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Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

James C. Scott
James C. Scott
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

This study presents an analysis of Malay peasant resistance to the Islamic zakat today and of French peasant resistance earlier to the Christian tithe, but it is offered with a larger argument in mind. Its purpose is to show that a vast range of what counts—or should count—as peasant resistance involves no overt protest and requires little or no organization.

Type
How Peasants Rebel
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , July 1987 , pp. 417 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1987

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References

1 For an excellent account and appraisal of the intellectual shift, see Aya, Rod, “Popular Intervention in Revolutionary Situations,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in Histoij and Theory, Bright, Charles and Harding, Susan, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 318–343Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 332–33. The quoted fragment at the end of this passage is from Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 338. Aya means to include informal organization such as “the habitual association of interested friends” within this definition.

3 Tilly, Charles, “Social Movements and National Politics,” pp. 297–317 in Statemaking and Social Movements, Bright, and Harding, , eds., 298Google Scholar. Tilly goes on to describe the Camisards as far more closely approximating his definition of a social movement.

4 For a more elaborate defense of this definition and an analysis of the issues involved, see Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ch. 7Google Scholar.

5 Bloch, Marc, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, Sondheirner, Janet, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 170Google Scholar. Note Bloch's implicit characterization of the “patient, silent struggles” as in some sense more “organized” than the great insurrections.

6 See, for example, Adas, Michael, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:2 (04 1981), 217–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bennett, H.S., Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), ch. 11Google Scholar; Blum, Jerome, Lord and Peasant in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), ch. 14Google Scholar, Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1972)Google Scholar; Hay, Douglas et al. , Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon 1975)Google Scholar, esp. chs. 3,4,5,6; Brewer, John and Styles, John, An Ungovernable People (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Hyden, Goran, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania (London: Heineman 1980)Google Scholar; Simon, Henri, Poland: 1980–82 (Detroit: Black and Red Books, 1985), esp. ch. 4Google Scholar; Daniel Kelliher, “Peasant and State in China, ” manuscript; Isaacman, Allen, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Pantheon, 1985), esp. chs. 6,7Google Scholar; and Haraszti, Miklos, Worker in a Worker's State (New York: Penguin, 1978)Google Scholar.

7 It is this criterion, incidentally, which led Hobsbawm to place groups such as the Sicilian Fasci and the Lazzarettists “ahead” of social banditry because of their utopian/revolutionary goals. Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels (New York: Norton, 1959), pp. 157–58Google Scholar.

8 Tilly, “Social Movements,” 304.

9 Where agrarian class relations embody strong elements of customary law, it is more common to find petitioning and even protest designed to defend customary practices against encroachment. Here the peasantry is defending a quasi-legal privilege.

10 Hobsbawm, Eric, “Peasants and Politics,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 1:1 (1973), 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 In this connection, see Linebaugh, Peter, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working- Class Composition: A Contribution to the Current Debate,” Crime and Social Justice, 6 (Fall-Winter 1976), 5–15Google Scholar; and Hay, Douglas, “Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase,” in Albion's Fatal Tree, Hay, et al. , eds., 189–254Google Scholar.

12 That research, focused on class relations within the village, is reported in Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

13 Islamiah, Badan Dakwah, Kedah, Pejabat Zakat Negeri, Panduan Zakat (Alor Setar: Majlis Ugama Negeri Kedah, [ca. 1970?]), 6Google Scholar.

14 However, when the sum of two harvests under double cropping was above the nisab, the zakat was to be collected.

15 Even by an entirely official accounting, the collection costs of the zakat as a proportion of total proceeds are quite high. In 1970, for example, the Zakat Office reported a figure for payments to amil and the central office administration that was equivalent to 22 percent. Doehring, Otto Charles, III “Malaysian Rice Policy and the Muda River Irrigation Project” (Ph.D. diss. Cornell University, 1973), 302–6Google Scholar. The unofficial costs of collection—the rice and cash that disappears along the way—is also an issue, to be discussed later.

16 The 1968 data come from a study of the same village by a Japanese scholar, reported in Horii, Kenzo, “The Land Tenure System of Malay Padi Farmers,” Journal of Developing Economies, 10:1 (03 1972), 45–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 The zakat, like the tithe, is assessed against the cultivator of the land, not the owner. Thus the households not liable to the zakat in Sedaka fall into one of the three categories: (1) landlords who do not cultivate, almost all of whom are retired farmers, (2) landless laborers, or (3) those cultivating one relong (0.71 acres) or less, who thereby fall below the nisab. There were fifteen such households in 1977–78 and twelve in 1979.

