James C. Scott

James Campbell Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist, born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, on 2 December 1936 and died at his home in Durham, Connecticut, on 19 July 2024.^1,3 He studied at Williams College and took his PhD in political science at Yale in 1967.^1,2 He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science, a professor of anthropology and the founding director of the Agrarian Studies programme.^1,3

His work was on peasant societies, state power and resistance.¹ For Weapons of the Weak (1985) he spent fourteen months in a village in Kedah, Malaysia, then returned to hear the villagers' views of his draft and revised the book after their criticisms.¹ His later books include Seeing Like a State (1998), The Art of Not Being Governed (2008), Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) and Against the Grain (2017).² He received the Social Science Research Council's Albert O. Hirschman Prize in 2020.³

He is the author of Seeing Like a State, his study of large schemes that made places legible from above and left out local, practical knowledge.