Henry Imler April 9th, 2008
Here is my theory chapter for my thesis. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.
My overall goal is to look at the Acts of Thomas in light of James C. Scott’s Hidden Transcript theory. Certain things I am wondering about are
- how to “beef up” the Foucault
- What can I cut? What can I move to footnotes?
- Did I adequately adapt the theory to the particular situation I am going to look at?
- Am I being clear?
Here is the word document: Chapter Two. Hit the “Read More” link for the whole thing in this post.
Introduction to the Theory
Before we can go about building a picture of the social world of the Acts of Thomas, we need to formulate a fruitful approach to the text, one that will allow us to mine the text for remnants of its community’s lives and help us to peer behind the veil of time and cultural distance. The aim of this chapter is to explain and expound James C. Scott’s theory of hidden transcripts and to expand his theory from the realm of political domination to the realm of religious authority. Scott’s theory enables us to understand how dominated peoples are able to resist and subvert the will of their dominators by means of concealed performances. This approach will lends itself to explaining the role of the text simultaneously both as a community’s means of resistance and as a means of authority. This expounding this paradox will be the focus of chapter four.
James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His work centers on the study of dominated peoples. His principle work, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, discusses the idea of the public and hidden transcript. He defines the public transcript as the official story of a culture. It encompasses the processes of the elite to their own ends.
“public mastery and subordination (for example, rituals of hierarchy, deference, speech, punishment, and humiliation)… [it gives] ideological justification for inequalities (for example, the public religious and political world view of the dominate elite)… [the strength of this approach is its] privileges the social experience of indignities, control, submission, humiliation, forced defense, and punishment.”[1]
Thus, the public transcript serves as a justification and explanation of domination of one group over another. People often imagine resistance to the public transcript and oppression in bold and visible statements, such as revolt and demonstration and revolution. Indeed, these are signs of resistance; however, they are dangerous ones. Rebellion is countered by the more forceful forms of oppression, such as execution. This forceful reaction is a ritualized response that arises out of the public transcript and reinforces its ideals. Resistance is often perceived only in two possible modes for the oppressed; either they are to accept life under domination and be a “happy slave,” or to openly rebel and face extreme physical punishment. Scott sees a third path; he postulates that “discontent and resistance are far more prevalent, widespread, and complex in their motives and methods that these simple alternatives allow.”[2] In this third category resides creative, passive resistance. Whenever the oppressed are not under surveillance, out of the master’s eye, they act in their own interests to recapture a sense of dignity and justice or out of a motivation for autonomy. Scott says that “The practices of domination and exploitation typically foster a hidden transcript of indignation.”[3] This hidden transcript serves as the negation of the public transcript and is the ideological basis for rebellion and revolts. However, it goes much deeper than this. Contrary to Spivak the subaltern does speak but this speech is hidden from public view. This offstage speech takes a variety of forms; it is not merely speech per say, but includes a wide range of practices, such as “poaching, pilfering, clandestine tax evasion, and… shabby work…”[4] Thus the hidden transcript is comprised of all actions that subvert, frustrate or ritually negate the oppressor’s hold on the populace.
Scott outlines four basic forms of cultural interchange.[5] The first, which is also the safest, is the flattery of social elites. The hidden transcript is the second and serves to provide an ideological basis for the more dangerous forms. Third is the interchange between public flattery and the hidden transcript, is often couched in double meaning, and is done by anonymous actors. Lastly, there is speaking truth to power. This is an open act of defiance and is a gamble for change. This last category can be anything from public ministries to open revolts. This progressive delineation of resistance demonstrates the wide range of reactions of the oppressed. The most important aspect of Scott’s work is that at any point an oppressed populace is capable of resistance, which challenges notions of hegemonic control by those in power. This is important because it allows us to see a nuanced layer of people’s lives that are otherwise missed.
Analysis of hidden and public transcripts enables us to peer beyond the veil of people’s material conditions and construct a better understanding of the lived lives of both those in and out of power. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to fleshing out Scott’s theory and method and transitioning his method from involuntary material dominance to include voluntary religious domination.
