A political scientist of Southeast Asia whose scholarly reach extended far beyond both discipline and region, Yale University professor James C. Scott passed away on July 19, 2024. Scott was author of multiple landmark works, including The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), and Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), among many others. Founder of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale, Scott was renowned for leading weekly seminars, hosting group meals at his farm, and offering meticulous critiques of work-in-progress.
James C. Scott joined the Association for Asian Studies in 1964 and served as AAS President in 1997-98. In 2021, the Journal of Asian Studies featured a forum on his work, which is available paywall-free at the Duke University Press website until October. Below, Asian Studies colleagues and students share their memories of Scott, whose influence will continue to resonate through the field for years to come.
Other links:
- Obituary for James C. Scott at the Washington Post
- New York Times obituary for James C. Scott
- David Polansky, “James C. Scott Trampled Across Borders to Explain the World” (Foreign Policy, July 31, 2024)
- Kudoboard of memories submitted by Scott’s Yale colleagues and students
- “In A Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott” (2021 video oral history)
- Jennifer Schuessler, “Professor Who Learns From Peasants” (New York Times profile, December 4, 2012)
- Stellan Vinthagen, “The Journal of Resistance Studies’ Interview with James C. Scott” (Journal of Resistance Studies 6, no. 1 (2020).
I heard the news of Jim Scott’s passing while traveling to a mountain village in East Java, Indonesia. While it is hard to write a short tribute to a man like Jim under any circumstances, it feels appropriate to write for him from this montane remittance forest. Jim so profoundly shaped the fields of Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, Agrarian Studies, and Political Ecology—and my own work in those same venues—through his scholarship, activism, and research. Through his prolific written work, he actively and often silently mentored generations of researchers around the world, constantly presenting us with new ways to learn from and explain the experiences and actions of marginalized people in places far from centers of authority, high culture, and hierarchy. He grounded his research in rural Southeast Asian people and places and “thickened” the tropes through which their lives came to be represented and understood.
In founding and leading the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale, he created an exciting, inclusive, collaborative, and participatory intellectual environment that openly contradicted its elite Global North venue. He used his base at that elite institution to forward an agenda of engaged scholarship and work that extended from his farm in rural Connecticut to the margins of authoritarian nation-states in Southeast Asia and the campuses from which he spoke and worked. The conversations in that room were formative and generative for so many who passed through.
Jim was not only a scholar activist, he was an activist amongst scholars, long before these terms were coined. Focusing on poor and/or rural actors and their relationships, Jim wrote against the grain even before his book of the same name. Through the concepts he deployed, he showed us new ways to see with a purpose: to equip his readers to make, promote, or facilitate change and justice. These concepts were not stapled in place—they moved between positions and positionalities as well as across agrarian environments and their infrastructures of power: “weapons of the weak,” “moral economies,” “seeing like a state,” and the concept of “Zomia” as an ungoverned site of resistance to power, inspiring millions of pages of elaboration and contestation. He compelled us to read against the grain in fieldwork and archives as he did, or in other ways.
As an officer of the Association for Asian Studies, I write not only in honor of “Former President of AAS, Professor James C. Scott,” but because of the contributions he made to Asian Studies within and across other fields. Jim initiated the Crossing Borders panels at the AAS conferences, bringing peasants, smallholders, workers, remote rural rulers, and Zomian subjects into conversations about the global and urban. Under AAS President K. Sivarmakrishnan, the current co-Director of Agrarian Studies at Yale, the AAS-in-Asia conference was launched “with Jim’s blessing.” I hope to continue making and expanding these connections, as current Vice President and 2025-26 President of the AAS. Moving forward, I hope AAS will re-engage and rework Critical Agrarian Studies within and across Asia and other areas, honoring and expanding Jim’s pathbreaking work.
— Nancy Peluso, University of California, Berkeley
Vice President, Association for Asian Studies
A World Without Jim
When I was a graduate student in History at Harvard, I heard about an interesting seminar at Yale run by a man named James Scott. Since my dissertation topic at the time was to study the agrarian background of Mao’s essay on the peasant movement of 1927, I thought it would be helpful. The Agrarian Studies seminar, and the person who ran it, became for over forty years one of my primary sources of intellectual inspiration, a mentor and a dear friend. Now what will we do without you, Jim?
Jim Scott was a man of so many parts it would be impossible to do justice to them all. First there was Jim Scott the writer. Each one of his magnificent books was a masterpiece of clarity and insight. He had the rare knack of pulling together multiple sources from disparate lands and disciplines under a compelling metaphor. Concepts such as “moral economy of the peasant,” “weapons of the weak,” or “seeing like a state” pervade all academic writing in history and the social sciences because they strike to the heart of the relationship between ordinary people and political power. From a passionate but rigorous standpoint, Jim unmasked the lies of power-holders while defending the ways in which neglected groups asserted their own right to respect. Perhaps my two favorites among Jim’s many pithy phrases are “cosmological bluster,” exposing the pretensions of ancient rulers that Heaven had their back, and the Ethiopian proverb that opens Domination and the Rights of Resistance, “When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.” Jim’s ethnographic immersion, after two years in Malaysia, gave him deep compassion for the victims of modern agricultural technology, and his vast reading in social theory and literature gave him the skill to construct provocative hypotheses with general applications.
