耶鲁大学政治学教授詹姆斯·斯科特于近日去世，世界各地受其思想遗产影响的学人纷纷刊文悼念。可以预见的是，未来数十年，对于国家本质、不平等权力关系、弱势群体主体性等议题感兴趣的研究者仍然会生活在斯科特的长阴影之下。实际上，在斯科特去世三年前，《亚洲研究期刊》便组织刊发了一组论文，以论坛的形式系统回顾和评价了斯科特的学术生平，并邀请斯科特作了回应。现将该论坛内容摘录，以兹怀念。

Power and Agency: The Discipline-Shifting Work of James C. Scott

Meredith Weiss and Pamela McElwee

The purportedly irreconcilable aims of “area studies” versus formal disciplines are a long-standing concern. In reality, their objectives are often inseparable, and approaches that start from and center a region have strongly contributed to theory building within disciplines. Few social scientists have been so productive in building bridges between these competing frames as James C. Scott, as evidenced by his celebrated body of work, his election to the presidency of the Association for Asian Studies, and his receipt of meritorious citations such as the Social Science Research Council's 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, awarded to “scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication.”

Peasant Studies: Subsistence, Justice, and Precarity

Shaila Galvin

“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work. Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.

Political Economy: Capturing the Wholeness of Social Relations and Ecological Contexts

Takeshi Ito

Undeniably, one of the rare characteristics of James C. Scott's scholarship is that his analytical insights are widely recognized in many fields beyond political science and Asian studies. Scott's contributions to the vast literatures of agrarian and environmental studies, the theory of hegemony and resistance, development studies, postcolonial studies, state formation, and anarchism, to name just a few, are recognized by scholars of diverse disciplines as new standards that challenge widely accepted assumptions and theories and reveal underappreciated aspects and untold narratives of social history—particularly for those who, under normal conditions, do not raise their voice and did not have letters to leave records.

Political Ecology: Nature and Society against the Grain

Pamela McElwee

This essay advances the argument for James C. Scott as a preeminent political ecologist, despite the fact that he has not claimed such a title for himself. While he is variously described as an (errant) political scientist, an (adopted) anthropologist, and a (most of the time) Southeast Asianist, he has not usually been called a card-carrying political ecologist. But in fact, his many works have foreshadowed a number of the topical concerns of political ecologists of Asia, such as his attention to subsistence strategies of peasants, to hegemony and resistance, to state power and simplifications, to anarchism and self-organization, and to ecological transitions and human-nonhuman interactions. The fact that Scott is one of the most-cited theorists in the field of political ecology is further proof of his influence, with authors using Scottian themes to launch critical investigations of how power shapes environmental relations and how politics plays a role in the co-constitution of nature and society.

Biotechnology: The Seed Panopticon Encounters Arts of Resistance

Ronald Herring

History, Zomia, Closure

Eric Tagliacozzo

It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain, Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is “one of their own.” This has certainly been true “internally” as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors.

Political Science: Seeing Like a Subversive Social Scientist

Meredith Weiss

Much of the work of political science revolves around institutions—the structures through which politics happens. Leaders enter the frame, of course, but often as institutions in human form: presidents, premiers, populists, and mobilizers who serve to channel and direct who does what and what they do, much like an agency or law. We might trace this pseudo-structural, largely mechanical reading of human agency to political scientists of an earlier era: the behavioralists of the 1950s and 1960s. James C. Scott began his career as just such a scholar. For his dissertation-turned-book, Political Ideology in Malaysia: Reality and the Beliefs of an Elite, Scott surveyed a gaggle of Malaysian bureaucrats to examine, effectively, the extent to which their values and assumptions supported or subverted the new democracy they served. Although itself fairly prosaic, that work foreshadows the political grime and games that soon pulled Scott in more promising directions theoretically, whether scrutinizing Southeast Asia or global patterns: disentangling structure from norms, finding agency around the margins of class and state, and rethinking how power looks and functions.

Response: Works and Days

James Scott

The large-spirited, learned, and sharp-witted organizers and contributors to this collection of essays have come to understand that I have quite mixed feelings about Festschriften and have dodged them for as long as possible. Why? Well, there are two reasons. The first reason is that such performances risk becoming a classic example of what I have elsewhere called “the public transcript.” The form tends to suppress dissent in favor of praise and filters out the “backstage” chorus of criticism and parody that accompanies, and should accompany, any body of work in social science. The second reason is that such celebratory events tend to occur at the dusk of a scholar's career, and, simply by summing up a trajectory of thought, resemble an intellectual funeral. “Well, that's that; what on earth does what he wrote add up to?” Since I flatter myself that I may still have a few novel and interesting things to say, things that may change my epitaph, my inclination is to not show up at the premature wake.