 Very good. We'll welcome everyone. Glad that you're able to join us. So we're very fortunate today to have James Scott here with us. Many of you will have attended the lecture last night and heard his presentation there. We had limited time for questions there. But this Q&A session is one that we asked people to submit questions in advance so that we could order the questions and have a kind of logical progression through them. So students have submitted questions. And Celia and I will chair the session and sort of go through the questions. And as we come to questions that have been submitted, we'll call on the people who submitted them to put them to Jim, OK? Just one preface to all of this. I think that Jim's work over the period of his career has been extremely rich in giving us the opportunity to think through big questions. Sometimes grounded in specific places, sometimes grounded in field work in a village setting, sometimes grounded in the historiography that he does, or the comparative historiography that he does, or the comparative reading of the ethnography. But his work invites us to engage with these questions and to apply them to a very diverse range of settings and times and places. And that's one of the things I've always most greatly appreciated about his work. Many of the questions that we have, then, are sort of ways of saying, well, how do you use Jim Scott to engage with what I do? So we'll be putting questions to him, some of which we'll put him in the awkward position of saying, well, I don't know, because that's not what I do. But in my experience, Jim's actually pretty good at engaging with a wide range of contexts. So let's bear that in mind as we go through this. And as we ask Jim to use Jim in places that Jim has never been, OK? So what we want to do in the beginning, we have a couple of questions here that Celia and I have put together just to sort of frame our conversation today. And the first one is this. I think people would find it interesting, Jim, to know a little bit more about what drew you to agrarian studies, specifically with a focus on the peasantry and its relationship with the state, as well as what drew you to Southeast Asia. Is there a backstory here that you can share with us that gives us a little bit of a sense of this emergent intellectual agenda? I can. And I think most people who have written a few things can produce a narrative of why they wrote one thing after the other. And sometimes the narrative is convincing. But in my case, it's not a narrative that I ever understood or lived. It's something I have created ex post facto to explain to myself what I did. Jean-Paul Sartre somewhere has a story about someone who has to either leave with his wife or stay with his sick mother, and he can't decide which to do. I forget how it turns out in Sartre. But let's imagine that finally he wants to do both of these things, but can't do both of them. And finally his wife leaves, and he decides, let's say, he decides to stay with his sick mother. Sartre's point is that he can tell you the next day why he's the kind of person who would stay with his mother. But it doesn't explain why he stayed with his mother. He has to produce, then, an account after he did what he did of why he did it and why he's the kind of person who would have stayed with his mother, even though it was a kind of spur of the moment improvisation and decision. So I stumbled in. I'm not going to bore you with the story of how I became a Southeast Asianist, because it shows the effects of random events. I had bungled my honors thesis as an undergraduate. My professor dismissed me. And if I wanted an honors degree, I had to find someone who would adopt me. And someone said, well, I think I'd like to understand more about the economic development of Burma. I was an economics major. And if you do this, I will adopt you as an honor student. And I said, fine. And then when I closed the door behind his office, I said to myself, where's Burma? And so I became a Southeast Asianist. I got a rotary fellowship to go to Burma. And one thing led to another. And I became a Southeast Asianist. As far as agrarian studies is concerned, that's actually a simpler story and maybe typical of my generation. I started to teach as a Southeast Asianist during the middle of the Vietnam War and the expansion of the Vietnam War. At the University of Wisconsin, which was a university in which a tremendous amount of turmoil and demonstrations were taking place. And I found myself in the middle of kind of a national debate, if you like, about the Vietnam War, being against the Vietnam War. Spent most of my first two years there speaking against the Vietnam War. And I became interested in peasant rebellion, obviously, and understanding the Viet Cong and how peasant rebellions happened. And I taught a course on peasant rebellion with a China specialist friend, Edward Friedman. And in those days, we had 400, 500 students in the class who were fighting for the microphone to denounce us as insufficiently progressive. And finally, I decided that since peasants were most the largest segment of the world's population, that it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture. And so when I finally went to Yale, we began something called the Program of Negrarian Studies. And it was brought together all those people who were interested in rural life generally, land tenure, agriculture, now food and environment. And for me, it was a kind of wonderful interdisciplinary community in which I learned a tremendous amount. I think of the book, Seeing Like a State, as the book that Agrarian Studies helped me write just by attending all of the seminars that we had, including ones in which Harry presented. Thanks, Jim. The next question really builds on that. It's about disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, because you regularly engage in your work with a range of disciplines, political science, anthropology, history. And the Program of Negrarian Studies forestry is very prominent, people in environmental sciences as well. Your work is also used by people in these disciplines. And you use ethnographic methods, you use archival methods, you engage with culture in ways that the typical political scientist doesn't. So tell us a little bit your thoughts on disciplines. Their usefulness, the problems they pose, where your work fits in relation to them. Do you consider yourself to be undisciplined? Definitely. How many people here are political scientists? There you go, okay. So I was trained as a political scientist. And the profession bores me to be frank. So I think if someone told me that I was gonna spend the rest of my life reading mainstream political science and gave me a loaded pistol, I would not hesitate to blow my brains out. So the fact is I am bored. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind. And so out of that boredom, especially when I started to work on peasants, I read bullsack and zola and sort of novels about the peasantry and memoirs. People ask me about it in a sense, my kind of intellectual organization of my interdisciplinary work. And I mean, I have to say, it's a consequence of boredom and the desire that the knowledge that so many other things have been written about the peasants that are more interesting than anything political scientists have written about them, that I should go to those places and learn these things and read things outside of the discipline. So, and my way of encapsulating that is that if you spend all of your time reading mainstream political science, you are going to reproduce mainstream political science. Nothing else can happen from that particular place. And so it seems to me anything interesting that happens in political science is probably an import from some exotic place outside political science. And I happen to just go to different exotic places than other people. And once in a while I stumble across something that helps me understand. And I, of course, political scientists generally want to deal with the world at a arm's length distance through surveys and so on. And the thing that attracted me to anthropology is that it insisted on kind of wide, eyes wide open field work and total immersion in a peasant community. And so I went from political science to kind of anthropology envy. And I can remember the first time I gave a talk when I think it was in Toronto and they didn't know what discipline I came from. And they said Jim Scott, social anthropologist from Yale and I thought, oh my God, I finally passed. And I was, I felt so proud that I, they didn't know I was a political scientist I had managed in retranscending my background. We've got a cluster of questions now that have put, we'll put all three of them together because they all deal with the complexity of methods, methodological complexities of kind of work that you've done. So Julia, where are you? There we go, Julia, can you pose your question? And so I just wanted to ask what methodological challenges and constraints you've faced in trying to piece together a kind of historical, political, and social picture of Zonia when it's made up of so many different groups of people that not only speak different languages but also have oral histories. So I didn't catch the very end of this. There are a pizza. Yes, I'll read it out again. What methodological challenges and constraints did you face in trying to piece together a coherent historical, political, and social picture of Zonia when it's made up of so many different groups of people that not only speak different languages but also have an oral history? And then we're gonna pose two more questions and you can sort of approach them together. Where is May and can we get the microphone to her? Patrick has the microphone there. Can we pass it over to her? Is that easy to do? The longest relay race in London. My question is, what are the main challenges you face in working on isolated or marginalized societies? I'll try to say that again. Okay. What are the main challenges you faced in working on isolated or marginalized societies? Okay. And then the third one is from Cormac. Where are you Cormac? There we go, right up here in the center. So in Weapons of the Week, you say that power-laden situations are nearly always inauthentic. So I was wondering that being a member of an elite Western institution yourself and so occupying a higher position in global power structures, has this affected your search for the hidden transcript among peasants and if so, how have you gotten around this? Good. Although complicated. Let me take the questions as in the order in which they were spoken. Originally in writing The Art of Not Being Governed, I imagined that what I was doing is studying the relationship of lowland Berman states to their hill peoples on the periphery of Burma, particularly the Shan, the Keren, and the Kachin and the Chin. And I realized that so many of these ethnic groups spilled over the border into other nations, the Kachin into China, the Shan into Thailand and so on, that I found it difficult to kind of contain my subject. And Bill and Van Schendel, a geographer from Amsterdam, convinced me that this was a kind of issue that could be dealt with on a pan Southeast Asian level. And as far as he's concerned, it goes over to Central Asia and Afghanistan as well. And although that's too much for me to swallow. So I, in terms of dealing with this absolutely fragmented hill cultures, languages, civilizations, many of them as you point out, having oral cultures and so on, I found myself simply reading every ethnography that I could find and every history of upland peoples, written from the Chinese perspective, from a Thai perspective, from a Burmese perspective, or from ethnic minority perspective. And trying in a sense to figure out what these ethnic histories had in common, the pattern of movement and so on. So I think I would have to describe what I did as this rough and ready effort to find commonalities in history and to ask myself, can one write a history of hill peoples vis-a-vis Valley peoples without having it be so general that it makes no sense at all. And I concluded of course, or I wouldn't have written the book, that there were some things to say about hill and valley relations, especially if you took a long historical perspective. And so if there's anything even remotely novel about that book, which has no original research to keep mine at all, it is I think the widest historical lens that's been trained on that particular problem. And I really do believe that we as scholars, we find it hard to think in units that are more than a lifespan or two lifespans or maybe three lifespans. And I found it bracing to sort of think about a 2000 year history of the Hmong and the Yi and so on and people moving back up the yongs of watershed over time. So I found in a sense to do what's called deep history or long dure as the French would say, I found that opened new windows for me. As far as dealing with isolated and marginal groups, the only fieldwork of any real extent that I've done is the fieldwork for Weapons of the Week. And this was a sort of mainstream rice farming a village in the state of Kedah in Malaysia. And they were not kind of marginal. They're part of the majority ethnic group linked to the ruling party. And so it's not as if I was studying hunters and gatherers deep in the mountains of Kalimantan and so on. So I actually don't think that I, my partner happens to work in Kalimantan and working among hunters and gatherers that are three days walk from the nearest road. I was, you know, 15 miles from the main trunk road to Kuala Lumpur and Ipo and I didn't suffer at all. And so this was not, Malay is a relatively easy language to learn. So I don't think when it comes to studying, I can study marginality because peasants, if you like, are marginal and I studied poor people in this village who are marginal to the village culture and power structure. So in that sense, I studied powerlessness and marginality, but I certainly wasn't studying whole communities that were isolated and marginal. The last question is a tough one. I mean, you can't, when I wrote Domination in the Arts of Resistance, which I think is my work that's traveled furthest outside the social sciences in some ways, you can't think about these issues without examining your own performance, right? Before people of power and the performance of people over whom you have power when you interact with them. So it's made me exquisitely self-conscious. And I'm in charge in part of trying to raise money for the Sagrarian Studies program. So once every year or two, I have to go to New York and I have to do a convincing performance for foundation executives that what we're doing is exactly what they want to have happen in the world. Between us, please don't convey this. It's a completely inauthentic performance, but you have to figure out what they expect of you, the dance, and it has to be convincing, right? You have to kind of in a sense practice it. And so I, nothing like people who are at the bottom of the heap who are indigent and so on. So I don't wanna dignify my insights with any particular kind of power, but it's not as if all of us don't find ourselves having to present ourselves in the most favorable light before someone who has the power to help us or hurt us or to injure us and so on. And in the same fashion, you sit around a seminar table at a university and the circular formation of the tables makes it seem as if everybody is equal. In a sense, the architecture of the seminar says equality and it says Habermas's ideal speech situation. But in fact, some people give grades and other people take them. And I'm under no illusions that one is the performance in a seminar is both a performance for one fellow students and a performance for the professor who gives out the grades and I do perhaps unworthy things occasionally I noticed when I go to a seminar, I try to come first actually to a seminar. And I notice as you I'm sure have is that people in the seminar place themselves in a habitual location vis-a-vis the person who's teaching, right? And after three or four sessions, you can draw a map and everyone is pretty much in the same place. And I then on the fifth week, I come in and I sit sitting in a completely different chair in the seminar and people come in and they're on autopilot going to their habitual seat and they realize that the power relations in the room in terms of people's location has changed and they have to then recalibrate and find a position that sort of restores what their sense of where they want to be. And so there's a there all of these things you know you there's no interaction that's not saturated with power and which doesn't repay a kind of effort to understand what's going on to understand your reactions and how you're tailoring your words and so on. So it's it I don't think it's made me particularly better actor but it's made me more sensitive to seeing what might be going on. And we'd like to go back to your intellectual project a little bit to ask you if you could name three to five scholars whose work has been particularly important to your own development and if you could tell us a little bit about how their work has informed yours. And then also if your primary interest has been in the dynamics of agrarian society how would you characterize the significance of agriculture and food in your intellectual project. So the first question is fun. That is to say there are books that I've read that are absolutely central to my intellectual formation. I think Henry and I were talking about this earlier Carl Polani's The Great Transformation. Someone told me that I had to read it before I went to graduate school and this is someone I respected. And so I read it before I came to graduate school and it probably if it's not the most influential book I read in my intellectual development it's pretty close to it. And still kind of rings true. And I found that eight or 10 years ago I taught it and I thought students would not be interested in the spinamoon system of poor relief but it turns out to be an incredibly charismatic book and everyone loved reading it. So Carl Polani is at the center of that. E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class also enormously important to me. I can remember the chair I was sitting in when I read it because it took me out two or three days. And that certainly has stuck with me in terms of the analysis of class consciousness. And I have two, the pictures of two scholars up over my desk. One of them is Marc Bloch, worked on feudal society in France and essential characteristics of French oral history. And he was the kind of oral historian that I would like to have become if I were an historian. The person who can stand on a hill and kind of read the history of the landscape over the last three or four centuries