Grain of Sand Award Winner 2013: James C. Scott
Winner: James C. Scott (Yale University)
Ever since his book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), Jim Scott has demonstrated how the meaning-making of the people in the settings one studies is central to political understanding and analysis. Drawing on years of field research in Southeast Asia, Scott brought fine-grained attention to ethnographic detail into conversation with high level theory to produce sophisticated and persuasive accounts of the centrality of contextualized meaning-making to the operation of power. This respect for actors’ own understandings of how power impacts their lives and livelihoods continues in his subsequent books. In research that parallels feminist theorizing, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) offered pointed critiques of research approaches that assume that the meaning(s) of human “behavior” is (are) self-evident.
Scott’s historical sensibility and focus on the possibility of democracy and freedom are on display in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). Their eclectic use of sources and evident curiosity make them arresting works of social science, enriching our understanding of knowledge and politics, and of the politics of knowledge. Finally, his most recent book, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012) makes an incisive case, in simple, often witty language, for a politics that challenges the centralization of authority.
Scott's approach to mentoring and training parallel the political sensibilities evident in his scholarship. Never a hand-holder or micro-manager, Scott excels at creating space for his students to pursue their own visions. His approach to graduate training, outlined in a compelling extended interview in Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder's Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics (2007), demonstrates a desire to mentor original thinkers and risk-takers rather than to reproduce technicians or intellectual schools of thought in the discipline.
Throughout his scholarship and mentoring, Scott demonstrates the importance of an understanding of, and respect for, lived experience. The actors who people his writings are driven by a passion for justice, a desire for dignity, or a hubris made possible and dangerous by power. He draws on a rich array of evidence (among these surveys, photographs, memoirs, fiction, and poetry); and his analytic explanation is not driven by a presumption of simplicity.
For these reasons, Jim Scott’s body of work has been and continues to be an inspiration to interpretive (and other) scholars who pursue humanistic research and knowledge. His writings indeed make it possible for us to see a world in a grain of sand.
