Is the peasantry capable of organizing for collective action? Students of peasant behavior have long wrestled with this question. Three images have dominated the literature. The first image – one of collective docility – goes back at least to Marx's statement that peasants are like “potatoes in a sack,” isolated from each other and unable to organize. The second image, having its roots in the success of Mao Zedong with peasant mobilization in China but coming to dominate the intellectual landscape during the Vietnam War, suggested the reverse. Peasants were now considered to have the ability to engage in revolutionary collective action. A third image, sketched mainly by James Scott, who earlier had been one of the proponents of the second view, made a forceful entry in the 1980s. Going under the rubric of ‘everyday resistance,’ the third image is about “the vast and relatively unexplored middle ground … (between) passivity and open, collective defiance.” As peasant rebellions are rare, this image concentrates on the everyday acts of dissent – “clandestine arson and sabotage, … footdragging, dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, slander, flight, and so forth” – acts that “require little or no coordination or planning” and are routinely used by peasants to express protest.

This chapter deals with yet another “unexplored middle ground,” which is covered neither by acts of revolution nor by docile silence, or indeed by everyday forms of struggle.