"Play fool, to catch wise."—proverb of Jamaican slaves
Confrontations between the powerless and powerful are laden with deception—the powerless feign deference and the powerful subtly assert their mastery.
Peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, laborers, and prisoners are not free to speak their minds in the presence of power.
These subordinate groups instead create a secret discourse that represents a critique of power spoken behind the backs of the dominant.
At the same time, the powerful also develop a private dialogue about practices and goals of their rule that cannot be openly avowed.
In this book, renowned social scientist James C. Scott offers a penetrating discussion both of the public roles played by the powerful and powerless and the mocking, vengeful tone they display off stage—what he terms their public and hidden transcripts.
Using examples from the literature, history, and politics of cultures around the world, Scott examines the many guises this interaction has taken throughout history and the tensions and contradictions it reflects.
Scott describes the ideological resistance of subordinate groups—their gossip, folktales, songs, jokes, and theater—their use of anonymity and ambiguity.
He also analyzes how ruling elites attempt to convey an impression of hegemony through such devices as parades, state ceremony, and rituals of subordination and apology.
Finally, he identifies—with quotations that range from the recollections of American slaves to those of Russian citizens during the beginnings of Gorbachev's glasnost campaign—the political electricity generated among oppressed groups when, for the first time, the hidden transcript is spoken directly and publicly in the face of power.
His landmark work will revise our understanding of subordination, resistance, hegemony, folk culture, and the ideas behind revolt.
Poachers
Poachers were certainly acting within the norms and hence with the support of most of their community.
And yet, we have no direct access to the hidden transcript of cottagers as they prepared their traps or shared a rabbit stew.
And of course there were no public protests and open declarations of ancient forest rights in a political environment in which all the cards were stacked against the villagers in any sustained, open confrontation.
At this level we encounter almost total si-lence—the plebeian voice is mute. Where it does speak, however, is in every-day forms of resistance in the increasingly massive and aggressive assertion of these rights, often at night and in disguise.
Since a legal or political confrontation over property rights in the forest would avail them little and risk much, they chose instead to exercise their rights piecemeal and quietly—to take in fact the property rights they were denied in law.
The contrast between public quiescence and clandestine defiance was not lost on contemporary authorities, one of whom, Bishop Trelawny, spoke of "a pestilent pernicious people . . . such as take oaths to the government, but underhand labor its subversion." Popular poaching on such a vast scale could hardly be mounted without a lively backstage transcript of values, understandings, and popular outrage to sustain it.
But that hidden transcript must largely be inferred from practice—a quiet practice at that. Once in a while an event indicates something of what might lie beneath the surface of public discourse, for example, a threatening anonymous letter to a games keeper when he continued to abridge popular custom or the fact that the prosecution couldn't find anyone with a radius of five miles to testify against a local blacksmith accused of breaking down a dam recently built to create a fish pond.
More rarely still, when there was nothing further to lose by a public declaration of rights, the normative content of the hidden transcript might spring to view.
Thus two convicted "deer-stealers," shortly to be hanged, ventured to claim that "deer were wild beasts, and that the poor, as well as the rich, might lawfully use them."
The point of this brief discussion of poaching is that any argument which assumes that disguised ideological dissent or aggression operates as a safety-valve to weaken "real" resistance ignores the paramount fact that such ideological dissent is virtually always expressed in practices that aim at an unobtrusive renegotiation of power relations.
The yeomen and cottagers in question were not simply making an abstract, emotionally satisfying, backstage case for what they took to be their property rights; they were out in the forests day after day exercising those rights as best they could.
The hidden transcript of customary rights and outrage is a source popular poaching providing that we realize, at the same time, that the practical struggle in the forests is also the source for a backstage discourse of customs, heroism revenge and justice.
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