James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of resistance: hidden transcripts, is studded with stimulating insights about power. The book is at least as much about the political significance of speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relationship among speech and power.
James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of resistance: hidden transcripts, is studded with stimulating insights about power. The book is at least as much about the political significance of speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relationship among speech and power.
James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of resistance: hidden transcripts, is studded with stimulating insights about power. The book is at least as much about the political significance of speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relationship among speech and power.
Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 407-424 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656344 Accessed: 06/10/2010 16:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org Review Essay Language and the "Arts of Resistance" Susan Gal University of Chicago James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), is certainly instructive for anthropologists and is studded with stimulating insights about power. Nevertheless, it is a deeply flawed work. The book was published several years ago and has been widely reviewed in journals of political science and sociology where the major issues of contention have been Scott's arguments about the nature of hegemony, the rationality of political action, and the logic of explaining revolutions (see, for example, Mitchell 1990 and Tilly 1991). However, the book is at least as much about the political significance of speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relationship among speech, belief, and ideology in everyday power relations, and the politi- cal efficacy of talk. And it is exactly the language-related concepts introduced in the book-such as transcript and infrapolitics-that are having the widest in- fluence, appearing with increasing frequency in writings about local politics and the political meaning of linguistic and cultural practices. For this reason, my aim is to discuss Scott's work for what it says and assumes about language and power. Ironically, it is just this aspect of the book that has not yet been seriously and critically reviewed. Domination and the Arts ofResistance ambitiously attempts to theorize the nature of communication across lines of economic power. Scott's broader aim is to "suggest how we might more successfully read, interpret, and understand the often fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups" (1990:xii). He ex- plicitly rejects the currently common assumption in neo-Marxist literature, as well as in mainstream political science, that subordinate groups acquiesce to economic systems that are manifestly against their interests because they come to believe in a dominant ideology that legitimates or naturalizes the power of ruling elites. Whether in the simplistic form of "false consciousness" and cul- tural consensus, or in more subtle stories about cultural hegemony or "hegemonic incorporation," these theories look to ideological mechanisms for Cultural Anthropology 10(3):407-424. Copyright ? 1995, American Anthropological Association. 407 408 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY the explanation of political quiescence in situations of exploitation and inequal- ity. Rejecting such theories and the image of passive subordination that they suggest, Scott's earlier research among Malay peasants documented the politi- cal effects of apparently trivial everyday actions, such as poaching, foot-drag- ging, and pilfering. In an influential theoretical move, he described these activi- ties as peasants' disguised attempts to resist and thwart the appropriation of their labor, property, or production (Scott 1985). Scott's current book differs from his earlier work as well as the work of many other critics of "dominant ideology" theories (see Abercrombie et al. 1980) in that he focuses on language and ideology. His major recommendation for better understanding the apparent political consent of subordinate groups is to examine how power relations affect what people say to different social audi- ences. The appearance of consent, he argues, is produced by the practical and material pressure on subordinates to refrain from "speaking truth to power" (Scott 1990:i). There is vastly more resistance to dominant ideologies than re- searchers have reported because they have failed to notice the "hidden tran- scripts" that express resistance and the hidden social sites at which such tran- scripts are created and acted out. When resistance occurs "in public," in front of the powerful, scholars have failed to note it because of the subtle, evasive speech genres in which it is routinely expressed. These genres of "ideological resis- tance," along with the disguised forms of economic resistance such as poaching, deserve special attention, he argues. Together they form what Scott calls the "in- frapolitics of the powerless," which is the indispensable and revealing precursor of those elaborate institutional political actions, such as revolutions and the for- mation of social movements, that are the more usual object of social science. Scott's work is potentially of great interest to readers of Cultural Anthro- pology for a number of reasons. First, he is attempting to understand familiar subject matter: communication, everyday talk, and ritual in contexts of unequal power. Second, Scott relies heavily on anthropological research, particularly studies of social interaction, sociolinguistics, folklore, and a range of perform- ance genres, to provide supportive evidence for his conceptual edifice. What he identifies as novel insights and observations about these phenomena will often sound familiar to those who have been reading the anthropological literature of the last decade. This is in part because his endeavor resembles the attempts within anthropology to reinterpret linguistic practices not only as patterned cul- tural difference but as expressions of speakers' involvement in large-scale rela- tions of unequal power, often as signs of resistance to dominant linguistic forms and the values they encode (summarized in Gal 1989). Third, while tacitly in- spired by conceptions of domination and