the
definition of "surplus" grain that had to be sold to the state, see Jean C. Oi, State
and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Politics of Grain Procurement (Ph. D. diss., Univ.
of Michigan, 1983). Nearly all of this resistance was called "soft opposition" by
those who practiced it and who made it clear that it was successful only if an "outward
manifestation" of compliance was maintained. Ibid., 238.
the appropriation of land, labor, taxes, rents, and so furth. Where everyday
resistance most strikingly departs from other furms of resistance is in its implicit
disavowal of public and symbolic goals. Where institutionalized politics is for-
mal, overt, concerned with systematic, de jure change, everyday resistance is
infOrmal, often covert, and concerned largely with immediate, de facto gains. 11
It is reasonably clear that the success of dct facto resistance is often directly
proportional to the symbolic confOrmity with which it is masked. Open insub-
ordination in almost any context will provoke a more rapid and ferocious response
than an insubordination that may be as pervasive but never ventures to contest
the furmal definitions of hierarchy and power. For most subordinate classes,
which, as a matter of sheer history, have had little prospect of improving their
status, this furm of resistance has been the only option. What may be accom-
plished within this symbolic straitjacket is nonetheless something of a testament
to human persistence and inventiveness, as this account of lower-caste resistance
in India illustrates:
Lifelong indentured servants most characteristically expressed discontent
about their relationship with their master by perfOrming their work care-
lessly and inefficiently. They could intentionally or unconsciously feign ill-
ness, ignorance, or incompetence, driving their masters to distraction. Even
though the master could retaliate by refusing to give his servant the extra
fringe benefits, he was still obliged to maintain him at a subsistence level
if he did not want to lose his investment completely. This method rf passive
resistance, provided it was not expressed as open definace, was nearly unbeatable,
it reinforced the Haviks' stereotype concerning the character of low caste
persons, but gave them little recourse to action. 12
Such furms of stubborn resistance are especially well documented in the vast
literature on American slavery, where open defiance was normally fOolhardy. The
11. There is an interesting parallel here with some of the feminist literature on
peasant society. In many, but not all, peasant societies, men are likely to dominate
every fOrmal, overt exercise of power. Women, it is occasionally argued, can exercise
considerable power to the extent that they do not openly challenge the formal myth
of male dominance. "Real" gains are possible, in other words, so long as the larger
symbolic order is not questioned. In mud! the same fashion one might contend that
the peasantry often finds it both tactically convenient as well as necessary to leave
the furmal order intact while directing its attention to political ends that may never
be accorded furmal recognition. For a feminist argument along those lines, see Susan
Carol Rogers, "Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance," American
Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (November 1975): 727-56.
12. Edward B. Harper, "Social Consequences of an Unsuccessful Low Caste Move-
ment," Social Mobility in the Caste System in India: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed.
James Silverberg, Supplement No. 3, Comparative Studies in Society and History (The
Hague: Mouton, 1968): 48-49, emphasis added.
history of resistance to slavery in the antebellum U.S. South is largely a history

of root dragging, false compliance, flight, feigned ignorance, sabotage, theft,
and, not least, cultural resistance. These practices, which rarely if ever called
into question the system of slavery as such, nevertheless achieved far more in
their unannounced, limited, and truculent way than the few heroic and brief
armed uprisings about which so much has been written. The slaves themselves
appear to have realized that in most circumstances their resistance could succeed
only to the extent that it hid behind the mask of public compliance. One
imagines parents giving their children advice not unlike advice contemporary
wage laborers on plantations in Indonesia apparently hear from their own parents:
I tell them {the youngsters} remember, you're selling your labor and the
one who buys it wants to see that he gets something for it, so work when
he's around, then you can relax when he goes away, but make sure you
always look like you're working when the inspectors are there. 13
Two specific observations emerge from this perspective. First, the nature of
resistance is greatly influenced by the existing furms of labor control and by
beliefs about the probability and severity of retaliation. Where the consequences
of an open strike are likely to be catastrophic in terms of permanent dismissal
or jail, the work furce may resort to a slowdown or to shoddy work on the job.
The often undeclared and anonymous nature of such action makes it particularly
difficult fur the antagonist to assess blame or apply sanctions. In industry, the
slowdown has come to be called an "Italian" strike; it is used particularly when
repression is feared, as in Poland under martial law in 1983. 14 Piece-work has
of course often been used as a means of circumventing forms of resistance open
to workers who are paid by the hour or day. Where piece-work prevails, as it
did in silk and cotton weaving in nineteenth-century Germany, resistance is
likely to find expression not in slowdowns, which are self-defeating, but in such
furms as the "shortweighting of finished cloth, defective workmanship, and the
purloining of materials. " 15 Each furm of labor control or payment is thus likely,
other things equal, to generate its own distinctive furms of quiet resistance and
"counterappropriation."
13. Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt,
1870-1979 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 184.
14. See, fur example, New lVrk Times, Aug. 18, 1983, p. A6, "Polish Under-
ground Backs Call fur Slowdown," in which it is noted that "The tactic of a slow-
down, known in Poland as an Italian Strike, has been used in the past by workers
because it reduces the risk of reprisal."
15. Peter Linebaugh, "Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working-Class Com-
position: A Contribution to the Current Debate," Crime and SocialJustice (Fall-Winter,
1976): 10. See also the brilliant analysis of piece-work by the Hungarian poet-worker
Miklos Haraszti, A WOrker in a WOrker's State, trans. Michael Wright (New York:
Universe, 1978).
The second observation is that resistance is not necessarily directed at the

