Keeping the slaves in check
A partial review of James C Scott 'Domination and the arts of resistance'
By Sonia Randhawa
Keeping subjugated populations under control is not easy. Imagine being the sole white family, overseeing a couple of hundred black slaves on a West Indies cotton plantation. Sheer force would never be enough to keep control – you could be overpowered at any time by those you 'owned'. A whole panoply of devices, devices that monitor the lives of the slaves at any and every point of time, have to be employed.
Control begins the moment a slave is born. In their own interest, their parents teach them to 'yes massa, no massa', to keep their heads down and only say what their masters want to hear. There are two ways of seeing this. It could be an astute strategy for survival, or it could be internalised inferiority. It could, of course, be both.
James C Scott has explored the way in which subjugated societies deal with subjugation, through contrasting 'hidden' and 'public' transcripts, exploring a range of societies from colonised Burma, to Malay peasants, Black slaves and rural serfs and tenant farmers in Europe. He finds that there are common themes running through methods of both domination and subjugation, for example that people feel humiliation and denigration as keenly as they feel physical assault. And that rulers rely on abjection and apology as much as they do the exercise of violence, in order to retain control.
One of the themes running through his analysis of the dominant classes is the fear of organisation by the subjugated masses. In the eyes of the dominant, there should be no horizontal links between their slaves or serfs. The slaves and serfs should only be linked through their master. This translated into concerns about slaves and serfs coming together, even for authorised festivals and religious services. For example, in the Southern United States, it was illegal for five blacks to come together without a white present. They were forbidden from holding religious services outside officially sanctioned ceremonies and times, and even then all sermons had to be officially sanctioned, with a white pastor present.
This was not, according to Scott, paranoia, it was completely justified. There were, again, various facets to this. First, there was the public display of the ability to organise. If the slaves could organise, it showed intelligence and ability, a public rebuttal to the assumption of ignorance and stupidity.
Second, there was the justified concern that if they started to talk, they would start to organise, and for activities other than praise of God.
This was not just a concern about rebellion, it was also concern about public ridicule, the sharing of information that might make the 'master' seem human, prone to foibles and capable of making mistakes. If they were openly seen as human – whether this was overly cruel, overly kind or just fallible – it could incite rebellion.
I find it amusing the irony that this provokes. In order to disguise their intelligence, while still expressing their resentment, still forming relationships and engaging in the activities that make us all human, the repressed have to use more intelligence, double entendre and sophisticated imagery and wordplay to hide their intentions to the oppressor while making the intentions clear to the oppressed. The most extreme example of this was the development of an entirely female language by women in Hunan, taking to great lengths the almost universal differences between the language of men and women. However, we can still see this today. During the year that the Nepalese king assumed complete power, broadcasters in the mountain kingdom were banned from reading the news. So they sang it instead. They weren't allowed to use the names of political parties, so they talked about symbols representing political parties. They weren't allowed to call for the king's removal for power, so they talked about the need to 'change your socks'!
A key lesson that Scott teaches us in his book is that autocratic power always incites rebellion. The further below the surface that the rebellion has to hide, the more likely it is that it explodes in violence, the more it engenders fear, the more it causes both the dictator and the dictated to be confined into roles and masks.
Note: James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Yale University Press, 1990
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