Scrounger, Worker, Beggarman, Cheat: The Dynamics of Unemployment and the Politics of Resistance in Belfast

Item Type Journal Article Author Leo Howe URL https://www.jstor.org/stable/3034160 Volume 4 Issue 3 Pages 531-550 Publication The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute ISSN 1359-0987 Date 1998 Extra Publisher: [Wiley, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland] DOI 10.2307/3034160 Accessed 2021-06-18 01:23:47 Library Catalog JSTOR Abstract This article examines certain crucial aspects of Scott's theory of power, domination and resistance. It takes issue with his binary model of social formations, his parallel distinction between 'public' and 'hidden' transcript, and his idea that resistance is the principal manner in which the weak articulate their relationships to the powerful. My ethnographic example describes how long-term, unemployed married men in a Protestant area of Belfast both resist and embrace a dominant discourse of welfare 'scrounging'. Workers accuse many unemployed people of not wanting to work. While the latter justify their own unemployment by reference to the lack of jobs, they adopt the dominant discourse of 'scrounging' to account for the unemployment of others. The way their arguments mix and weave themes from different types of account in a variety of contexts calls into question the usefulness of Scott's concepts of public and hidden transcripts. Short Title Scrounger, Worker, Beggarman, Cheat