An Aside on Language and the Extent of Domination
Because both we are concerned with the social world of the Acts of Thomas we need to spend some time discussing the terms order, power, and domination, because these terms are loaded, value laden, and ambiguous. Power is a slippery term, one that is not easily defined. Scott defines power as “not having to act or, more accurately, the capacity to be more negligent and casual about any single performance.”[6] In the loosest sense, I will here refer to power as a person or organization’s ability to control and influence itself and/or another’s actions. Power is not limited to a binary relationship between two parties, instead it emanates from everywhere and “power as influence” flows between all persons and institutions.[7] Since we are primarily concerned here with texts and performance based transcripts, it is helpful to frame our notion of power in terms of discourse along the lines of Foucault’s analysis of power. This idea of power as influence in discourse will govern the term power here and a few important issues will be examined as they relate to the application of power to the study of a vanished people. When framing the issue of power in terms of discourse there are several issues that need to be addressed. The first of which is the disparity between modern notions of power and notions of power found in antiquity. Secondly, how to frame the language of power will be addressed, along with the implied ethical framework that is used to describe the causes and effects of power as it operates within a given society.
Before we begin, it is important to note that power was conceived of differently by people in antiquity than it is conceived of today. In other words, we can be sure that the community that produced the Acts of Thomas was not familiar with Foucault and our analysis needs to take this into account. For a person in antiquity, power did not flow between all persons and institutions; instead, it was a finite commodity, one that was only obtained as a result of a loss in power from another. This is unlike the modern notions of power outlined above. Due to this we need to include both notions of power in our analysis. Modern notions of power as they relate to Scott’s theory will be addressed here; a discussion of how power operated in the minds of the people in the social world of the Acts of Thomas will be examined in the next chapter.
The words we use to describe phenomena and concepts are never neutral and betray the biases of the writer. Due to the inherent normative nature of descriptive language we need to explore not only what set of metaphors to employ but also what ethical baggage our metaphors carry with them. While Foucault was not forthcoming in regards to a succinct definition of power, discourse, and a host of other terms, he was adamant as to how to frame the language of power and discourse. In an interview with Alessandro and Pasquale Pasquino, Foucault suggests that instead of the “great model of language” which is popular amongst French Structualists[8] our reference point in doing history should be war and struggle.[9] This is because the model of language looses the sense of struggle that the alternate model of war captures so vividly. In addition to the model of war we will also employ metaphors of performance to aid in our descriptions of phenomena because central to Scott’s method is the acting out of daily life.
Because power emanates from everywhere and consists of the ability to influence oneself and others, actualizing this ability is intimately bound up in performances of will and force. The issue here is the assumed moral status of those in power and those attempting to exercise their power. Using the language of war, we introduce into our analysis terms such as tactics, strategy, domination, and etcetera. Implicit in our use of these terms is the assumption that those in power (the dominant) operate from a position of moral deficiency and that those out of power (the dominated) are plucky moral heroes. It is assumed that every successful use of power is an abuse of power. When our subjects are slave and master this implicit moral evaluation slides easily from our terms. However, when we move relationship networks were the power disparity is much lesser, such as from patron to client or from religious leader to religious adherent, the moral evaluations wrapped up in our terms begin to skew our scholarship without merit. Hence, in this study I want to drain these terms of their moral innuendo, and leave the moral evaluation of this contest of will and force for others; for my concern here is merely the description of the social world of the Acts of Thomas not a moral prescription.
Building off of the above view of power, we can now address order, domination, and discourse. In this study I will refer to order as the creation and the utilization of roles within a society. Therefore, order is the use of power to create and maintain roles. Domination, on the other hand, refers to a disparity between two groups’ ability to actualize their potential influence. Domination thus speaks of the degree to which power and order are successfully applied to a people. Scott uses the term to describe extreme power disparities. The types of domination that Scott chooses to look in his works at are those “institutionalized means of extracting labor, goods, and services from a subject population.”[10] During the course of this study, we will not limit ourselves to such extreme examples, but instead widen our scope to include those power relations that are not as disparate, the whole time using the term domination to refer to power relations that are not in balance. This will allow us to examine actors involved in both voluntary and non-voluntary power relationships.