immediate source of appropriation. Inasmuch as the objective of the resisters is
typically to meet such pressing needs as physical safety, rood, land, or income,
and to do so in relative safety, they may simply fOllow the line of least resistance.
Prussian peasants and proletarians in the 1830s, beleaguered by dwarf holdings
and wages below subsistance, responded by emigration or by poaching wood,
fOdder, and game on a large scale. The pace of "fOrest crime" rose as wages
declined, as provisions became more expensive, and where emigration was more
difficult; in 1836 there were 207,000 prosecutions in Prussia, 150,000 of which
were fur fOrest offenses. 16 They were supported by a mood of popular complicity
that originated in earlier traditions of free access to fOrests, but the poachers
cared little whether the rabbits or firewood they took came from the land of
their particular employer or landlord. Thus, the reaction to an appropriation in
one sphere may lead its victims to exploit small openings available elsewhere
that are perhaps more accessible and less dangerous. 17
Such techniques of resistance are well adapted to the particular characteristics
of the peasantry. Being a diverse class of "low classness," scattered across the
countryside, often lacking the discipline and leadership that would encourage
opposition of a more organized sort, the peasantry is best suited to extended
guerrilla-style campaigns of attrition that require little or no coordination. Their
individual acts of root dragging and evasion are often reinfOrced by a venerable
popular culture of resistance. Seen in the light of a supportive subculture and
the knowledge that the risk to any single resister is generally reduced to the
extent that the whole community is involved, it becomes plausible to speak of
a social movement. Curiously, however, this is a social movement with no fOrmal
organization, no formal leaders, no manifestoes, no dues, no name, and no
banner. By virtue of their institutional invisibility, activities on anything less
than a massive scale are, if they are noticed at all, rarely accorded any social
significance.
Multiplied many thousandfOld, such petty acts of resistance by peasants may
in the end make an utter shambles of the policies dreamed up by their would-
16. Ibid., 13. In 1842, for Baden, there was one such conviction for every four
inhabitants. For three centuries poaching was perhaps the most common rural crime
in England and the subject of much repressive legislation. See, for example, the
selections by Douglas Hay and E. P. Thompson in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and
Society in Eighteenth-Century England by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule,
E. P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
17. Apparently the theft of wood in Germany in this period rarely touched com-
munal forests. It goes without saying that, when a poor man survives by taking
from others in the same situation, we can no longer speak of resistance. One central
question to ask about any subordinate class is the extent to which it can, by internal
sanctions, prevent the dog-eat-dog competition among themselves that can only serve
the interests of appropriating classes.
be superiors in the capital. The state may respond in a variety of ways. Policies
may be recast in line with more realistic expectations. They may be retained
but reinforced with positive incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary compli-
ance. And, of course, the state may simply choose to employ more coercion.
Whatever the response, we must not miss the fact that the action of the peasantry
has thus changed or narrowed the policy options available to the state. It is in
this fashion, and not through revolts, let alone legal political pressure, that the
peasantry has classically made its political presence felt. Thus any history or
theory of peasant politics that attempts to do justice to the peasantry as a
historical actor must necessarily come to grips with what I have chosen to call
everyday forms of resistance. For this reason alone it is important to both document
and bring some conceptual order to this seeming welter of human activity.
Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines. 18 Just as millions of anthozoan
polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of in-
dividual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier
reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that
is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state
runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck
itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is
only rarely that the perpetrators of these petty acts seek to call attention to
themselves. Their safety lies in their anonymity. It is also extremely rarely that
officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be
to admit that their policy is unpopular, and, above all, to expose the tenuousness
of their authority in the countryside--neither of which the sovereign state finds
in its interest. 19 The nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness
of the antagonists thus conspire to create a kind of complicitous silence that all
but expunges everyday forms of resistance from the historical record.
History and social science, because they are written by an intelligentsia using
written records that are also created largely by literate officials, is simply not
well equipped to uncover the silent and anonymous forms of class struggle that
18. As Hobsbawn and Rude point out, it is not only conservative elites who have
overlooked this form of resistance, but also the urban left: "The historians of social
movements seem to have reacted very much like the rest of the urban left-to which
most of them have traditionally belonged-i.e. they have tended to be unaware of
it unless and until it appeared in sufficiently dramatic form or on a sufficiently large
scale for the city newspapers to take notice."
19. But not entirely. District-level records are likely to prove rewarding in this
respect, as district officials attempt to explain the shortfall in, say, tax receipts or
conscription figures. to their superiors in the capital. One imagines also that the
informal, oral record is abundant, for example informal cabinet or ministerial meet-
ings called to deal with policy failures caused by rural insubordination.
typify the peasantry. 20 Its practitioners implicitly join the conspiracy of the
participants, who are themselves, as it were, sworn to secrecy. Collectively, this
unlikely cabal contributes to a stereotype of the peasantry, enshrined in both
literature and in history, as a class that alternates between long periods of abject
passivity and brief, violent, and futile explosions of rage.
He had centuries of fear and submission behind him, his shoulders had
become hardened to blows, his soul so crushed that he did not recognise
his own degradation. You could beat him and starve him and rob him of
everything, year in, year out, befOre he would abandon his caution and
stupidity, his mind filled with all sorts of muddled ideas which he could
not properly understand; and this went on until a culmination of injustice
and suffering flung him at his master's throat like some infuriated domestic
animal who had been subjected to too many thrashings. 21
There is a grain of truth in Zola's view, but only a grain. It is true that the
"onstage" behavior of peasants during times of quiescence yields a picture of
submission, fear, and caution. By contrast, peasant insurrections seem like vis-
ceral reactions of blind fury. What is missing from the account of "normal"
passivity is the slow, grinding, quiet struggle over rents, crops, labor, and taxes
in which submission and stupidity are often no more than a pose--a necessary
tactic. What is missing from the picture of the periodic explosions is the un-
derlying vision of justice that informs them and their specific goals and targets,
which are often quite rational indeed. 22 The explosions themselves are frequently
a sign that the normal and largely covert forms of class struggle are failing or
have reached a crisis point. Such declarations of open war, with their mortal
risks, normally come only after a protracted struggle on different terrain.
RESISTANCE AS THOUGHT AND SYMBOL

