CAROL J.

GREENHOUSE

Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts: The Discursive

Arts of Neoliberal Legitimation

ABSTRACT In this article, I offer a reading of James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) from an
inverted standpoint: Whereas Scott’s focus is on resistance from below, mine is on resistance from above. My case study involves some
of the more prominent legal and political responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001—notably the President’s Military Order of
November 13, 2001, establishing military tribunals for noncitizen detainees charged with terrorism. My analysis supports Scott’s thesis
regarding the discursivity of resistance while challenging some of his conclusions regarding the form and content of hegemony, as read in
the current neoliberal milieu. With respect to the military tribunals, I argue that their establishment represents an extension of executive
power rehearsed prior to the attacks, and that the politicization of security in the United States involves institutions and issues that have
long antecedents in partisan political terms. [Keywords: discourse, states, hegemony, neoliberalism, partisan politics]

“H IDDEN TRANSCRIPTS” IS ONE of those

phrases—like its conceptual cousins, “collec-
tive conscience,” “cultural relativity,” “social structure,”
“imagined communities,” and “thick description”—that
entered fully and immediately into the anthropological lex-
icon destined for immortality. But with immortality comes a
perpetual question of emphasis. Collective conscience or col-
lective conscience? It makes a difference.1 It is as if history—
our history, in this moment—cannot resist conflating con-
cepts with references to their visibility, in effect making over
these “quivering” (Boon 1999:25) aesthetic expressions of
humane possibility into declarations of material and ideo-
logical fulfillment. This is the essence of one powerful hid-
den transcript of our times, by which politicians’ claims to
legitimacy leave their traces in cultural theory as problems
of identity and interpretation.
James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hid-
den Transcripts (1990) is about transcripts—encoding, read-
ing, and interpreting the discourse of political struggle. The
book is neither a revelation of secrets nor a general the-
ory of resistance—although it has sometimes been read as
such (see, e.g., Gutmann 1993; Levi 1999:91–92; cf. Kelley
1992:293). It is a book about the dilemmas of making and
writing political history from below. In this article, I take my
main theme from Scott’s emphasis on “hidden transcripts”
as a theoretical rejoinder to Gramscian formulations of
hegemony, in order to suggest that hidden transcripts are
also elements of political struggle from above. Scott’s book
is almost wholly devoted to test cases of hidden transcripts
from the most extreme sorts of subordination involving “in-
stitutionalized means of extracting labor, goods, and ser-
vices from a subject population” (1990:21), but it is not
theoretically restricted to instances of resistance from be-
low (see Introduction, this issue; see also Rogers 1992:702).
As Scott explains, the hidden transcript of the oppressed is
only one side of that project—anticipating a “new way of
understanding resistance to domination” in the difference
between the hidden transcripts of the dominant and the
oppressed, and their respective relationships to the “pub-
lic transcript of power relations” (1990:xii; see also 1993,
1998).
Scott’s chapter on hegemony implies that this relation-
ship is complicated by the way power flows through dis-
course. The circulation of the discourse of power is always
subject to restriction, redirection, and specialization. For ex-
ample, discussing court ritual at Versailles, Scott hints in-
triguingly that the performance of power (even as domi-
nation) can miss the mark of its audience, or reach only
so exclusive an audience that it escapes broader recogni-
tion (1990:69). Similarly, he observes that the “rhetorical
force” of “the self-dramatization of domination” is stronger
“among the leading actors themselves than among the far
more numerous bit players” (1990:69). The smaller the play-
ers (i.e., the greater their exclusion from the sphere in which

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 107, Issue 3, pp. 356–368, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433.
C 2005 by the American Anthropological

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their consent is relevant to the rites and routines of power),
the more their hidden transcripts will be opaque, fragmen-
tary, and subterranean. Scott reserves a place for the concept
of “hegemony” in relation to those who do see themselves
as beneficiaries of—and perhaps potential holders of—state
power.
Eventually, I will return to the provocative proxim-
ity Scott arranges between “fugitive” political conduct
(1990:xi) and academic writing about power relations. In
the first half of this article, I summarize the book’s main
themes, emphasizing Scott’s distinction between hidden
transcripts and hegemony as elements of political strug-
gle from below. In the second half of this article, I deploy
both concepts in a reading of a politics of struggle from
above via an extended discussion of the Military Order of
November 13, 2001—President George W. Bush’s order es-
tablishing military tribunals for prosecution of U.S.-held de-
tainees in the War on Terror. How we read the Military Order
depends on much that Scott discusses regarding the discur-
sive valences of resistance—including the extent to which
hegemony is trumped by hidden transcripts. I begin with
the main purposes and themes of Domination and the Arts
of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS
Published in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe,
the book’s main focus is on “subordinate” or “powerless”
groups, to borrow Scott’s terminology. Not surprisingly, per-
haps, given the tides of those times, all of the examples
are success stories. And they are wide ranging: some liter-
ary, some lived, some familiar, some exotic, some painted
with broad brush, some pointillist. Their very range evokes
a global sweep—perhaps another sign of those times, so
easily imagined (then) in millennial terms, as old empires
and their successors broke down, and the last decade of
the century dawned democratic (or so we thought). The
book’s narration is anchored in the here and now (primar-
ily through textual examples [1990:x]); indeed, it is an ex-
cursus on a problem of reading that scholars share with the
people about whom they write.
Scott’s descriptions evoke the social thickness of his
evidence (see 1990:103), drawing readers’ attention to the
turtles under the elephant, a split second after they have
shrugged (or was it a twitch?).2 The world about which
Scott writes is sharply divided between the powerful and
the powerless—an allowable distinction, perhaps, given the
extreme and highly ritualized social distances in the situa-
tions he considers. Still, as I will suggest later, this binary is
a specific instance of his theory, not integral to the theory
itself (cf. Gal 1995:417). Indeed, the question of status and
identity (and misidentification) is part of what is at stake in
the thesis of the hidden transcript (1990:14).
Scott’s discussion unfolds along two main fronts: First,
he considers the conditions under which political resistance
is thinkable, and second, he explores the conditions un-
Greenhouse • Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts 357
der which it becomes possible. Domination dramatizes it-
self with what Scott calls a “public transcript”—the open
performance of power and a deliberate display of its signs.
The hidden transcript is the other side of that power, re-
worked as its negation. It comes to us, as social observers—
and perhaps to the rebels, too—first as a problem of inter-
pretation (1990:xi–xii). A hidden transcript cannot be se-
cret (by definition, it has already been declared—the verb
Scott uses throughout the book). But a hidden transcript
is inevitably difficult to locate and read, at least until it has
been consolidated as a coherent symbolic statement among
a unified group of people (1990:135). This is especially true
given (1) the atomizing effects of oppression (1990:217), (2)
the initially improvisatory nature of the transcript’s codings
(1990:134), and, perhaps most fundamentally, (3) the elu-
siveness of symbolic discourse for victims of trauma (see also
Daniel 1996:chap. 5). Even then, Scott tells us, its legibility
is limited to that restricted group.
Hidden transcripts are arcane not only because of their
specialized cross-references and social restrictions but also
because they are temporally displaced from the observable
event. The metaphor of the “transcript” implies that the
action has already taken place elsewhere. In this sense,
the hidden transcript is not speech as such (Gal 1995:405)
but, rather, a shorthand term for the interpretive doubts—
second thoughts—about what has just been said. Or there
has been an act that—only after the fact, and only if the
conditions are right—becomes discernible as a response. A
hidden transcript calls for close attention and exegesis. For
all of these reasons, a hidden transcript is highly specific—
closely keyed to the time, place, person, discourse, display,
and need specific to its articulation (1990:chaps. 2 and 6; see
also pp. 69, 133–135, 184, 224). For these same reasons, it is
not accessible empirically, at least not consistently (1990:x,
xii–xiii).