resistance borrowed from Gramsci, his followers, and critics, Scott's specific conceptual proposals rely on a much more familiar set of metaphors drawn directly from everyday language use: ideology is figured as transcript, on-stage or off-stage talk, libretto, performance, and dia- lect. However, despite these apparent points of convergence and superficial similarity, Scott's book actually moves in quite a different direction than the LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 409 theoretical development of recent anthropological approaches to language. A critique of Scott, therefore, provides the occasion to discuss new analyses of language and power, showing by comparison how they diverge from what is, in fact, the more traditional approach found in Scott's book. Most generally, Scott relies on unexamined and simplified images of sup- posedly unmediated face-to-face communication as guiding metaphors in un- derstanding the production, dissemination, and effects of ideology. I will argue here that this basic conceptual move is misguided, leading him to misunderstand the ethnographic materials he uses and to omit some of the most intriguing ques- tions about the nature of language in the moder world. A characteristic feature of the works I will cite in opposition to Scott's approach is that they understand linguistic forms, practices, and their effects-whether dominating, resistant, or hegemonic-to be importantly constructed and mediated by linguistic ideolo- gies that vary across space and history (see, for example, Kroskrity et al. 1992; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). In what follows, I will first explicate Scott's more specific proposals about the relationship among ideology, "transcripts," and domination, and then out- line four basic criticisms of this work. First, in proposing the idea of hidden tran- scripts, Scott develops a notion of the natural (precultural, presemiotic) interact- ing self that is at odds with recent understandings about the role of linguistic ideologies and cultural conceptions in the production of self and emotion. Sec- ond, the major analytical categories he uses-dominant and subordinate-are so broadly generalized over space and time that important cultural differences between forms of power cannot be captured in his scheme. Third, Scott's central term, public, is of considerable interest for students of language, social interac- tion and ideology, yet it is drastically undertheorized in this book, and its prob- lematic ideological aspects are thus made invisible. Fourth, although his princi- pal aim is to explicate the political significance of talk-its significance as constitutive "performative" acts-Scott's analyses of linguistic phenomena ex- plore only the referential or representational aspects of language, and even within this narrowed perspective, fail utterly to grapple with grammatical and pragmatic complexity. The possibility that grammatical categories could con- tribute to tacit hegemony is ignored; pragmatic strategies such as ambiguity or irony are assumed to have intrinsic functions such as subversion or resistance, regardless of the linguistic ideologies and cultural contexts in which such prac- tices are embedded. The Book's Argument Scott starts with the observation, taken from his own experience, that peo- ple are careful in their speech to those who have power over them. Complaints, opinions, and responses that would be imprudent if made to the powerful are often choked back, and such "repressed speech" is redirected to others. On those rare occasions when anger and indignation overcome such sensible discretion, a feeling of elation is likely to follow. In the effort to systematize and theorize this insight, he draws his examples very broadly: from studies of slavery, serf- 410 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY dom, and caste subordination, patriarchal gender relations, colonialism, racism, state socialism, and total institutions such as jails and prisoner-of-war camps. On the basis of this wide array of evidence, he argues that Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a "hidden transcript" that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant. The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed. [Scott 1990:xii] Scott's initial scheme thus posits four separate transcripts, with powerful and subordinate groups each having both a hidden and a public form. The hidden transcript of the subordinate is largely an emotionally fueled response to domination; the practice of domination creates the hidden transcript (p. 27). Characteristically, this creation occurs in a range of autonomous social sites that are cloistered from the surveillance and interference of the powerful: in slave quarters, untouchable villages, and the taverns of the working class. Such sites are not automatically available; they must be won and continually de- fended by various kinds of social struggle. It follows that the ordinarily observ- able relations between subordinate and dominant groups represent the encoun- ter of the public transcript of the dominant and that of the subordinate (p. 13). The subordinate, in these public encounters, are coerced by material constraints to defer to the dominant, or to flatter and cajole them. Alternatively, the subor- dinate may enact the image of themselves proffered by the dominant in order to demand the goods, rights, and privileges that the dominant group's own public (legitimating) ideology implies are due to those who are the proper subjects of their rule. It is thus often in the interest of the subordinate to maintain their def- erential public transcript, even though they do not believe it, especially if open rebellion is seen as a practical impossibility. The weak are most likely to resist in devious ways, without any open confrontation (p. 86). What can be part of any public transcript is also a matter of struggle. Scott points out that "the capacity of dominant groups to prevail ... in defining and constituting what counts as the public transcript and what as offstage is ... no small part of their power" (p. 14). As this quote makes clear, the intriguing no- tion of four separate transcripts, offered early in the book, collapses later on into a more familiar configuration: although contestations often occur, dominant groups largely control what can be said and done in the single public transcript, a single publicly acknowledged "reality." It is of central importance to Scott that while the assertion of this reality may fool the dominant, working as a kind of "self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage, improve their cohesion" (p.67), the weak are not taken in. For the weak, the public transcript is, at most, a "dramatization of power re- lations that is not to be confused with ideological hegemony" (p. 66-67; empha- sis is original). In chapters 2 and 3, Scott marshals a wide array of often subtle ethnographic, literary, and historical examples-rituals, conversations, pro- tests, parades and other gatherings, petitioning of monarchs, everyday visual and audible displays of rank and deference-which in each case can be under- LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 411 stood as evidence of such a public transcript, jointly created, for their different reasons, by the dominant and the weak. Thus, ironically, the process of domination itself generates the social evi- dence that apparently confirms notions of hegemony. The dilemma of scholars is to discern what the subordinate "really" think, when they are not performing for the public transcript, by finding evidence of their hidden transcript. Such evidence is available even from public events because the subordinate engage in "a veiled discourse of dignity and self-assertion within the public transcript" (p. 137). If one knows how to decode the public acts and speech of the weak, one can discern in them an "ideological resistance [that] is disguised, muted and veiled for safety's sake" (p. 137). "What we confront then, in the public tran- script, is a strange kind of ideological debate about justice and dignity in which one party has a severe speech impediment induced by power relations" (p. 138). Ultimately, the importance of these forms of resistance-"arts of political dis- guise"-is that they are the "infrapolitics" of the oppressed, the elementary forms of their political life, on which the possibility of more open action de- pends. Each form of "disguised resistance... is the silent partner of a loud form of public resistance" (p. 199) which may eventually emerge, given favorable conditions. For Scott, it is not true that subordinates experience ideological contradic- tions, a doubled or divided consciousness. Nor is it the case that, given the domi- nant cultural materials, they find it hard to articulate a counterreality, as hegem- ony theorists might say. Rather, their hidden ideas about a different world, which Scott is sure they have, have just not been realizable in practice. In some ways this seems an attractive conceptual scheme. Scott joins the new cultural historians in pointing out the nontransparent, socially constructed nature of historical and archival evidence. The book's strength is in the engag- ingly described and kaleidoscopic examples of performances-of-resistance and rituals-of-the-weak. Furthermore, his emphasis on struggle and conflict in the creation of such performances is a welcome antidote to an older ethnography of speaking that too easily assumed cultural consensus in the interpretation of speech. Finally, anthropologists can only applaud his attention to linguistic prac- tices as politically important phenomena. However, as I argue below, it is exactly Scott's handling of linguistic materials that finally undermines his argument. Selves and Interacting Subjects Scott thinks of the public transcript as a matter of performance, acting, and even posing. This may sound at first like the familiar Goffmanian insight that social life can be viewed as drama. However, Scott's understanding of perform- ance is much narrower than this and is linked to a notion of an authentic self that is necessarily betrayed by performance. Scott's position is thus antithetical to Goffman's (1959) view that every social act is unavoidably a presentation of self. Goffman's dramaturgical metaphors suggest that all social beings in the in- teraction order are necessarily, in some sense, actors. In contrast, Scott thinks of acting as an onerous imposition, suffered mostly by the weak: "the script and 412 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY stage directions for subordinate groups are generally far more confining than for the dominant" (p. 28), for it is the weak who must "suppress and control feel- ings" and simulate emotions (p. 29). It is for the subordinate that the public tran- script is a "realm of masks" in which "less of the unguarded self is ventured" (p. 29). In contrast, for the dominant, "power means not having to act" or perform; it is "the capacity to be more negligent and casual about any single perform- ance" (p. 29; emphasis in original). In a chapter entitled "Domination, Acting and Fantasy," sociolinguistic and social psychological studies from several dec- ades ago are invoked to argue that for the subordinate, public life is made up of "command performances" (p. 29) that involve, most centrally, "masking one's feelings" in response to the indignities of exploitation (p. 37), and "controlling what would be a natural impulse to rage, insult, anger and the violence that such feelings prompt" (p. 37). Indeed, Scott asserts that the content of the hidden transcript emerges sys- tematically from the redirection of this suppressed rage, from the "frustration of reciprocal action" (p. 37). In its proper social site, the hidden transcript provides the means to express these emotions and make them collective. It is in this sense that, according to Scott, domination creates the hidden transcript. For this ex- planation to hold in the broad range of cases to which Scott applies it, the nature of personhood or the self must be assumed to be known and unproblematic across vast cultural and historical differences, and a naturalized, indeed hydrau- lic, view of the emotions must be accepted. Yet these assumptions are untenable. The culturally constructed and vari- able nature of the "person" is by now a truism in anthropology (see Geertz 1983), supported by much evidence across a range of theoretical approaches. Careful new empirical work (reported in Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990) suggests that emotions are best seen as constituted in social discourses and situated speech practices which are likely to vary across time and space, not as primor- dial internal states that are fixed responses to environmental stimuli. In this con- structionist view, rage itself would have to be understood as discursively consti- tuted, not as a "natural" response. Scholars investigating linguistic practices within situations of unequal power have noted that subordinate groups often produce several distinct dis- courses about emotion. For instance, Abu-Lughod (1986) discusses the dissi- dent or subversive expression of love, performed in oral lyric poetry among the Bedouin of Egypt's Western Desert. The genre is most closely associated with women and youths who are this society's disadvantaged dependents. But Abu- Lughod repeatedly stresses that this poetry is anything but a spontaneous out- pouring of feeling. Rather, it is artful, planned language, rich in irony. It is a case of counterdiscourse, rather than some explosion of raw experience into the realm of official opinion. More generally, the expression of contradictory opin- ions by a single speaker, in different contexts, is not necessarily evidence of dis- sembling or inauthenticity. In a bilingual community in Hungary, any single vil- lager expresses many and often conflicting opinions about the value of the two languages he or she speaks, including opinions that show evidence of a resis- LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 413 tance to official languages and ideologies. But these contrasting stances cannot be classified as posed versus genuine; they are evidence of the coexistence of deeply felt yet contested discourses (Gal 1993). More important, Scott's equation of power with lack of expressive con- straint flies in the face of cross-cultural evidence. Extensive ethnographic case studies have demonstrated that in some societies it is the holders of greatest power who must restrain themselves physically, linguistically, and often in the expression of emotion exactly because it is superior restraint that culturally and ideologically defines and justifies their power, enabling them to properly exer- cise it. In this sense, the link between linguistic forms and their functions is con- structed and mediated by local ideologies of self, language, and power. The in- directness and allusive quality of Malagasy men's speech (Ochs 1974), the linguistic inarticulateness, even ungrammaticality, of Wolof nobles (Irvine 1990), the strenuous restraint in performance required of monarchs in the Bali- nese theater state (Geertz 1980), and the muting of interactional gestures among educated, high-status Javanese (Errington 1988) are only the best known of such examples. In short, there is no simple, universal relation between social power and the form in which emotion is expressed, exactly because the construction and expression of affective states is mediated by linguistic ideology. What is odd about this part of Scott's argument is that he himself provides counterevidence to his major claims in the course of making other points. In- deed, it is a general and irritating characteristic of the book that Scott often de- nies in one place a point he has demonstrably asserted in another. So, for in- stance, he argues elsewhere that the dominant do indeed need to provide a "performance of mastery" that is sometimes hard to construct, and their "com- portment ... must embody the ideas by which ... domination is publicly justi- fied" (p. 49). In a footnote (p. 52 n. 16; see also p. 105), he makes the familiar ob- servation that different types of legitimation of power will require different types of public performance from the powerful. For instance, only those who claim to rule because they are more honest and better qualified need to hide their moral lapses and technical mistakes. But this more discursive or constructionist approach to emotion, power, and the self disappears in most of the text, in favor of the view that directly derives the form and content of hidden transcripts from the universal emotional plumbing of the weak, who are coerced to hide their pent-up rage. Scott's inconsistencies around questions of selfhood and emotion derive from his apparent ambivalence about two currently controversial epistemologi- cal issues in social science. The first is the vexed question of the researcher's own positionality. It is typical that, while rightly alerting his readers to the subtle role of different perspectives and conflicting goals in the creation of the public transcript, Scott's definition of transcript-a term whose metaphorical use is fundamental to this book-reveals his own reluctance to follow the argument through and adopt a similarly perspectivalist approach to hidden transcripts in his analyses. Scott says he uses the notion of transcript in its "juridical sense (proces verbal) of a complete record of what was said ... also includ[ing] non- 414 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY speech acts such as gestures and expressions" (p. 2). But this definition ignores the fact, often noted by students of social interaction, that any transcript is itself a socially constructed artifact, created for definable purposes that depend on the goals of the transcriber, and can be neither "complete" nor the objective "view from nowhere" that Scott's definition suggests (see Ochs 1979). The second issue is revealed in his attempt partially to reform but at the same time to retain a widespread metaphor of power and resistance that domi- nates current social science discourse. Timothy Mitchell (1990) has drawn at- tention to the way in which this master metaphor depends on our everyday (Western) conception of the person as an internally autonomous, self-formed consciousness living inside a physically manufactured body. This familiar dual notion of the person leads to the idea that power itself is dual: coercion is usually understood as an external force exercised on the body but not necessarily pene- trating and controlling the mind, while persuasion is the mental mode by which power operates, one that captures the mind. In a parallel argument, Rosalind O'Hanlon (1988) notes that when Marxist critics want to bring oppressed or ne- glected groups to the attention of Western audiences, they do so by trying to show that the oppressed are also recognizably like the Western ideal of the po- litical subject, that is, they are dual selves. The critic thus presents the oppressed as self-formed, internally autonomous actors mentally resisting an external domination. In contrast, Mitchell (1990:546) follows Foucault in arguing that this dual, autonomous subject is itself "the effect of distinctively modern forms of power." Mitchell argues that such forms of power ought to be explored