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Review: Language and the "Arts of Resistance"

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
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Review Essay

Language and the "Arts of Resistance"


Susan Gal
University of Chicago

James Scott's latest book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hi


Transcripts (1990), is certainly instructive for anthropologists and is stud
with stimulating insights about power. Nevertheless, it is a deeply flawed
The book was published several years ago and has been widely review
journals of political science and sociology where the major issues of conte
have been Scott's arguments about the nature of hegemony, the rationali
political action, and the logic of explaining revolutions (see, for exam
Mitchell 1990 and Tilly 1991).
However, the book is at least as much about the political significance
speech. It analyzes the situated nature of political expression, the relation
among speech, belief, and ideology in everyday power relations, and the
cal efficacy of talk. And it is exactly the language-related concepts intro
in the book-such as transcript and infrapolitics-that are having the wide
fluence, appearing with increasing frequency in writings about local politic
the political meaning of linguistic and cultural practices. For this reason, m
is to discuss Scott's work for what it says and assumes about languag
power. Ironically, it is just this aspect of the book that has not yet been ser
and critically reviewed.
Domination and the Arts ofResistance ambitiously attempts to theorize
nature of communication across lines of economic power. Scott's broader
is to "suggest how we might more successfully read, interpret, and unde
the often fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups" (1990:xii). He
plicitly rejects the currently common assumption in neo-Marxist literatu
well as in mainstream political science, that subordinate groups acquie
economic systems that are manifestly against their interests because they
to believe in a dominant ideology that legitimates or naturalizes the powe
ruling elites. Whether in the simplistic form of "false consciousness" and
tural consensus, or in more subtle stories about cultural hegemony
"hegemonic incorporation," these theories look to ideological mechanisms

Cultural Anthropology 10(3):407-424. Copyright ? 1995, American Anthropological Association.

407

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408 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the explanation of political quiescence in situations of exploitation an


ity. Rejecting such theories and the image of passive subordination t
suggest, Scott's earlier research among Malay peasants documented t
cal effects of apparently trivial everyday actions, such as poaching,
ging, and pilfering. In an influential theoretical move, he described t
ties as peasants' disguised attempts to resist and thwart the appropr
their labor, property, or production (Scott 1985).
Scott's current book differs from his earlier work as well as the work of
many other critics of "dominant ideology" theories (see Abercrombie et al.
1980) in that he focuses on language and ideology. His major recommendation
for better understanding the apparent political consent of subordinate groups is
to examine how power relations affect what people say to different social audi-
ences. The appearance of consent, he argues, is produced by the practical and
material pressure on subordinates to refrain from "speaking truth to power"
(Scott 1990:i). There is vastly more resistance to dominant ideologies than re-
searchers have reported because they have failed to notice the "hidden tran-
scripts" that express resistance and the hidden social sites at which such tran-
scripts are created and acted out. When resistance occurs "in public," in front of
the powerful, scholars have failed to note it because of the subtle, evasive speech
genres in which it is routinely expressed. These genres of "ideological resis-
tance," along with the disguised forms of economic resistance such as poaching,
deserve special attention, he argues. Together they form what Scott calls the "in-
frapolitics of the powerless," which is the indispensable and revealing precursor
of those elaborate institutional political actions, such as revolutions and the for-
mation of social movements, that are the more usual object of social science.
Scott's work is potentially of great interest to readers of Cultural Anthro-
pology for a number of reasons. First, he is attempting to understand familiar
subject matter: communication, everyday talk, and ritual in contexts of unequal
power. Second, Scott relies heavily on anthropological research, particularly
studies of social interaction, sociolinguistics, folklore, and a range of perform-
ance genres, to provide supportive evidence for his conceptual edifice. What he
identifies as novel insights and observations about these phenomena will often
sound familiar to those who have been reading the anthropological literature of
the last decade. This is in part because his endeavor resembles the attempts
within anthropology to reinterpret linguistic practices not only as patterned cul-
tural difference but as expressions of speakers' involvement in large-scale rela-
tions of unequal power, often as signs of resistance to dominant linguistic forms
and the values they encode (summarized in Gal 1989). Third, while tacitly in-
spired by conceptions of domination and resistance borrowed from Gramsci, his
followers, and critics, Scott's specific conceptual proposals rely on a much more
familiar set of metaphors drawn directly from everyday language use: ideology
is figured as transcript, on-stage or off-stage talk, libretto, performance, and dia-
lect.
However, despite these apparent points of convergence and superficial
similarity, Scott's book actually moves in quite a different direction than the

