Weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance

This sensitive picture of the constant and circumspect struggle waged by peasants materially and ideologically against their oppressors shows that techniques of evasion and resistance may represent the most significant and effective means of class struggle in the long run.
The limitations of any field of study are most strikingly revealed in its shared definitions of what counts as relevant. A great deal of the recent work on the peasantry my own as well as that of others-concerns rebellions and revolu tions. Excepting always the standard ethnographic accounts of kinship, ritual, cultivation, and language-it is fair to say that much attention has been devoted to organized, large-scale, protest movements that appear, if only momentarily, to pose a threat to the state. I can think of a host of mutually reinforcing reasons why this shared understanding of relevance should prevail. On the left, it is apparent that the inordinate attention devoted to peasant insurrections was stim ulated by the Vietnam war and by a now fading left-wing, academic romance with wars of national liberation. The historical record and the archives-both resolutely centered on the state's interests-abetted this romance by not men tioning peasants except when their activities were menacing. Otherwise the peasantry appeared only as anonymous contributors to statistics on conscription, crop production, taxes, and so forth. There was something for everyone in this perspective. For some, it emphasized willy-nilly the role of outsiders-prophets, radical intelligentsia, political parties-in mobilizing an otherwise supine, dis organized peasantry. For others, it focused on just the kinds of movements with which social scientists in the West were most familiar-those with names, banners, tables of organization, and formal leadership. For still others, it had the merit of examining precisely those movements that seemed to promise large scale, structural change at the level of the state.