18 Three additional factors may be at work here. Since 1976, input costs had increased markedly while the price for paddy was stagnant, squeezing profits. In addition, the beginning of combine harvesting in 1976 had cut into wage earnings of smallholders reducing their income further. Finally, the irrigated season of 1978 was cancelled because of a water shortage, and farmers were therefore more reluctant in 1979 to surrender much of their harvest to the amil.

19 The amil's census of declared acreage is not available for 1979, but given the aggregate figures it is unlikely that the situation differed materially from the 1977–78 season in this respect.

20 This burden is not mitigated by the property tax paid by the owner-operator, which in Malaysia is negligable.

21 There are also good prima facie reasons to consider the role of partisan politics in resistance to the zakat. The amil is, in fact, the local strongman of the ruling Malay party (the United Malay Nationalist Organization), and the state government of Kedah, including the Zakat Office, is dominated by the same party. Members of the opposition party (Partai Islam Se-Malaysia) might well resent handing over the zakat to their factional enemies. A slight difference in compliance does in fact exist, but it is not of any significant magnitude. The difference would have been, in all likelihood, larger except for one capital fact. Villagers allied with the opposition are more fearful that they may be prosecuted for their failure to pay, while the political allies of the amil enjoy virtual immunity. Only two villagers have been charged with nonpayment before the sariah courts in the past two decades; both were members of the opposition.

22 The opposition party, Partai Islam Se-Malaysia aspires to take over the state religious bureaucracy and the Zakat Office, not to decentralize or abolish it.

23 Field notes, 9 April 1979. All quotations of villagers are drawn from my field notes unless otherwise indicated.

24 The zakat, like the tithe, is applied almost entirely to the major food grains and livestock, and not to inedible cash crops. Both levies reflect their origin in the paramount concern with food supply and its distribution, the basis of public order in traditional society.

25 The imam happens also to be a stalwart of the ruling party, while Haji Kadir is with the opposition. He chooses, however, to make his case on grounds that virtually all villagers would accept.

26 The very notion of alms or charity is bound up with the concept of a discretionary gift. Once it is collected by law it loses its status as charity in the normal sense and becomes a tax—even if it is used for charitable purposes.

27 Doehring, “Malaysian Rice Policy,” 1976.

28 For scattered evidence on resistance to the zakat, see especially Fujimoto, Akimi, “Land Tenure, Rice Production, and Income Sharing among Malay Peasants: A Study of Four Villages” (Ph.D. thesis, Flinders University, 1980), 178–188Google Scholar, which includes data on Province Wellesley and Kelantan. Also see Yamashita, M., Jegatheesan, S., and Wong, C. Y., Agro-Economic Studies in the Muda Project Area (Alor Setar: Muda Agricultural Development Authority, 1976), pt. 1Google Scholar; and Clive, Kessler, Islam and Politics in a Malay State: Kelantan 1838–1969 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

29 A good share of this zakat peribadi was, in the past, provided to harvest laborers. It was treated by the larger fanners as a discretionary religious gift that, not incidentally, helped guarantee a reliable labor force during the peak labor demand at harvest time. For the beneficiaries, it came to be regarded as a customary right. After 1976, when combine harvesters became available in place of hand labor, these gifts to harvest workers declined steadily. This loss of income by the poor has been accompanied, ironically, by a comparable growth in thefts of paddy from the larger farmers. Poor villagers humorously call these thefts “private zakat that one takes for oneself.” Here again, it appears, we have an example of successful resistance. In this instance, however, it is class-based resistance within the village rather than resistance to state taxation. The form is nevertheless structurally similar. There is no open protest, no public outcry, but rather the quiet appropriation by the bolder of the poor of the zakat peribadi that they feel is legitimately due them.

30 Mid-sized farmers are here defined as those cultivating between 2.8 acres (4 relong) and 5.6 acres (8 relong).

31 Badan Dakwah Islamiah, Panduan Zakat, 10.

32 If the suspicions of many villagers are correct and Basir does actually manage to skim off something for himself beyond his commission, then another possibility emerges. A tacit accord may perhaps be discerned in which Basir's small manipulations are not denounced by villagers so long as he, in turn, permits them to practice their usual evasions.

33 Government revenues in Malaysia are largely drawn from export and import taxes, corporate income taxes, and various excise levies. Unlike the case in the classic agrarian kingdoms of Asia, extraction from the food-producing sector has never been very significant.

34 The Reformation in northern Europe and England, for example, marked a sharp break in the tithe struggle. In England, at least one third of all tithes had been distributed to laymen by 1600, and many more were abolished by substituting land grants in the process of enclosure. See Evans, Eric J., The Contentious Tithe: The Tithe Problem and English Agriculture, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), ch. 1Google Scholar; and Lansdell, Henrx, The Sacred Tenth or Studies in Tithe-Giving, Ancient and Modern (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1906), 283–89Google Scholar.