in their own right in order to discover how they create a world that, "like the modern subject ... seems to be constituted as something divided from the beginning into two neatly opposed realms, a material order on the one hand and a separate sphere of meaning or culture on the other" (1990:546). Clearly, for Scott, sub- ordinate groups seem more self-formed and autonomous if they can be seen as producing resistance not through some range of alternate discourses (which might seem like mere tricks of mental persuasion as nefarious as that of a domi- nant discourse) but directly from their supposedly unmediated experience of rage in the face of domination. Although the emphasis is on resistance, there is no room in this scheme for cultural or ideological mediation of emotion, for counterdiscourse, or for the contradictions of mixed beliefs. In sum, the use of the dramaturgical metaphor in this book is shallow, con- tradicting the tradition of Goffman and the ethnography of speaking. The analy- sis of power-laden interaction relies on assumptions about the nature of human subjects and their emotions that diverge from recent comparative and construc- tionist work in anthropology. There are similarly problematic assumptions in the book's larger comparative scheme. The Trouble with Dominant and Subordinate Scott flattens the great range of power relations evident in the diverse so- cial formations of the historical and ethnographic record into a single opposition LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 415 between dominant and subordinate. Effacing the historical and cultural differ- ences between the situations of groups such as 18th-century American slaves, 19th-century Russian peasants, and late-20th-century workers in former Com- munist states, he concentrates instead on the similarities between them. In his terms, they are all groups that are relatively weak politically and economically, and that construct public and hidden transcripts. A transcript is either a meta- phor for ideology, based on the image of face-to-face courtroom interaction, or, in the case of the hidden transcript that expresses resistance, it is the actual prod- uct of face-to-face interaction that occurs in protected sites. It follows that, for Scott's purposes, the political use of language is assumed to be similar across cultures, and across systems of domination and historical periods. There are important sociological reasons for not conflating so many differ- ent forms of political and economic domination. But I will concentrate here only on some of the language-related disadvantages of such a strategy. One unfortu- nate result is the slighting or ignoring of the ideological impact of those commu- nicative media-print, television, video, radio, and film-whose existence and functioning vary significantly across the historically different cases that Scott equates, and whose creation and dissemination of ideology are not at all ade- quately described by the face-to-face metaphor. Thus, Scott's book describes a barely recognizable landscape in which it often appears that 19th-century work- ers did not read broadsheets, and 20th-century peasants, workers, and post- Communists are not profoundly influenced by listening to radio, watching tele- vision, or playing cassette recorders. Yet some of the greatest political and ideological changes of the last 200 years-changes importantly related to Scott's concern with domination, including the rise of nationalism, the creation of the citizen-subject, the spread of consumerism, and the recent collapse of communism-have been shaped by the existence of these mass media. Because these changes are subsumed under the dominant-subordinate dichotomy, Scott provides very little separate commentary on them and no theoretical apparatus to understand their relation to linguistic processes. A brief sketch of one well-known example should suffice to illustrate the problem. Benedict Anderson's (1983) analysis of nationalism draws attention to the creation of communities in which members will never know or interact with most of their fellow members, in part because the size of the group makes face- to-face contact among all members an impossibility. Scott never explicitly con- siders such groups organized by national ideology. In his terminology, we would sometimes have to call such groups economically and politically "subor- dinate," as in the case of nations formed against a colonial power, and at other times they would be "dominant." But, in either case, as Anderson shows, the imagination of such communities is central to their existence. And this construc- tion or imagination has been made possible, historically, because of mediation by certain artifacts of print capitalism: the regional newspaper and the novel. The reading of newspapers is an 416 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY extraordinary mass ceremony ... performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. [Anderson 1983:35] Whatever the shortcomings of Anderson's larger argument, it is obvious that populations of the kind Scott defines by his labels "subordinate" and "domi- nant" must also be created and united by such complex linguistic processes (call them imagination, mobilization, or consciousness-raising) that are usually not examples of face-to-face interaction. Yet Scott provides no analysis at all of such mediated communication. By drawing attention to print and other mass media, I am also suggesting that, contrary to Scott's analysis, the "sites" at which hidden transcripts are cre- ated need not be restricted to places where furtive face-to-face encounters occur. Resistance to domination is just as likely to be produced by illegal radio sta- tions, samizdat magazines, pirated music cassettes, or patched-in cable TV. An- thropology itself has certainly not solved the problem of how to analyze such mediated linguistic practices, but it is clear that the tools of face-to-face analysis alone are inadequate to the task. Instead, we need to understand the semiotic processes and ideologies with which people imagine their identities, their sub- ordination, and their "communities," through such media, and vis-a-vis other social identities. Scott's single schematic dichotomy of dominant and subordinate also hides the fact that different forms of domination produce different configurations of language use in politics, or what Scott would perhaps call different kinds or or- ders of transcripts. One