Ethnography.com

Reposted from The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2019

James C. Scott is one of the major social science writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  His first book Moral Economy of the Peasant published in 1976, studied Vietnamese peasants, and how they resisted social change while being rooted in a different “moral economy.”  In subsequent decades he expanded his work to include other countries of Southeast Asia.  And still later in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State he described how state-directed planning in Tanzania, Brazil, China, and the Soviet Union worked—and did not work. …

Hey, I published a book last October, Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline. It is about Max Weber’s view of authority, and why so many of us obey.  What follows is a lightly edited version of the introductory chapter where I have a bit of fun comparing subsistence peasants to well-paid UN bureaucrats..  To get to the more uplifting parts, you will need to read more—I suggest you order it from your library, or if you are feeling wealthy, get a copy from Amazon.com…

Quick capital trials were undertaken in the remote corners of Tanganyika Territory, even those places that did not have their own gallows. But  the sentence could only be carried out at one of the officially designated gaols where execution by hanging was carried out on a permanent or temporary gallows built and conducted to official specifications.  A willing European officer also needed to be available to release the trap door. As you will read in this series, transport of prisoners along the rough roads, trails, rails, and ships of Tanganyika could be slow and complicated—it might involve a five week walk, a trip on a third-class boat trip accompanied by four officers of the court, or presumably other similar arrangements.…