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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 409

theoretical development of recent anthropological approaches to


critique of Scott, therefore, provides the occasion to discuss new an
language and power, showing by comparison how they diverge from
fact, the more traditional approach found in Scott's book.
Most generally, Scott relies on unexamined and simplified image
posedly unmediated face-to-face communication as guiding metapho
derstanding the production, dissemination, and effects of ideology.
here that this basic conceptual move is misguided, leading him to mis
the ethnographic materials he uses and to omit some of the most intr
tions about the nature of language in the moder world. A characteris
of the works I will cite in opposition to Scott's approach is that they
linguistic forms, practices, and their effects-whether dominating, re
hegemonic-to be importantly constructed and mediated by lingu
gies that vary across space and history (see, for example, Kroskrity
Woolard and Schieffelin 1994).
In what follows, I will first explicate Scott's more specific propo
the relationship among ideology, "transcripts," and domination, and
line four basic criticisms of this work. First, in proposing the idea of
scripts, Scott develops a notion of the natural (precultural, presemiot
ing self that is at odds with recent understandings about the role o
ideologies and cultural conceptions in the production of self and em
ond, the major analytical categories he uses-dominant and subo
so broadly generalized over space and time that important cultural
between forms of power cannot be captured in his scheme. Third, Sc
term, public, is of considerable interest for students of language, soc
tion and ideology, yet it is drastically undertheorized in this book, a
lematic ideological aspects are thus made invisible. Fourth, although
pal aim is to explicate the political significance of talk-its signi
constitutive "performative" acts-Scott's analyses of linguistic pheno
plore only the referential or representational aspects of languag
within this narrowed perspective, fail utterly to grapple with gram
pragmatic complexity. The possibility that grammatical categories c
tribute to tacit hegemony is ignored; pragmatic strategies such as a
irony are assumed to have intrinsic functions such as subversion or
regardless of the linguistic ideologies and cultural contexts in which
tices are embedded.

The Book's Argument


Scott starts with the observation, taken from his own experience, that peo
ple are careful in their speech to those who have power over them. Complain
opinions, and responses that would be imprudent if made to the powerful are
often choked back, and such "repressed speech" is redirected to others. On thos
rare occasions when anger and indignation overcome such sensible discretion,
a feeling of elation is likely to follow. In the effort to systematize and theoriz
this insight, he draws his examples very broadly: from studies of slavery, serf

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410 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

dom, and caste subordination, patriarchal gender relations, colonial


state socialism, and total institutions such as jails and prisoner-of-w
On the basis of this wide array of evidence, he argues that

Every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a "hidden trans


represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dom
powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing t
and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed. [Scott 1990:xi

