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Response: Works and Days
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2021
Extract
The large-spirited, learned, and sharp-witted organizers and contributors to this collection of essays have come to understand that I have quite mixed feelings about Festschriften and have dodged them for as long as possible. Why? Well, there are two reasons. The first reason is that such performances risk becoming a classic example of what I have elsewhere called “the public transcript.” The form tends to suppress dissent in favor of praise and filters out the “backstage” chorus of criticism and parody that accompanies, and should accompany, any body of work in social science. The second reason is that such celebratory events tend to occur at the dusk of a scholar's career, and, simply by summing up a trajectory of thought, resemble an intellectual funeral. “Well, that's that; what on earth does what he wrote add up to?” Since I flatter myself that I may still have a few novel and interesting things to say, things that may change my epitaph, my inclination is to not show up at the premature wake.
- Type
- Forum—Power and Agency: The Discipline-Shifting Work of James C. Scott
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2021
References
1 Scott, James C., “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4, no. 1 (1977); 1–38Google Scholar; 4, no. 4 (1977): 211–46.
2 Scott, James C., Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguise, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics (New York: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.
3 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 49 (originally published 1944)Google Scholar.
4 Published in The New Yorker, December 14, 1992, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baran´czak and Clare Cavanagh.