just by looking at the hedgerows, at the sort of marks on the land. And I think feudal society, all two volumes of it but without footnotes is one of the most readable, wonderful books I've ever read. And the other one is perhaps less known to you but known to peasantists everywhere is Cheyanov on the theory of peasant society which basically comes from meticulous studies of labor and expenditure and cropping in small peasant farms, part of an Austrian and German tradition of small farm studies around the turn of the century. And it's worth noting that Cheyanov was murdered by Stalin in the early 1930s and Mark Block was murdered by the Nazis in the course of the Second World War as well. The other person who, in seeing like a state, it struck me all of a sudden that the people who make great innovations are often people who are knowledgeable about a discipline but who have not been trained in the mainstream of that discipline. And to be less obscure, I learned so much from Jane Jacobs' work on the death and life of great American cities. And she was not an urban planner, she was not an urban historian, she worked in an architectural firm, I think, and she had a different eye as a mother, among other things, and as a walker in the city. She saw the city with eyes that no urban planner and she produced the best critique of modernist urban planning that I think we have that's now kind of settled doctrine. But at the time, in 1960, it wasn't. And the other example is Rachel Carson. And she starts out her book, for those of you who read it, is noticing women in Michigan noticing that there are no songbirds in their backyard anymore and what's happened to them. And so she was, I think, an oceanographer or a marine biologist who happened to be interested in pesticides and wildlife. And both of these people wrote books sort of orthogonal to the discipline and the work on biology and environment at the time. And they both launched hundreds and hundreds of ships of other scholars who wanted to do work of that kind. So it's kind of sobering that most of this work was produced by, I wouldn't say outsiders, but quasi-outsiders. And so the trick is, how can you make yourself a quasi-outsider and see with fresh eyes, all the things that your discipline takes for granted. And one of the things you can do, of course, is to reverse every assumption that your discipline teaches you and see how it looks upside down. And usually it's just as plausible as it is the way that you're taught. And that's a good way to start. Oh, there was another one. I lost my... So the second one was just thinking about how you'd characterize the significance of agriculture and food in your own intellectual project. Well, I think I mentioned yesterday the fact that I was, for more than two decades, a sheep breeder. And so I actually, I do a little gardening, but I'm not much interested in scratching the earth and making vegetables grow. I do, I'm an animal husband person. And I always have loved raising animals. And so, and that was, I was never very profitable. I did learn to do my own shearing, which is definitely the hardest thing I've ever learned to do, and sheared for neighbors. And so I've enjoyed a kind of a relationship with agriculture as a mediocre farmer, as a mediocre sheep raiser, and as a mediocre beekeeper. And I'm serious about the mediocrity. I'm not, I mean, I'm right there in the middle. As a sheep shearer, I get a sort of solid B or B plus, all right? In any case, so I found that actually practicing a little agriculture makes me sensitive to issues that I would not otherwise understand. The, when I started, when we started, there were four of us who started the American Studies Program, we thought this was essentially a peasant studies program. We were interested in land tenure, and we were interested in peasants. What we knew about crop biology, and botany, and how things grew, and soil composition, and environment, or food, and supply chains, we didn't know anything about that. And so what has happened is that the students who've come to our door over the past 20, 25 years have been interested more in environment, in food, in supply chains, in sort of botanical, the people in the environmental studies know a lot about soil cover, and nutrients, and erosion. And so I think that my interest in food and agriculture, agriculture as opposed to peasants, is a result of changes in the zeitgeist and the things that people are interested in. And then I mentioned Michael Pollan, so I remember we were gonna do a little conference on land tenure, and I remember Michael Pollan, who's got a good sense for the popular zeitgeist, saying, you know, if you do a conference on land tenure, no one's gonna come. Figure out a way to start with food, and then you can take them anywhere you want to take them. But you ought to start with a place where you know they're likely to be engaged. And I think the fact is that food is given the current concerns about health, and food chains, and environment, and so on, it's a fabulous way to have people trace back where whatever they're eating comes from, and how it was created in the supply chain that put it together. And that's part of a serious analysis of capitalism, and I mean, you can go to deep theoretical levels starting out with that piece of meat on your plate, or that vegetable. Thanks for that, Jim. We wanna shift into some questions that have a kind of thematic focus now. In Weapons of the Week, there's a story in there of the Combine Harvester that gets stuck in the mud, right? After it's introduced, and this technology begins to replace peasant labor, a Combine Harvester is stuck in the mud, and peasants are asked to help get it out. And of course, they're not very pleased about that and resist it. So it's emblematic both of them becoming irrelevant, and also their means of resisting this. And I've always thought of this story as being possibly one of two things. It's either emblematic of a moment of transition that's irreversible, or it's a story that is told over and over and over again in many different places and at many different times. But the question really is one, as you look back over the years and what you've seen in the various places and the things that you've studied, how long can this timeless story be retold before there is no one left of the sort that you have long studied to resist? I'm thinking. We're trying to. So let me answer in two ways. And the first is why that story seemed important to me at the time and why we might think of stories like that as telling us something important. So this was with, in a sense, the waves of history rolling over these small farmers in the area in which I was doing my research. They understood that their days were numbered. And the Combine Harvester stuck in the mud was a kind of moment of reversal. It was a moment of symbolic victory and it was important for them because it was a moment of success and triumph in an otherwise a world in which the cards were stacked against them in every other way. And that's why they dwelt on it. And I think you can see that it's not just peasantry, that it's interesting the world of rumors and gossip and so on is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives the kind of volume and amplitude to a rumor is that it satisfies people's dreams and expectations about the world. And so I remember there was a man in my village who was actually disliked because aside from me, he was the only person who had a little automobile and he never took anyone to the hospital, never did any service for the village and so on. And there was a rumor that the Chinese from whom he'd borrowed the money for the car had come to repossess it. And I've never seen people happier because they hated him because he wasn't using his wealth to sort of be a good member of the community and they were just overjoyed. It turned out to be a false rumor but it permeated the whole village for days and days and days and it turned out to be false. And lo and behold, two months later, the Chinese middlemen did come and take the car so that they had their moment. And so I think Eric Habsbaum captures this in his idea of social banditry of the, and it's hardly any country that you can find that doesn't have a history of what Habsbaum calls social banditry. That is people who rob from the rich and give to the poor, who are seen as benefactors of the poor. And Habsbaum's point, which I think is absolutely correct, is that it doesn't much matter what the social bandit is doing and Jesse James, there are stories about Jesse James helping little old ladies across the street of coming home to his town to teach Sunday school as a good Christian and none of this is even remotely true. This is the dream that people had that he was one of them and was a good Christian citizen of his town. And so they in a sense filled the void and information with their utopian expectations of what a good man who was violating the law on their behalf might have done. And so the world of rumor and gossip and so on is like a privileged world for a social scientist or an anthropologist to kind of take the temperature of popular aspirations and it operates in ways that are scary as well. So there was a study done on propaganda as a book put together actually to train people in the Second World War on the Allied side to make propaganda. And one of the studies that they did was you probably have heard of it in elementary psychology classes. They showed Americans in this case a picture of a circle of people in which a white man is holding a knife and gesturing towards a black man. And they showed that to a large number of Americans just for five seconds or so and took it away. And then a half hour later they asked what was in the picture after doing some other things and something like 50% of the people who saw it transferred the knife to the black man rather than to the white man because they had this image that it's blacks who were threatening and who were dangerous. And so you can see that in a sense the way in which the public imagination shapes ambiguity or a void of information and fills it with their fears, their anxieties, and their aspirations. Second half. Well, how long does this story go on? Does it go on interminably? Or is there an end game in all of this? Oh, but I mean in a world of injustice there's gonna be dreams of justice whether they're peasants around, whether it's justice for peasants or not is another thing we may be seeing in many places the end of the small holder and via Campesina not withstanding. It may be that kind of small property of that kind, its days are numbered. But it seems to me that the kind of rumors and dreams of justice done, I mean I think of since I'm in the UK there was a popular mythology about the early Brinks robberies I think, right? In which since they didn't kill anybody and they got away with a lot of money that belonged to the banks and so on, people thought that was just fine. And so there's a dreams of justice are, will be, they are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with us for as long as there's injustice and that doesn't seem to be in short supply. Another question that relates to this about the persistence and the resilience versus the disappearance of spaces and places. Tour, where are you? Yeah, can we pass the microphone down? You've discussed the importance of considering friction of distance when analyzing agriculture historically. The idea being that not every mile is the same, difficult terrain may make a nearby place practically different, distant. But as new technologies reduce transportation times, is friction of distance still an important concern? How do you feel this will play out in the future and in which regions if any, will it be most important? So, yeah, I actually, I found the kind of simple ideas of the degree of friction impeding movement in pre-modern societies to be extremely important in which if you, I mean, in a simple way, if you wanna understand the spread of Burmese civilization, it spreads up and down the navigable rivers more or less. And, you know, 15, 20 miles off the river when you get into the hills, Burmese civilization pretty much stops. And so it's kind of ease of movement, of trade, exchange, influence, religious currents, commerce, and so on. Depending on how easy the movement is, either along coasts or in river valleys that are navigable, you can see the way in which cultural exchange and actually political power often move. And it seemed to me that what I called distance demolishing technologies like all-weather roads and telegraph and I suppose now cell phones, helicopters, airplanes, and so on, make that friction of distance less and less relevant, let alone drones, right? In which you don't have to have the human beings going there in a direct way. And so it's, although the Pakistani troops and American troops can probably not conquer Waziristan, they can make it pretty much impossible and uninhabitable for large numbers of guerrilla fighters. However, I think dealing with it that way as I by and large did overlooks something very important and that is the way in which the friction of distance is a social creation as well as just a geographical fact. So that guerrillas who are staging a insurrection are likely to fell trees across the road, blow up bridges, and so on. And if you like to make a kind of terrain that's difficult to penetrate, difficult to organize, and so on. Aside from just occupying difficult places like swamps and mountains, they can actually construct swamps and mountains by flooding, you know, the great example, of course. Although it's kind of a disaster is that in 1938, Shanghai Shek opens the dykes on the Yellow River in order to impede the Japanese advance and probably 300,000 people who perish as a result of it, but it does slow the Japanese advance and the Dutch always thought that they would open the dykes as well in order to stop a German invasion. So this idea of, in a sense, changing the landscape, either officially or as a guerrilla shows us that the friction of distance can be altered by human activity. And it's also true of areas in particularly slum areas of cities that are dissident areas in which the police don't dare go. And there are lots of sort of Latin American African slum areas that are quasi-autonomous, often run by gangs I might add as well. It's not as if they're not ruled, but they're a place where it's almost impossible for the writ of the state and its police to penetrate. There's a moment in one of my favorite films, which is called Casablanca, you may have seen in which I think a German officer is bragging to Humphrey Bogart, Rick, that one day the Germans will be in New York. And Rick says, there are certain sections of New York I would advise you not to gather, not to go into. And I thought he understood this principle that there are parts of a city that are, if you like, difficult to govern because the residents choose to make it difficult or impossible to govern. Let me follow on that. What about the natural world? In the art of not being governed, you make the argument that there are particular natural ecologies, in that case it's hills, it's mountains, it's high terrain, that lend themselves to forms of resistance, forms of retreat from authority. And you map that out very nicely with the kind of relationship between people, between their cultivars and between these spaces of resistance. We see today all kinds of forces that are expanding into these hinterlands and borderlands, whether we have the exhaustion of arable land and the farming now in marginal areas, in rainforest ecosystems, in terrain that has greater slopes. We also see attempts in agricultural sciences to create technologies that can be expanded into these terrains. But to what extent do you see these natural niches, these ecological niches themselves as being able to persist through time and providing the kind of cover or the kind of habitat for forms of social and economic and political resistance as well? That's a big question. I guess it seems to me, I was struck by the fact that in the kind of late 20th century, let me back up for a second, there are parts of most countries, particularly in the south, the global south, in which the state never had much interest. It might be desert, they might be swampy, they might be the sort of what empty quarters it's called. But they'd be areas in which the population is relatively thin. It doesn't produce much in the way of important resources and trade. And so these are areas that I called fiscally sterile areas in the art of not being governed. And these areas were, in a sense, in British and French colonial rule, they were ruled indirectly by appointing some native chief over them and making sure they didn't cost the metropolitan country any money in particular. Because they, and the areas that were valuable economically as export zones and so on as tax fields, those were ruled more or less directly. But in the late 20th century, it seems to me, the desire of capitalist industry for rare earth metals, for different kinds of oars, for the things that are important, both for cell phones and aerospace industry, hydroelectric sites, stands of timber that are now both valuable and can actually be gotten out by helicopter in the most difficult situations. What's interesting to me is that there's scarcely a part of the world that doesn't have some capitalist return that can be realized providing that this area is made accessible and resources can be extracted from it. So this idea that there was, if you like, ignored area, I think actually swamps that have not been drained actually are one of the last areas that persist. So at the, in the Civil War, when the Civil War began in the United States, there were 7,000 escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia North Carolina border because it was an area in which you could go and be safe if you couldn't make it to Canada. And so there's a, it's not as if these things are absent, it's that they're fewer and fewer and the technology is to make them legible and to bring them back into control. Think, for example, of the Vietnam War and Agent Orange, which is an effort to destroy the canopy of the forest so that you could actually detect movements of the Viet Cong underneath the canopy. So, and the spread of plantations, palm oil, rubber, what have you in Southeast Asia is also making these places legible. As is in Southeast Asia, the movement of valley peoples who are, whose population is growing quickly, there's this effort in Vietnam, in Burma, in Thailand to take Thai Bermans and Vietnamese and move them up into the hills in order to engulf the indigenous population and to people, the borders with people who they regard as culturally similar and more loyal. And the same, of course, is true to what's happening in Southwest China. It's