Weapons of the Weak- Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance Read online

  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 for 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 for no purpose other than to find a moment of solitude. I found 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 transcript” (see chapter 7) made me appreciate for the first time the truth of Jean Duvignaud’s comment: “For the most part, the village yields itself to the investigator and often he is the one to take refuge in concealment.”3 I also found 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 draw 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 for my life and my work, the word gratitude cannot begin to cover.

  Despite a determined effort to trim the manuscript, it remains long. The main reason for 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 for the “Roshomon effect” that social conflict creates. Another reason for including some narrative has to do with the effort, toward the end, to move from a close-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.

  [Page 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 for 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 found in appendix D.

  This book is for 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 suggestions 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 found it impossible to write as if I 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 for 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. [Page xx] 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 Comparative 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 Jin, Colin Abraham, the Deputy Vice—Chancellorthen Dean—Kamal Salih, and Assistant Dean Amir Hussin Baharuddin for their advice and kindness. Nafisah bte. Mohamed was an exceptional tutor of the Kedah dialect who helped me prepare for the fieldwork. The Centre for Policy Research at USM has conducted much of the finest research on the Muda Scheme in Kedah and, for 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 Setar were unfailingly generous 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 understanding. 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 Nonini, 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 for 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 de
tailed criticism of [Page xxi] colleagues. I made painful cuts; I dropped arguments they thought ludicrous or irrelevant—or both; I added historical and analytical material they thought necessary. 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 Gibbons, 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 are 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 Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SOC 78-02756), and Yale University for support while in Malaysia. Most recently a postdoctoral 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 preoccupation 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 Shigeharu Tanabe and Andrew Turton helped sharpen my perspective. Another and more contentious workshop organized with the help of the Social Science Research 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 Political Science Review (October 1973); History and Peasant Consciousness in Southeast Asia, edited by Andrew Turton and Shigeharo 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 are 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.

  [Page xxii]

  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. Eric Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. (1973): 3–22.

  2. Marc Bloch, French Rural History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), 170.

  3. Jean Duvignaud, Change at Shebika: Report From a North African Village (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 217.

  1 • Small Arms Fire in the Class War

  [Page 1]

  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 for work with her transplanting group. Before I could [Page 2] 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 Tongkang. He recited verses of the Koran over her and suggested a poultice for 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 for 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 for 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 for much of Sedaka. 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 for 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 for Razak to finish. After all, Razak and Azizah made attap roofing for 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, [Page 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 quarters. 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 legitimately 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.