Scott's initial scheme thus posits four separate transcripts, with po


subordinate groups each having both a hidden and a public form.
The hidden transcript of the subordinate is largely an emotiona
response to domination; the practice of domination creates the hidde
(p. 27). Characteristically, this creation occurs in a range of autonom
sites that are cloistered from the surveillance and interference of th
in slave quarters, untouchable villages, and the taverns of the work
Such sites are not automatically available; they must be won and cont
fended by various kinds of social struggle. It follows that the ordina
able relations between subordinate and dominant groups represent
ter of the public transcript of the dominant and that of the subord
The subordinate, in these public encounters, are coerced by material
to defer to the dominant, or to flatter and cajole them. Alternatively
dinate may enact the image of themselves proffered by the dominant
demand the goods, rights, and privileges that the dominant group'
(legitimating) ideology implies are due to those who are the proper
their rule. It is thus often in the interest of the subordinate to maintain their def-
erential public transcript, even though they do not believe it, especially if open
rebellion is seen as a practical impossibility. The weak are most likely to resist
in devious ways, without any open confrontation (p. 86).
What can be part of any public transcript is also a matter of struggle. Scott
points out that "the capacity of dominant groups to prevail ... in defining and
constituting what counts as the public transcript and what as offstage is ... no
small part of their power" (p. 14). As this quote makes clear, the intriguing no-
tion of four separate transcripts, offered early in the book, collapses later on into
a more familiar configuration: although contestations often occur, dominant
groups largely control what can be said and done in the single public transcript,
a single publicly acknowledged "reality."
It is of central importance to Scott that while the assertion of this reality
may fool the dominant, working as a kind of "self-hypnosis within ruling groups
to buck up their courage, improve their cohesion" (p.67), the weak are not taken
in. For the weak, the public transcript is, at most, a "dramatization of power re-
lations that is not to be confused with ideological hegemony" (p. 66-67; empha-
sis is original). In chapters 2 and 3, Scott marshals a wide array of often subtle
ethnographic, literary, and historical examples-rituals, conversations, pro-
tests, parades and other gatherings, petitioning of monarchs, everyday visual
and audible displays of rank and deference-which in each case can be under-

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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 411

stood as evidence of such a public transcript, jointly created, for th


reasons, by the dominant and the weak.
Thus, ironically, the process of domination itself generates the
dence that apparently confirms notions of hegemony. The dilemm
is to discern what the subordinate "really" think, when they are not
for the public transcript, by finding evidence of their hidden tran
evidence is available even from public events because the subordina
"a veiled discourse of dignity and self-assertion within the public tr
137). If one knows how to decode the public acts and speech of the
can discern in them an "ideological resistance [that] is disguised
veiled for safety's sake" (p. 137). "What we confront then, in the p
script, is a strange kind of ideological debate about justice and digni
one party has a severe speech impediment induced by power relatio
Ultimately, the importance of these forms of resistance-"arts of p
guise"-is that they are the "infrapolitics" of the oppressed, the
forms of their political life, on which the possibility of more open
pends. Each form of "disguised resistance... is the silent partner of
of public resistance" (p. 199) which may eventually emerge, giv
conditions.

For Scott, it is not true that subordinates experience ideological contradic-


tions, a doubled or divided consciousness. Nor is it the case that, given the domi-
nant cultural materials, they find it hard to articulate a counterreality, as hegem-
ony theorists might say. Rather, their hidden ideas about a different world,
which Scott is sure they have, have just not been realizable in practice.
In some ways this seems an attractive conceptual scheme. Scott joins the
new cultural historians in pointing out the nontransparent, socially constructed
nature of historical and archival evidence. The book's strength is in the engag-
ingly described and kaleidoscopic examples of performances-of-resistance and
rituals-of-the-weak. Furthermore, his emphasis on struggle and conflict in the
creation of such performances is a welcome antidote to an older ethnography of
speaking that too easily assumed cultural consensus in the interpretation of
speech. Finally, anthropologists can only applaud his attention to linguistic prac-
tices as politically important phenomena. However, as I argue below, it is exactly
Scott's handling of linguistic materials that finally undermines his argument.

Selves and Interacting Subjects

Scott thinks of the public transcript as a matter of performance, acting, and


even posing. This may sound at first like the familiar Goffmanian insight that
social life can be viewed as drama. However, Scott's understanding of perform-
ance is much narrower than this and is linked to a notion of an authentic self that
is necessarily betrayed by performance. Scott's position is thus antithetical to
Goffman's (1959) view that every social act is unavoidably a presentation of
self. Goffman's dramaturgical metaphors suggest that all social beings in the in-
teraction order are necessarily, in some sense, actors. In contrast, Scott thinks of
acting as an onerous imposition, suffered mostly by the weak: "the script and