the movement of large numbers of Han populations into these areas that essentially overwhelm and engulf an indigenous population that becomes a minority. And if you look at how the borders of Tibet, most of the Tibetan Buddhists are outside of the autonomous region of Tibet. And that's by design in order to divide them up and mix them with Han populations who can dominate them. So there's one more question here that pertains to the kind of dynamic between disappearance and persistence. And it relates to food and food ways in Southeast Asia. Andy, where are you? There, can we get the microphone over here? Thank you. In reference again to Weapons of the Week, have you recently revisited at all, Kapala Mudda? Mudda, what are your views on the state and the future sustainability of the Southeast Asian food system and the cuisines that it supports? And to what extent are Western methods of production and consumption habits impacting Southeast Asian cuisine in your view? I'm not sure I'm the best. I do go back to this village as a kind of matter of habit and kind of loyalty every four or five years. I go back, but it's changed enormously and a lot of the people that I knew are now dead. I think it's important to say that in terms of food ways, the area in which I was working was an area of marine clay soils that was sea bottom not so very long ago, geologically, and that it was entirely a rice growing plain. I mean, people grew a handful of vegetables during the dry season along the canals, watering them from time to time, but this place didn't grow very much except rice, period, and they were small fish in the patties and in the canals, and there were a whole series of greens that one could gather, what's called kan kan, which people sort of ate regularly every day. So I actually think that I probably had the healthiest diet of my entire life because it was fish, rice, and greens every day, right? All day, all day long. And it was monotonous, but there was nothing unhealthy about it except there was not much in the way of fruits that you had came from the highlands, came from, but they were available in most of the markets because Malaysia had a pretty good road system that made the movement of things, of hill products. So my impression is that Malayan peasant cuisine is monotonous but quite healthy, and that with a little extra cash, they can add, they do have bananas and coconuts, with a little extra cash, they can add the fruits and vegetables that are not grown in their region. So I think given the constraints of income, they eat probably as well as almost anybody in the world and in the city, the Malaysia is a kind of wonderful hybrid of Chinese food, Indian food, Malay food, and also fusions of these food. Many of you are familiar with so-called Nonya food, which is the sort of straight Chinese version of Malay, of Malay food, which is kind of famous in Penang and other places. So I think as a cosmopolitan place with a lot of different tastes and a pretty intelligent food, popular food consuming public, that Malaysia has a food culture that's very rich and varied. Now, if you change the lens on your question a little bit and ask what's happening to Malaysia as a food producer, then by and large, it's producing palm oil, rubber, and rice, three basic commodities and not contributing very much to the biodiversity of agricultural goods. And so from that perspective of where they fit into the international food chain, you could draw a much more pessimistic and lamentable picture. But in terms of my understanding, there's something that you find in Malaysia that I think you find versions of in Singapore and perhaps a bit in Thailand as well. People may know more about this than I do, but essentially a restaurant structure in which you have a kind of central place and a proprietor of the tables and chairs and who sells all the drinks. And then around the periphery of this little football field, if you like, with its tables and chairs and drinks and the drinks being sold centrally, there are maybe 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 stalls cooking a single dish with little boys and girls running back and forth to ask if you'd like that dish. And so this is the ultimate Petit Bourgeois, ultimate Petit Bourgeois utopia in which these people live or die depending on whether you like the single dish that they prepare. And if you don't like it, they're out of business. And so I think it may not be good for their level of anxiety and peptic ulcers in terms of how their business is doing, but for a consumer, it's a kind of magical, it's a magical organization form for providing fabulous cuisine. So we'd like to move on to thinking more about sort of the state and the economy and corporations and things like that. So first of all, we've got a question from Olena. Okay, so if someone could get a mic to Olena. Yep. Okay, your work has documented many of the ways that states undermine peasant farming, land tenure rights and even agricultural ecologies, but in some historical instances, the state has played a key role in securing endangered ecosystems, shoring up land rights and subsidizing farming. Can you comment on the scope for the state to play a beneficial role in such instances? I'm sorry, I'm trying to locate, here we go, okay, I'm sorry. So if you would, while you have the microphone, tell me more about these places that are protecting farmers and ecosystems. I can, actually, so I think you use an example in one of your books here on the, sort of the double cropping of rice and how the state actually took control of the water supply and that's how it came with double cropping. And initially that did raise the level of everyone's sort of well-being, but as you argued over time, actually the inequalities increased and actually I think the, particularly for the peasants, they actually suffered. But in the initial instance, it was, it did help. And I was just wondering if there, yeah, if there's any other instances like that. Right, so that's true, everyone looked on the double cropping as the first time when even poor families could eat rice all year long, which was important sort of civilizational marker for them. So that was a moment in which, if you like, land tenure remained constant and the supply of water all year round increased and it was a boom for everyone. But very quickly, those effects began to filter back and change the land tenure system, in which large owners who had previously had to rent to tenants because they couldn't farm large areas, could use the big machines and then could farm and kick off a lot of their tenants. So I, my impression is that it is, that it's only in quasi-revolutionary situations where the state steps in and guarantees smallholder property. The most striking example of that is probably the Mexican revolution, right? In which Mexican peasants got back their milpa lands that had been taken away by plantations and so on. And for a long time, up until the kind of new basic law 10 years ago enforced in part by the World Bank, a lot of Mexican peasants had at least sort of foot in the land able to grow some of the major subsistence crops that they needed. But I think that's actually fairly exceptionally rare. And when it does happen, it happens because there's a kind of popular movement of land rights that is powerful enough to either create a government that is dedicated to that and to enforce it. The, as you know, there's lots, the world is filled with failed land reforms. So usually there's what's called a land retention limit, you know? I remember someone explaining this to me in the Philippines that they were traveling with a land reform team. And the news came over the radio, they were setting the limit of how much land you could keep before it would be seized and distributed to tenants. And it turned out that the, I think I have this right, this was under Marcos a long time back, that the land, the retention limit was declared to be 20 hectares, which is a lot of rice land. And the land reform team broke into spontaneous applause because they all owned between 10 and 20 hectares of land themselves. And they were happy that none of this land was going to be taken away from them. So when you have a retention limit, of course, it's possible for people to avoid it in hundreds of ways by distributing land to their cousins, their children, their nephews, their nieces, and to make sure that no one rises above this retention limit. And so most government land reforms are effectively a dead letter and those that are not are because of massive popular pressure or an actual revolution. The, I, oh, the other thing I wanted to mention is, I think, especially in kind of the neoliberal moment that we're living in, the economists of the IMF and the World Bank believe that the only way you have economic progress is for land to seek its highest return. And that is to create a market, a national market in land in which anybody can buy land anywhere. And that means making sure that people who have unclear title or given clear title, this is Hernando de Soto's particular hobby horse. And the idea is that what they're trying to do in Mexico is to title all these tiny little pieces of land and Hernando de Soto believes they can use it as a collateral to get a loan to start a small business of one kind or another. In fact, it allows for the concentration of land in the hands of wealthy entrepreneurs who may actually be able to get more profit out of this land than a smallholder but probably at the price of the insecurity of smallholders who previously had some subsistence goods that they were in direct control of. And so it seems to me that the largest development project in the world, you could say, is the World Bank Land Titling Project. And it's a formula, I'm sure you can send 40, in America I'd say 49.99 and a serial box top to the World Bank and they will send you back a land titling kit because they are titling land all over the world with the objective of making it possible to market land in a secure contractual way that's guaranteed by law as they're trying to make land a commodity. And while I'm mentioning that, I think it's interesting that it's now possible for countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, and so on to actually lease for 99 years huge tracts of land in the third world. And so it turns out that land is not only a fungible commodity within a national market for property, but it's also an international market for land in which the one thing you thought would stay in the same place can effectively be sold to foreigners. So we've got a couple of questions now relating to corporations. I'm gonna pose one and then Tracy's gonna pose one. So Tracy, if someone could get a microphone to Tracy in the meantime. So in the introduction to seeing like a state, you suggest that global capitalism is just as much a force for uniformity and simplification of states, but with the added issue that money talks not people. So how do corporations see like states and how is seeing like a corporation different? And along these lines, it would be really interesting to have you apply the model if you wouldn't mind, perhaps to a corporation such as a supermarket chain. And then Tracy, if you could. My question is that given that few societies, if any, are now fully independent of the market forces, how should ethnographers today consider corporations as actors when they're doing their research? I'm trying to figure out your question, Tracy. Let me, maybe I'll figure it out by the time I answer the first. I think it is true that corporations, particularly large corporations, they are large bureaucratic institutions that have to work by a series of rules that are more or less followed. And the result of this is to create a kind of uniformity, but increasingly with kind of difference, if you like, at the very last consumer level. Let me explain what I mean, and I'll get to the supermarket kind of model as well. But let's imagine you're a part of the central administration of McDonald's. You think of yourself as producing a relatively uniform product in a way that is organized so that it is replicated again and again and again, a kind of McDonald's module, if you like. Now, it may be that the sauces at the end, and there are a couple of extra things that sort of, if you like, satisfy a local market that's not having this or that. And so it's not entirely uniform, but by and large where the French fryers are, where the things are in their frozen area, where the grills are for the burgers, where the cheese, all of this is organized at the center. And the reason why it's organized at the center is that it allows control so that someone can come with a clipboard from central casting and find out if this is sanitary, if this is in the... They know that the module has to sort of, in a sense, satisfy, it's easy to inspect. It has to satisfy a certain series of standards and it allows someone from the center to go out and evaluate it and tick the boxes and rate things. I mean, it's the same reason we have standard applications for higher education institutions and so on, and it's an effort to produce a kind of uniform set of standards that can be inspected centrally. So it also requires a standardization of the materials that are being bought. So if you go to a big supermarket chain, they are not interested in dealing with a large number of small sellers of agricultural commodities, let's say sweet potatoes or raspberries and so on. They want, they'd like to deal with a large supplier who can then guarantee them a uniform product a year round, right, of the same quality standards and shipped regularly and not having to rely on vagaries of rainfall or changes in conditions here or there. And so they have a preference, just like banks have a preference for large loans, supermarkets have a preference for suppliers who can supply green beans or cauliflower or oranges on a year-wide basis. It doesn't matter to them if they, in turn, may have to deal with a lot of small dealers, but they have to kind of guarantee a standardized, regular bulk volume supply or the model of the supermarket is no longer viable. So if I had a dream dissertation to do as a person interested in food, I would spend two years shadowing the buyer for one of these major, especially for perishable things like raspberries and strawberries and so on that can't travel very long, they're likely to spoil. I mean, I think you would, and the way in which, of course, which we all know the layout of a supermarket is minutely calculated at what's gonna be at eye level when you walk in, if you want the milk, the sort of staples, you have to walk through the whole store to get generally to the sort of staples that you want because you want your eyes to pass through, right? And people pay money to be at eye level as opposed to be at knee level, as opposed to be above eye level. All of this, it's amazing how deeply they are into our lizard brain, all right? Both in terms of the tastes that we crave and salt and sugar and fat and also in how they have figured out consumer behavior. So it's, and I think it would be wonderful to kind of understand how their mind works and do an ethnography, just like, you know, Karen Ho's wonderful book called Liquidated, she got into a Wall Street hedge fund and spent three years understanding the world from the World Wall Street Hedge Fund perspective. And it seems to me, I wish more ethnographers would, as they say, study up, right? And go into, because these people have their own tribal rituals just as exotic as anybody in Papua New Guinea and we just don't spend our time trying to understand it. I'm sorry, did I answer your question? I don't think I did. The question really arose out of, as I've read a number of ethnographies this term, a lot of people studying peasant agriculturists bemoan the presence of a market or cooperatives who extract value from the peasants, but there doesn't seem to be any robust methodology for dealing with the corporations on the other side of those transactions so that there's a corporate perspective on the transaction. It just seems to be a sort of here there be dragons area of ethnographic research. I suppose that would be remedied by the kind of ethnography that we've been talking about, by people who either undercover or with permission go and do ethnographies of corporations as they're dealing with, right? So I had, I would recommend is a hero student of mine, who's named Tim Pakirat. And he got the idea, which was not politically correct for a political scientist. He was interested in what it did to people to kill sentient beings every day all day for a living. And so what he did was, although he's originally of Thai-American background and was gonna work in Thailand, he learned Spanish and got himself a job in a slaughterhouse working for a year and a half, including on the kill floor of the slaughterhouse and ended up writing an ethnography of vision and in the slaughterhouse in a book that I promise you, you cannot put down, it is so gripping. And it was everybody said that this was a career-ending move as a dissertation. But he wanted to do it. And the book is a kind of an astounding account of the way in which the clean and dirty sections of a slaughterhouse are kept separate from another, workers treated differently and the way the line works. And it was only possible, I was afraid that they'd figure out who he was in a range in an industrial accident. But it was, you could only write this ethnography, I think by actually doing this work, right? And so, and if he asked permission, they never would have given it to him. So he just did it, right? So he avoided all of the, what is it, the protocols that for the people you're interviewing, et cetera, he just ignored it all and did it. And nothing much happened. And he did, and he spent three months hanging livers in a cold room with another Hispanic worker. I mean, three months just taking a liver that came in a chain and putting it in a box and passing it out. And so it was, he didn't think that there was a lot of ethnography coming out of the room where it was packing livers, but he gradually worked his way into other parts of the plant. But I wish more people would, in a sense, go into the belly of the beast, either of corporations or supermarkets or institutions that have some interest in, at the end of his book he suggests making slaughterhouses out of glass and allowing school children to see how their meat's prepared. But the idea that, and that's why I believed, I think it's not correct, but I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the world actually worked. And if you could show how the world actually worked, it would always be have a demasking and a subversive effect on the powerful. I don't think that's quite true, but it seems to me it's not bad as a point of departure anyway. Thinking now about the idea of the moral economy, can a moral economy work at scale or within a market capitalist system? And here I'm thinking academics are starting to sort of read initiatives like fair trade as forms of moral economy. So I wonder if this seems like a valid conceptual tool to you. I think many of you probably know more about this than I do. That is to say, I haven't studied fair trade, but it is an effort to, you're completely correct. It's an effort to impose a kind of sense of fairness and moral economy on transactions. And the same could be true for, if you like, goods that are environmentally produced, right? In a way that's sustainable. And how you do this at scale is I think enormously difficult. I had a friend, and so that is, I don't know much about this and I'd be happy to be enlightened by those of you who know more, but all of these efforts of fair trade and certified ecologically, organically produced, they require a certification regime. And there are lots and lots of institutions, including the Rainforest Alliance and World Wildlife Fund, I think as well, that now make a tremendous amount of their money by providing certifications for the production of ecologically produced bananas, palm oil, et cetera, et cetera. And a person I knew who worked for the Rainforest Alliance said what was interesting to him and quit is that the Rainforest Alliance had never sanctioned anybody whom they were certifying. That is to say, they would say, oh, no, you mustn't do this pesticides again. It'll slap you in the wrist. And we're going to check in another month. And so, I mean, they did in a sense, look over these people's shoulder and scold them, but they were so terrified of losing this important source of income by certification that they ended up essentially, this is called in America a regulatory capture, that the people who are regulating an industry come to see things from the point of view. That's the people they spend time with. They understand their problems on the ground and they end up often getting captured by the people that they're supposed to regulate. So I think that the problem of a moral economy lies in creating the kind of institutional instruments that are kind of reliable and don't get captured, right? And most of them probably do get captured and maybe that's the time to throw them out and start again, I don't know. Great, and so now just to think a little bit about sort of the relationship between the state and the citizenry. You discussed the possibility that citizens within Western liberal democracies may suffer from a form of institutional neurosis, sapping their energy for civic dialogue with the state. If this is the case, you suggest that an urgent task of public policy is to foster institutions that expand the independence autonomy and capacity of the citizenry. So this is something you talk about in two chairs for anarchism. What would picking up on something you discuss in seeing like a state, what would a Metis-friendly institution look like and how might we distinguish between a responsible citizenry and a more autonomous citizenry? Hmm. Well, I do have a lot of people who have picked up on that. I'm always accused of being a critic and never having anything constructive to say. And I actually don't think it's my job to have anything constructive to say. I'm probably happy being a critic. But I did in seeing like a state, I did have like little four little rules of thumb, right? About how Metis-friendly institutions, right? A lot of people have picked up on that as the only time Scott actually stepped out of character and tried to make a constructive suggestion about anything. But I do believe, and this was inherent and for those of you who were there last night, I am struck by the way in which agriculture compared to hunting and gathering is a diminished and narrowing world linked to the production of usually one single and very important staple as opposed to the kind of rich, natural world, and you could even say spiritual world if you wanted, of hundreds of gatherers and then kinds of ways in which they have to understand the way in which the world works in a larger way. So there's a moment that I think people don't, I came across it only a couple of years ago. So Adam Smith's example of the division of labor is a pin factory, right? Making pins along the assembly line. And de Tocqueville reads Adam Smith's work and de Tocqueville's comment is actually my comment, I thought it was brilliant. He says, yes, it may be a very efficient way of producing pins, but what can one expect from a man who spent the last 20 years putting heads on pins, right? So there is a kind of, if you like, in the division of labor, there is a kind of purposeful deliberate stupidification if I can invent a word of that the division of labor depends on, on a series of kind of repetitive, it's also creating factory hands who are substitutable for one another, who are only asked to do a kind of simple operation repetitively and to in a sense, replace artisanal production with production that is assembly line. And if, as I try to explain a bit in two cheers for anarchism, an anarchist would ask not if this factory process is the best process for producing a car engine or a styrofoam cup or a pin, an anarchist would ask, what kind of people does this productive process produce at the end of five years, 10 years? Because it's not just producing pins, it's not just producing cups, it's producing people. And these are people either with greater capacities, more intelligence, more freedom and innovation and more capacity to contribute to the enterprise or it's producing people who are, whose world has been narrowed and diminished and from whom, as Tocqueville said, not much can be expected, right? Not their fault, and so to not ask what kind, to not ask what is the most important product of any industrial process which is the people that it produces over time is to leave out the most relevant question and it's a question that a neoclassic economist would never ask and it's a question that would be the first question that an anarchist who was interested in autonomy and freedom would always ask. Jim, I wanna come back to the state now. A lot of your work has been critical of the state, come back to the theme of criticism. No. You associate developing technologies of rule historically with ever more exploitative forms of hierarchy and of course revolutionary states come in for focused critique in your work as you distinguish between struggles over and through the apparatus of the state. And you point out that these struggles have generally been disastrous for peasants and the working poor. But in a globalized world where decisive forms, and here I'm thinking about things like vertically integrated food supply chains, operate at ever greater distances and seem ever less controllable to ordinary people, is there not some role for the state? Is resistance possible without engaging the state, without using the state in one way or another? This actually goes to a bone that Henry and I have been chewing on for a long time. And the, let me say yes, but then qualify it so heavily that it might seem like a no. That is to say it's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of these supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state, right? Unless it is a kind of authoritative state structure. Now, so yes. Now qualifications that will leave little of the yes standing. The, first of all, most states aren't even remotely democracies. And most of the people who run these states by and large do the bidding of their corporate masters and take bribes and are servants of international capitalism, right? So we take those people that off the table and we can't rely on those states, can we, right? And then you take contemporary Western democracies that let me use my own country which I know best as an example. Yes, you have an electoral system. Yes, we elected the first black man president. Yes, there are some changes. On the other hand, the concentration of wealth has grown steeper and steeper and steeper. It allows lobbyists and people who provide campaign finance to basically control a campaign in its message. These people tend at the sort of high echelons of the corporate world to control most of the media and the kind of messaging that is, right? And these people also are able to sit on the congressional committees, in fact, and write the loopholes in the legislation. Even when there's reform, they're able to so influence the wording of the legislation that the loopholes are built in. They don't have to be found, they are actually legislated. And so you get then, I think, a state that in a neoliberal world is less and less able to be an honest mediator, a representative of popular aspirations to discipline corporations, to, you know, I don't want to leave a little bit of the yes standing because as the result of the financial crisis, there were slightly more stringent rules on bank capitalization, on regulation, on some consumer protection. But I think by and large, there is not much in the way. Now Scandinavian social democracy is a better picture. But North Atlantic, Anglo-American, neoliberalism is not providing a kind of state that I think can provide this kind of discipline and regulation. I'm pessimistic. In which case, it would be interesting to see what you say to the next one. It's about this communication between the citizenry and the state. So obviously, in the process of rendering things legible to the state, this involves simplification as you've discussed. And one thing that you mentioned in two cheers for anarchism is that a characteristic of great power is not having to listen. So how can civil society or perhaps anthropologists advocating over issues that concern sort of specific groups package complex knowledge and local knowledge in a way that estates more capable of listening. So how can we make the state read citizens as they read themselves? Yes, so metaphorically, one has to beat the state over the head with a two by four, as we would say in America. So there's a book that I've actually read a pricey of, but not taken the radical step of reading the book itself. And it's called, I think it's called Doubt Is Our Most Important Product. And it's a history of industry-sponsored research on pesticides, smoking, and all these sort of public health hazards. And the effort to create doubt as about climate as well, about is climate warming happening? Well, some people doubt it. So the idea is that you don't have to convince people that you're right. You have to convince them only that they doubt the kind of crisis of let's say pesticide use or climate change is there and going to change their life tomorrow. So in a sense, there is a, at the level of the contest for knowledge, industry is able to produce countervailing shadow of doubt casting research for every set of facts that you want to present for government action. So I don't believe that a rational discussion between me and you as scientists and state is gone. So that's where in two chairs for anarchism, it seems to me that all of the structural changes that took place in the 20th century in the United States in any case took place because of fairly massive disruption outside the institutional channels of representation and elections, right? Those channels are so controlled, so clogged, so oligarchic that in the New Deal after the depression in the civil rights movement, in the welfare rights movement, even in the women's suffrage, which is a sort of more complicated case, you had to create pretty massive disruption out. So we have democratic institutions, the job of which is to create change through institutional electoral procedures and electoral democratic campaigns. The fact is in the 20th century, these institutional channels have never produced substantial change. Change has been produced by mass disruption of people who are, right, at their back against the wall, have no jobs or laying siege to welfare centers and the depression, invading public spaces in the civil rights movement and so on, in which the disorder that is created, there's a desperate effort to, in a sense, bring back a kind of public order and it involves a kind of panicked set of concessions, whether it's unemployment compensation, social security, and so on. So I think it's a terribly demoralizing prospect that change in democracies, by and large, has never taken place, except by extra institutional forms of disruption. These are, of course, very dangerous because they can lead to other forms of right-wing consolidation as well. So it's not as if I don't understand the dangers of this, but don't tell me that the institutions are working because they haven't been working. Jim, the next question follows on from that because in the moral economy of the peasant, you quote Tony, who writes of China, there are districts in which the position of the population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him. And then you go on and build on this and describe the peasants of whom you write in that book as being a risk averse, precisely because they have to avert catastrophe rather than press for more ideal arrangements. But I'm wondering if this can't also be said more and more of more and more people, especially within the context of the global financial crisis in which most everyone feels their abilities to reproduce life as they know it is becoming more and more precarious. I mean, we spend a lot of time looking around over the past decade in response to the responses to the financial crisis, let alone the financial crisis itself, wondering, well, where is the, why are we not in the streets? And, you know, and I just wonder if you can comment on that. Yes, by the way, I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember. It turns out that that quote, which I quoted Tony, Tony stole from somebody else. And I came across, it was at Hallevi, I could have wrote a history of Frantz or at Ali Hallevi. Anyway, how dare him, you know? When you quote somebody, you kind of think it's his own work. And then I came across the fact that he'd actually pilfered it without so much as a buy your leave from Hallevi. So, damn you anyway, Tony. Don't do this again. Now, where was I? Precariousness and if this now applies to a greater number of people, if this now explains a lack of vigorous response to? Yeah, so again, I betray this sort of political system that I spend most time lamenting, that is to say the American political system. I would make an argument that the financial crisis was a fantastic populist moment in which reforms of the kind of magnitude of the New Deal might have been passed. And that we missed that moment because, you'll see where I'm headed, give me, be patient with me, because we elected a black president. So Barack Obama, knowing that he lives in a racist society, knowing that people will not put up with an angry black man, had to be the most respectable, he had to be the most respectable white person who just happened to have black skin. And he had to reassure large patches of the white electorate that he was no threat, that he wasn't angry, that he wasn't gonna do anything daring. And I think he read this correctly that he would not have been elected president had he not represented himself in the way that he represented himself. And the result was that we lost an opportunity to take advantage of this great populist moment. If actually John Edwards had not been screwing around and ruined his candidacy, he was probably a more viable populist. And it's even conceivable that Hillary Clinton might have been for all I know. But in any case, it's one of those things in which the price of getting a black man elected president of the United States, which is a important historical gain, was I think bought at the cost of letting go a populist moment by making sure that a black presidential candidate seemed as if he was never gonna rock the boat. Whereas a white populist candidate like Edwards could have been legitimately angry and no one would have raised racist hackles about his anger. So I think that hopefully now that we've done that, been there, done that, if there's another financial crisis, we can make the populist moment come back again. That's a completely personal interpretation on my part, by the way. I don't know whether any commentators share it, but it's astounding given what happened and so many people with their backs to the wall, all of their savings wiped out, their pensions gutted and so on. This was a moment for populist outrage in a whole series of financial reforms and it didn't happen at all. And so you have to, it's like why the dog didn't bark, why did this not happen? We have one more question and it takes us even closer to home for you, back to New Haven or to Durham actually. Claire, where are you? There we go, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I was reading about your farm in New Haven and this really struck a chord of me, giving your comments on escape agriculture and also on the sense of autonomy provided by land ownership in teachers for anarchism. So my question is, to what extent do you see your farm and other smaller hobby farms, if you will, as effective forms of resistance in the West? I don't think there are resistance at all. You know, as you say, it's a hobby farm and I now, instead of sheep, have two Scottish Highland cows who've been there for seven or eight years and are like decorative lawn ornaments more or less than I have chickens and bees and I do this for my peace of mind and I don't think I'm, now, what I have done, I wouldn't dignify it with the name of resistance, is that I've come to love this land so well, it's about 46 acres, that I arranged to have it put in a conservation, what we call a conservation easement, which means that it can never be built on and always has to be open land or agricultural land and that sort of reduced its value to my children, oh well, too bad for them, but it means that the land itself will never be, there will not be a Walmart or a Sainsbury or and so I've done what little I can to make sure that I've done right by the land. Great, well thanks, Jim, we've come to the end of our time, we could sit here for hours and enjoy the conversation with you, just let me mention, you talked about the great transformation as this book that was really, how did you describe it, as a landmark but a reference point for you, Weapons of the Week was really that for me, so I think a lot of people have engaged with various works of gyms and found them really sort of inspirational and so we really appreciate the opportunity to be able to sit here and to talk through with you various works and your perspectives on them, it's been a real privilege, so thanks for sharing that all with me. Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Yeah.