example will suffice. In describing Mongolian politics, Caroline Humphrey notes that in societies encapsulated within a Soviet-type system, domination did not consist of an elite group surrounded by a subordi- nated mass (as Scott's implied model suggests), but rather "domination resides in a series of equivalent positions in nesting hierarchies, such that a similar domination may be exercised at each level" (1994:46). Humphrey (1994) sug- gests that in such cases, there was typically an "official transcript," a version of Marxism-Leninism, that was mostly written, perceived to be highly ideological, sanctimonious and stilted, and imposed on Mongolians by Soviet force and om- nipresent Soviet "advisers." Rather than any unified opposition to this official ideology, expressed in some hidden transcript, there was a range of quite widely known, ambiguous, but not at all hidden, transcripts, used by everyone in Mon- golia. Hidden sites frequented by people of a single subordinate social category not only were rare but also were subverted by the knowledge that anyone could be an informer. This was because lines of division between subordinate and dominant were impossible to draw: everyone experienced both domination and subordination within the tightly nested hierarchies of everyday Mongolian life, and everyone engaged in riddle-like, deliberately cryptic analyses of everyday events (Humphrey 1994:44-48). LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 417 Thus, if the conflation of different kinds of social systems into a single schematic dichotomy is problematic, so is the related assumption that the sub- ordinate and the dominant are always clearly definable, unified, and separable groups, unambiguously opposed to each other. State socialism is a striking prob- lem for Scott's dualism, but nested hierarchies and nondualistic forms of domi- nation occur in other social formations as well. My larger point is that, in con- trast to Scott's implicit assumption of dualistic fixity, the place of language in political life varies significantly across systems of domination. Definitions of Public Another fundamental conceptual tool in Scott's work is the distinction be- tween public and hidden. Public is defined as "action that is openly avowed to the other party in the power relationship" and a "shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate" (p. 2). Once again, face-to-face interaction provides the model for ideological discourse, and no further discussion of the concept is provided. Public thus becomes a matter of audience: who is supposed to be witnessing certain speech, gestures, prac- tices. But if public means merely an audience, then hidden transcripts, by defi- nition, must also have their publics. Even the caveat that hidden transcripts are produced in opposition to power will not help to define them. As Scott acknow- ledges, power relations, after all, occur inside subordinate groups too, when leaders exert power over followers or group pressure coerces members. Thus, we can easily imagine a hidden transcript that voices resistance, from within an enslaved group, to the ideology of a particular slave leader. What then distin- guishes public and hidden transcripts? Or, one might ask, from whose perspec- tive do we call a transcript "hidden" or "offstage"? Scott mentions that the split in the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of a Black Power movement in the United States in the 1960s was preceded by "offstage discourse among black students, clergymen and their parishioners" (p. 199). But since much of the dis- sension over strategies among black elites in the 1960s was reported in regional and local newspapers, potentially available to all, in what sense was this dis- course "hidden"? Scott acknowledges some of these problems and attempts to solve them by briefly arguing that there are many hidden transcripts developed in a continuum of sites, with some sites being more "intimate" than others and so "relatively freer of intimidation from above" (pp. 25-27). But if there can be many hidden transcripts and also many public ones-some of these occurring even within subordinate groups-we have gained little in analytic precision or insight. In the end, the problem is not one of counting and distinguishing transcripts or the views they express, rather it is that the definition of public used by Scott is unexamined and inadequate. The idea of public, far from being a simple ques- tion of audience, based on the model of witnessed face-to-face interaction, is it- self a deeply ideological construct in Western thought, often linked exactly to the separation of language from a face-to-face situation and thus to the decon- textualization of language by print. Based on its role in European history, one 418 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY might call the notion of public a logic for the legitimation of political power. It has been identified in a number of forms in recent analyses of postabsolutist Europe and North America. Warner (1990), building on the influential discus- sion by Habermas (1989), argues that the legitimacy of 18th-century American republicanism was based on the negative notion of disinterested individuals who, because the anonymity of print allowed them to be no-one-in-particular, could claim to represent everyone (the public, the people). As I have hinted above, Anderson's (1983) notion of the "imagined community" plays on the same logic of a non-face-to-face social group defined through simultaneous reading as "everyone-in-the-nation," because no-one-in-particular. Feminist critics have noted that the idea of a public actually helps to con- stitute the powerful, ruling group in society by silently excluding many catego- ries of people and activities (Fraser 1992 and Landes 1988). Fictions of disinter- estedness and anonymity produced through ideas about disembodied language accomplish this exclusion while also masking it. In 18th-century France, Eng- land, and the United States, for instance, it was women, blacks, and men without property who were categorized as necessarily particularistic, partisan, and self- interested; their political actions could never have been seen as disinterested and so legitimately directed at the general, the "common" weal, the "public" good. Thus, it is not only that dominant groups often control what counts as the public transcript. More fundamentally, groups can become politically dominant, at least in some kinds