Discourse refers to the ways in which actors describe their world.[11] Discourses impact every facet of how one views his or her world. [Need an Example] Without it there are no meanings, no understandings, and no consciousness. Here we will not limit discourse to mere verbal descriptions, but also include the performance aspect of discourse. Therefore, the influence over discourse is the heart of power for our study.
The Public Transcript
James C. Scott employs a social logic to chart out a 4 quadrant schema of a given society, with the hidden vs. the public and the dominant vs. the subordinate as the two axes. The public transcript resides in the public sphere although it is generated by the performances of both the subordinates and the dominant see Figure 1 on page 17. The public transcript, in its most general terms, consists of performance. It is controlled and patterned by those in the dominant positions of power. The pubic transcript is defined as those performances which serve to further public mastery and subordination through rituals of hierarchy, deference, speech, punishment, and humiliation and to manage ideological justifications for inequalities by the dominate elite in order to manage the material appropriation.[12] Scott observes that our public performances are just that – the acting out of rituals that are not sincere, but instead are of benefit.
Here we may perhaps say that the power of social forms smooth relations with our acquaintances. Our circumspect behavior may also have a strategic dimension: this person to whom we misrepresent ourselves may be able to harm or help us in some way.[13]
Building off of this idea, Scott introduces the public transcript as “the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate.”[14] The public transcript deals with the most obvious and visual manifestations of domination, “it is designed to be impressive, to affirm and naturalize the power of dominate elites, and to conceal or euphemize the dirty linen of their rule”[15] Thus the purpose of the public transcript is the creation and sustention of order and power. There are five primary functions of the public transcript i) affirmation, ii) stigmatization, iii) concealment, iv) euphemization, and v) unanimity.[16] It is to these primary functions which we will turn next.
The public transcript additionally is defined by those performances that either justify the social order or act it out. Everything that makes up the official story of a culture participates in the public transcript. Laws, official speeches, paying of taxes, and etcetera all serve to affirm the public transcript and to further its legitimacy in the eyes of the rulers and the ruled. These tellings of the official story can be symbolic displays of power, such as military parades, [17] or they can be real displays of actualized power, such as the display of vanquished foes of the transcript, such as Roman crucifixions.[18]
The official script of a culture is highly selective. Just as those performances which bolster its authority are highlighted, those performances which erode its authority are, at the same time, concealed. Scott gives two examples of such concealment, the Hutu of Rwanda publicly disavowing the fact that they eat meat in front of the Tutsi and the Brahmins of India neglecting the purity codes while out of the public eye.[19] The most powerful aspect of this concealment here is that the Tutsi and the lower Hindu caste members know that the above is happening. However, no one acknowledges it publicly – and that is the important part. It is “[o]nly when contradictions are publicly declared do they have to be accounted for,”[20] because they threaten the official story, or the public transcript. As long as these contradictions are kept out of the public discourse legitimacy is maintained.
Similar to the public transcript’s ability to discriminately select only those performances which buttress their narrative, the transcript also has the power to inscribe meaning onto phenomena with the intention of buttressing their narrative by means of stigmas and euphemisms. Euphemisms are “the self-interested tailoring of descriptions and appearances by dominant powerholders…”[21] In the business world, for example, people are “let go” rather than fired. Bribes in the late Roman republic were often referred to as liberalitas.[22] Euphemization is not limited the realm of language, but includes the masking of everything from rituals to architecture. The official story is thus sanitized for the purpose of making it more palatable for subordinate consumption. Just as the process of selection of public performances runs both ways, so too does the naming power of public discourse. Where there are euphemisms there are also dysphemisms. Those which are considered threats to the transcript, because either they dare to publicly display contradictions or they otherwise question the official story,[23] are named with stigmatizing labels. These serve to delegitimize any discourse performed that might threaten the official story. The discriminating selection of performances and the process of masking clay as gold foster a sense of unanimity in the community. Critical flyers are taken down, propaganda posters are raised, the dirty are given clean clothes, and the dissenters are imbued with terror. The resulting effect is the perception that the current network and balance of power relations are both optimal and natural. Society publicly thus appears to have “unanimity among the ruling groups” and “consent among subordinates.”[24]
It is largely those in power who are the consumers of the public transcript. For the ruling members of a given society, the public transcript is a “kind of self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage, improve their cohesion, display their power, and convince themselves anew of their high moral purpose.”[25] Horsely demonstrates how 2nd Temple priests’ sacrifices and service were preformed largely to “bolster the priestly aristocracy’s own self image as powerful and justified in their positions of dominance.”[26] They must go to great lengths to maintain the public transcript because “it generates considerable friction” and must be maintained through the “symbolization of domination by means of demonstrations and enactments of power”[27] as we have outlined above.
The public transcript is built with power through means of performance and discourse. The architects of the public transcript may be the ruling members of a given society, but all members contribute to its construction. The rulers must successfully present their shows of power and solidarity, and likewise the ruled must play their part at their peril. The substance of the public transcript is the sum of all public performances by the rulers and the ruled alike. It functions to justify and maintain a set of power relations. To use the metaphor of war, the public transcript is the occupation of the ruled by the rulers. Because the occupation is successful does not mean it is successfully resisted. This is where the hidden transcript comes into play.
The Hidden Transcripts
Having outlined the major points involved in the creation and maintenance of the public transcript, we can now turn to the hidden transcript. If the public transcript consists of those performances which serve to bolster the official story of a culture, then the hidden transcript consists of all those performances which serve to undermine the official story of a culture and bolster the autonomous culture of the oppressed. More accurately, hidden transcripts contain everything that is veiled from the public eye. As outlined above, there are four ways in which the dominated can deal with being on the losing end of power relations: flattery, creation and use of hidden transcripts, exchange between the public and hidden transcripts, and speaking truth to power. In this section, we will explore what goes into the creation of a hidden transcript, how it functions, and what we can learn about a people group by the study of it.
There are two requirements for the creation of the hidden transcript. The first one is a space that is free from control or surveillance; the second is a shared experience by those gathered in such a space.[28] The hidden transcript and the desire for autonomy[29] behind it must also be articulated and the resistance must be social in nature. This anger is “well cooked” by the time it makes its way into written discourse. Thus, in Paul’s letters one sees both the acknowledgement of the anger: “there is neither slave, nor free” [30]and at the same time, social restraint: “Let each of you remain in the condition in which you were called. Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it.”[31] This well-cooked desire for autonomy enters into a social struggle on the borders of the two transcripts. It is here that cultural innovation takes place. Religious texts are artifacts of this cultural innovation.
The demonstration of cultural autonomy in the face of domination is the principle contribution of Scott’s work. He challenges theories of hegemony and through his pain staking research, has demonstrated that while the subordinate may appear as though they have internalized the official story of a culture, in reality the picture is more complicated. The subordinate maintain culturally acceptable appearances where they are under surveillance. This gives the impression of hegemonic control of the subordinate by the dominant. However, when cultural sites that are not under surveillance are examined, we find the opposite to be the case. In these sequestered sites, the subordinate craft for themselves a transcript. These sequestered sites must be “social space[s] insulated from control, surveillance, and repression from above.”[32] This hidden transcript is generated and performed away from the public eye. Susan M. Elliott elucidates this idea in her essay on reconstructing resistance in the New Testament.
“’We can say whatever we want, but nobody is listening’ means ‘We have no access to the public transcript.’ It speaks to the nature of the hidden transcript… where the hidden transcript…may appear very large… and… often hidden more by a lack of attention to it than any apparent suppression.”[33]
Elliot aids in our understanding of hidden transcripts through her analysis of immigrants’ comments on the USA’s freedom of speech rights. It emphasizes that anytime there is a power disparity, there will be a hidden transcript. This is because “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” [34] This alternate transcript may or may not include elements of the public transcript in it depending on the will of the subordinate group.
So far we have only discussed how the hidden transcript is generated, maintained, and performed by subordinate peoples and defined the generators of the hidden transcript as those actors who lack the power to generate public culture. In this group we have only included those persons who are materially dominated. However, is it not only the materially dominated that are unable to generate culture and are required by the public transcript to maintain appearances. The public transcript assigns roles and performances to every member of a given society. All have their part to play; any deviance from their ascribed role threatens the public transcript and therefore endangers their self-interests.
