James C. Scott (1936-2024)

July 24, 2024 1:49 AM

James C. Scott, noted anthropologist and author dies after "having suffered from heart and kidney failures, Maung Hmek had decided to pull the plug on himself, declining dialysis and other medical interventions, but he was still following Myanmar affairs" (Remembering Maung Hmek aka Shwe Yoe aka James C. Scott)

Best known for his book Seeing Like a State, he was mentioned many times on Metafilter, mostly in passing. (See this review for more details on his book and possible problems with his approach: Paul Seabright: The Aestheticising Vice, LRB Vol. 21 No. 11 · 27 May 1999)



There's one area of his life which was much less discussed - his collaboration with the CIA in the '60s. From the Berkeley, CA, Oral History Center's interview, in his own words:

So I had also, not knowing what to do, I applied to join
the CIA. I had applied to Harvard Law School and had been accepted,
and on a kind of flash of daring, I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to
Burma, and I got the Rotary Fellowship to Burma. I thought to myself,
I can postpone Harvard Law School, I can always go to law school, but
when am I going to get a chance to go to Burma? And so, I decided to
go to Burma and spent a year there, and in the meantime—this is not in
a lot of my stuff—the CIA people asked me to write reports on Burmese
student politics and so on, which I did. Then they arranged through
the National Student Association to have me go to Paris for a year and
be an overseas representative for the National Student Association. I
went to the Congo; I went to Ghana; I went to, oh, Scotland. I spoke
at the French National Student Union meeting. I went to the
Polish—first American to go to the Polish National Student meeting, et
cetera.

and a little later

So at the end of my Burma year, I saw, if you like,
student politics in three or four different places, and
including—we're talking '60, and so I met the sort of Communist
leaders of the CGMI, which was the Communist student union in
Indonesia, most of whom were killed after '65, and so
on.

The linked obit above claims:

If Maung Hmek was in a situation to report to the CIA as a
Rotary International Fellow in Yangon and Paris in his postgrad years,
he had more than redeemed himself by turning against the state and
state apparatuses as one of the most influential anarchists of our
time.

but this will be decided by future historians.

posted by kmt (22 comments total)

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posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:20 AM on July 24

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posted by HearHere at 3:21 AM on July 24

I know a lot of people who knew him, and everyone says he was a very kind man and a great mentor and colleague. His work speaks for itself.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:45 AM on July 24 [4 favorites]

I was chatting with my spouse a few weeks ago about how Seeing Like A State is probably one of the most influential books in shaping my thoughts. Also not long ago I put it on as an audiobook hoping something dense and familiar would help me sleep, which sort of helped my insomnia but it was still giving me much to think about. I paused so I could do a proper re-read. The CIA connection is wild.

The eulogy link mentions that a fire had destroyed most of Scott’s personal academic archive before he died. What a loss.
posted by lilac girl at 4:32 AM on July 24 [1 favorite]

How many people died long deaths in windowless basement rooms with drains in the floor because of Scott?
I admire Seeing Like a State enormously but my opinion of it's author is very low right now.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:53 AM on July 24 [3 favorites]

How did he get the various names?
posted by eviemath at 6:05 AM on July 24 [1 favorite]

This took me down a long Burmese rabbit hole and created a yen for an encounter with the poetry of Ko Ko Thett.
posted by kozad at 6:24 AM on July 24

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He was my neighbor growing up, he had a little hobby farm down the road in our Connecticut town that, circa 2001, was undergoing the process from rural to suburban as most folks sold off their herds and fields to turn them into cul-du-sacs full of McMansions. Reading Seeing Like a State more than a decade later, I was absolutely gobsmacked when he started talking about vernacular vs. top-down knowledge using examples of street names from my childhood, and that the guy who was raising some kind of southeast Asian cattle with remarkably long horns across from the high school was the same guy who was a towering figure in political theory.
I had no idea about the CIA stuff, gonna take me a while to process.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:29 AM on July 24 [6 favorites]

A complicated life that ended better than it began. There are worse ways to be remembered.
posted by pattern juggler at 7:01 AM on July 24 [2 favorites]

How many people died long deaths in windowless basement rooms with drains in the floor because of Scott?

I'm gonna bet zero.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:39 AM on July 24 [5 favorites]

I should start on reading Weapons of the Weak, because it does amuse me to consider that Malaysian peasantry and our low-key passive aggressive ways contributed to his work.
posted by cendawanita at 7:53 AM on July 24 [3 favorites]

I'm gonna bet zero.

Do you have a good source about this? CIA activities in Myanmar in the 60s and 70s are hard to pin down. I know the US was at odds with the military dictatorship, but the torture and murder of communists does not seem beyond the pale for the regime, and giving the names of communists to the regime is not a atretch for the CIA. So I can't say I am sure Scoot's work for the agency cost no one their life.
posted by pattern juggler at 7:55 AM on July 24

Scott was also involved in monitoring the college student Left in Congo in the 60s - he also helped with the establishment of a more "West-friendly" student Left group. Like many efforts of the CIA, it ultimately backfired/failed - the student group didn't actually go the way they hoped. (That's a simplification, if you're interested in reading more a colleague/friend wrote about this in detail in his book).

Regardless, he was an excellent scholar and by all accounts a very generous colleague and supportive of junior scholars. A mixed legacy, but I'd say he gave more than he took.
posted by coffeecat at 8:15 AM on July 24 [1 favorite]

unlikely many of you here, I had not heard of him before. sounds like a very complicated legacy, and also a tasty rabbit hole I may hop into for a bit...
posted by supermedusa at 8:58 AM on July 24

I'm gonna bet zero.

Sure, being a CIA informer in Congo in the '60s couldn't possibly have horrifying consequences for other people.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:43 AM on July 24

Against the Grain is a great book imho
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 12:16 PM on July 24 [1 favorite]

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posted by infini at 1:16 PM on July 24

Seeing Like A State and Against the Grain are cornerstones of my whole worldview. Seeing was an essential antidote to my nascent technocratic mindset in my grad school days; Against the Grain is really an essential text about technology and "progress".

I've got holds on Students of the World and Patriotic Betrayal to read more, but I think accusing him of knowingly putting people at risk of being tortured to death is pretty far-fetched. He was in Burma before the coup, so he wouldn't have been thinking about Communist names ending up in their hands. He was probably in Congo in 1960 and some shit was surely going down then, but I don't get the impression that student organizations were a huge element (maybe Students of the World will tell me otherwise, but the book is subtitled with "1968"...). He was 23; this was way before Vietnam, before the revelation of MKUltra, etc. It's certainly possible that he put names in reports that were later used to target people for violence, but it's not at all clear to me that he could have known what we now know about the CIA's methods.
posted by McBearclaw at 1:23 PM on July 24 [3 favorites]

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posted by JoeXIII007 at 4:21 PM on July 24

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posted by brendano at 5:22 PM on July 24

So I can't say I am sure Scoot's work for the agency cost no one their life.

I'm fine with waiting for more evidence to emerge. Until then, as far as I'm concerned, he's precisely as culpable in the crimes of US foreign policy as the rest of us citizens, no more, no less.

Going to plug Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, one of his earlier and as far as I can tell lesser-known works. In addition to being what it says in the title, it's a fascinating study in the micropolitics of village life in 1970s Malaysia.
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:31 PM on July 24 [1 favorite]

Weapons of the Weak is definitely not a "lesser-known work." It's a seminal contribution to the study of peasants (regardless if one agrees with its thesis) and was one side of a classic debate on the subject. The book has tens of thousands of other works citing it (and its own wikipedia page).
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 1:02 AM on July 25 [1 favorite]