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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

tance to official languages and ideologies. But these contrasting sta


be classified as posed versus genuine; they are evidence of the coex
deeply felt yet contested discourses (Gal 1993).
More important, Scott's equation of power with lack of exp
straint flies in the face of cross-cultural evidence. Extensive ethn
studies have demonstrated that in some societies it is the holders
power who must restrain themselves physically, linguistically, and
expression of emotion exactly because it is superior restraint that c
ideologically defines and justifies their power, enabling them to p
cise it. In this sense, the link between linguistic forms and their fun
structed and mediated by local ideologies of self, language, and po
directness and allusive quality of Malagasy men's speech (Och
linguistic inarticulateness, even ungrammaticality, of Wolof n
1990), the strenuous restraint in performance required of monarch
nese theater state (Geertz 1980), and the muting of interactional ge
educated, high-status Javanese (Errington 1988) are only the best k
examples. In short, there is no simple, universal relation between
and the form in which emotion is expressed, exactly because the c
and expression of affective states is mediated by linguistic ideolog
What is odd about this part of Scott's argument is that he hims
counterevidence to his major claims in the course of making other
deed, it is a general and irritating characteristic of the book that S
nies in one place a point he has demonstrably asserted in another.
stance, he argues elsewhere that the dominant do indeed need
"performance of mastery" that is sometimes hard to construct, and
portment ... must embody the ideas by which ... domination is pub
fied" (p. 49). In a footnote (p. 52 n. 16; see also p. 105), he makes the
servation that different types of legitimation of power will requi
types of public performance from the powerful. For instance, onl
claim to rule because they are more honest and better qualified need
moral lapses and technical mistakes. But this more discursive or co
approach to emotion, power, and the self disappears in most of the t
of the view that directly derives the form and content of hidden tran
the universal emotional plumbing of the weak, who are coerced to
pent-up rage.
Scott's inconsistencies around questions of selfhood and emo
from his apparent ambivalence about two currently controversial
cal issues in social science. The first is the vexed question of the r
own positionality. It is typical that, while rightly alerting his reader
role of different perspectives and conflicting goals in the creation
transcript, Scott's definition of transcript-a term whose metapho
fundamental to this book-reveals his own reluctance to follow the
through and adopt a similarly perspectivalist approach to hidden t
his analyses. Scott says he uses the notion of transcript in its "jur
(proces verbal) of a complete record of what was said ... also includ

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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.

The Trouble with Dominant and Subordinate

Scott flattens the great range of power relations evident in the diverse so-
cial formations of the historical and ethnographic record into a single opposition

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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 415

between dominant and subordinate. Effacing the historical and cu


ences between the situations of groups such as 18th-century Ame
19th-century Russian peasants, and late-20th-century workers in
munist states, he concentrates instead on the similarities between t
terms, they are all groups that are relatively weak politically and e
and that construct public and hidden transcripts. A transcript is ei
phor for ideology, based on the image of face-to-face courtroom in
in the case of the hidden transcript that expresses resistance, it is th
uct of face-to-face interaction that occurs in protected sites. It fol
Scott's purposes, the political use of language is assumed to be sim
cultures, and across systems of domination and historical periods.
There are important sociological reasons for not conflating so m
ent forms of political and economic domination. But I will concentr
on some of the language-related disadvantages of such a strategy.
nate result is the slighting or ignoring of the ideological impact of
nicative media-print, television, video, radio, and film-whose
functioning vary significantly across the historically different cas
equates, and whose creation and dissemination of ideology are not
quately described by the face-to-face metaphor. Thus, Scott's book
barely recognizable landscape in which it often appears that 19th-c
ers did not read broadsheets, and 20th-century peasants, workers
Communists are not profoundly influenced by listening to radio, w
vision, or playing cassette recorders. Yet some of the greatest
ideological changes of the last 200 years-changes importantl
Scott's concern with domination, including the rise of nationalism,
of the citizen-subject, the spread of consumerism, and the recent
communism-have been shaped by the existence of these mass m
these changes are subsumed under the dominant-subordinate dich
provides very little separate commentary on them and no theoret
to understand their relation to linguistic processes.
A brief sketch of one well-known example should suffice to il
problem. Benedict Anderson's (1983) analysis of nationalism draws
the creation of communities in which members will never know or interact with
most of their fellow members, in part because the size of the group makes face-
to-face contact among all members an impossibility. Scott never explicitly con-
siders such groups organized by national ideology. In his terminology, we
would sometimes have to call such groups economically and politically "subor-
dinate," as in the case of nations formed against a colonial power, and at other
times they would be "dominant." But, in either case, as Anderson shows, the
imagination of such communities is central to their existence. And this construc-
tion or imagination has been made possible, historically, because of mediation
by certain artifacts of print capitalism: the regional newspaper and the novel.
The reading of newspapers is an

