Reading James C. Scott

While reading James Scott, I did not hesitate to appreciate human being's disposition regarding to his/her resistance against hegemony and oppression. Scott clearly brings the idea of silent protest persistent in everyday social life. The idea of 'hidden transcript' is what something that helped me envisage the forms of everyday resistance around me. Scott's ethnography on Malaysian peasantry is really very vivid in the sense he has minutely observed and portrayed the hidden form of resistance in this 'pre-industrial' society.
People "pilfer", make "false compliance", "gossip", spread "rumors" as means of resisting the existing authority which demands compliance in every bit of transcript they resort to. Strange! the hidden transcript works pretty effectively in that situation when the ruling classes are using violence to keep status quo intact.
Contrarily, theory of unconsciousness and Gramsci's theory of hegemony place human agent in that socio-cultural location where s/he is just a consumer of the ruling class ideology. As an individual, a person is unable to resist any kind of oppression ; revolution is possible only through mass and that mass should be galvanized by the 'organic intellectual'. For Scott, an individual agent can defy the oppression on his own through the hidden transcript. He does not even need collective effort on doing so.
In my analysis, Scott  puts human agency in the core of his theory of 'infra politics'.
Based on:
James Scott's Weapons of the weak:Everyday forms of peasant resistance