Thus far, I have treated everyday fOrms of peasant resistance as if they were not
much more than a collection of individual acts or behaviors. To confine the
analysis to behavior alone, however, is to miss much of the point. It reduces the
20. The partial exceptions that come to mind are anthropology, because of its
insistence on close observation in the field, and the history of slavery and Soviet
collectivization.
21. Zola, The Earth, 91.
22. I do not by any means wish to suggest that violence born of revenge, hatred,
and fury play no role-only that they do not exhaust the subject, as Zola and others
imply. It is certainly true, as Cobb (Police and the People, 89-90) claims, that George
Rude (The Crowd in History, 1730-1848 [New York: Wiley, 1964}) has gone too far
into turning rioters into sober, domesticated, bourgeois political actors.
explanation of human action to the level one might use to explain how the water
buffalo resists its driver to establish a tolerable pace of work or why the dog
steals scraps from the table. But inasmuch as I seek to understand the resistance
of thinking, social beings, I can hardly fail to ignore their consciousness-the
meaning they give to their acts. The symbols, the norms, the ideological forms
they create constitute the indispensable background to their behavior. However
partial or imperfect their understanding of the situation, they are gifted with
intentions and values and purposefulness that condition their acts. This is so
evident that it would hardly merit restating were it not for the lamentable
tendency in behavioral science to read mass behavior directly from the statistical
abstracts on income, caloric intake, newspaper circulation, or radio ownership.
I seek, then, not only to uncover and describe the patterns of everyday resistance
as a distinctive behavior with far-reaching implications, but to ground that
description in an analysis of the conflicts of meaning and value in which these
patterns arise and to which they contribute.
The relationship between thought and action is, to put it very mildly, a
complicated issue. Here I wish to emphasize only two fairly straightforward
points. First, neither intentions nor acts are "unmoved movers." Acts born of
intentions circle back, as it were, to influence consciousness and hence subsequent
intentions and acts. Thus acts of resistance and thoughts about (or the meaning
of) resistance are in constant communication-in constant dialogue. Second,
intentions and consciousness are not tied in quite the same way to the material
world as behavior is. It is possible and common for human actors to conceive of
a line of action that is, at the moment, either impractical or impossible. Thus
a person may dream of a revenge or a millennia! kingdom of justice that may
never occur. On the other hand, as circumstances change, it may become possible
to act on those dreams. The realm of consciousness gives us a kind of privileged
access to lines of action that may-just may-become plausible at some future
date. How, for example, can we give an adequate account of any peasant rebellion
without some knowledge of the shared values, the "offstage" talk, the conscious-
ness of the peasantry prior to rebellion? 23 How, finally, can we understand every-
day forms of resistance without reference to the intentions, ideas, and language
of those human beings who practice it?
The study of the social consciousness of subordinate classes is important for
yet another reason. It may allow us to clarify a major debate in both the Marxist
and non-Marxist literature--a debate that centers on the extent to which elites
23. Lest this seem implicitly and one-sidedly to treat consciousness as prior to
and in some sense causing behavior, one could just as easily recoil one step and
inquire about the construction of this consciousness. Such an inquiry would neces-
sarily begin with the social givens of the actor's position in society. Social being
conditions social consciousness.
are able to impose their own image of a just social order, not simply on the
behavior of non-elites, but on their consciousness as well.
The problem can be stated simply. Let us assume that we can establish that a
given group is exploited and that, further, this exploitation takes place in a
context in which the coercive fOrce at the disposal of the elites and/or the state
makes any open expression of discontent virtually impossible. Assuming, fur the
sake of argument, that the only behavior observable is apparently acquiescent,
at least two divergent interpretations of this state of affairs are possible. One
may claim that the exploited group, because of a hegemonic religious or social
ideology, actually accepts its situation as a normal, even justifiable part of the
social order. This explanation of passivity assumes at least a fatalistic acceptance
of that social order and perhaps even an active complicity-both of which
Marxists might call "mystification" or "false-consciousness." 24 It typically rests
on the assumption that elites dominate not only the physical means of production
but the symbolic means of production as welP 5-and that this symbolic hege-
mony allows them to control the very standards by which their rule is evaluated. 26
As Gramsci argued, elites control the "ideological sectors" of society-culture,
religion, education, and media-and can thereby engineer conser•t fur their rule.
By creating and disseminating a universe of discourse and the concepts to go
with it, by defining the standards of what is true, beautiful, moral, fair, and
legitimate, they build a symbolic climate that prevents subordinate classes from
thinking their way free. In fact, fur Gramsci, the proletariat is more enslaved
at the level of ideas than at the level of behavior. The historic task of "the party"
is therefOre less to lead a revolution than to break the symbolic miasma that
blocks revolutionary thought. Such interpretations have been invoked to account
fur lower-class quiescence, particularly in rural societies such as India, where a
24. See the argument along these lines by Richard Haggart, The Uses of Literacy
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1954): 77-78.
25. In the Marxist tradition one might cite especially Antonio Gram~ci, Selections
from the Priion Notebooks, ··ed. and trans. Quinten Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 123-209, and Georg Lukacs, History and
Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1971). Marx, to my knowledge, never used the term "false-
consciousness,"" although "the fetishism of commodities" may be read this way. But
the fetishism of commodities mystifies especially the bourgeoisie, not merely sub-
ordinate classes. For a critical view of "hegemony" as it might apply to the peasantry,
see James C. Scott, "Hegemony and the Peasantry," Politics and Society 7, no. 3
(1977): 267-96, and chap. 7 below.
26. For other explanations of the same phenomenon, see, fur example, Frank
Parkin, "Class Inequality and Meaning Systems," in his Class Inequality and Political
Order (New York: Praeger, 1971), 79-102, and Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970).
venerable system of rigid caste stratification is reinforced by religious sanctions.

