| Peasant have occupied the majority of the social population since ancient times,but in the long academic history,peasant are not the key group discussed by political scientists.James C.Scott questioned previous theories about peasant status and peasant resistance.He believed that peasant did not have as little political influence as elites imagined.Scott deeply observes the social relations of moral economy,localism culture and asylum in the lower society,puts forward the theory of moral economic of the peasants,and explains two forms of non-violent social struggle,namely daily resistance and separatist rebellion.His research provides a new perspective for the previous theory of resistance.This article attempts to sort out a clearer framework from Scott’s anthropological narrative,and conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of Scott’s resistance thoughts.The basic ideas of this paper are as follows: Firstly,the existing research in this paper is sorted out comprehensively from two aspects.One is the development of the theory of resistance,and the other is the research status of Scott’s thought.Secondly,it elaborates Scott’s thought of resistance from three perspectives: the environment of resistance,the motivation of resistance and the form of resistance.The three parts answer three questions respectively,namely,what kind of background environment does Scott observe the political struggle take place in? Why did Scott observe political resistance among the underprivileged? How will we fight? Finally,based on all the above studies,this paper evaluates Scott’s research contents and research methods from two aspects of contribution and limitation.The underlying non-violent resistance described by Scott takes place in the context of moral economy,localism culture and patron-client political.And there are many reasons for the political struggle of the low-level peasants.The change of economic relations of production enlarges the gap between the rich and the poor,which makes it difficult to guarantee the minimum social rights of the peasants.The original redistribution mechanism has also changed,and the small-scale peasants facing the survival crisis are in a thorough predicament.Secondly,the imbalance of reciprocity provides the moral basis for the political struggle of small farmers.Thirdly,the institutional environment has changed.The social simplification project carried out by the state has broken the original closed rural political environment.To a certain extent,it has squeezed the original informal organizations in the countryside.Peasants have resisted the surveillance,suppression and resource acquisition that may arisetherefrom.Fourth,farmers have the ability to use ideological resources to fight.Generally speaking,the first three points are the incentives of peasants’ resistance psychology,and the last one is the explanation of peasants’ resistance ability,which ultimately leads to peasants’ resistance behavior.Peasants’ political resistance mainly includes two kinds: daily form resistance and separatist rebellion.Scott’s contribution to the research content can be summarized as "break" and "build" : "break" is to reflect on the original theory of resistance,pointing out the shortcomings of the original theory of resistance,mainly reflected in Scott’s rethinking of "social movement",advocating that the daily form of resistance under subculture can also achieve the desired results of social movement;He put forward the elite perspective of the western theory of resistance,refuted the hypothesis of "no politics at the bottom",and put forward that the traditional society in the countryside is the assets of the revolution and the peasants are the participants behind the revolution.He rethinked the social mobilization in the peasant revolution,believing that the peasants mobilized the leading class,rather than the leading class mobilized the peasants."Build" means that Scott put forward his own framework of political research at the bottom,redefining the role and status of peasants in political life from the political results;rethinking the "ideological hegemony";putting forward the principles of simplification and clarity of national planning and social construction,thinking about national modernization,and declaring that the political ecology at the bottom of the country is for national modernization.From the perspective of research methods,Scott uses vertical cooperation model to analyze class relations,and introduces anthropological and historical research methods to analyze political issues.Of course,Scott’s research also has some shortcomings.Although the research methods of anthropology have strengthened the credibility of data,they also limit him to the paradigm of Western centralism.Because of the static characteristics of the research methods of anthropology,he has some shortcomings in exploring the development trend of theory in the historical scope. |