Overall, then, the book is not about resistance as such
but, rather, the interpretive demands of resistance. “How,”
asks Scott at the outset, “do we study power relations when
the powerless are often obliged to adopt a strategic pose in
the presence of the powerful and when the powerful may
have an interest in overdramatizing their reputation and
mastery?” (1990:xii). Scott’s primary thesis is that resistance
focuses on those very same dramatizations, taking up their
signs and symbols, recoding them, and reworking them into
another—opposing—message. The hidden transcript is not
secret but disguised—to use Scott’s terminology throughout
the book. And although disguise might seem to be an empir-
ical reference (e.g., suggested by the carnivalesque maskings
that provide some of the book’s key images), Scott’s analysis
suggests that it is a symbolic process, a recoding of power’s
key symbols.
Most of the examples in the book involve face-to-face
relationships. However, as I explain later, when the power
relation is not face-to-face, the hidden transcript has a much
wider field of play in relation to its manipulation of signs
of status and identity (see also Gal 1995:416). In those
contexts, the disguise element is more hermeneutic than
358 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 3 • September 2005
symbolic (or perhaps just more figurative than literal); still,
it points to the power relation in question, revising the
terms by which power’s signs are (standardly) legible. Scott
insists that resistance involves the negation of power’s signs
and symbols, but disguise in the literal sense is optional, a
possibility that is always open in theory.
THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL MOBILIZATION
FROM BELOW
Scott tells us that a hidden transcript is a necessary condi-
tion for the emergence of political discourse, whether from
above or below (1990:xii). In this sense, the hidden tran-
script is an interpretive thesis, improvised and negotiated
over time, specifying sometimes-minute gestures or even
silences as meaningful acts (messages, gambits, or answers)
and signs of membership (passwords or argot). Indeed, it
is a condition of low-technology politics in that it is local
and depends on presence (1990:121 ff., 129 ff.). Moreover,
the hidden transcript emerges in recognizable form from
groups that are already unified and prepared to exchange
messages from within their agreed-on symbolic code. The
hidden transcript is an interpretive schema, then, and is it-
self a sign (empirically unconfirmable, as Scott notes) that
there has already been an exchange of messages and mean-
ings. Scott refers to this interpretive nexus as a circuitry of
energy—a “grid,” by which he means “the maximum pos-
sible symbolic reach of such acts, [for] the population for
whom such acts carry comparable meaning” (1990:224).
The grid may be local (as in Scott’s examples) or not (as
in this article).
In front of the hidden transcript, drawing it out, is
the public performance of domination and subservience
(chap. 3). Behind it, holding it back, might be a general
lack of information or lack of access to media of communi-
cation, not to speak of sheer lack of energy (chap. 5). For this
reason, unless and until it erupts in open rebellion, a hid-
den transcript always remains somewhat opaque, partially
submerged in silence—neither “prologue” to (1990:202)
nor “surrogate” for (1990:184, 191) open rebellion (see
1990:chap. 8; cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991:4, 29). For
Scott, the hidden transcript is dialogic, perhaps even dialec-
tical (in the open-ended sense that Comaroff and Comaroff
give this term [1991:19–27, 1997:28–29]), in that its primary
effect is revelatory, prompting a shift of consciousness. Scott
writes, “It is only when [the hidden transcript] is openly de-
clared that subordinates can fully recognize the full extent
to which their claims, their dreams, their anger is shared by
other subordinates with whom they have not been in di-
rect touch” (1990:223). At that point, the hidden transcript
becomes intentional and tactically oriented toward collec-
tive action—hidden, perhaps, from its targets but no longer
from its authors.
Read in this way, compliance is merely the appearance
of consent, the mirror in which the dominant might see
themselves glorified. But for those who hold up the mirror,
the real action is on the other side of its opaqueness. In
an extended discussion, Scott is critical of scholars who—
like the powerful dupes about whom he writes—have been
taken in by this illusion so far as to credit subordinates
with internalizing their overlords’ hegemonic ideology and
so assenting to their domination (1990:71 nn. 1–2). Scott
insists that although this erroneous conclusion might be
based on what appears to be ample evidence at the level of
social description, this evidence is merely the artifact (at
least some of the time) of the hidden transcript. He ex-
plains, “Even close readings of historical and archival ev-
idence tend to favor a hegemonic account of power rela-
tions. Short of actual rebellion, powerless groups have . . . a
self-interest in conspiring to reinforce hegemonic appear-
ances” (1990:xii). Chapter 4 details the sustained forms of
work such conspiracies require: the imaginative “work of
negation” (1990:111–115) and the “mutuality” of concerted
social labor (1990:118–119). The hidden transcript “works”
by authorizing a false impression of compliance and subor-
dination: It exaggerates the performance of subordination,
for example, to make it literally correct and unobjection-
able, all the while recoding those very gestures and signs
for recirculation as counterdiscourse. Scott calls the social
mobilization of this reverse flow of power a “fugitive poli-
tics” (1990:xii) or an “infrapolitics” (1990:184) of resistance
(1990:particularly chaps. 1, 7).
To some extent, Scott’s critique of hegemony is
phenomenological—a “thick description” kind of objection
to mistaking subordinates’ means of resistance, which are
limited, for their motives, which are abundant (1990:90–
93).3 But such an argument could as easily be brought to
bear on the hidden transcript thesis, as well. That thesis also
involves ascriptions of motive and affect to gestures and ut-
terances. Why should the critique of hegemony, then, not
apply also to the hidden transcript? This question is com-
pounded by Scott’s insistence that the hidden transcript is
“beyond proof” (1990:96). I read his critique of hegemony
as a gesture toward the stakes in misreading hidden tran-
scripts as evidence of subordination (rather than resistance).
For Scott, this gesture seems to turn significantly on what
he makes of the differentials of social status in his main
examples.
HEGEMONY AND SOCIAL STATUS
Scott distinguishes hegemony and hidden transcripts on
the grounds of different status positions (raised to the level
of an epistemological distinction), implying that hegemony
and hidden transcripts operate on different sides of a break
across a field of political discourse. In other words, in con-
trast to the binary polarity of power positions that forms the
book’s main test cases, here Scott tells us that the field of po-
litical discourse is not unified. Hidden transcripts and hege-
mony involve different social locations and different inter-
pretive economies. Hegemony, he seems to say, belongs to
the high end of the power scale; hidden transcripts of sub-
ordination belong to the low end. At the end of his chap-
ter on hegemony and false consciousness (1990:106–107),

Scott returns briefly to the situations—beyond the scope
of his main concerns and examples—where “a would-be
hegemonic ideology does manage to convince members of
subordinate groups to take it to heart” (1990:106). What
happens then is trouble:
The system may have the most to fear from those sub-
ordinates among whom the institutions of hegemony
have been most successful. The disillusioned mission boy
(Caliban) is always a graver threat to an established re-
ligion than the pagans who were never taken in by its
promises. The anger born of a sense of betrayal implies
an earlier faith. [1990:107]
In general, though, Scott’s focus on “slavery, serfdom, the
caste system, colonialism, and racism” (1990:xi) turns well
away from the main social arenas of Gramsci’s concerns
with hegemony, which are primarily within civil society or
even within the state itself (Gramsci 1971:12–13, 52, 245–
246; for a critical discussion, see Kelley 1992:294–296).