35 The small tithes (menues dîimes) on such crops as linseed, hemp, potatoes, buckwehat, and on cattle, milk, and wool were a major source of contention, which we must largely ignore here.

36 Henri Marion, in his standard early history of the tithe, cites surveys at about the time of the Revolution which claim that two thirds of religious income came from the tithe collection. La dîme ecclésiastique en France au XVIIIe siècle et sa suppression (Bordeaux: Imprimerie de l’université, 1912), 90–98Google Scholar.

37 Quoted in Ardant, Gabriel, Histoire de l’impôt (Paris: Fayard, 1971), I, 389Google Scholar.

38 Marion, La dîme ecclésiastique, 121–22.

39 Ibid., 161–62.

40 Lorcin, Marie-Thérèse, “Une musée imaginaire de la ruse paysanne: La fraud des décimables du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle dans la région lyonnaise,” Études rurales, no. 51 (07-09 1973), 123Google Scholar. See also Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, The Peasants of Languedoc, Day, John, trans. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 185Google Scholar.

41 Rives, Jean, Dîmes et société dans l’Archivêché d’Auch au XVI1Ie siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1976), 119Google Scholar.

42 See, for example, Marion, La dîme ecclésiastique, 72–80; and Nicolas, Jean, “La dîme: Contrats d’affermage et autres documents décimaux,” in La pratique des documents anciens, Devos, Roger et al. , eds. (Annecy: Archives départmentales de la Haute-Savoie, 1978), 191Google Scholar. Georges Frêche provides an account of a monastic chapter in the Toulouse region that received 77,887 livres in income and alloted only 839 livres—or 1 percent—for alms. Toulouse et la région midi-pyrénées au siècles des lumières (vers 1670–1789) (Paris: Editions Cujas, 1974), 527Google Scholar.

43 Marion, La dîme ecclésiastique, 194–202; and Rives, Dîmes et société, 169.

44 Jean Nicolas, “La dîme,” 178, supplies some typical examples from Haute-Savoie. In 1615, the residents of one commune refused to pay the wine tithe and threatened to throw the collector into the Rhône. In 1682, another village, led by its curé, stoned the monks and their tithe agent when they came to collect the grain. In 1736, peasants wearing disguises sacked the granary of the tithe collector, and no witnesses could be found to testify against them.

45 Le Roy Ladurie, Peasants of Languedoc, 184. As in most contemporary third world countries, the state is relatively stronger vis-à-vis civil society than it was in seventeenth-century France. The rare occasions on which the Malay peasantry has demonstrated publicly have been followed by very effective repression and police work, leading cultivators to draw the obvious conclusions about open protest.

46 Ibid., 186.

47 Frêche, Toulouse, 543.

48 Nicolas, Jean, La Savoie au 18e siècle: Noblesse et bourgeoisie, (Paris: Maloine, 1978), II, 681Google Scholar.

49 Lorcin, “Une musée imaginaire,” 117.

50 Ibid., 124.

51 Frêche, Toulouse, 540.

52 Lorcin, “Une musée imaginaire,” 120–21.

53 Cited in Ardent, , Histoire de l’impôt, I, 384Google Scholar.

54 Nicolas, “La dîme,” 185–86.

55 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy and Gay, Joseph, Tithe and Agrarian History from the 14th Century to the 19th Century: An Essay in Comparative History, Burke, Susan, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 27Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., 66.

57 Nicolas, “La dîme,” 185.

58 Frêche, Toulouse, 540–43.

59 Such new lands were called novales and were often the tithe preserve of the local bas clergy for a stated period (say, ten or twenty years) before becoming the property of the major tithe owners. The local clergy were thus especially assiduous in sniffing out new fields. Rives, Dîmes et société, 29–33.

60 See, for example, Lorcin, “Une musée imaginaire,” 113; and Rives, Dîmes et société, 39–42.

61 Frêche, Toulouse, 540.

62 Lorcin, “Une musée imaginaire,” 114.

63 Ibid., 116. The tax-exempt status of the base was itself the fruit of resistance inasmuch as it had earlier been titheable.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid., 119.

66 See Viard, Paul, Histoire de la dîme ecclésiastique dans la royaume de France (Paris: Librarie Alphonse Picard, 1912), 39Google Scholar.

67 Ibid.; Lorcin, “Une musée imaginaire,” 119.

68 Robinson, Armstead, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: Slavery's Demise and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (Yale University Press, forthcoming), manuscript chs. 5–8Google Scholar.