Then there was Jim the teacher. After going to Yale in 2008, I had the privilege of co-teaching the Agrarian Studies seminar with Jim and other colleagues. Each year was a new adventure, with new students entering and new ideas pouring out of Jim’s head, as he worked on his next book. But he never monopolized attention; he listened carefully to all the students, read their papers carefully, and generously acknowledged the value of their insights, even if he disagreed with them. Choosing the Agrarian Studies postdoc fellows each year was also a rewarding task. We could select outstanding young scholars from around the world, from a wide range of disciplines, and give them complete freedom to do their research—provided they attended the seminar regularly and presented their work. The “gag rule”—the distinctive feature of the seminar—required every presenter to send a paper in advance, talk for only five minutes, then remain silent for up to 45 minutes while the entire group pitched in with critiques, suggestions, and elaborations. Usually the discussion ended up far away from the original topic of the paper, but that was the point—to expand everyone’s horizons and to communicate clearly to the general public. The seminar itself included local farmers, political activists, and others from well beyond the Yale academic community.
The seminar’s focus responded to trends in the academy and the real world. From being centered on peasant rebellions in the 1980s, it evolved into discussions of modern high-tech agriculture, and then into ecological themes, embracing animals, food, pollution, climate, forests, rivers, and even tea drinking. Its strength was a flexible, evolving form of intellectual dialogue that never got fixed in a single paradigm.
There was Jim the artist: an accomplished pastel painter of landscapes and portraits of the people he most admired. Jim the poetry lover participated during the COVID years in a small online poetry club I organized. Jim the farmer, of course, knew intimately the steers, chickens, bees, and sheep that he raised proudly in Durham. Jim the foodie was just as enthusiastic about a three-star dinner at Noma created by René Redzepi (who spoke at Yale), as he was about the local Thai restaurants in New Haven. And Jim the cook produced twice a year for the Agrarian Studies fellows his own delicious roast chicken dinners, accompanied by wine and stimulating conversation. Although a self-proclaimed anarchist, he was not a self-promoter; he deeply enjoyed building communities and helping everyone in the group to aspire to their own best selves.
China, so dominated by bureaucratic state power, might seem completely alien to the world of Jim Scott. Yet Jim was fascinated by China. China, after all, produced not only the heinous emperor Qin, but the anarchist philosopher Zhuangzi, the farmer-poet Tao Qian, and the rollicking novel of peasant rebellion, The Outlaws of the Marsh. We often discussed the role of “escape landscapes”: marshes, grasslands, hill country, in providing sanctuaries for those who fled the Chinese and other states, and these appeared as a main theme in The Art of Not Being Governed. This book, which described anti-state people in the hill country of Southwest China and its borderlands, won the Fairbank Prize in premodern Chinese history, showing that even the massive imperial Chinese state never gained a total grasp on its territory. In Seeing like a State, the question of the famine following the Great Leap Forward looms ominously over the argument: was the Great Leap the exemplar of destructive high modernism, or the very opposite, Utopian romanticism detached from any empirical reality of agrarian life? Perhaps both at the same time.
A Chinese proverb sums up best Jim Scott’s huge presence and his lingering influence: “the man is gone; his shadow remains.” (人去留影) We will carry on.
— Peter C. Perdue, Yale University
In Fall 2000, I arrived at Yale for my graduate study. Like many other students, I was full of excitement to study the discipline I had chosen for graduate study. At the very beginning of my training, Jim gave me an unusual and yet unforgettable piece of advice which continues to shape my work even today: You are what you read; diversify your reading. If you’re studying political science, half of what you read should come from fields outside political science. Although it took me a while to fully understand it, this is one of the wisest and most lasting pieces of advice that I received from him. In my first semester, I took the Agrarian Societies course, which exposed me to diverse authors and books about agrarian and environmental change from anthropology, history, and political science. To be honest, I struggled to keep up with the weekly assignments; he gave us at least one book per week. But I very much enjoyed it and his Agrarian Studies colloquium series which supplemented the course with guest speakers from all over the country. Jim was very generous with his time in accepting our requests for independent study with him. He literally provided hungry graduate students with (Southeast Asian) food for thought. I was fortunate to participate in two of these independent study groups—on Southeast Asian History and Society and on Power, Domination, and Resistance—where a sense of comradeship as Southeast Asianists grew among the participants, which continues to this date. In 2002, Jim organized the “Chicken Conference.” He not only tirelessly provided labor to physically set up the venue alongside graduate students but also thanked the volunteers by sending charming cards with his witty words. Jim remains forever in my heart the best mentor, teacher, and person I always look up to.