I read Scott’s main examples alongside his insistence on
hegemony’s limits as his tacit specification of hegemony as
an effect of state recognition—implying that hegemony is
predicated on subordinates’ identification with the state.
Correspondingly, his critique of hegemony registers an im-
portant cautionary note against extending that recognition
and identification in theory past its demonstrable limits in
practice. Perhaps this is why Scott makes the thick descrip-
tion argument for hidden transcripts but not for hegemony.
At stake in the distinction is the question of how states con-
stitute their visibility concretely through social identities
(Corrigan and Sayer 1985). I believe this question is more
fundamental to Scott’s argument than the test of Gramsci
per se.
Read from this standpoint, Scott’s critique of hegemony
becomes an extension of his claims for the hidden tran-
script, rather than their antithesis.4 His main argument
against hegemony is that even the extremes of exclusion
do not preclude resistance and collective mobilization. But,
as noted earlier, this is an instance of his theory rather than
the theory itself. Hegemony, which he places on the other
side of the line he imagines between the high and the low,
can be understood in these same terms from the other di-
rection (so to speak). If the hidden transcript of subordi-
nates rests on their taking up the key signs and symbols of
the dominant for purposes of infrapolitical mobilization,
so hegemony refers to the way the dominant take up key
signs and symbols of their subordinates—their constituents,
perhaps—to mobilize their own infrapolitics.
We need not assume that hegemony rests on an inter-
nalization of a ruling ideology by people who live beyond
its field of interests. Hegemony (like a hidden transcript)
points to a critical economy of signs in (and as) a field of
political struggle. Hegemony, in other words, refers to the
social effects of a dominant group’s appropriation of their
subordinates’ external signs—of identity, morality, need, as-
piration, and so forth—twinning state power to authority
in more broadly social terms. What motivates people is be-
yond the reach of what we can know from afar; however,
Greenhouse • Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts 359
what we can learn from their situations is something of
how the regime’s public transcript of power incorporates
their presence as authentication of its legitimacy and so-
cial completeness. Hegemony in this sense—with the thick
description left in—would be particularly at issue in liberal
democracies, in which the mirroring of popular discourses
in the public discursive operations of the state is crucial to
state legitimation.5
We can rescue hegemony from Scott’s “thick descrip-
tion” objection, in other words, by recognizing that the ap-
pearance of assent from below (so to speak) is produced—
often very carefully—by the ways states troll and curry the
signs of their constituents’ social and moral orders. Such
“work of negation” from above may take place in sustained
or entirely ad hoc ways (indeed, sometimes inviting de-
mands for inclusion and redress, and even benefiting from
protest). As a hidden transcript of the dominant, hegemony
masks the zones in which states function beyond public ac-
countability. In this sense, hegemony is crucial to how states
publicize themselves. But the hidden transcript thesis sug-
gests that as we extend that thesis to the spheres of political
mobilization within the state, we should focus not gener-
ally on domination but with utmost specificity on where
and how state power is expressed and felt, as discourses of
state power borrow from other registers of experience. This
would be the counterpart to the infrapolitics of subordina-
tion. The state’s work of negation is similarly opportunis-
tic, working through fragments of discourse. The familiar
shorthand for this kind of operation is “spin”—a concept to
which I shall return shortly. I summarize here simply by ob-
serving that Scott’s chapter on hegemony is to some extent
itself a hidden transcript, pointing past the book’s margins
to the theaters where new dramas of power are playing in
our neighborhood.6 Let us follow the trajectory of Scott’s
hidden transcript on hegemony. The discussion will take us
past Scott’s main examples but not his main concerns.
HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS OF DOMINATION
Scott’s discussion implies that as we turn from subordi-
nates to those in charge, we should not expect the hid-
den transcript to develop or present itself in the same way
nor, indeed, to be hidden in the same way. It should, how-
ever, retain both its specificity and its doubleness, symbol-
ically keyed to structural contradiction. The hidden tran-
script of resistance from below, Scott tells us, should be
read in relation to the strategic need to conceal insubor-
dination. But once the hidden transcript is declared, this
need for masking corresponds exactly to the need to con-
ceal compliance—because, as Scott implies, compliance is
linked to the prospect of privilege (1990:106–107; see also
chaps. 2–3). In other words, the hidden transcript surfaces
at the point where resistance meets ambivalence, prompt-
ing broad competition over meanings (1990:124 ff., 129 ff.,
206; cf. Field 1994:196). What would be the correspond-
ing need—the corresponding doubleness and interpretive
strain—in the corridors of power of a liberal democracy?
360 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 3 • September 2005
In liberal democracies, too, perhaps, we can seek hid-
den transcripts at the junctures where the powerful must
conceal their own resentment of their role and their con-
stant need for political justification, as well as their internal
divisions where these arise from crucial structural contra-
dictions. “The” discourse of power, even within high-level
state institutions, gains its illusory coherence and generality
from the active concealment of its fissures—concealment by
recoding. Certainly, the means exist for the production of
hidden transcripts within the institutional centers of state
power. Professional and institutional gatekeeping practices
(e.g., security classifications and clearances, and executive
privilege), bureaucratic routines and the privacy afforded
by the conventional distinction between work and home,
and ready access to communication technology—not to
speak of pollsters, press relations offices, and public rela-
tions firms—all add up to ideal settings for the rapid de-
velopment and codification of hidden transcripts. I do not
mean anything so obvious as secrets, lies, or petty manip-
ulation in the ordinary sense of these terms. Public rela-
tions are not the source of the need for hidden transcripts
for the powerful any more than they are for their clients
or constituents. I read Scott’s thesis as suggesting that hid-
den transcripts arise from a more fundamental need: the
necessity and opportunity to convert the ambivalence of
resentment into political capital.
Accordingly, we should look for hidden transcripts of
domination in the locations where the state’s fundamen-
tal need for “visibility” as “society” confronts its need
for invisibility within the circulation and accumulation
of global capital (Corrigan and Sayer 1985:esp. introduc-
tion, chap. 6). For example, the new security state must be
highly visible—not only through predictable performances
of surveillance and security but also by “the way it works
within us” (to borrow Corrigan and Sayer’s reference to the
English context). Reworking security, in other words, re-
makes identity, especially to the extent that it redefines the
distinction between citizen and foreigner as part of the “cul-
tural form” of the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985:199–200).
But the ideological and pragmatic commitment to private
interests also requires the state to be invisible. This is par-
tially to avoid being implicated in scandal (i.e., the stuff
of mere secrets and lies or indifference) but more funda-
mentally to obviate the need to display its dependence on
private forms of power and to preempt being called on to
define the difference between the public interest and those
private interests.
But “the state” is not an entity. It is a dynamic field of
tension among and within the agencies of government in
relation to their wider spheres of interest and operation. As
such, it is not surprising that states elude ethnographers’
field of vision. This is because its critical operations are hid-
den, disguised as visible social forms that readily slip away
from scrutiny. Drawing on Philip Abrams (1988), Ana Maria
Alonso ascribes this slipperiness to the “misplaced con-
creteness” of the “state idea” (1994:380). The “misplaced
concreteness” would seem to be specifically the illusion of
an encompassing discourse of power that is constitutive of
identity. Reclaiming identity from the state is therefore not
the same as attaining the state’s power, since identity cir-
culates discursively “within” the state as public and hidden
transcripts.