Lower castes are said to accept their fate in the Hindu hierarchy in the hope of
being rewarded in the next life. 27
An alternative interpretation of such quiescence might be that it is to be
explained by the relationships of fOrce in the countryside and not by peasant
values and beliefs. 28 Agrarian peace, in this view, may well be the peace of
repression (remembered and/or anticipated) rather than the peace of consent or
complicity.
The issues posed by these divergent interpretations are central to the analysis
of peasant politics and, beyond that, to the study of class relationships in general.
Much of the debate on these issues has taken place as if the choice of interpretation
were more a matter of the ideological preferences of the analyst than of actual
research. Without underestimating the problems involved, I believe there are a
number of ways in which the question can be empirically addressed. It is possible,
in other words, to say something meaningful about the relative weight of con-
sciousness, on the one hand, and repression (in fact, memory, or potential) on
the other, in restraining acts of resistance.
The argument fur false-consciousness, after all, depends on the symbolic align-
ment of elite and subordinate class values-that is, on the assumption that the
peasantry (proletariat) actually accepts most of the elite vision of the social order.
What does mystification mean, if not a group's assent to the social ideology that
justifies its exploitation? To the extent that an exploited group's outlook is in
substantial symbolic alignment with elite values, the case fur mystification is
strengthened; to the extent that it holds deviant or contradictory values, the case
is weakened. A close study of the subculture of a subordinate group and its
relation to dominant elite values should thus give us part of the answer we seek.
The evidence will seldom be cut and dried, fur any group's social outlook will
contain a number of diverse and even contradictory currents. It is not the mere
existence of deviant subcultural themes that is notable, for they are well-nigh
universal, but rather the forms they may take, the values they embody, and the
emotional attachment they inspire. Thus, even in the absence of resistance, we
are not without resources to address the question of false-consciousness.
To relieve the somewhat abstract nature of the argument thus far, it may be
helpful to illustrate the kind of evidence that might bear directly on this issue.
Suppose, fur example, that the "onstage" linguistic term fur sharecropping or
fur tenancy is one that emphasizes its fairness and justice. Suppose, further, that
the term used by tenants behind the backs of landlords to describe this rela-
27. But note the effOrts of lower castes to raise their ritual status and, more
recently, the tendency fur harijans to leave Hinduism altogether and convert to Islam,
which makes no caste distinctions among believers.
28. See, for example, Gerrit Huizer, Peasant Mobilization and Land Reform in In-
donesia (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1972).
tionship is quite different-cynical and mocking. 29 Is this not plausible evidence