of societies and in particular historical periods, exactly by constituting themselves as the natural, unquestioned members of a disinter- ested, anonymous public. A form of opposition to this ideological mechanism is the creation of alternate publics, which have indeed been much discussed in re- cent politics of race and gender. Thus, public is not an innocent or transparent term linked only to audi- ences, as Scott would have it. Rather, within the Western tradition, the broad no- tion of a public is a form of political legitimation in which the decontextualiza- tion and depersonalization of language produces the image of a social group uniquely fitted to govern because it is no-one-in-particular and thus can suppos- edly stand for everyone. On the model of the historical research that has emerged around the analysis of the concept of public in Europe and the United States, global comparative endeavors such as Scott's book would have to ex- plore the key terms that produce and mask such exclusionary legitimation in other social formations, and also the way that language ideology and mass me- dia are implicated in the creation of such categories. Language and Hegemony Despite these gaps in his analysis of publics, the strongest sections of Scott's book are those in which he discusses the complicitly created public tran- script, focusing on the linguistic practices in which subordinate groups express their dissatisfaction and resistance to dominant ideology. However, Scott's as- sumptions about the unmediated (precultural, presemiotic) relationship among LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 419 linguistic form, ideology, and social function undermine the generality of his formulations and severely limit their usefulness for anthropology. As I have noted, Scott argues against what he calls "thick" theories of he- gemony. These are theories which posit that subordinate groups accept the dominant ideology and therefore consent to their own subordination, believing it to be just. Scott distinguishes between such theories of ideological incorpora- tion and "thin" theories of hegemony, which assert only that subordinate groups perceive their own powerlessness to be natural or inevitable. Thin theories, ac- cording to Scott, allow that subordinates can and do imagine alternative worlds. But such alternate views are seldom expressed openly. To avoid reprisals, and in order to manipulate the powerful and thereby achieve social change, the ex- pression of hidden transcripts, of resistant ideologies, is muted, veiled, muf- fled, disguised, and anonymous, according to Scott, and often appears to uphold the reigning ideology in the very act of questioning or subverting it. In a rich, central chapter entitled "Voice under Domination: The Arts of Political Dis- guise," Scott's goal is to detail the linguistic mechanisms of resistance. Using much evidence culled from sociolinguistic studies, he suggests that anonymity in speaking, the use of euphemisms, indistinct and indirect grumbling, polyva- lent symbolism, and cryptic metaphor are all forms of resistance because they hide the identity and intent of the speaker. Oral culture, trickster tales, symbolic inversions, and rituals of reversal are similarly forms of resistance. Indeed, their pervasiveness among the weak is used as evidence by Scott for the widespread absence of cultural hegemony. But Scott's analysis of these "arts of disguise" is seriously flawed, for the function of resistance cannot be directly equated with a list of linguistic forms or strategies. Any linguistic form-such as euphemism, metaphor, indirection, trickster tale, or anonymous speaking-gains different meanings and has differ- ent social and political effects within specific institutional and ideological con- texts. As Scott himself mentions in passing elsewhere in the book, euphemisms are also used by the strong, with quite different effects. The cryptic metaphors and indirection Scott links to weakness and resistance were very much in evi- dence in the discourse of ruling elites in state socialism (see, for example, Gal 1991); and, as I have suggested above, the practice of speaking anonymously can work as a legitimating strategy for powerful groups. Cultures vary widely in the kinds of speech styles they identify as powerful or weak. Even silence can be as much a strategy of power as of weakness, depending on the ideological under- standings and contexts within which it is used. Scott's insistence on linking speech forms directly to political functions, without the mediation of culture or linguistic ideology, parallels the way in which he attempts to link emotions directly to selves, without the mediation of culture. Both attempts derive, ultimately, from a referentialist view of language in which texts and transcripts are read for their supposedly fixed, unproblem- atic, denotational meaning. Tropes are seen not as cultural constructions but merely as transformed or deformed versions of the literal. In this view there is no need to consider the cultural context in correlating linguistic forms to social 420 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY functions. In contrast, recent work on linguistic ideology argues that linguistic practices-tropes and figurative uses of language, such as euphemisms and in- direction, as well as the supposedly "literal"-are interpretable only within par- ticular social and institutional contexts, and are linked to social functions such as resistance or domination only through specific linguistic ideologies. How- ever aptly chosen his particular examples of resistance, Scott's more general theoretical proposals ignore this mediating role of linguistic ideology, thus vi- tiating his larger argument about language and resistance. A similar lack of attention to the relationship between language ideology and linguistic form mars Scott's argument about the limits of cultural hegem- ony. It would hardly be worthwhile here to enter into the forest of arguments about cultural hegemony that social theorists have produced. But it bears repeat- ing that, within the Gramscian tradition, the notion of resistance-of opposi- tional, residual, emergent, or alternative cultural forms-has long been central to discussions of hegemony (see, for example, Williams 1973). Scholars have also described hegemony as the use of social constraints to create an appearance of consensus in an atmosphere of intimidation. Thus, Scott's arguments about the ubiquity