State power is not limited to outcomes that are pro-
duced electorally or through representation (in the leg-
islative sense). The connections between state power and
transnational or private forms of nonstate power are mul-
tiple and ongoing. The difference between being in or out
of office is, therefore, not at all the same as the difference
between being in or out of power. Moreover, we should not
assume that holding office maximizes power. Given the em-
beddedness of state power in the private sector, it would
seem that the interregnum is the power position, rather
than the incumbency with its imperatives of accountability
and availability. Depending on how important we under-
stand the private sector to be in determining the interests
and efficacy of state officials, it is not difficult to imagine
public office as the site of a hidden transcript. “Holding
office” involves a performance of power calculated to sus-
tain the controlling force of the concept of “the public in-
terest,” meanwhile both concealing and checking (if not
wholly controlling) active connections with powerful pri-
vate interests. A highly visible executive is indispensable to
this hidden transcript’s work of negation, although not a
guarantee of its success. The energy of the electorates for
recounts, recalls, and redistricting suggests that the public
understands elected office in relation to this wider play of
powers, including powers forged in the private sector.
There is much that we do not know about the inner
worlds of government. However, the hidden-transcript the-
sis encourages us to look for them by indirection, examining
those hidden transcripts that surface in plain sight. In the
most facile milieu of high government, law may double as
public and hidden transcript in just this way. Law meets the
criterion of “ritualism” that Scott sees as a strategic advan-
tage in disguising emergent political restructuring: “Sub-
ordinate groups have typically learned . . . to clothe their re-
sistance and defiance in ritualisms of subordination that
serve both to disguise their purposes and to provide them
with a ready route of retreat that may soften the conse-
quences of a possible failure” (1990:96). We need only add
“leaders” and “leadership” to “subordinate groups” and “rit-
ualisms of subordination” to make the wider connection.
CASE STUDY: LAW AS HIDDEN TRANSCRIPT
To take a concrete example from this milieu, I take the in-
stance of the President Bush’s Military Order of November
13, 2001. The Military Order declares a “state of war” and, in
that context of national emergency, establishes military tri-
bunals as an option for the trial and sentencing (including
execution) of noncitizen detainees accused of terrorist acts,
broadly defined. The Military Order gives the trial and sen-
tencing power to the executive branch, with the president
as final authority. The Military Order establishes the rules of

evidence, judgment, and appeal in terms that eliminate or
reduce some of the procedural safeguards defendants enjoy
in the civilian system, as well as under the code of mili-
tary justice. There was an immediate, if relatively technical,
response in the press and “think tank” websites. In addi-
tion, Congress held hearings in early December 2001. Most
proponents of the Military Order emphasized the exclusive
focus on noncitizens—even to the point of specifying the
intended jurisdiction of the tribunals as a single person,
Osama bin Laden himself—as a way of countering critics’
concerns about the implications of the tribunals for the civil
liberties of U.S. citizens. If only for this reason, we might
reread the Military Order as a hidden transcript of citizen-
ship relative to the new contours of executive power.
There are other reasons to read the Military Order
as a hidden transcript of presidential power, as well as
a public transcript of new direct powers. Virtually every
published proponent worked previously in a Republican
White House or Justice Department. (Critics tended to be
academics or public interest advocates.) Every published
commentary—whether for or against military tribunals—
compared them to the federal courts. There was some dis-
agreement as to whether the United States was technically
at war and whether the constitutionality of the military tri-
bunals would depend on this.7 There were differences of
opinion over whether the tribunals should be seen as a
supplement to or a substitute for the federal courts. Propo-
nents took the position that the tribunals would provide a
salutary shunt around Congress—implying that the debate
over the bill that became the USA PATRIOT Act (passed by
Congress on October 26, 2001, after six weeks of debate)
had shown Congress to be incapable of sufficient speed or
focus in responding to aggression. The commentaries re-
veal a common discourse that places the Military Order
squarely in the middle of wider judgments of the efficacy
of Congress and the federal courts. In this respect, the com-
mentary adds significantly to the Military Order itself, mak-
ing it into a corrective measure with respect to the institu-
tions of government.8 As Scott seems to anticipate in his
discussion of hegemony, however, the debate over the Mil-
itary Order remained a fairly technical debate among a rel-
atively small group of legal specialists; it did not become
a general debate. By February 2002, there was little new
commentary; by then, the detention camps had been set
up in Guantánamo, outside the territorial jurisdiction of
the federal courts. Even in advance of any proceedings, the
Military Order was (and remains) a literal pretext for the re-
arrangement and reassessment of Congress and the federal
courts on the grounds of national security and procedural
efficiency.9
Proponents of the Military Order specifically portrayed
the federal courts as encumbered by rules of evidence and
other procedural requirements that they see as complicat-
ing or outright barring terrorists’ prosecution and convic-
tion. They also pointed to appeals as inordinately time
consuming. Some advocates set these issues in a context
of high publicity—caricaturing the federal courts. Senator
Greenhouse • Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts 361
Mitch O’Connell (R–KY) imagined the federal court al-
ternative as “a repeat of the O. J. Simpson trial, com-
plete with grandstanding by defense lawyers” (Lewis 2001).
Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Secu-
rity Agency, said: “I don’t think anyone wants to see Osama
bin Laden brought before a court here to be defended by
Johnnie Cochran” (Myers and Lewis 2001). Attorney Gen-
eral John Ashcroft expanded on this image in more gen-
eral terms: “Now, when we come to those responsible for
this, say who are in Afghanistan, are we supposed to read
them the Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defense lawyer,
bring them back to the United States to create a new ca-
ble network of Osama TV or what have you?” (U.S. Senate
Judiciary Committee 2001a). For clarification of these allu-
sions, we shall return to Los Angeles. For now, these satiri-
cal references to trial lawyers and their (African American)
clients suggest that, if the Military Order is going to be nor-
malized through civilian institutions, it will be in the con-
texts in which access to law is contested and determined for
citizens—civilian plaintiffs and criminal defendants alike.
In such contexts, debates over rules of evidence and
procedure are already coded for partisanship over civil rights
and access to law and already keyed to other debates over
the separation of powers. On both sides, commentators
drew on long-standing partisan debates over the efficacy
of the civil justice system, federalism, and the separation of
powers—specifically the efficacy of the judiciary as viewed
retrospectively across the civil rights era. Proponents pre-
sented the modern judiciary as hampered by civil rights
(including the laws covering searches, arrests, and criminal
trial procedure). The critics of military tribunals cast that
same history in a different light.
Notwithstanding official explanations of the tribunals
as designed for trials outside the territorial United States,
commentators consistently reterritorialized them—usually
by reference to previous military commissions on U.S. soil.
Robert Bork (2001)—whose nomination to the Supreme
Court was withdrawn in the face of intense opposition
in Congress and by liberal groups in 1987—argued that
the Military Order does not go far enough, citing prece-
dent for extending the jurisdiction of tribunals to citizens.
David Rivkin and colleagues discussed what they seem to
believe is one such precedent: the 1862 military commis-
sion that sentenced over three hundred Dakota Sioux to
death by hanging in the aftermath of a raid against white
settlers in Minnesota (Rivkin et al. 2001). However, they
ignore the fact that the Dakota were not citizens of the
United States at that time.10 Other commentators referred
to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 (February
19, 1942), compelling the internment of Japanese nation-
als and U.S. citizens of Japanese descent—sometimes sup-
porting the Executive Order as evidence of the legality of
military tribunals, even for citizens (regarding Korematsu v.
United States [1944] as a positive precedent, see Glaberson
2001). The public commentary on that order, too, focused
on the need to protect citizens: (1) the innocent Japanese
nationals and Japanese Americans from the risk of attack by
362 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 3 • September 2005
citizen vigilantes, and (2) U.S. citizens from the security risk
some commentators claimed was inherent in any Japanese
presence on the California coast. One San Francisco colum-
nist went so far as to warn of the possibility of a dangerous
alliance between Japanese and African Americans, referring
to a “Japanese-Negro fifth column” (see Caylor 1942).
