I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it.… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.” — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“First, the visionary intellectuals and planners behind them were guilty of hubris, of forgetting that they were mortals and acting as if they were… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism,… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
