| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt, editors. Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge. (Yale Agrarian Studies Series; Yale ISPS Series.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 310. Cloth $35.00, paper $14.00.
James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt's selection of papers from the proceedings of the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies since its 1991 inauguration presents a fascinating miscellany of reflections on the study of rural society and its problems. The chosen authors range across South Asia and Europe between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, joining theoretical discussion to finely judged empirical illustrations in the best of crossdisciplinary ways. Of course, Scott is one of the few genuinely pandisciplinary voices in this area. Originally a political scientist working on Malaysian elites, he has authored an enviable succession of field-defining books during the past quarter-century, beginning with The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1976), continuing through the closely related Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and culminating most recently in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), not to speak of his wider influence exercised through conferences, edited volumes, and repeatedly cited essays.	1
Scott first entered this area in the heyday of "peasant studies" signaled by the launching of the Journal of Peasant Studies in Britain (1973) and the Peasant Studies Newsletter in the United States (1972), and it is instructive to measure the current volume against that earlier moment of interdisciplinary innovation. Most obviously, peasant studies belonged firmly to a materialist context of critical social science, driven by angry dissatisfaction with modernization theory and development economics, by affinities with Marxist political economy, by political sympathy for peasant-based guerrilla insurgencies in the Third World, and with a strong accent on twentieth-century Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia rather than Europe. Such work was inspired by a variety of approaches subsequently shedding much of their prestige, including world systems theory, historical sociologies of backwardness, anthropological work centered on political economy (citing Eric R. Wolf rather than Clifford C. Geertz), sociologies of rural protest emphasizing land occupations and food riots, and studies of landholding systems, rural markets, and household economics.	2
The intervening trajectories of scholarship on agrarian societies, while immensely ramified and diverse, reflect the general transition during the later 1980s and early 1990s from materialist epistemologies to "culturalist" ones stressing the contingencies and constructedness of subjectivity, meaning, and perception. One of the most fascinating such trajectories, with continuing impact on studies of the peasantry in various parts of the world, has been that of the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective, which in its eleven volumes and wider repertoire of publication since 1982 reflects the movement from social history into forms of cultural studies in an especially challenging way. The third of the four sections in the volume under review, presenting South Asian samples of "Agrarian and Environmental Histories" by Paul Greenough, David Arnold, and David Ludden, connects directly with that body of work, although Ludden's essay is less a case study than a sometimes oversimplifying general critique. With their reconstructions of the complex ecologies of colonial India, Greenough and Arnold show the importance of continuing to integrate the social into the ascendant forms of cultural analysis, while Ludden addresses the same argument to Subaltern Studies in general.	. . .

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