— Takeshi Ito, Sophia University, Tokyo
I first met Jim Scott when I arrived at Yale as a prospective PhD student in 1994. I confess that I had no clue how renowned he was, even then—to me, he was simply (and happily for me) a lefty Malaysianist who might advise a PhD in political science. Over coffee, he explained to me and two other prospective students (not focused on Asia at all: a first clue!) that he was a hands-off advisor, lest he create a flock of “Scotties.” Having only just stumbled across the notion of pursuing a PhD or academic career, I could only guess at what he meant by that caveat, so I didn’t let it bother me.
In practice, I’ve come to realize, what Jim produced—apart from a truly extraordinary collection of books and other works, of course!—was precisely what he denied: a flock of Scotties. But true to form, few are acolytes in the traditional sense; it would surely be impossible to follow closely in Jim’s adamantly peripatetic intellectual footsteps if one tried. The loss of Jim is unsettling not only in its own right, as the quelling of a truly brilliant mind, but also for the waves it has sent through a far-flung community modeling Jim’s borders-be-damned, transcript-flipping way of thinking. Jim offered me, and I’m sure others, precise, astute feedback on course papers and dissertation-chapter drafts (never missing the stray syntactical error or warrantless cliché). But far more important to my own intellectual development and commitment has been the extent to which I and others in Jim’s extended orbit came to channel his way of thinking: questioning assumptions, ferreting out subtexts, owning one’s interests beyond “objective” scholarship, and wondering what insights might be tucked away, behind the frame.
Meanwhile, there was the PhD to get through. To an insecure, fairly clueless grad student, Jim’s hands-off approach turned out to feel worrisomely like disinterest. (Luckily, Kay Mansfield was ever on call, for both reassurance and practicalities!) Hence I appreciated all the more the chance to build a post-advisor/advisee relationship in the years since—which Jim’s incessant questions and encouragement made easy to do. And yet I thrived in the environment he created. The Program in Agrarian Studies Jim established at Yale—the team-taught grad course, as well as the Friday seminars—proved transformative; it made me a much worse political scientist, by mainstream measures, but allowed a rare chance to revel in curiosity and fascinating details and inspiringly brilliant colleagues. Jim’s innovations, from having grad students serve as seminar discussants to excoriating overwrought “academic” language, fostered an eminently inclusive, more empowering than intimidating environment. His famous potlucks at the farm, and even his insistence on treating any of his crew he could round up to a meal at any given conference, simply amplified that warmth and community. Throughout, Jim never sought to dazzle, but to foster a shared glow; I will miss that light.
— Meredith Weiss, University at Albany, SUNY
When James Scott passed away last month one could feel a collective exhalation of breath across the width and breadth of the academy. His scholarship simply resonated with just about everyone: political scientists and anthropologists; historians and sociologists; seekers of truth of many stripes, beyond the academy itself. He was invested in speaking to all of these audiences, because his intellect sought out bases of the human condition, regardless of where such human beings were found in time or space. It’s not an accident that his co-taught Agrarian Studies seminar was the largest graduate class offered at Yale for many years. Students piled into the room, seeking to understand the world better through the intellectual connections made in that forum. On scholarly grounds alone, I think it would be fair to say that this was the most impactful venue in the teaching of graduate students in New Haven for over a quarter of a century.
Yet this summary tells only part of a story. Jim made community wherever he went; his pot-lucks after the Agrarian Studies seminars were legendary, out at his rural farm in Durham, CT. He was also a part of the Southeast Asianist fold across what he called “the invisible college” of global academia, and he had similar status among political scientists and anthropologists, as well as among those who self-described as anarchists. No topic was too distant for him to be interested in it. He was equally at home discussing a myriad subjects, simply because he seemed to be equally interested in all aspects of the human condition, and the ways people organized themselves across time and space. A more “open” intelligence—one profoundly concerned with the levers of power in global communities—may not have been bestowed upon another human being. Genuine kindness and humility was also part of this demeanor, and the result was that all of us were moths around the flame that was Scott.
In the 1990s, the Yale Bookshop used to hold remainders sales on Yale University Press books; hundreds upon hundreds of them would sit in bins outside of the store. A good number of the books upon my shelves now date from that era, when they were sold at four dollars a copy. One day I was at those bins sifting with my girlfriend (now my wife) who was also a Yale grad student, though one working in a different discipline altogether, and on a different part of the world. Jim’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance momentarily floated to the top of the piles, and my hand went to grab it. There was a firm tug back, a hidden hand of resistance; my partner had seen the book at the exact same time. She grabbed the other side. We both looked up, surprised, and then smiled, as each of us saw who possessed the other end.
