Weapons Of The Weak: Everyday Forms Of Peasant Resistance

In James Scott’s novel Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance we are shown the social and political dynamics in the village of Sadaka. The poor get poorer and the rich get richer and there is not much that can be done about it. They both need one another though. One cannot thrive without the other and one must be careful not to tip the scales in their society. The poor in the village must be careful when showing their dissatisfaction. They cannot risk a full blown revolt so they must show their displeasure in other, more subtle ways. The first example of one such way of showing dissatisfaction in Scott’s novel is false compliance. An example of false compliance Scott showed us was when Razak would offer his services or labor to an upper class individual in the village but would ask for the money
The villager takes four weeks to do something that he could have done in just two. No one would be able to prove he is taking longer than necessary on purpose so there can be no repercussions. Feigned ignorance is also almost impossible to prove. An example of this would be when a landlord asks a tenant to be off the land in a year but just before the year is up the tenant plants another crop. So when the landlord comes around at the end of the year to take the land he sees he is unable to because the tenant has already started the crop. When he asks the tenant the farmer can say he did not understand the landowner or that he misunderstood. Either way there is nothing the landowner can do now so he allows the farmer to stay. Everyday forms of peasant rebellion do not look like rebellion. They look like everyday life. That is because most of the forms of struggle fall just short of outright defiance. “Here I have in mind the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups: foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabatoge. .