that the tenant's view of the relationship is largely demystified-that he does
not accept the elite's definition of tenancy at face value? When Haji Ayub and
Haji Kadir are called Haji "Broom," Haji Kedikut, or Pak Ceti behind their backs,
is it not plausible evidence that their claim to land, to interest, to rents, and to
respect is at least contested at the level of consciousness, if not at the level of
"onstage" acts? What are we to make of lower-class religious sects (the Quakers
in seventeenth-century England, Saminists in twentieth-century Java, to name
only two of many) that abandon the use of honorifics to address their social
betters and insist instead on low furms of address or on using words like "friend"
or "brother" to describe everyone, Is this not telling evidence that the elite's
libretto fur the hierarchy of nobility and respect is, at the very least, not sung
word fur word by its subjects?
By reference to the culture that peasants fashion from their experience-their
"offstage" comments and conversation, their proverbs, fOlksongs, and history,
legends, jokes, language, ritual, and religion-it should be possible to determine
to what degree, and in what ways, peasants actually accept the social order
propagated by elites. Some elements of lower-class culture are of course more
relevant to this issue than others. For any agrarian system, one can identify a
set of key values that justify the right of an elite to the deference, land, taxes,
and rent it claims. It is, in large part, an empirical matter whether such key
values find support or opposition within the subculture of subordinate classes.
If bandits and poachers are made into fulkheroes, we can infer that transgressions
of elite codes evoke a vicarious admiration. If the furms of outward deference are
privately mocked, it may suggest that peasants are hardly in the thrall of a
naturally ordained social order. If those who try to curry the personal favor of
elites are shunned and ostracized by others of their class, we have evidence that
there is a lower-class subculture with sanctioning power. Rejection of elite values,
however, is seldom an across-the-board proposition, and only a close study of
peasant values can define the major points of friction and correspondence. In this
sense, points of friction become diagnostic only when they center on key values
in the social order, grow, and harden.
THE EXPERIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMAN AGENTS