These self interests vary with the variance of roles within a society. On the one hand, the subordinate is protecting his physical safety in the face of state punishment; the dominant, on the other hand is looking to maintain her position of power within the society. George Orwell gives us a glimpse of the dominant’s motivations in maintaining their side of the public transcript in his essay “Shooting and Elephant.” In the essay Orwell is tasked with killing an elephant that had become enraged and killed a man. A crowd of Indian peasants follows him over a few hills to the site of the elephant attack. By the time they reach their destination, the elephant has calmed down and is no longer a threat. Orwell is hesitant to shoot the elephant, but the pressure of backing down in front of the crowd is insurmountable. Orwell writes:
And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.[35]
Through this example we see how even those in power are required to maintain appearances at their own peril. The powerful too retreat to sequestered sites away from the public eye. Orwell later writes about how nice it was to be able to retreat back to social sites away from the expectations of the native populace. Hidden transcripts within their societal power regions are therefore also generated by those in positions of power. What began as a simple picture of the subordinate resisting the dominant becomes increasingly complicated as each stratum of power relations in a given society is added to the analysis. All actors and groups within a given society are in fact generators of the singular public transcript and simultaneously generators of regional hidden. Figure 1 represents the general structure of Scott’s theory as it is applied to a bipolar society consisting solely one materially dominant group and one materially subordinate group.
Figure 1:

Both the materially dominant and the materially subordinate contribute to the creation and maintenance of the public transcript. While it serves the material needs of the dominant at the expense of the subordinate, it is not fully owned by either group.
Modifying the Method
Now that the basics of Scott’s theory have been outlined and the pros and cons of his theory examined, we can turn to an evaluation and adaptation of the text to our source materials. Our time frame, source materials, and objects of analysis all differ substantially from Scott’s methods and goals. Due to this, we will need to adapt his theory to our aims. Our goals here are to analyze an ancient religious text to see i) how the text functioned in the society in which it was produced and ii) what the text can tell us about a vanished people group.
Our chief obstacle in modifying Scott’s theory to our aims is the nature of domination his application Scott addresses. He specifically states that his subject matter will be those forms of domination that are the result of material exploitation.[36] Our aims are different from Scott’s as we wish to look at a religious text located within a culture where material exploitation is only part of the story. We will need to adapt his method to include areas of experience beyond material power relations. Scott foresees the widening of application of his theory while staying away from essentialist claims, claiming there is a “structural family resemblance” between any set of unequal power relations.[37] Anytime there is an official story there will be cords of disagreement. These cords of disagreement often cannot be voiced publicly because the actors lack the authority to do so. Whenever these conditions exist, a natural result will be the fostering of subversive narratives.[38] In cases of extremely unequal power relations, such as slavery or colonial rule, the alternate narratives are easier to discern. However, in cases where the structures of domination are not as prevalent, in cases of power inequality are less extreme, hidden transcripts are still present, they just show up in different forms. Therefore, I wish to generalize Scott’s theory and expand it to cover all sets of power relations. Scott himself alludes to this eventual widening of his theory when he discusses the sociology of cohesion within the hidden transcript.[39] Scott is narrowing his concern to the interplay between the public and hidden transcript and therefore does not fully address the implications of the generation of a subculture. These subcultures are most certainly unified in relation to the dominant culture, but internally they develop their own hierarchy and power relations, all of which can be analyzed via Scott’s method.
When we apply Scott’s theory to the creation and use of a religious text a complex picture emerges. Four groups come into focus, the politically dominant, the religious community, the religious leaders, and the religious adherents. The politically dominant is the class of persons that carry political authority within the culture. They wield political authority and power over all other members of the community, including the religious sub-community. The religious leaders are those persons who are, at the same time, subordinate to the politically dominant and dominant within their own religious sub-community. The final group is the religious adherents. These people are subordinate to both the political and religious community leaders. Between each of these groups are unique sets of power relations as illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2

The religious text is created by the leaders of the religious community and melds the group’s current social conditions with the community’s oral traditions. It is purposed not only as a guide to life currently, but also as a record of those stories which give meaning and purpose to the community. In Scott’s theory, the religious text serves multiple roles relative to the observer. In relation between the religious community and the political authority, the text functions as part and record of the religious community’s hidden transcript.[40] However, as an authority-laden product of power by the religious leaders, the text also functions a record of the public transcript for the religious community itself. As a consequent of the above, religious texts are artifacts that can be mined for four out of the five transcripts shown in Figure 2. The religious sub-culture’s public and hidden transcript ( PT-B and HT-B) are the most visible in the text, with the culture’s public transcript (PT-A) and the religious adherent’s hidden transcript (HT-C) being less visible. Analyzing a religious text along these lines will enable us to build a better description not only of the power relations among the three major groups, but also to peer beyond the veil of presentation. The presentation of the text is both the public transcript of the religious community as a whole and the hidden transcript of the community in relation to the political community. Because of this, the text is not an objective imprint of the lives of the community which created the text, but rather an amalgam of the community’s idealized and realized worlds. Scott’s theory will enable us to unpack this stew into its separate components.
