Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture. — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
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
