The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the… — James C. Scott Anthropologists 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… — James C. Scott History 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… — James C. Scott Habits 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… — James C. Scott Long ago 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… — James C. Scott Identity 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… — James C. Scott Big day 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… — James C. Scott Always believe 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… — James C. Scott Dialectics 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;… — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.” — James C. Scott Plants and animals 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… — James C. Scott Death 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… — James C. Scott Capitalism Copy Share Image
“Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is… — James C. Scott Social order Copy Share Image
I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work… — James C. Scott Bored Copy Share Image
Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career… — James C. Scott Agriculture Copy Share Image
“We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.” — James C. Scott Copy Share Image
“Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by… — James C. Scott Malicious gossip Copy Share Image
The world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives volume and amplitude… — James C. Scott Dream Copy Share Image
The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly. — James C. Scott Freedom Copy Share Image
In a world of injustice there's going to be dreams of justice. — James C. Scott Dream Copy Share Image
“immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate… — James C. Scott Law Copy Share Image
“New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize… — 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… — James C. Scott Anthropologists Copy Share Image
“The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization,… — James C. Scott Aspiration Copy Share Image
What's interesting to me is that in the late twentieth century it seems that there's scarcely a part of the world that… — James C. Scott Areas Copy Share Image
