James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia has been immensely fruitful, leading to books such as The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (1976); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985); and Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups (1990).
In the larger realm of political science, Scott’s Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) explores the limits of government power created by local knowledge and knowledge problems worldwide. His latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009) combines these interests to depict technologies of resistance to state power in Southeast Asia.
Scott holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (1967) and has received numerous grants from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.