Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia - Peasant Studies And The Idea Of Anticolonialism

With the shift toward an "autonomous" reading of anticolonialism came a connected interest in focusing on peasant society and consciousness. Pathbreaking works, such as James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, applied models for studying peasants to the anticolonial movements of the 1930s (the Saya San Rebellion in British Burma and the Nghe-Tinh Uprising in French Vietnam) in order to understand not just how "Southeast Asians" might have articulated and understood revolt but also in what specific ways peasants would have expressed and made sense of the new colonial order. The work of Scott and others suggested that the economic conditions of the 1930s directly challenged the peasantry's locally defined threshold for subsistence, resulting in the widespread rebellions and resistance that occurred throughout the region. Peasant studies tended to also concentrate on economic causal factors, leading scholars to suggest possible connections between the anticolonial rhetoric and new communist influences that were slowly becoming a part of these and other nationalist movements to come. Yet peasant studies also led to the emerging interest in "everyday" forms of resistance and "avoidance" protest that focused on how peasants and communities may have expressed anticolonial sentiment on a daily basis as opposed to the larger and less frequent rebellions that officials and scholars had grown accustomed to study. Anticolonial behavior could be expressed by sabotage, flight, the dragging of one's feet, and other forms of self-preservation and protest that were directed against authority and/or the colonial state. In a fundamental way, the influence of peasant studies upon the idea of anticolonialism challenged for the first time some of the categories and foci of colonial officials by momentarily shifting attention away from the major rebellions and revolts to the everyday behavior of Southeast Asians. The breadth of scholarship generated by this focus continues to influence the field in the early twenty-first century, by which time the focus on the peasantry had broadened to include minority groups, women, and ethnicities involved in challenges to the state and its apparatus.