69 Ibid., manuscript ch. 8, p. 2.

70 How is it possible, for example, to explain the collapse of the Czarist army and the subsequent victory of the Bolsheviks without giving due weight to the massive desertions from the front in the summer of 1917 and the accompanying—unorganized—land seizures in the countryside? Few if any rank-and-file participants intended a revolution, but that is precisely what they precipitated. R. C. Cobb's account of draft resistance and desertion both in postrevolutionary France and under the early empire are, in the same vein, compelling evidence for the role of everyday resistance in bringing down regimes. Ferro, Marc, “The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic, and Revolutionary,” Slavic Review, 30:3 (09 1971), 483–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cobb, R. C., The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 96–97Google Scholar.

71 For Tanzania, see Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania; for China, see Kelliher, Daniel, “Peasant-State Relations in China during Rural Reforms, 1978–1984,” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985), ch. 3Google Scholar; and for Vietnam, White, Christine Pelzer, “The Role of Collective Agriculture in Rural Development: The Vietnamese Case,” Research Report 3592, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1984, mimeographGoogle Scholar.

72 This does not mean that everything a peasant household might do to survive counts as resistance. When survival comes at the expense of members of the same class, appropriation by superordinate classes is aided, not resisted.

73 One might, in principle, elaborate an account of the tax resistance described here entirely in terms of what is known as rational-choice theory. Such an account would begin with the desire of peasants to maximize their after-tax income and would then examine the information and coercion costs required of the state or religious authorities to ensure compliance. The pattern of evasion would then be seen to be a tacitly negotiated outcome of a struggle between opposed rational actors, each maximizing its gains and minimizing its costs. The problem with such a gloss on the tax evasion we have examined is not so much that it is mistaken per se; it is rather that, by its radically simple (simple-minded?) model of human behavior, it misses most of the social facts that would interest anyone but a game theorist. Its implicit assumption that the cause of an action is nothing more than the results it brings about abandons the effort to uncover any more complex reasons why this particular tax is resisted. It is clear, for example, that both Malaysian and French peasants could and did give rather elaborate reasons for their dislike of the tithe. These reasons amount to a collective vision of what would have been a fair, equitable, and tolerable tithe system. By, in effect, treating such notions of justice as post facto rationales beneath its consideration, rational-choice theory denies such visions any role in constituting such behavior. For any view of human action in which the stated intentions and values of the actors themselves are deemed relevant for adequate interpretation, this will not do. We may note here that the Malay peasants, at least, do in fact voluntarily give up a portion of their income, which they distribute as a private tithe within the village. They would hardly do so if they were the mere income maximizers posited by rational-choice theory. Resistance to the official zakat or the Catholic tithe is not simply a matter of narrow self-interest; it is also a matter of popular views of custom, justice, and religious duty.

In its interpretation of the options facing tithe collectors, rational-choice theory must begin with the costs of enforcement. Here again it posits what an historian would want to have explained. The costs of enforcement are above all an artifact of the level and techniques of resistance devised by local communities and arising out of their normative solidarity in opposition to the tithe. How that resistance originates, how it is maintained, are the social facts that determine the very parameters within which the tithe collectors may “rationally” act.

74 See, in this context, the fine article by Reddy, William M., “The Textile Trade and the Language of the Crowd of Rouen, 1752–1871,” Past and Present, no. 74 (02 1977), 62–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reddy argues that it was precisely the lack of organization in crowd behavior that was enabling and that the crowd came to value and use spontaneity in the knowledge that it was the most effective and least costly means of protest. The cultural understandings were so well developed that any just grievance could, he writes, bring together a crowd without any planning or organization, let alone formal leadership.

75 And not just the peasantry. In his interpretation of nineteenth-century working-class history in England, Francis Heam finds, in just such informal structures of ritual and community, the heart and soul of direct action by the working class. The erosion of these structures by midcentury was the key, he believes, to the domestication of the proletariat. Domination, Legitimation, and Resistance: The Incorporation of the 19th Century English Working Class, Contributions in Labor History No. 3 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

76 Compare, for example, the popular folktales of trickster figures—Till Eulenspiegel in northern Europe, Sang Kancil the mousedeer in Malaysia, Brer Rabbit in the ante-bellum American South—in which the weak but cunning hero outwits his powerful opponents. As a South Carolina slave saying captured it, “de bukrah [white] hab scheme, en de nigger hab trick, en ebery time the bukrah scheme once, the nigger trick twice” (Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 81Google Scholar).

77 See Barrington Moore's analysis of German workers after World War I and Russian workers in 1917 for detailed evidence. Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), ch. 6–11Google Scholar.