Discover the Best Books Written by James C. Scott

James C. Scott (born December 2, 1936) is an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He is a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies, subaltern politics, and anarchism. His primary research has centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance to various forms of domination. The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic."

Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and Ph.D. in political science from Yale. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he is Sterling Professor of Political Science. Since 1991 he has directed Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies. He lives in Durham, Connecticut, where he once raised sheep.

Scott was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1936. He attended the Moorestown Friends School, a Quaker Day School, and in 1953 matriculated at Williams College in Massachusetts. On the advice of Indonesian scholar William Hollinger, he wrote an honors thesis on the economic development of Burma. Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1958 and his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1967.

Upon graduation, Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma. He was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Scott agreed to do reporting for the agency and, at the end of his fellowship, took a post in the Paris office of the National Student Association, which accepted CIA money and direction in working against communist-controlled global student movements over the next few years.

Scott began graduate study in political science at Yale in 1961. His dissertation on political ideology in Malaysia, which Robert E. Lane supervised, analyzed interviews with Malaysian civil servants. In 1967, he took a position as an assistant professor in political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. As a Southeast Asia specialist teaching during the Vietnam War, he offered popular courses on the war and peasant revolutions. In 1976, having earned tenure at Madison, Scott returned to Yale and settled with his wife on a farm in Durham, Connecticut. They started with a small farm, then purchased a larger one nearby in the early 1980s and began raising sheep for their wool. Since 2011, the pastures on the farm have been grazed by two Highland cattle named Fife and Dundee.

Scott's first books were based on archival research. He is an influential scholar of ethnographic fieldwork. He is unusual for conducting his primary ethnographic fieldwork only after receiving tenure. To research his third book, Weapons of the Weak, Scott spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia, between 1978 and 1980. When he had finished a draft, he returned for two months to solicit villagers' impressions of his depiction and significantly revised the book based on their criticisms and insight.