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416 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

extraordinary mass ceremony ... performed in silent privacy, in the l


skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he perform
replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whos
he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
1983:35]

Whatever the shortcomings of Anderson's larger argument, it is ob


populations of the kind Scott defines by his labels "subordinate" and
nant" must also be created and united by such complex linguistic pr
them imagination, mobilization, or consciousness-raising) that are us
examples of face-to-face interaction. Yet Scott provides no analy
such mediated communication.
By drawing attention to print and other mass media, I am also suggesting
that, contrary to Scott's analysis, the "sites" at which hidden transcripts are cre-
ated need not be restricted to places where furtive face-to-face encounters occur.
Resistance to domination is just as likely to be produced by illegal radio sta-
tions, samizdat magazines, pirated music cassettes, or patched-in cable TV. An-
thropology itself has certainly not solved the problem of how to analyze such
mediated linguistic practices, but it is clear that the tools of face-to-face analysis
alone are inadequate to the task. Instead, we need to understand the semiotic
processes and ideologies with which people imagine their identities, their sub-
ordination, and their "communities," through such media, and vis-a-vis other
social identities.
Scott's single schematic dichotomy of dominant and subordinate also hides
the fact that different forms of domination produce different configurations of
language use in politics, or what Scott would perhaps call different kinds or or-
ders of transcripts. One example will suffice. In describing Mongolian politics,
Caroline Humphrey notes that in societies encapsulated within a Soviet-type
system, domination did not consist of an elite group surrounded by a subordi-
nated mass (as Scott's implied model suggests), but rather "domination resides
in a series of equivalent positions in nesting hierarchies, such that a similar
domination may be exercised at each level" (1994:46). Humphrey (1994) sug-
gests that in such cases, there was typically an "official transcript," a version of
Marxism-Leninism, that was mostly written, perceived to be highly ideological,
sanctimonious and stilted, and imposed on Mongolians by Soviet force and om-
nipresent Soviet "advisers." Rather than any unified opposition to this official
ideology, expressed in some hidden transcript, there was a range of quite widely
known, ambiguous, but not at all hidden, transcripts, used by everyone in Mon-
golia. Hidden sites frequented by people of a single subordinate social category
not only were rare but also were subverted by the knowledge that anyone could
be an informer. This was because lines of division between subordinate and
dominant were impossible to draw: everyone experienced both domination and
subordination within the tightly nested hierarchies of everyday Mongolian life,
and everyone engaged in riddle-like, deliberately cryptic analyses of everyday
events (Humphrey 1994:44-48).

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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 417

Thus, if the conflation of different kinds of social systems


schematic dichotomy is problematic, so is the related assumptio
ordinate and the dominant are always clearly definable, unified
groups, unambiguously opposed to each other. State socialism is a
lem for Scott's dualism, but nested hierarchies and nondualistic f
nation occur in other social formations as well. My larger point
trast to Scott's implicit assumption of dualistic fixity, the plac
political life varies significantly across systems of domination.

Definitions of Public

Another fundamental conceptual tool in Scott's work is the distinction be-


tween public and hidden. Public is defined as "action that is openly avowed to
the other party in the power relationship" and a "shorthand way of describing the
open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate" (p. 2). Once
again, face-to-face interaction provides the model for ideological discourse, and
no further discussion of the concept is provided. Public thus becomes a matter
of audience: who is supposed to be witnessing certain speech, gestures, prac-
tices. But if public means merely an audience, then hidden transcripts, by defi-
nition, must also have their publics. Even the caveat that hidden transcripts are
produced in opposition to power will not help to define them. As Scott acknow-
ledges, power relations, after all, occur inside subordinate groups too, when
leaders exert power over followers or group pressure coerces members. Thus,
we can easily imagine a hidden transcript that voices resistance, from within an
enslaved group, to the ideology of a particular slave leader. What then distin-
guishes public and hidden transcripts? Or, one might ask, from whose perspec
tive do we call a transcript "hidden" or "offstage"? Scott mentions that the split
in the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of a Black Power movement in
the United States in the 1960s was preceded by "offstage discourse among black
students, clergymen and their parishioners" (p. 199). But since much of the dis-
sension over strategies among black elites in the 1960s was reported in regiona
and local newspapers, potentially available to all, in what sense was this dis
course "hidden"?

