Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> THE IDEA BEHIND THIS BOOK developed as a result of my persistent and rather slow-witted efforts to make sense of class relations in a Malay village. I was hearing divergent accounts of land transactions wage rates social reputa- tions and technological change. By itself this was not so surprising inasmuch as different villagers had conflicting interests. More troubling was the fact that the same villagers were occasionally contradicting themselves! It was some time before it dawned on me that the contradictions arose especially but not uniquely among the poorer and most economically dependent villagers. The dependency was as important as the poverty since there were several fairly autonomous poor whose expressed opinions were both consistent and independent. The contradictions moreover had a kind of situational logic to them. When I confined the issue to class relations alone-one of many issues-it seemed that the poor sang one tune when they were in the presence of the rich and another tune when they were among the poor. The rich too spoke one way to the poor and another among themselves. These were the grossest distinc- tions; many finer distinctions were discernible depending on the exact com- position of the group talking and of course the issue in question. Soon I found myself using this social logic to seek out or create settings in which I could check one discourse against another and so to speak triangulate my way into unexplored territory. The method worked well enough for my limited purposes and the results appeared in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press 1985). (LL)