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Response: Works and Days

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

James C. Scott*
Affiliation:
James C. Scott ([email protected]) is Sterling Professor of Political Science, Acting Director of Agrarian Studies, and Professor in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Anthropology and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University.
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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
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2021

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References

1 Scott, James C., “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4, no. 1 (1977); 138Google 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.