Scott acknowledges some of these problems and attempts to solve them by


briefly arguing that there are many hidden transcripts developed in a continuum
of sites, with some sites being more "intimate" than others and so "relatively
freer of intimidation from above" (pp. 25-27). But if there can be many hidde
transcripts and also many public ones-some of these occurring even withi
subordinate groups-we have gained little in analytic precision or insight.
In the end, the problem is not one of counting and distinguishing transcripts
or the views they express, rather it is that the definition of public used by Scot
is unexamined and inadequate. The idea of public, far from being a simple ques-
tion of audience, based on the model of witnessed face-to-face interaction, is it-
self a deeply ideological construct in Western thought, often linked exactly to
the separation of language from a face-to-face situation and thus to the decon
textualization of language by print. Based on its role in European history, one

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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.

Language and Hegemony

Despite these gaps in his analysis of publics, the strongest s


Scott's book are those in which he discusses the complicitly created p
script, focusing on the linguistic practices in which subordinate grou
their dissatisfaction and resistance to dominant ideology. However,
sumptions about the unmediated (precultural, presemiotic) relations

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LANGUAGE AND THE "ARTS OF RESISTANCE" 419

linguistic form, ideology, and social function undermine the ge


formulations and severely limit their usefulness for anthropolog
As I have noted, Scott argues against what he calls "thick" t
gemony. These are theories which posit that subordinate gr
dominant ideology and therefore consent to their own subordin
it to be just. Scott distinguishes between such theories of ideolo
tion and "thin" theories of hegemony, which assert only that su
perceive their own powerlessness to be natural or inevitable. Th
cording to Scott, allow that subordinates can and do imagine alte
But such alternate views are seldom expressed openly. To avoid
in order to manipulate the powerful and thereby achieve social
pression of hidden transcripts, of resistant ideologies, is muted
fled, disguised, and anonymous, according to Scott, and often ap
the reigning ideology in the very act of questioning or subvertin
central chapter entitled "Voice under Domination: The Arts
guise," Scott's goal is to detail the linguistic mechanisms of res
much evidence culled from sociolinguistic studies, he suggests t
in speaking, the use of euphemisms, indistinct and indirect grum
lent symbolism, and cryptic metaphor are all forms of resistan
hide the identity and intent of the speaker. Oral culture, trickste
inversions, and rituals of reversal are similarly forms of resistan
pervasiveness among the weak is used as evidence by Scott for
absence of cultural hegemony.
But Scott's analysis of these "arts of disguise" is seriously f
function of resistance cannot be directly equated with a list of l
or strategies. Any linguistic form-such as euphemism, metapho
trickster tale, or anonymous speaking-gains different meanings
ent social and political effects within specific institutional and
texts. As Scott himself mentions in passing elsewhere in the bo
are also used by the strong, with quite different effects. The cr
and indirection Scott links to weakness and resistance were ver
dence in the discourse of ruling elites in state socialism (see, fo
1991); and, as I have suggested above, the practice of speakin
can work as a legitimating strategy for powerful groups. Culture
the kinds of speech styles they identify as powerful or weak. Ev
as much a strategy of power as of weakness, depending on the id
standings and contexts within which it is used.
Scott's insistence on linking speech forms directly to politic
without the mediation of culture or linguistic ideology, paralle
which he attempts to link emotions directly to selves, without t
culture. Both attempts derive, ultimately, from a referentialist
in which texts and transcripts are read for their supposedly fi
atic, denotational meaning. Tropes are seen not as cultural const
merely as transformed or deformed versions of the literal. In th
no need to consider the cultural context in correlating linguistic