But make no mistake—no one let go. There was only one copy. To this day it is the only book I co-own with another human being. It would take a Solomonic intervention to sort this out; the magnetic resonance of the man and the power of his ideas were both too much to even think about letting go. So it was with Jim. He will be sorely, sorely missed.
— Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University
I visited Jim on June 1st. Although physically frail, he was in good spirits. His mind was sharp as usual, and his voice strong and cheerful. As my partner and I devoured his cheese cake, he passionately discussed politics and, again and again, sweetly uttered “I love you” to members of his family who rang him that afternoon. He proudly showed us the lovely white and pink peonies from his farm and he couldn’t stop talking about his new barn, which he was using as an art studio. I treasured meeting Jim the artist, who enjoyed sitting in front of an easel with crayon in hand. His drawing of himself with his Scottish highland cattle—the last of which passed just two days before him—touched my soul.
I went to see Jim for two reasons. One was to say goodbye. I was to return to Cambridge (UK) for a new job, for which Jim gave me many blessings. The other reason was to apologize. I felt I was too demanding a reader of his manuscript for the soon-to-be-published In Praise of Floods. I knew Jim had a major health scare, but I underestimated the intensity and seriousness of it. In my oblivious critique, I asked him to articulate better his concept “Thick Anthropocene” vs. “Thin Anthropocene.” I challenged his conflation of deep time with macro-time while ignoring micro-time. Again and again, I commented with multiple exclamation marks: “This is good. Say more!! Say it fully!!”In places where he intended to embody perspectives of nonhuman others, I criticized his Jim-esque writing style and urged him to undo his idiosyncratic Jimness, so “the river dolphin who comes to the town hall” could actually assert a voice and fashion a style of their own.
I asked for so much that when I learned how much pain and danger he had endured, I felt terrible. I berated myself, “What an idiot I am!“ Yet there was Jim, a pure intellectual. He simply brushed away my unease and said, “Yours were easily the most helpful, owing to your close and sympathetic reading. It was a model of collegiality.” Calling himself the lucky beneficiary, he said the book—his last one—was made better. Always generous, always putting ideas and others’ well-being above himself, that is the Jim I will remember.
— Ling Zhang, University of Cambridge
I was incredibly lucky to have met Jim my first semester of graduate school at Yale in 1995 when I took his team-taught class on Agrarian Societies. I was just getting my footing back in academia after a stint in government and then overseas and wasn’t even sure what topic I would do my PhD research on. Yet between the Program in Agrarian Studies and the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, both of which Jim ran at that point, I started to get pulled into his gravitational force. He took me under his wing, doing directed readings with me and keeping me encouraged and on-track as my interests in Vietnam took shape and then flight. I worked as a graduate assistant for Ag Stu (as it was known) for several years to organize conferences on chickens, colonialism, and other topics (he knew I had no money to speak of beyond a paltry graduate fellowship and magically had extra work for me when I was struggling to pay rents): these were always eclectic gatherings, as Jim made connections among disparate people and topics to spark discussion and debate. It was a dream model of grad school, including getting end-of-the-week meals at least once a month with luminaries from Alice Waters and Michael Pollan to Donna Haraway and others at restaurants I couldn’t afford on my own or at his farmhouse (he cooked a moose at least once). All because Jim recognized rightly how important food and fellowship was to thinking and doing.
One of the things I especially valued about Jim is that despite being a star academic, he never made much distinction between us grad students and everyone else. We would all get tapped to be discussants at the weekly Friday lunch seminar when various scholars came in town to present their works in progress. My now-husband Chris Duncan remembers getting roped in to be a discussant on a complex theoretical paper about Appalachia, protesting with a wail “But I work in eastern Indonesia!” Those things did not matter to Jim, because Jim had a plan—that you were to be stretched outside your comfort zone. And you didn’t dare not prepare—I sweated over those commentaries more than most actual published papers either before or since, as I did not want to let him down. And for those visitors who tried to impress Jim with pompousness or rudeness to us students—woe be unto them. Jim was the master of the backhanded statement to let people know they had crossed intellectual lines.
When I left Yale and became a professor at Arizona State and then Rutgers, with public-school budgets and administrators who policed academic boundaries, I realized I could never build the world I had experienced at Yale as one of Jim’s students, and my own grad students have been the poorer for it. I cannot imagine another scholar whose passing will be as keenly felt by so many across a huge range of disciplines, from his home in political science to us anthropologists who claimed him as one of our own to libertarian economists who appreciated his skepticism towards the state. He was utterly sui generis, and I will miss his wisdom and support keenly. My last emails with him earlier this summer were about a stalled writing project of mine, and his cheery support and offhand comments sending me in a new direction were his typical advice. I will continue to treasure those words, and now definitely finish that new book. Thanks, Jim.
— Pam McElwee, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey