| 1 | Name: | Dr. James C. Scott | |
| Institution: | Yale University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2020 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 304. Jurisprudence and Political Science | ||
| Residency: | resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
James C. Scott is currently Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Forest & Environmental Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from that same institution in 1967. Between earning his Ph.D. and beginning to teach at Yale, he was Professor of Political Science from 1967-1976 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. James C. Scott began as an on-site-searcher in Southeast Asia, then expanded into works of general importance for political science, anthropology, and history. These works have reached wide audiences. How do ordinary people use "weapons of the weak" against political and economic elites? What is the nature of the "moral economy" that peasants abide by? How do central "seeing eye" states "read" their populations, and so what? In the U.S., a notable instance of that "reading" is the federal government's division of the continent into cadastral land plots in the 1780s courtesy of Thomas Jefferson. Scott has a warm view of anarchism, as seen in his recent Against the Grain. Why have powerful ancient city states like those in Central America risen and, perhaps for good reason, fallen? Scott has won a number of prizes, among them the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2010, the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award of the American Political Science Association in 2015, and the Prize of the Foundation Mattei Dogan of the International Political Science Association in 2018. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1978-79. His works include: The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, 1977; Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, 1987; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 1990; Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1999; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2010; Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ( 1992) and the Association for Asian Studies (president, 1997). James C. Scott was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |||