A Southeast Asian Archaeologist’s Perspective on James Scott’s Contributions to the Field

More than an entire archaeological generation has passed since “post-processual” critiques up-ended the world of archaeological theory, and we now travel through a rich and varied theoretical landscape that draws inspiration from scholarship from the natural sciences to the humanities. Our collective obsession with new methodologies still threatens to overwhelm our interpretive frameworks, as advances in science, geomatics, and AI offer ever more precise tools for data recovery and analysis. Against this backdrop, and with metrics looming ever larger as the primary criterion of intellectual success, it is perhaps not surprising how few archaeologists today read the source literature from which we draw our dominant theoretical frameworks. Like their predecessors a generation ago, most archaeologists still engage in the mining-and-bridging strategy that Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt (1993: 3) described during the peak of the post-processual era: grab a current approach from the social sciences or humanities and cobble it into archaeological shape, without fully understanding the source field from which it originated. Few archaeologists today cite Immanuel Wallerstein when they invoke some revisionist world-systems model, and still fewer mention Benedict Anderson when discussing variations on imagined communities. We are not unique among scholars in doing this, as such ideas become deeply embedded in our interpretive world. Yet understanding how this intellectual current shape-shifts as it wafts across the field of archaeology requires returning to its source. James Scott has been a more important contributor to these currents of the last several decades than I suspect most archaeologists recognize.