It was with such issues in mind that I spent more than a year and a half in the
village ofSedaka listening, asking questions, and trying to understand the issues
that animated villagers during my stay among them. The result is, I hope, a
dose-to-the-ground, fine-grained account of class relations in a very small place
(seventy families, 360 people) experiencing very large changes (the "green rev-
29. Tenancy in Central Luzon, the Philippines, is a striking case in point. Com-
munication from Benedick Kerkvliet, University of Hawaii.
olution": in this case, the double-cropping of rice). Much of that account, though
not all of it, is an account of what appears to be a losing class struggle against
capitalist agricultural development and its human agents. It goes without saying
that I have thought it important to listen carefully to the human agents I was
studying, to their experience, to their categories, to their values, to their under-
standing of the situation. There ate several reasons for building this kind of
phenomenological approach into the study.
The first reason has to do with how social science can and ought to be
conducted. It is fashionable in some of the more structuralist variants of neo-
Marxism to assume that one can infer the nature of class relations in any
nonsocialist Third World country directly from a few diagnostic features-the
dominant mode of production, the mode and timing of insertion into the world
economy, or the mode of surplus appropriation. This procedure entails a highly
reductionist leap straight from one or a very few economic givens to the class
situation that is presumed to fOllow from these givens. There are no human
actors here, only mechanisms and puppets. To be sure, the economic givens ate
crucial; they define much, but not all, of the situation that human actors face;
they place limits on the responses that are possible, imaginable. But those limits
ate wide and, within them, human actors fashion their own response, their own
experience of class, their own history. As E. P. Thompson notes in his polemic
against Althusser: ·
nor is it [the epistemological refusal of experience} pardonable in a Marxist,
since experience is a necessary middle term between social being and social
consciousness: it is experience (often class experience) which gives a color-
ation to culture, to values, and to thought; it is by means of experience
that ·the mode of production exerts a determining pressure upon other
activities . . . . classes arise because men and women, in determinate pro-
ductive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle,
to think, and to value in class ways: thus the process of class fOrmation is
a process of self-making, although under conditions which are given. 30
How else can a mode of production affect the nature of class relations except as
it is mediated by human experience and interpretation? Only by capturing that
experience in something like its fullness will we be able to say anything mean-
ingful about how a given economic system influences those who constitute it
and maintain it or supersede it. And, of course, if this is true fur the peasantry
or the proletariat, it is surely true fur the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie,
and even the lumpenproletatiatY To omit the experience of human agents from
the analysis of class relations is to have theory swallow its own tail.
30. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1978), 98, 106-07.
31. It is also true for the regular pattern of human activities that we call insti-
tutions. For example-note well, structuralists-the state.
A second reason for putting the experience of human agents at the center of
the analysis concerns the concept of class itself. It is all very well to identify a
collection of individuals who all occupy a comparable position in relation to the
means of production-a class-in-itself. But what if such objective, structural
determinations find little echo in the consciousness and meaningful activity of
those who are thus identified? 32 In place of simply assuming a one-to-one cor-
respondence between "objective" class structure and consciousness, is it not far
preferable to understand how those structures are apprehended by flesh-and-blood
human actors? Class, after all, does not exhaust the total explanatory space of
social actions. Nowhere is this more true than within the peasant village, where
class may compete with kinship, neighborhood, faction, and ritual links as foci
of human identity and solidarity. Beyond the village level, it may also compete
with ethnicity, language group, religion, and region as a fucus of loyalty. Class
may be applicable to some situations but not to others; it may be reinfOrced or
crosscut by other ties; it may be far more important for the experience of some
than of others. Those who are tempted to dismiss all principles of human action
that contend with class identity as "false-consciousness" and to wait fur Althus-
ser's "determination in the last instance" are likely to wait in vain. In the
meantime, the messy reality of multiple identities will continue to be the ex-
perience out of which social relations are conducted. Neither peasants nor pro-
letarians deduce their identities directly or solely from the mode of production,
and the sooner we attend to the concrete experience of class as it is lived, the
sooner we will appreciate both the obstacles to, and the possibilities for, class
fOrmation.
A further justification fur a close analysis of class relations is that in the
village, and not only there, classes travel under strange and deceptive banners.
They are not apprehended as ghostly, abstract concepts but in the all-too-human
furm of specific individuals and groups, specific conflicts and struggles. Piven
and Cloward capture the specificity of this experience for the working class:
First, people experience deprivation and oppression within a concrete set-
ting, not as the end product of large and abstract processes, and it is the
concrete experience that molds their discontent into specific grievances
against specific targets. Workers experience the factory, the speeding
rhythm of the assembly line, the foremen, the spies, the guards, the owner,
and the pay· check. They do not experience monopoly capitalism. 33
In the same fashion the Malay peasant experiences increasing land rents, stingy
32. See the persuasive argument along these lines by James Brow, "Some Problems
in the Analysis of Agrarian Classes in South Asia," Peasant Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall
1981): 15-33.
33. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), 20, emphasis added.
landlords, ruinous interest rates from moneylenders, combine-harvesters that