Nevertheless, most commentators who referred to intern-
ment held it up—and the Supreme Court’s majority opin-
ion in Korematsu v. United States—as negative examples: “We
are at the ‘Korematsu’ crossroads,” Lawrence Tribe said in
his testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee
(U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee 2001b).
MILITARY TRIBUNALS AS EFFICIENT
JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION
As early as September 20, 2001, one prominent advocate
of military tribunals, George J. Terwilliger III, had already
publicly voiced his support for a military or executive tri-
bunal for the prosecution of Osama bin Laden. He likewise
supported extending the president’s authority to “the thou-
sands of federal, state and local authorities” involved in
the antiterrorist effort “to use even more aggressive tech-
niques than they have so far” (McGraw 2001). According to
Terwilliger:
I don’t think that the investigation ought to be . . . bound
by the rules of criminal procedure, the rules of evidence
or available lawful investigative techniques that are part
of a criminal investigation [. . . ] I think the authority to
investigate and . . . to obtain evidence . . . is much greater
than that [. . . ] Clearly, if it’s a choice between bringing
him to a criminal trial and a summary execution, I’m in
favor of the latter. [McGraw 2001; brackets indicate added
ellipses]
Terwilliger, currently a partner at the law firm of White
and Case, was the Deputy Attorney General and Acting
Attorney General under former President George H. W.
Bush; he also served in the Reagan White House. I focus
on Terwilliger because his long public career yields a fuller
context than any one commentary or set of commentaries
can, and also because he is known as “an informal adviser
to the White House” (Associated Press 2001).11 In the pri-
vate sector, he often appears on the news or the Web as
a commentator on matters related to criminal prosecution
and antiterrorism. He testified in favor of the tribunals at
the congressional hearings on the military tribunals issue
(U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee 2001b).
Terwilliger is lead author of an undated memorandum
distributed by the Federalist Society in the fall of 2001,
recommending military commissions as an appropriate re-
sponse to the demands of prosecuting terrorists. “Interna-
tional terrorism is a matter of national security, rather than
merely criminal law enforcement” is the title of one sec-
tion, in which he cautions against “the over-judicialization
of political and policy issues” (Terwilliger et al. n.d.). Defin-
ing terrorism in these terms potentially expands the mili-
tary’s role in the homeland, ordinarily thought to be an
exclusively civilian domain except under the most extreme
circumstances.12 Terwilliger’s larger argument addresses the
issue of the president’s emergency powers and the flexibil-
ity of the Fourth Amendment under certain circumstances.
He emphasizes that a corollary to the president’s “plenary
power” in relation to establishing military commissions and
border controls in the United States is the potentially global
scope of allowable investigative assistance: “United States
officials and agencies are free to accept and make use of
any truly independent assistance or information offered by
other nations without regard to the methods or sources by
which it was obtained” (Terwilliger et al. n.d.)—presumably
but not explicitly including torture.
In the course of his years in the Justice Department,
Terwilliger was prominent in several high profile cases in-
volving the FBI—at Ruby Ridge (where he was involved in
planning the rules of engagement), in Los Angeles (where
he coordinated the prosecutions in the aftermath of the vi-
olence), and in Panama (where he was involved in planning
Operation Just Cause, the mission that resulted in the cap-
ture of Manuel Noriega). Each of these situations involved
elements with parallels in the present War on Terror: the as-
sessment of tradeoffs as between lethal and nonlethal strate-
gies, the coordination of state and federal prosecution of
individuals arrested during the violence, and the capture of
a foreign leader for trial in the United States. I focus here
on the Los Angeles example, because it left the more readily
available public record and because it illuminates the refer-
ences of those prosecutorial caricatures offered by Attorney
General Ashcroft and others, cited above.
In Los Angeles, beginning on the afternoon of April 29,
1992, five days of violence followed the acquittal of four
white policemen charged with the beating of Rodney King,
an African American man. Although that domestic urban
situation might seem to be automatically ruled out as a
point of connection to this discussion of the War on Ter-
ror, there are significant elements in common. The ques-
tion of whether the violence was domestic or foreign—and
planned or spontaneous—was not immediately clear to city,
state, and federal law enforcement officers. They took se-
riously the possibility that it was the work of a conspir-
acy, possibly involving radical Muslims and “even certain
Colombians and Iraqis” (CovertAction Information Bul-
letin 1993:147) In the midst of the violence, a Los Angeles
Times headline reported: “Libya calls violence a black in-
tifada” (Los Angeles Times 1992). Transnational compar-
isons seemed to be irresistible. After the violence ended, New
York Times analyst R. W. Apple criticized President Bush and
his aides for referring to the events in Los Angeles as “the
domestic equivalent of last year’s Persian Gulf War” (Apple
1992).
The violence was a response to the jury verdict on April
29. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was unable
to establish order, and the California National Guard was
called up to assist. President Bush declared a state of emer-
gency and federalized the National Guard, sending federal
troops (see below) as well. On May 1, Attorney General
William P. Barr sought to contain the situation with his

announcement that he would reopen the investigation of
the King beating, with the possibility of a new lawsuit
against the officers on federal civil rights charges (Johnson
1992). Federal troops were deployed on the streets of Los
Angeles for two days, May 1 and 2, before being pulled
back to their bases. The violence ended on May 3. On May
6, the president sent a team of 50 federal officials to over-
see a federal investigation of “riot-related violence” and to
coordinate arrests (Wines 1992). That team was headed by
Terwilliger, whom the New York Times referred to as “an ar-
chitect of the Justice Department’s response to the riots”
(Wines 1992). In the course of six days, there were 5,002 ar-
rests, mostly by the LAPD (Webster and Williams 1992:26).
For two weeks, Los Angeles was occupied by over
ten thousand federal troops, consisting of 4,500 federal
troops and 6,000 National Guard (twice the number of
peacekeepers in Kabul at the end of 2001). Roughly 1,000
additional federal agents—including FBI SWAT teams,
members of the U.S. Border Patrol, the Bureau of Prisons,
the Federal Marshal’s Office, and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Firearms and Tobacco—were also deployed in the city. The
troops included U.S. Marines who had recently returned
from Desert Storm, and the U.S. Army 7th Infantry Divi-
sion, which had been involved in the Noriega mission in
Panama in 1990. These units were under the command
of Major General Marvin L. Covault of the 7th Infantry
Division as a Joint Force. The federal effort overall was
coordinated by Robert S. Mueller III, then head of the U.S.
