Dear Members of the Agrarian Studies Community,
It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that James C. (Jim) Scott passed away peacefully in his home in Durham, CT on Friday, July 19, 2024. Jim was an eminent scholar and beloved mentor, teacher and colleague, renowned for his wide-ranging and highly influential work on agrarian societies, peasant resistance, and critique of state-centered development.
Jim was also a skilled farmer, who relished tending to his 46-acre farm in Durham. As he noted in a 2012 New York Times profile, “I’m as proud of knowing how to shear a sheep as I am of anything.”
Jim earned his PhD. From Yale in 1967 and returned as faculty in 1976, where, at the time of his passing, he was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus in Anthropology, the School of the Environment, and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS). He is the author of a number of foundational works including: The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Seeing Like a State (1998), Two Cheers for Anarchism (2002), The Art of Not being Governed (2009), Against the Grain (2017), and In Praise of Floods, scheduled to be published by Yale University Press in February, 2025.
In 1991, Jim founded the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale, a renowned interdisciplinary initiative that for decades has shaped how scholars understand rural life and society. He was also active in the MacMillan Center’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies.
Jim has won countless awards throughout his career and was scheduled to receive the Yale Graduate School’s Wilbur Cross Medal this October
We invite members of the community to share their memories, photos, stories, and thoughts with Jim’s family and friends via this link. We also invite you to watch “In a Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott,” an oral history by Todd Holmes (UC Berkeley), below. Finally, we invite you to read this 2001 interview with Richard Snyder.
Jim was a pioneering figure, with an indefatigable spirit and enormous heart, and we will miss him dearly.
On March 28, 2024, the Agrarian Studies community gathered to celebrate Jim Scott, watch a selection from the oral history “In a Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott,” and participate in a discussion about his life and work.
Photos by Harold Shapiro