replace him, and petty bureaucrats who treat him shabbily. He does not experience
the cash nexus or the capitalist pyramid of finance that makes of those landlords,
combine-harvester owners, moneylenders, and bureaucrats only the penultimate
link in a complex process. Small wonder, then, that the language of class in the
village should bear the birthmarks of its distinctive origin. Villagers do not call
Pak Haji Kadir an agent of finance capital; they call him Kadir Ceti because it
was through the Chettiar moneylending caste, which dominated rural credit
from about 1910 until World War II, that the Malay peasant most fOrcibly
experienced finance capital. The fact that the word Chettiar has similar conno-
tations fur millions of peasants in Vietnam and Burma as well is a tribute to
the homogenization of experience which the capitalist penetration of Southeast
Asia brought in its wake. Nor is it simply a question of recognizing a disguise
and uncovering the real relationship that lies behind it. For the disguise, the
metaphor, is part of the real relationship. The Malays historically experienced
the moneylender as a moneylender and as a Chettiar-that is, as a fOreigner and
a non-Muslim. Similarly, the Malay typically experiences the shopkeeper and the
rice buyer not only as a creditor and wholesaler but as a person of another race
and another religion. Thus the concept of class as it is lived is nearly always an
alloy containing base metals; its concrete properties, its uses, are those of the
alloy and not of the pure metals it may contain. Either we take it as we find it
or we abandon the empirical study of class altogether.
That the experienced concept of class should be fOund embedded in a partic-
ular history of social relations is hardly to be deplored. It is this rootedness of
the experience that gives it its power and its meaning. When the experience is
widely shared, the symbols that embody class relations can come to have an
extraordinary evocative power. One can imagine, in this context, how individual
grievances become collective grievances and how collective grievances may take
on the character of a class-based myth tied, as always, to local experience. Thus,
a particular peasant may be a tenant of a landlord whom he regards as particularly
oppressive. He may grumble; he may even have fantasies about telling the
landlord what he thinks of him or even darker thoughts of arson or homicide.
If this is an isolated, personal grievance, the affair is likely to stop there--at
fantasy. If, however, many tenants find themselves in the same boat, either
because they share the same landlord or because their landlords treat them in
comparable ways, there arises the basis fur a collective grievance, collective fan-
tasy, and even collective acts. Peasants are then likely to find themselves trading
stories about bad landlords and, since some landlords are likely to be more
notorious than others, they become the fOcus of elaborate stories, the repository
of the collective grievances of much of the community against that kind of
landlord in general. Thus, we have the legend ofHaji Broom, which has become
a kind of metaphorical shorthand fur large-scale landlordism in the region. Thus,
we have poems about Haji Kedikut, which are not so much stories about
individuals as a symbol fOr an entire class of Haji landlords.
If there had ever been (and there has not) a large-scale movement of rebellion
against landlords in Kedah, we can be certain that something of the spirit of
those legends would have been reflected in action. The way was already sym-
bolically prepared. But the central point to be emphasized is simply that the
concept of class, if it is to be fOund at all, is to be found encoded in concrete,
shared experience that reflects both the cultural material and historical givens
of its carriers. In the West, the concept of food is expressed most often by bread.
In most of Asia, it means rice. 34 The shorthand for capitalist in America may be
Rockefeller, with all the historical connotations of that name; the shorthand for
bad landlord in Sedaka is Haji Broom, with all the historical connotations of that
name.
For all these reasons, the study of class relations in Sedaka, as elsewhere, must
of necessity be as much a study of meaning and experience as it is of behavior
considered narrowly. No other procedure is possible inasmuch as behavior is never
self-explanatory. One need cite only the famous example of a rapid closing and
opening of a single eyelid, used by Gilbert Ryle and elaborated on by Clifford
Geertz, to illustrate the problem. 35 Is it a twitch or a wink? Mere observation
of the physical act gives no clue. If it is a wink, what kind of wink is it: one
of conspiracy, of ridicule, of seduction? Only a kno\\'ledge of the culture, the
shared understandings, of the actor and his or her observers and confederates can
begin to tell us; and even then we must allow fOr possible misunderstandings.
It is one thing to know that landlords have raised cash rents for rice land; it is
another to know what this behavior means for those affected. Perhaps, just
perhaps, tenants regard the rise in rents as reasonable and long overdue. Perhaps
they regard the rise as oppressive and intended to drive them off the land.
Perhaps opinion is divided. Only an inquiry into the experience of tenants, the
meaning they attach to the event, can offer us the possibility of an answer. I
say "the possibility of an answer" because it may be in the interest of tenants
34. "Man does not live by bread alone." But "bread" may come to mean more
than just food; it may mean the wherewithal for living or cash, as in "Can you loan
me some bread, man?" In Malay society, the proverb jangan pecah periok nasi orang
(Don't break someone else's rice pot) means "don't threaten someone else's source of
livelihood."
35. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 6-9.
An excellent summary of this intellectual position may be found in Richard ] . Bern-
stein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1978), 173-236. As Bernstein notes, "These intentional descriptions,
meanings, and interpretations are not merely subjective states of mind which can be
correlated with external behavior; they are constitutive of the activities and practices
of our social and political lives" (229-30).
to misrepresent their opinion, and thus interpretation may be tricky. But without
that information we are utterly at sea. A theft of grain, an apparent snub, an
apparent gift-their import is inaccessible to us unless we can construct it from
the meanings only human actors can provide. In this sense, we concentrate at
least as much on the experience of behavior as on behavior itself, as much on
history as carried in people's heads as on "the flow of events," 36 as much on how
class is perceived and understood as on "objective class relations."
The approach taken here certainly relies heavily on what is known as phe-
nomenology or ethnomethodology. 37 But it is not confined to that approach, for
it is only slightly more true that people speak for themselves than that behavior
speaks for itself. Pure phenomenology has its own pitfalls. A good deal of
behavior, including speech, is automatic and unreflective, based on understand-
ings that are seldom if ever raised to the level of consciousness. A careful observer
must provide an interpretation of such behavior that is more than just a repetition
of the "commonsense" knowledge of participants. As an interpretation, it has to
be judged by the standards of its logic, its economy, and its consistency with
other known social facts. Human agents may also provide contradictory accounts
of their own behavior, or they may wish to conceal their understanding from
the observer or from one another. Hence, the same standards of interpretation
apply, although the ground is admittedly treacherous. Beyond this, there simply
are factors in any situation that shed light on the action of human agents, but
of which they can scarcely be expected to be aware. An international credit crisis,
changes in worldwide demand for fuod grains, a quiet factional struggle in the
cabinet that affects agrarian policy, small changes in the genetic makeup of seed
grain, fur example, may each have a decicled impact on local social relations
whether or not they are known to the aqtor~ involved. Such knowledge is what
an outside observer can often add to a description of the situation as a supplement
to, not a substitute for; the description that human agents themselves provide. For
however partial or even mistaken the experienced reality of the human agents,
it is that experienced reality that provides the basis for their understanding and
their action. Finally, there is no such thing as a complete account of experienced
reality, no "full verbal transcript of the conscious experience. " 38 The fullness of
the transcript is limited both by the empirical and analytical interests of the
transcriber-in this case, class relations broadly construed:-and by the practical
limits of time and space.
36. CliffOrd Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought," Amer-
ican Scholar 49, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 175.
37. See, fur example, Roy Turner, ed., Ethnomethodology: Selected Readings (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
38. John Dunn, "Practising History and Social Science on 'Realist' Assumptions,"
in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed.
C. Hookway and P. Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 160.
What is attempted here, then, is a plausible account of class relations in