Justice Department’s Criminal Division (and subsequently
Director of the FBI under President George W. Bush’s
administration). Coordination between the federal troops
and the LAPD was problematic, according to the indepen-
dent report on the LAPD response later commissioned by
the Los Angeles Police Commissioners.13 Specifically, LAPD
Chief Darryl Gates apparently expected the federal troops
to be at his disposal, as supplemental police on the street.14
And correspondingly, the military command was uncertain
of crossing the line into law enforcement, in view of federal
statutory restrictions on military involvement in civilian
law enforcement.15 The Webster Report is unambiguous in
defending the military engagement under Posse Comitatus,
given President Bush’s declaration of a state of emergency
and his federalization of the California National Guard.16
I choose Los Angeles as the site of a “discursive trail”
(see below) connected to the military tribunals because the
career connection between these situations suggests that
the values implicit in the Military Order—as articulated by
Terwilliger—might have been forged at least partially in the
crucible of that experience.17 Other public statements by
Terwilliger show him to have long been a champion of the
values of speed and finality in the federal prosecution of
violent offenders—specifically, developing approaches that
eliminate litigation from the law enforcement process and
freeing law enforcement from oversight.18 For example,
as Deputy Attorney General, he was associated with what
became known as “the Terwilliger Order,” removing the FBI
from the oversight of the Office of the Inspector General
Greenhouse • Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts 363
in favor of the weaker Office of Professional Responsibility
in the Justice Department.19
The concise text of the Military Order is a public tran-
script of presidential power. At the same time, it is a hid-
den transcript, in that the combination of the proponents’
statuses (as former or present executive branch officials)
and their discursive positionings of tribunals (in reference
to civilian institutions in peacetime) demand interpreta-
tion. In this regard, the key element is their support for
tribunals, cast explicitly as a preferable alternative to the
federal courts and Congress. Specifically, they present these
civilian institutions as forums where efficiency is hindered
by rules of procedure crafted to protect civil rights by the
advocates these commentators delegitimate (and even cari-
cature) as “liberals.” Thus, their celebration of clean lines of
jurisdiction, swift prosecution, and finality in the executive
office should be read not (merely) as a comment on the de-
mands of extraordinary times. It should also be recognized
as a comment on the partisan debates over the civil liber-
ties of people under arrest and charged with crimes (dating
from the Supreme Court’s opinions in Gideon v. Wainwright
[1963] and Miranda v. Arizona [1966]) and, far more broadly,
as a comment on the partisan debates over federal regula-
tion since the “Reagan revolution.” To put this differently,
the Military Order—read as a hidden transcript from these
clues—trumps 30 years of partisan struggle within the gov-
ernment itself over issues of separation of powers, federal-
ism, and civil liberties. It accomplishes this by providing a
discursive warrant for (1) linking foreign terrorism to do-
mestic racial violence and (2) affirming the supremacy of
the executive branch relative to the Congress and judiciary.
The War on Terror (and the war in Iraq) is necessary to the
fusion of the public and hidden transcripts, but the discur-
sive trails of the current hidden transcripts do not originate
there.
REREADING HIDDEN TRANSCRIPTS,
RESTRUCTURING POWER
My reading of the Military Order—to return to Scott’s
methodological framework—resituates the text of the or-
der based on commentaries that I treat as authoritative ex-
egetical guidance. I read the commentaries this way, es-
pecially because they are authored by individuals whose
experience in the Reagan and first Bush administrations
suggests something of their substantive career interests (I
do not speculate on personal motives) and political posi-
tions as professionals. In the aggregate, in other words, the
commentaries suggest where we should look for a hidden
transcript—particularly within specific parameters of time,
place, and interest. It is these parameters that guide my own
interpretive efforts. The advocates of the Military Order may
or may not be “disillusioned” (to echo Scott’s phrase, cited
earlier) but they are upwardly mobile professionals whose
career lines (and for some, histories of publication) yield
what I term discursive trails. Discursive trails sometimes dis-
appear, only to turn up again in surprising places.20 In lieu
364 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 3 • September 2005
of the generality of discourse that is itself the principal hid-
den transcript of the modern liberal state, I look to such
discursive trails for the ethnographic evidence of how the
neoliberal state operates in the midst of discourse.
It is those discursive trails—with their emphasis on
presidential autonomy as the materialization of national
security—that suggest how the Military Order can be read
as a hidden transcript arising from the tension between the
administration’s contradictory needs for visibility and in-
visibility in relation to national security and global capital.
However, two issues remain. First of all, Scott’s thesis re-
garding hidden transcripts is not merely an invitation to
decoding, but to decoding in relation to emergent lines of
political restructuring. Second, Scott’s critique of hegemony
distinguishes it from the hidden transcript but then reserves
it for the analysis of resistance within the state. How, then,
does the Military Order speak to the issues of restructuring
and resentment?
The issue of restructuring is perhaps already in view,
given the discursive connection between the justification
of the Military Order and the antiregulatory rhetoric since
the 1980s. The main proponents of this specific line of rea-
soning in relation to the Military Order are David B. Rivkin
and Lee A. Casey, both of whose careers provide a second
discursive trail through elements of the Military Order. If
Terwilliger represents the domestic side of the order, Rivkin
and Casey represent its international side, as well as its inter-
face with the transnational private sector. Rivkin and Casey
are partners in Washington, D.C., at the law firm of Baker
and Hostetler. Both separately and together, they are fre-
quent contributors to Republican and conservative forums
(e.g., the National Federal of Republican Assemblies [2001],
the logo of which is “The Republican Wing of the Repub-
lican Party”). Rivkin served in the office of Vice President
Bush, and he was later legal adviser to the counsel to the
president and deputy director of the Office of Policy Devel-
opment in the Justice Department. Casey also served in the
first Bush administration, within the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel. Let us consider their rationales for
the Military Order on the spectrum of the wider publica-
tions of these two men.
Their memorandum, “Bringing Al-Qaeda to Justice,”
was coauthored with Darin R. Bartram, a member of their
law firm. The memorandum—posted on the Heritage Foun-
dation website and dated November 5, 2001—undertakes a
constitutional assessment of trying al-Qaeda members un-
der the military justice system, in either court martial or
military tribunals. Among other justifications for such a sys-
tem, they reveal that “media reports indicate that this issue
is already being considered by, among others, the staff of
the Senate Committee on the Judiciary” (Rivkin et al. 2001).
They make no recommendation for or against military tri-
bunals but spell out the advantages of the military justice
system “from the government’s perspective” (Rivkin et al.
2001). The positives include exclusion of the public, speed,
and protection of “highly sensitive intelligence material”
(Rivkin et al. 2001). They also characterize the military jus-
tice system as comparatively free of the due process require-
ments of the civilian justice system, a characterization that
has been disputed by other commentators on the Uniform
Code of Military Justice. Among the negatives, they include
the prospect that al-Qaeda defendants will press for civilian
trials risking diplomatic repercussions in the process. At the
same time, they also note the possible advantage that, if the
risks of such negatives were sufficiently low, “The United
States might prefer a public trial so that the rest of the world
can evaluate the strength of the evidence against each in-
dividual” (Rivkin et al. 2001).
Although the authors leave open the question of mili-
tary tribunals, they are unambiguous in their assessment of
the role the Supreme Court might choose to play if military
tribunals are established. They refer to the likelihood that
the Supreme Court might choose to limit military tribunals
on U.S. soil, adding that “it is likely that the Supreme Court
would allow the trial overseas by military commission”
(Rivkin et al. 2001). They also take the view that “in the
past 50 years, the Supreme Court has become more protec-
tive of civil liberties, and is less likely to defer as extensively
to the political branches in time of war or national emer-
gency as it once did [in Ex Parte Quirin (1942)].”21 Therefore,
they recommend a formal declaration of war by Congress as
the surest means of avoiding a negative test at the Supreme
Court. The rest of the article recommends classifying al-
Qaeda members as “unlawful combatants” and assesses the
possibility of avoiding a court challenge on the grounds that
the United States is in “a state of war” with the Taliban, as
sponsors of al-Qaeda. The conclusion repeats the article’s
only certainty: the authors’ prediction that the Supreme
Court would accept a challenge to military tribunals (distin-
guishing it from Ex Parte Quirin), given what they claim is
the Court’s political evolution toward favoring due process
guarantees. The Military Order was published the follow-
ing week, declaring a state of war and categorically denying
appeal to the federal courts. The same authors’ article on
“unlawful belligerency” appeared a few weeks later (Casey
et al. 2001).
