OBITUARY
The American radical scholar and author of The Art of Not Being Governed and other seminal books once dodged death threats in Yangon and rode a vintage motorcycle to Mandalay.
By LUKE JAMES CORBIN | FRONTIER
James C. Scott died on Friday aged 87 in his home in Connecticut. Called Jim by his friends, he had a career lasting more than five decades at Yale University – first as a graduate student and eventually as one of its top-ranking Sterling Professors, before a busy “retirement” as an emeritus scholar at the institution. He had a profound influence on anthropology and political science, but, rare among intellectuals, his impact on the people around him exceeded that of his scholarship.
Jim fought ill health for years, electing to undertake risky medical procedures rather than stopping his work. He was well-known not only for his decades of teaching at Yale and for creating its Agrarian Studies programme, but also for his many books.
His writing style was at times polemical but always persuasive, catering to experts and general readers alike. He undertook years of ethnographic fieldwork and many months of archival research, generating several influential theses that continue to inform the interpretive social sciences. But he was also unafraid to produce works based solely on secondary sources (or as he put it, “library work”), synthesising others’ insights and communicating them to a wider audience. His publications range from treatises on anarchism and the earliest beginnings of sedentism, to the failings of development programmes by modern states and the moral economy of peasants.
He wrote about events and ideas in places as diverse as the Middle East, the Soviet Union, China and Brazil. But he called himself a Southeast Asianist first and foremost, and his heart lay in Myanmar in particular.
As a young man Jim studied political economy at Williams College, Massachusetts, where he was guided by his honours supervisor to study the economic development of Burma, as Myanmar was then called. This led him to visit the country in 1958-1959 under a Rotary International fellowship. There, he studied Burmese at the University of Mandalay, and attempted some work in economics at the University of Rangoon under the professor U Hla Myint, before realising that the “statistics were completely bogus, by and large”.
Away from the library, he took several long-distance rides on a 1940 Triumph motorcycle, including from Rangoon (as Yangon was called then) to Mandalay, and made many local friends – while also writing reports on student politics and other topics for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. He even received death threats, likely in connection to this work. This was a sign of how fractious and dangerous student politics was in the newly independent, democratic Burma of the 1950s.
These formative years shaped Jim for his graduate studies at Yale, where he wrote about political ideology in Malaysia, then his first academic job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his success as a researcher of peasant politics, which led to tenure at Yale University and his next 10 books.
For all of Jim’s passion for and interest in Myanmar, he never published a book solely about the country. But that was just about to change. In March this year Jim sent me the manuscript for his latest book, In Praise of Floods, which will be posthumously published by Yale University Press. It is a riveting environmental history of the Ayeyarwady River, the historic lifeblood of the Bamar and other peoples. Through Myanmar’s riparian reality Jim meditates on how and why humans so thoroughly misunderstand rivers, even though they have shaped cultures over millennia. While deadly serious in its purpose, it is also a touching and at times playful swansong – one that could only have been written after a rich and well lived life.
Much could be written about Jim’s political work and stances, but he was particularly incensed at the military’s mistreatment of the people of Myanmar over decades, from General Ne Win’s seizure of power in 1962 to the 2021 coup and its bloody aftermath. He himself had been arrested at least six times at civil rights demonstrations in the US, so he knew firsthand how it felt to have one’s peaceful protest met with force. Through his teaching at Yale and as leader of the university’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Jim remained engaged with Myanmar, despite not spending much time there again until after political reforms began in 2010. These reforms would result in the relaxation of censorship and more opportunities for international universities to engage with local scholars and institutions.
In that heady period, Jim was instrumental in starting the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship, of which I am currently the managing editor-in-chief. The journal, whose first edition was published in 2016, was envisioned as the spiritual successor to the Journal of the Burma Research Society. The latter ran from 1911 to 1980, when it was forcibly shut down by military authorities, who have long repressed social science research in the country. Jim remained an active board member of the IJBS until he died. He genuinely cared about the plight of the Myanmar people and the country’s public sphere, and about providing publishing opportunities for promising Myanmar researchers and writers.
After the 2021 coup, Jim and fellow scholars U Tun Myint and Ajarn Chayan Vaddhanaphuti set up Mutual Aid Myanmar to fundraise for participants in the Civil Disobedience Movement against military rule. The initiative has so far raised close to US$1 million and supported over 17,000 people. Jim’s son Aaron has told those sending him condolences for his father’s passing: “Don’t send flowers, send money to the Burmese/Myanmar resistance.” This is proof that James C. Scott was not only a formidable mind, a generous teacher and a kind mentor, but also a true friend of Burma.
Luke James Corbin is Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship and Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School, Australian National University.
To watch a 90-minute interview with Jim about his life, filmed in 2018 by Teidi Productions in association with the Oral History Center at the University of California, Berkeley, click here.
To donate to Mutual Aid Myanmar, click here.