In accordance with the above, our procedure here will be to first analyze the text in terms of each of the four transcripts which are contained within the text: the PT-B, HT-B, PT-A, and HT-C. However, due to the transparent nature of the hidden transcript and a lack of a direct production by the religious adherents it is likely that scant information will be mined to construct HT-C. Once each of these layers has been indentified and constructed as best as is possible given our data set, the information will be combined to help build a clearer picture of the community’s social world.
Using Scott’s approach will helps the humanities, and consequently biblical studies, to avoid reductionism by paying attention to the domination and subjugation thru the lens of human feelings and interactions. This emphasis helps to reduce the dependency/overemphasis on the material and social dimensions of societies. While Scott wants to examine primarily the materially dominated peoples, his analysis here privileges the social experience of indignities, control, submission, humiliation, forced deference, and punishment.” (emphasis added)[41] Horsely, commenting on the value of Scott’s theory writes:
Perhaps one of the most important potential gains in recognizing the reality of the hidden transcript [for New Testament studies and other academic fields] is Scott’s enlargement of the field of vision to include the emotional-cultural dimension of subordinated people’s lives.[42]
Thus Scott’s theory enables one to peer beyond the material to the experiential aspect of domination. Before we can apply this method and theory to the text of the Acts of Thomas, we need to situate the text and community historically and culturally, which is the aim of the next chapter.
Bibliography
Coleman, K. M. “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments.” The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44-73.
Elliott, Susan M. “Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance in Paul’s Letters: A Response.” In Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James C. Scott to Jesus and Paul, edited by Richard A. Horsley. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. 1st Vintage Books ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
———. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by `, 51-75. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Horsley, James. “Introduction.” In Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James C. Scott to Jesus and Paul, edited by Richard A. Horsley. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.
Manning, C. E. “‘Liberalitas’ - the Decline and Rehabilitation of a Virtue.” Greece & Rome 32, no. 1 (1985): 73-83.
Nye, Malory. Religion: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2003.
Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” In George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters. Boston: David R. Godine Publisher, 2000.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
White, Hayden V. “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground.” History and Theory 12, no. 1 (1973): 23-54.
[1] James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 111.
[2]James Horsley, “Introduction,” in Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James C. Scott to Jesus and Paul, ed. Richard A. Horsley (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 7.
[3] Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 7.
[4] Ibid., 14.
[5] Ibid., 18-19.
[6] Ibid., 29.
[7] Malory Nye, Religion: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2003), 64-65.
[8] Hayden V. White, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” History and Theory 12, no. 1 (1973): 24.
[9] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. ` (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 55.
[10] Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 21.
[11] Nye, Religion: The Basics, 68.
[12] Horsley, “Introduction,” 4.
[13] Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 1.
[14] Ibid., 2.
[15] Ibid., 18.
[16] Ibid., 48.
[17]Ibid., 51.
[18] K. M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” The Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 46.
[19] Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 50.
[20] Ibid., 51.
[21] Ibid., 54.
[22] C. E. Manning, “‘Liberalitas’ - the Decline and Rehabilitation of a Virtue,” Greece & Rome 32, no. 1 (1985): 78.
[23] This is not limited to human actors, but can include such things as modes of government (e.g. Communism) and modes of economics (e.g. consumerism).
[24]Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 55.
[25]Ibid.
[26] Horsley, “Introduction,” 5.
[27] Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 45.