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420 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

functions. In contrast, recent work on linguistic ideology argues tha


practices-tropes and figurative uses of language, such as euphemism
direction, as well as the supposedly "literal"-are interpretable only
ticular social and institutional contexts, and are linked to social fun
as resistance or domination only through specific linguistic ideolog
ever aptly chosen his particular examples of resistance, Scott's mor
theoretical proposals ignore this mediating role of linguistic ideolog
tiating his larger argument about language and resistance.
A similar lack of attention to the relationship between language
and linguistic form mars Scott's argument about the limits of cult
ony. It would hardly be worthwhile here to enter into the forest of
about cultural hegemony that social theorists have produced. But it b
ing that, within the Gramscian tradition, the notion of resistance-
tional, residual, emergent, or alternative cultural forms-has long b
to discussions of hegemony (see, for example, Williams 1973). Sc
also described hegemony as the use of social constraints to create an
of consensus in an atmosphere of intimidation. Thus, Scott's argum
the ubiquity of resistance are hardly new; on the contrary, they are q
ent with much existing literature on the subject. What is new is Sc
tence that this "infrapolitics" is the precedent for open conflict (p. 1
hidden transcript is the silent partner of later public revolt or mo
199). In this romantic characterization of resistance, Scott ignores th
which hegemony may be tacit and resistance often partial and self-d
can lead as easily to the reproduction of domination as to revolutio
sion is surprising because the very ethnographic studies he cites to
point about the strength of resistance also describe its frequently co
nature and effects.
For instance, Willis's (1977) influential study of working-class British
school lads shows that their counterculture, created in resistance to the hegem-
ony of the school, made them neither politically radical (or revolutionary) nor
conventionally successful. Instead, it produced cynicism and the reproduction
of their powerlessness. Importantly, while resisting some aspects of dominant
ideology in the school, the lads actively reproduced and elaborated other aspects
of dominant ideology, such as the devaluation of women and girls (Willis 1977).
Similarly, in his discussion of Sennett and Cobb's (1972) work on the "hidden
injuries of class" among working-class American men, Scott notes the workers'
complaints about bosses' routine assaults on their dignity, which he rightly in-
terprets as ideological resistance (p. 112). But he fails to report Sennett and
Cobb's (1972) further argument that these same men blamed themselves, not the
class system, for their lack of economic success. They tacitly "incorporated" the
reigning ideology of meritocracy. Thus, while resistance is indeed widespread,
ideological incorporation may partially coexist with it, as different aspects of
dominant ideology cross-cut each other.
No doubt Scott would more easily detect the complexities of resistance and
the partial or contradictory forms of hegemony if his understanding of language

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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:

Although it is an arena of conflict, the [gender] category system continues to


function in everyday contexts even for speakers who are examining and purpose-
fully remodeling their behavior, for, even as one part of the category system is
brought into conscious contention, other parts remain in place unchallenged. The
category system creates a particular cultural hegemony, the unquestioned accep-
tance, by both men and women, of men as a normative, unmarked category of
person. The hegemonic structure is reproduced below the speaker's threshold of
awareness, unconsciously, but is challenged from above the threshold of aware-
ness, consciously. [1992:389]

There is no room for such complex interactions of resistance, domination, and


hegemony in Scott's analytical scheme.

Conclusion

Despite its flaws, James Scott's book offers a challenge to anthropology


attempts to integrate a wide range of ethnographic materials in the interest

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422 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

understanding political processes and power dynamics. He takes seriou


centrality of linguistic practices in the production and dissemination o
and their importance in understanding resistance to cultural hegemo
book deserves attention for its breadth of vision, its often astute discu
the logic of resistance, and its range of evidence. But ultimately, Scott
to theorize the links between language and power fails, because his ap
language lacks some of the basic principles about linguistic form and
currently being developed within the anthropological study of languag
cial life.

Notes

Acknowledgments. Many thanks to Kit Woolard, Ben Lee, and Michael Silverstein
for their suggestions, criticisms, and careful readings.

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