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Reviewed Work(s): Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts by James
Scott
Review by: Susan Gal
Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 407-424
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/656344
Accessed: 09-05-2019 03:43 UTC
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Review Essay
407
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408 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 409
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410 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 411
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412 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
stage directions for subordinate groups are generally far more confini
the dominant" (p. 28), for it is the weak who must "suppress and co
ings" and simulate emotions (p. 29). It is for the subordinate that the p
script is a "realm of masks" in which "less of the unguarded self is v
29). In contrast, for the dominant, "power means not having to act" o
it is "the capacity to be more negligent and casual about any single
ance" (p. 29; emphasis in original). In a chapter entitled "Domination
and Fantasy," sociolinguistic and social psychological studies from se
ades ago are invoked to argue that for the subordinate, public life is
"command performances" (p. 29) that involve, most centrally, "mask
feelings" in response to the indignities of exploitation (p. 37), and "
what would be a natural impulse to rage, insult, anger and the violenc
feelings prompt" (p. 37).
Indeed, Scott asserts that the content of the hidden transcript em
tematically from the redirection of this suppressed rage, from the "fr
reciprocal action" (p. 37). In its proper social site, the hidden transcrip
the means to express these emotions and make them collective. It is in
that, according to Scott, domination creates the hidden transcript. F
planation to hold in the broad range of cases to which Scott applies it,
of personhood or the self must be assumed to be known and unp
across vast cultural and historical differences, and a naturalized, inde
lic, view of the emotions must be accepted.
Yet these assumptions are untenable. The culturally constructed
able nature of the "person" is by now a truism in anthropology
1983), supported by much evidence across a range of theoretical app
Careful new empirical work (reported in Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990
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 prim
dial internal states that are fixed responses to environmental stimuli. In this
structionist view, rage itself would have to be understood as discursively con
tuted, not as a "natural" response.
Scholars investigating linguistic practices within situations of uneq
power have noted that subordinate groups often produce several distinct di
courses about emotion. For instance, Abu-Lughod (1986) discusses the di
dent or subversive expression of love, performed in oral lyric poetry among
Bedouin of Egypt's Western Desert. The genre is most closely associated wit
women and youths who are this society's disadvantaged dependents. But Ab
Lughod repeatedly stresses that this poetry is anything but a spontaneous o
pouring of feeling. Rather, it is artful, planned language, rich in irony. It is a
of counterdiscourse, rather than some explosion of raw experience into
realm of official opinion. More generally, the expression of contradictory op
ions by a single speaker, in different contexts, is not necessarily evidence of
sembling or inauthenticity. In a bilingual community in Hungary, any single
lager expresses many and often conflicting opinions about the value of the
languages he or she speaks, including opinions that show evidence of a resis
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 413
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414 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
speech acts such as gestures and expressions" (p. 2). But this definit
the fact, often noted by students of social interaction, that any transcr
a socially constructed artifact, created for definable purposes that d
goals of the transcriber, and can be neither "complete" nor the obj
from nowhere" that Scott's definition suggests (see Ochs 1979).
The second issue is revealed in his attempt partially to reform
same time to retain a widespread metaphor of power and resistance
nates current social science discourse. Timothy Mitchell (1990) has d
tention to the way in which this master metaphor depends on our
(Western) conception of the person as an internally autonomous, se
consciousness living inside a physically manufactured body. This fa
notion of the person leads to the idea that power itself is dual: coerci
understood as an external force exercised on the body but not necess
trating and controlling the mind, while persuasion is the mental mo
power operates, one that captures the mind. In a parallel argument
O'Hanlon (1988) notes that when Marxist critics want to bring oppr
glected groups to the attention of Western audiences, they do so b
show that the oppressed are also recognizably like the Western idea
litical subject, that is, they are dual selves. The critic thus presents t
as self-formed, internally autonomous actors mentally resisting an
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.
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
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 415
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416 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 417
Definitions of Public
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418 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
might call the notion of public a logic for the legitimation of politic
has been identified in a number of forms in recent analyses of pos
Europe and North America. Warner (1990), building on the influent
sion by Habermas (1989), argues that the legitimacy of 18th-centur
republicanism was based on the negative notion of disinterested
who, because the anonymity of print allowed them to be no-one-in
could claim to represent everyone (the public, the people). As I
above, Anderson's (1983) notion of the "imagined community" p
same logic of a non-face-to-face social group defined through si
reading as "everyone-in-the-nation," because no-one-in-particular.
Feminist critics have noted that the idea of a public actually he
stitute the powerful, ruling group in society by silently excluding m
ries of people and activities (Fraser 1992 and Landes 1988). Fictions
estedness and anonymity produced through ideas about disembodied
accomplish this exclusion while also masking it. In 18th-century Fr
land, and the United States, for instance, it was women, blacks, and m
property who were categorized as necessarily particularistic, partisan
interested; their political actions could never have been seen as disint
so legitimately directed at the general, the "common" weal, the "pu
Thus, it is not only that dominant groups often control what counts
transcript. More fundamentally, groups can become politically dom
least in some kinds of societies and in particular historical periods,
constituting themselves as the natural, unquestioned members of a
ested, anonymous public. A form of opposition to this ideological m
the creation of alternate publics, which have indeed been much discu
cent politics of race and gender.
Thus, public is not an innocent or transparent term linked only
ences, as Scott would have it. Rather, within the Western tradition, t
tion of a public is a form of political legitimation in which the deco
tion and depersonalization of language produces the image of a
uniquely fitted to govern because it is no-one-in-particular and thus
edly stand for everyone. On the model of the historical resear
emerged around the analysis of the concept of public in Europe and
States, global comparative endeavors such as Scott's book would
plore the key terms that produce and mask such exclusionary legit
other social formations, and also the way that language ideology an
dia are implicated in the creation of such categories.
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 419
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420 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 421
included more attention to linguistic form and the way that its politic
is conditioned by language ideology. Two quite different examples w
trate this point. Although Scott often mentions minority languages a
he is interested mostly in the way these can shield the hidden transcr
ing oppositional talk impenetrable to powerful observers. But in soc
have undergone linguistic standardization, domination is not directly
economic weakness but is established exactly by the ideological const
a "monoglot standard," inculcated in schools and in mass media and
the property of the bourgeoisie. Once the belief in the communicativ
or other superiority of such a standard has been established, other v
whatever their provenance, are usually seen (and not only by standar
as degenerate or inferior versions of the standard itself. Regardless o
political and economic aspects of their weakness, speakers of such va
ideologically constituted as a subordinate group on the basis of th
cultural, cognitive, or aesthetic inadequacy of their speech. As many
have shown, such speakers may resist by continuing to use their ow
but within regimes of standardization they often also devalue them
the varieties they use (see Silverstein 1987; Woolard 1985).
A second, quite different kind of example similarly provides a com
subtle case of resistance and tacit hegemony mediated by linguistic st
is well known, English has a system of obligatory pronominal gende
ries. Critics have complained for at least 200 years that, by virtue of t
tural properties, these distinctions naturalize and reproduce certain c
thought, including the ideological assumption that men are the proto
man actors. However, the articulation of grammatical gender with cat
humannesss and social agency creates an impressive stability in the
tem, making it difficult to change. Building on Silverstein's (19
analysis of gender marking in English, Hill and Mannheim summari
lemma:
Conclusion
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422 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Notes
Acknowledgments. Many thanks to Kit Woolard, Ben Lee, and Michael Silverstein
for their suggestions, criticisms, and careful readings.
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