Sedaka that relies as much as possible on the evidence, experience, and descrip-
tions of action which the participants have themselves provided. At numerous
points I have supplemented that description with interpretations of my own, for
I am well aware of how ideology, the rationalization of personal interest, day-to-
day social tactics, or even politeness rilay affect a participant's account. But never,
I hope, have I replaced their account with my own. Instead I have tried to validate
my interpretation by showing how it "removes anomalies within, or adds infor-
mation to, the best description which the participant is able to offer." For, as
Dunn argues,
What we cannot properly do is to claim to know that we understand him
or his action better than he does himself without access to the best de-
scription which he is able to offer. . . . The criterion of proof for the
validity of a description or interpretation of an action is the economy and
accuracy with which it handles the full text of the agent's description.

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Weapons of the Weak

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

1. Small Arms Fire in the Class War 1

3. The Landscape of Resistance 48

5. History according to Winners and Losers 138

6. Stretching the Truth: Ideology at Work 184

7. Beyond the War of Words: Cautious Resistance and

8. Hegemony and Consciousness: Everyday Forms of

Photographs following page 162

3.1 Size Distribution of Paddy-Land Holdings, Muda Irrigation

1. Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1

peasantry-a class scattered across the countryside, lacking fOrmal organization,

The unseemly length of the acknowledgments that fOllow is indicative of how

colleagues. I made painful cuts; I dropped arguments they thought ludicrous or

5. Called Hari Raya Puasa or simply Hari Raya.

I was a rich man and I became poor

65. It appears that the term is widespread, at least in northeast Malaysia. On

THE SYMBOLIC BALANCE OF POWER

THE UNWRITTEN HISTORY OF RESISTANCE

ginally affect the various forms of exploitation that peasants confront.

In this situation, it is understandable if the development equation is often

7. This issue centered on the much resented "Twenty-Nigger Law," as it was

history of resistance to slavery in the antebellum U.S. South is largely a history

The second observation is that resistance is not necessarily directed at the

RESISTANCE AS THOUGHT AND SYMBOL

venerable system of rigid caste stratification is reinforced by religious sanctions.

tionship is quite different-cynical and mocking. 29 Is this not plausible evidence

THE EXPERIENCE AND CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMAN AGENTS

landlords, ruinous interest rates from moneylenders, combine-harvesters that

What is attempted here, then, is a plausible account of class relations in

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