The Rivkin–Casey dossier includes position papers on a
wide range of issues, broadly connected by the issue of U.S.
autonomy in international affairs. Thus, their 2001 article,
“Europe in the Balance,” advocates that the U.S. distance it-
self from Europe, on the grounds that the European Union
is a return to a premodern feudal state. They suggest that the
European Union is inappropriately positioned to influence
the United States in directions antithetical to U.S. interests
on such issues as “new international treaty regimes, such as
the Kyoto Protocols on Global Climate Change and the pro-
posed International Criminal Court . . . the death penalty,
gun control, . . . and national missile defense” (Casey and
Rivkin 2001). They conclude:
Trying to sweep our differences under the rug will not
work. While there is nothing wrong with justifying our
policy preference in terms of American raison d’etat, it
is still essential to explain them also in terms of nor-
mative moral principles. For far too long, we have been
conceding the moral high ground to the Europeans.
[Casey and Rivkin 2001]

Their 2001 testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Re-
lations Committee explains their view that the Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty is no longer valid, on the grounds that
the Soviet Union no longer exists. According to Rivkin and
Casey, because the president cannot, in effect, create a new
treaty partnership with the Russian Federation and other
former Soviet states without Senate ratification, the treaty
should be scrapped. They recommend that the ABM Treaty
be considered null and that its renewal proceed from new
negotiations with the ratification of the Senate (Rivkin and
Casey 2001).
Their article titled “The Rocky Shoals of International
Law” argues that “international law constitutes a real and
immediate threat to U.S. national interests” (Rivkin and
Casey 2000–01). They object to a
“new” international law [that] purports to govern the
relationship of citizens to their governments, affecting
such domestic issues as environmental protection and
the rights of children. Among other things, it would:
nearly eliminate the unilateral use of military force; create
the unattainable requirement of avoiding all civilian ca-
sualties in combat; promote the criminal prosecution of
individual state officials by the courts of other states and
international tribunals; and permit—or even require—
international “humanitarian” intervention in a state’s in-
ternal affairs. [Rivkin and Casey 2000–01]
Their critique of international law is consistent with
an earlier article vigorously recommending that the United
States refuse to join the International Criminal Court.22
Their argument is in terms of U.S. autonomy, concluding:
The fundamental rights secured by the Constitution—
rights successfully defended by Americans on battlefields
around the world—can be summed up as follows: The
American people govern themselves, and they have a
right to be tried in accordance with the laws enacted by
their elected representatives and to be judged by their
peers and none other. The Rome ICC treaty, in concept
and execution, is utterly antithetical to these rights. It
should be opposed by the United States with all the vigor
it has mustered, throughout its history, to fight similar
threats to the fundamental values of the Republic. [Casey
and Rivkin 1999]
On the domestic front, Rivkin and Casey are opposed
to legal abortion; in addition, Rivkin, writing on his own,
contributed a position paper opposing President Clinton’s
health reform proposal in 1993. In the latter case, his objec-
tion was not to the content of the proposal but its vehicle,
the Commerce Clause. “Where,” he asks, “does the U.S. gov-
ernment get the power to require that every one of its cit-
izens must participate in a government-sponsored health-
care program? Ask this of a health-care reformer and he, or
she . . . will immediately utter the two most magic words in
late 20th-century constitutional jurisprudence—Commerce
Clause” (Rivkin 1993). If this position is upheld, he contin-
ues, “Congress will be able to regulate you not because of
who you are or what you do for a living, or whether you
use the interstate highways, but merely because you exist”
(Rivkin 1993).
Greenhouse • Hegemony and Hidden Transcripts 365
The significance of these extracts in relation to the mil-
itary tribunals is their demonstration of how the defense of
the Military Order fits discursively alongside other (superfi-
cially unrelated) issues on the horizon of tension between
what Rivkin and Casey consistently gloss as sovereignty and
internationalism. This line of tension, as we have seen, runs
wide and deep, connecting along a single discursive axis the
legal instruments of global trade on the one hand, and the
critique of constitutionally based claims in favor of domes-
tic civil rights law enforcement on the other. These are not
“the same” in any absolute sense, but the discursive trail of
Casey and Rivkin constitutes them as such, recoding them
on the basis of their respective negations (to borrow Scott’s
term) of presidential autonomy—the latter being the key,
in their view, to U.S. supremacy.
RESENTMENT
This brings us to the second question—the question of hege-
mony. Scott’s analysis of the hidden transcript joins the am-
bivalence of resentment to political capital. I have reread
his discussion of hegemony to point to the special implica-
tions of the hidden transcript in relation to state practices,
focusing on the mobilization of political capital. Now, it re-
mains to consider the extent (if any) to which we should
read the Military Order in relation to an ambivalence of re-
sentment. As we have already seen, the discursive trail of
the Military Order (highly partisan from the very outset)
quickly leads back across a terrain of past litigations, poli-
cies, and treaties, offering grounds for their de facto or de
jure reversal. The commentary in favor of the Military Order
has the unambiguous tone of returning to unfinished busi-
ness. Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Congress
and the White House—and sometimes the Supreme Court—
were locked in partisan battle over the very issues these
discursive trails trace anew. In the 1990s, that battle was
steeply pitched. Through most of the 1990s, the Clinton
administration faced a conservative Republican Congress
and, at times, a crippling conflict over the functioning of
government itself. Particularly notable were the repeated
failures to pass a timely federal budget and the continual
prosecution of the Clintons culminating in impeachment
and trial of President Clinton. These institutional develop-
ments would seem to be evidence enough of bitter partisan
resentments and a vindication of the present administra-
tion as a return or retaking of the federal government. It
is also a scenario in which reversing liberal gains could be
(and is) cast in strongly counterhegemonic (and moraliz-
ing) terms. Indeed, those very terms of resistance are now
suffused with the rhetoric of national security.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the idea of the “hidden transcript” is a use-
ful prompt for rereading, whether the hint of a message
comes from above or below. We need both the hidden tran-
script and hegemony to read the Military Order. We need
the hidden transcript to understand how the discourse of se-
curity builds on long-standing partisan debates over rights
366 American Anthropologist • Vol. 107, No. 3 • September 2005
and law enforcement, separation of powers, neoliberalism,
and international law. We need hegemony—with the thick
description left in—to account for the moralizing of parti-
san resentment as well as its stakes in that same context.
My effort has been to suggest where we might look for
hidden transcripts among the powerful—the other side, so
to speak, of Scott’s examples. The purpose of the exercise is
to explore more fully the ambit of Scott’s theoretical claims,
on ground allowed (if not examined directly) in his own
exposition. It is Scott’s critique of hegemony that suggests
we should look within the state for the extension of that
discussion, because it is there that civil servants must per-
form a power that—in multiple senses—both is and is not
their own. There, we find the ready makings of hidden tran-
scripts, as well as the resignification and drive toward polit-
ical restructuring that Scott explicitly associates with hege-
mony. The hidden transcript in this sense is not “fatal” to
a theory of hegemony (Scott 1990:77), but it demands that
any theory of hegemony be reflexive. I take this to be one
implication of his “conviction” that “there is no social lo-
cation or analytical position from which the truth value of
a text or discourse may be judged” (1990:x).
Scott’s thesis suggests that the discursivity of resistance
can be theorized only in its specificity.23 And, following his
line of argument past his test case to other ground, we can
see that this is equally true of the discursivity of the state.
States are highly specific in their discursive demands and
fulfillments. At the same time, reaching the ethnographic
ground of those specifics will mean more than recovering
the contingent aspects of identity, because the hidden tran-
script of “identity” no longer confronts the state at its prin-
ciple juncture of visibility (cf. Mitchell 1991:91). What po-
litical agency or representation might actually consist of as
a general matter in the current circumstances is far from
clear. We should not expect political agency to lend itself
to a general theory or to emerge in some readily recogniz-
able form from the ironies of identity; it is an interpretive
project—of reading the transcripts. This much at least seems
certain, given the increasingly fugitive politics of visibility
under conditions of neoliberalism. Missing Scott’s interpre-
tive emphasis on transcripts as a meeting of imaginations
means missing his identification between scholarship and
resistance, the essence of the book’s reflexive and critical
challenge. In that regard, Scott draws the stakes starkly: He
is telling us that to fail to see the hidden transcript is to see
like a state.
C AROL J. G REENHOUSE Department of Anthropology, Prince-
ton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to K. Sivaramakrishnan for his col-
legial stewardship of the conversation with James Scott—and to
James Scott, for his generous engagement with each of us on the
panel. My thanks, too, to Annelise Riles, Adriana Petryna, Carolyn
Rouse, Richard Wilson, Elizabeth Mertz, and other colleagues at
Princeton, Cornell, the New School University, and the American
Bar Foundation, all of whom heard and helped with variations of
the analysis of the post–September 11 material. The responsibility
for the analysis and any errors remains my own.
1. Drawn respectively from Anderson 1991, Benedict 1934,
Durkheim 1983, Evans-Pritchard 1940, and Geertz 1973. For reread-
ings and rearticulations, respectively, see the following: on Emile
Durkheim, Jones 2001 (esp. chap. 1) and Greenhouse 2003; on
Ruth Benedict, Boon 1999:23–36; on E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Geertz
1988:49–72; on Clifford Geertz, Geertz 1973 (esp. introduction),
2000:18; on Benedict Anderson, Anderson 1991:6–7.
2. For the full setting of the allusion to turtles and elephants, see
Geertz 1973:28–29; for the full allusion to winks and twitches, see
Geertz 1973:6–7.
3. For comparisons between Scott’s approach and Geertz’s “thick
description” (among other parallels to interpretive scholar-
ship in ethnography and adjacent disciplines), see especially
Kelley:1992:292; Little 1993:154, 155; and Scribner 1991:862.
4. See Kelley’s critical assessment, concluding with the prediction
that Scott’s argument will “enrich our understanding of hegemony
rather than displace it” (1992:297).
5. Scott himself suggests this comparison in an intriguing pass-
ing comment, in which he contends that “infrapolitics is . . . real
politics. . . . In many respects, it is conducted in more earnest, for
higher stakes, and against greater odds than political life in liberal
democracies” (1990:200). His analogy seems to compare subordi-
nates with voters; my comparison involves elected and appointed
officials.
6. Cf. Gaventa 1992:345, referring to hidden transcripts as “public
transcripts.”
7. All proponents of the military tribunals establish terrorism as the
context of their advocacy but not all consider the question of war.
Among advocates, Rivkin et al. (2001) are unusual in calling for a
declaration of war. One commentator argues for the repeal of the
1973 War Powers Resolution on the grounds that it places “partisan
bickering” within Congress ahead of the president’s constitutional
responsibilities as commander in chief, and endangers soldiers by
politicizing military intervention before a world audience (Turner
n.d.).
8. For example, Rivkin et al. 2001 offers the view that it is the evo-
lution of the Supreme Court toward increasing “independence”
(from the executive branch) on civil rights issues (since Ex Parte
Quirin) that makes a Congressional declaration of war a strategic
necessity (i.e., internal to the United States).
9. For example, see interview with U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White,
who argues for tribunal procedures that parallel those the civilian
courts in almost all respects (Weiser 2002). Compare to the com-
ments of an anonymous Justice Department official on the Locker-
bie trial (Toner and Lewis 2001).
10. For full discussion of the question of lawful or unlawful
belligerency, the trials, and President Lincoln’s commutation of
most sentences (38 Dakota men were hanged), see Chomsky
1990.
11. Terwilliger was lead attorney for Bush in the Florida election
cases in November and December 2000.
12. Vice President Cheney also recommends the creation of a do-
mestic role for the military, in the form of a homeland military
command for the purposes of dealing with domestic terrorism (Dao
2002). Defining the military’s role in terms of international security
indicates deference to the terms of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878
(18 USC 1385), proscribing the use of the military for purposes of
ordinary domestic law enforcement.
13. The report was authored by William Webster, former director
of both the FBI and the CIA, and Hubert H. Williams, former chief
of police of Newark, NJ (Webster 1992).
14. Gates was known for having introduced high tech and
“paramilitary” policing, presiding over the United States’s “premier
Special Weapons and Tactics Team” (Fritsch 1992).
15. Posse Comitatus Act of 1978, 18 USC 1385.
16. William Webster is opposed to military tribunals in the prose-
cution of terrorists (McGraw 2001).

17. Stephen Brill (2003:125–126, 220–221, 266–267) credits former
Attorney General William Barr and Terwilliger with the initial pro-
posal, based on interviews with both.
18. In 2000, for example, Terwilliger testified before House Ju-
diciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime in its hearings on
“Project Exile: The Safe Streets and Neighborhoods Act of 2000”
(HR 4051). His testimony reported on the success of “Operation
Triggerlock,” a Justice Department initiative in cooperation with
state and local law enforcement. The purpose of the initiative was
to refer for federal prosecution those that they be-
lieved were the most dangerous armed chronic offend-
ers [i.e., with three violent crime convictions found with
firearms]. . . . We aimed to maximize the bang for the tax-
payer’s buck by going after “the badest [sic] of the bad.”
. . . These cases [about 7,000] did not overburden the fed-
eral judiciary with lengthy trials. They were simple cases,
the only relevant question being “Does the accused have
the prior conviction and did the accused possess a gun?”
[U.S. House of Representatives 2000]
Later, Terwilliger commented on the current gun control debate:
We . . . are subjected currently to the ludicrous notion that
the trial lawyers can solve our gun crime problems for
us by bringing cases that result in liability of gunmak-
ers for what criminals do with their products. . . . As you
know so well, addressing public safety is a core function
of government. Our streets, workplaces, and schools are
bound to be more safe if we resolutely go about iden-
tifying and incapacitating armed career offenders. [U.S.
House of Representatives 2000]
19. Attorney General Janet Reno later reversed this order (U.S. Sen-
ate Judiciary Committee 2001c).
20. I draw the notion of a bureaucratic “career line” from Weber
(1978:963), with the difference that Weber was interested in fixed
career lines as a structural feature of bureaucracy, whereas (in that
same context) I am interested in the way they represent sequences
of professional engagement and mobility for individuals. I prefer
the career line to its alternative, biography, in that the career line
is integral to what Scott calls the “public transcript” of state power.
21. In Ex Parte Quirin (317 U.S. 1 [1942]), the U.S. Supreme
Court validated the military commissions as ordered by President
Roosevelt for the prosecution of German saboteurs who, after a
transatlantic crossing by submarine, were caught with explosives
on Long Island, N.Y., on June 13, 1942.
22. President Clinton signed the treaty on New Year’s Eve, 2001.
23. “To look at the symbolic dimensions of social action . . . is not to
turn away from the existential dilemmas of life for some empyrean
realm of de-emotionalized forms; it is to plunge into the midst
of them” (Geertz 1973:30). For discussion of Scott’s book in related
terms, see Rogers 1992. “Its broad ambition . . . is to construct a new
mode of politically committed social analysis at a time when so-
cialism is discredited and capitalism appears to reign supreme as
the dominant force in world history” (1992:703).
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