Everyday forms of Resistance

As Tibor Dessewffy, the editor of this section explains in his introduction, there are two aims to be achieved with this collection of essays. On one hand, it was Replika’s intention to introduce the work of political scientist and anthropologist James Scott to the Hungarian public. As Dessewffy argues, however, Scott is not simply an “emerging American classic” who should be known in Hungary in order to catch up with recent developments in Western social sciences. Scott’s notion of everyday resistance can be extremely important and useful in understanding Hungarian social changes under both state-socialism and post-communism. One of the most painful problems for Hungarian social science (and to be sure, in other academic communities as well) is to detect “invisible” or, with Scott’s word, “hidden” socio-economic processes. Scott’s studies of course can not bestow upon empirical results concerning the Hungarian situation, but his writings provide a theoretical toolkit, which might be very useful in analysing (post)communist social changes. Scott’s non-positivistic methodology and the elegance of his arguments are also relevant to consider in the survey-dominated Hungarian social science.
This thematic section contains four articles. Two of them are written by Scott himself. The first is a chapter from his classic book: “Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.” Here Scott criticises Gramsci’s notion of “hegemony” and its implication that people live with false consciousness when they accept their subordination. Although dominated people, on the surface, seem to follow “the agenda of the powerful” in their social interactions, it does not mean that they are not able to use strategies of resistance “under the table” in times when surveillance is overwhelming. The second piece offers an inventory of the different forms and practices of everyday resistance in different social and historic contexts. The third article is a comment written by historian Charles Tilly, who expresses his appreciation for Scott’s work but also suggests some interesting points for further consideration. In the fourth essay, the Hungarian historian, István Rév, discusses various forms of everyday resistance, as practised by Hungarian peasants during the Stalinist fifties. Rév, somewhat self-critically, also warns us to avoid the pitfalls of giving a heroic description of the actions of the atomized peasants. Instead of idolising a self-conscious political opposition to the state by the “nation” he proposes to settle with a more down-to-earth, realistic vocabulary.