of resistance are hardly new; on the contrary, they are quite congru- ent with much existing literature on the subject. What is new is Scott's insis- tence that this "infrapolitics" is the precedent for open conflict (p. 196), that the hidden transcript is the silent partner of later public revolt or mobilization (p. 199). In this romantic characterization of resistance, Scott ignores the extent to which hegemony may be tacit and resistance often partial and self-defeating. It can lead as easily to the reproduction of domination as to revolution. The omis- sion is surprising because the very ethnographic studies he cites to support his point about the strength of resistance also describe its frequently contradictory nature and effects. For instance, Willis's (1977) influential study of working-class British school lads shows that their counterculture, created in resistance to the hegem- ony of the school, made them neither politically radical (or revolutionary) nor conventionally successful. Instead, it produced cynicism and the reproduction of their powerlessness. Importantly, while resisting some aspects of dominant ideology in the school, the lads actively reproduced and elaborated other aspects of dominant ideology, such as the devaluation of women and girls (Willis 1977). Similarly, in his discussion of Sennett and Cobb's (1972) work on the "hidden injuries of class" among working-class American men, Scott notes the workers' complaints about bosses' routine assaults on their dignity, which he rightly in- terprets as ideological resistance (p. 112). But he fails to report Sennett and Cobb's (1972) further argument that these same men blamed themselves, not the class system, for their lack of economic success. They tacitly "incorporated" the reigning ideology of meritocracy. Thus, while resistance is indeed widespread, ideological incorporation may partially coexist with it, as different aspects of dominant ideology cross-cut each other. No doubt Scott would more easily detect the complexities of resistance and the partial or contradictory forms of hegemony if his understanding of language LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 421 included more attention to linguistic form and the way that its political function is conditioned by language ideology. Two quite different examples will illus- trate this point. Although Scott often mentions minority languages and dialects, he is interested mostly in the way these can shield the hidden transcript by mak- ing oppositional talk impenetrable to powerful observers. But in societies that have undergone linguistic standardization, domination is not directly a result of economic weakness but is established exactly by the ideological construction of a "monoglot standard," inculcated in schools and in mass media and viewed as the property of the bourgeoisie. Once the belief in the communicative, aesthetic, or other superiority of such a standard has been established, other varieties, whatever their provenance, are usually seen (and not only by standard-speakers) as degenerate or inferior versions of the standard itself. Regardless of the exact political and economic aspects of their weakness, speakers of such varieties are ideologically constituted as a subordinate group on the basis of the supposed cultural, cognitive, or aesthetic inadequacy of their speech. As many studies have shown, such speakers may resist by continuing to use their own varieties, but within regimes of standardization they often also devalue themselves and the varieties they use (see Silverstein 1987; Woolard 1985). A second, quite different kind of example similarly provides a complex and subtle case of resistance and tacit hegemony mediated by linguistic structure. As is well known, English has a system of obligatory pronominal gender catego- ries. Critics have complained for at least 200 years that, by virtue of their struc- tural properties, these distinctions naturalize and reproduce certain categories of thought, including the ideological assumption that men are the prototypical hu- man actors. However, the articulation of grammatical gender with categories of humannesss and social agency creates an impressive stability in the gender sys- tem, making it difficult to change. Building on Silverstein's (1985) original analysis of gender marking in English, Hill and Mannheim summarize the di- lemma: Although it is an arena of conflict, the [gender] category system continues to function in everyday contexts even for speakers who are examining and purpose- fully remodeling their behavior, for, even as one part of the category system is brought into conscious contention, other parts remain in place unchallenged. The category system creates a particular cultural hegemony, the unquestioned accep- tance, by both men and women, of men as a normative, unmarked category of person. The hegemonic structure is reproduced below the speaker's threshold of awareness, unconsciously, but is challenged from above the threshold of aware- ness, consciously. [1992:389] There is no room for such complex interactions of resistance, domination, and hegemony in Scott's analytical scheme. Conclusion Despite its flaws, James Scott's book offers a challenge to anthropology. It attempts to integrate a wide range of ethnographic materials in the interests of 422 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY understanding political processes and power dynamics. He takes seriously the centrality of linguistic practices in the production and dissemination of ideology and their importance in understanding resistance to cultural hegemony. The book deserves attention for its breadth of vision, its often astute discussions of the logic of resistance, and its range of evidence. But ultimately, Scott's attempt to theorize the links between language and power fails, because his approach to language lacks some of the basic principles about linguistic form and ideology currently being developed within the anthropological study of language and so- cial life. Notes Acknowledgments. Many thanks to Kit Woolard, Ben Lee, and Michael Silverstein for their suggestions, criticisms, and careful readings. References Cited Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. 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The Practice of Conceptual History - Timing History, Spacing Concepts - Reinhart Koselleck - BR - Translated by Todd Presner, Kerstin Behnke, and Jobst Welge - BR - Foreword by Hayden White