Sterling Professor Jim Scott Receives Social Science Award

Congratulations to Professor James Scott, who will be receiving the A.SK Social Science Award from the Berlin Social Science Center for his life-long research on agrarian societies and the importance of place and environment in relation to politics and social organization.

Jim Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale. He is the co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program, which he started at ISPS in 1991.  

Scott is considered an influential scholar of ethnographic fieldwork, whose work has focused on how postcolonial people resist domination and anarchy. His primary research centered on peasants of Southeast Asia and their strategies of resistance.

Scott received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 1967, and he returned to teach at Yale in 1976. He became emeritus in 2021. His many publications include Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale Press, 1985, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale Press 1980, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Press, 1998; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Press, 2008; Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton Press, 2013; Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest Agrarian States, Yale Press, 2017.

He has received numerous awards and honors. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded resident fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Institute for Advanced Study. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation and was president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1997. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.