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.

This essay employs James Scott’s (1990) concepts of hidden and public transcripts to explore shifting power relations during the Iberian encounter with early modern Japan. Introduced by Charles Boxer (1951), the term ‘Christian Century’ is sometimes used to refer to the dynamic period of contact between Europe and Japan between 1543 (the first recorded arrival of Europeans in Japanese waters) and 1639 (the expulsion of all Iberian merchants and missionaries from the archipelago). This was Japan’s first global moment, a time of intense cultural contact with Europe and new links with India, Southeast Asia, coastal Africa and the Americas. While the dynamism of the period makes the phrase ‘Christian Century’ inapt in certain respects, it will be used here (without scare quotes) as a convenient label. The question of the nature of power is central to my discussion. Japanese archaeologists and premodern historians often work with a view of power which, in the terminology of Michael Mann, is both intensive and authoritative. Intensive power “refers to the ability to organize tightly and command a high level of mobilization or commitment from the participants”, while authoritative power is “actually willed by groups and institutions” comprising “definite commands and conscious obedience” (Mann 1986: 7–8). Such a view of power is arguably appropriate for the ‘absolutist’ regime of the early modern Tokugawa era (1603–1868), but can hardly be applied to the Kofun period (250–700) when an early state first appeared in the Japanese Islands. For instance, the influential proposal made by archaeologist Yukio Kobayashi in the 1950s that the distribution of a particular type of bronze mirror in the third century reflected the spread of state power now seems like a clear over-interpretation (cf. Edwards 2006). In Mann’s (1986) IEMP model of the sources of social power (ideological, economic, military and political) situated within overlapping networks, the bronze mirrors analysed by Kobayashi were a source of ideological power, but the extent to which they also supported economic, military and political power remains an open question.

Scott returned time and again to the topic of how states produced land cadasters (and vice-versa). “[A] state cadastral map,” he wrote in Seeing Like a State, “created to designate taxable property-holders does not merely describe a system of land tenure; it creates such a system through its ability to give its categories the force of law” (1998: 3). This is lyrical and axiomatic. But best of all, not content to point out the artificiality of a system, Jim pressed on to pursue the purpose states had in simulating powers. The cadaster performs a kind of ontological alchemy: it not only helps to create state capacity, but it grounds it in ways of knowing (as law, as science) which are discursively fixed and unquestionable, with obvious political benefits. As he did with everything from moral economies to grain baskets, Jim always forged ahead to think through why forms of control worked – how they served state projects – and not just expose them.

When you read about James Scott, you commonly come across words such as ‘provocative,’ ‘contrarian,’ alongside ‘counter-narrative’ – such are the attempts to place his histories as outside the mainstream of thought. For this reason alone, his work is so worthwhile. He has always offered a striking perspective that can have a lasting influence on how you view things thereafter. In a way, he finds the blind spots in much of historical and cultural perspectives, and shows us how much we miss when not shining the light in such directions. I maintain here that it is the anarchistic elements of Scott’s thought that leads him to address the blind spots of others. He developed his anarchist perspective increasingly throughout his books, culminating in The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012). At first, he described how he characterized political organizations in his lectures and seminars in ways in which he found himself noticing how much they shared with anarchist perspectives, finding himself saying, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue” (Scott 2012: ix; see also 2020: 64; Holmes 2023). So, he began to explore anarchist theorists more closely, and in the process he even taught a course on anarchism at Yale. We should note that his anarchism is not at full throttle. After all, he did only offer “two cheers” (2012) for it, not three, but the weight of his scholarship is surely towards the anarchist side. In this sense, Scott represents one of the few prominent intellectuals that opted to work in this vein, alongside the contributions of Noam Chomsky (2005, 2013) or David Graeber (e.g., 2004, 2009, 2020). There are also several works that collect together scholars working in this direction for the social sciences, social movements, and theory (e.g., Shukaitis et al. 2007; Klausen and Martel 2011; Lilley and Shantz 2015; Levy and Newman 2019), all of which reveals that there’s been an increasing turn to this line of thought, after a period in which Marxist thinking was more common in the academy. Here, I discuss how Scott’s lifework has had an important influence on archaeology, anthropology, political science, and history through his theoretical approach in addition to several concepts that he developed that have been useful for considering political dynamics at various scales, in ancient early states (and their peripheries) to contemporary states and non-state regions such as the zomias of Southeast Asia. Throughout, I emphasize how Scott’s thinking upends so many common perspectives about political dynamics.

James C. Scott was the most incisive theorist of the state for people who are ambivalent about the state’s existence. He was a major theorist of power, revealing the covert weapons that groups without formal, coercive power wield against the state and its representatives. He pioneered ethnography in political science, insisting throughout his career on dangers of neglecting local context and knowledge. In doing so, he expanded our understanding of politics to include the politics of peasants, pre-state, and stateless people. Despite Scott’s eminence and his relevance to central questions in the field, his thought remains at the margins of political theory. The field has barely begun to mine the potential of Scott’s scholarship for new insights and research programs. If there is a theme that unifies Scott’s major works, it is the need to dispel state myths and to uncover and examine social and political life that are omitted or distorted by state agents (among whom are academics, especially political scientists). Scott dedicated his career to overcoming a major blind spot: that much of our evidence is produced by states. He consistently applied an “anarchist squint” to political life, illuminating features that otherwise remained invisible (Scott 2014).

At the time of working on this paper (December 2024), I attended a session organized by Bidar Research Institution in Tehran, where a young feminist was presenting the results of her M.A. dissertation on the Iranian women’s movement, One Million Signatures Campaign, in the 2000s. When I questioned the application of theories developed to study the agency and political action of subaltern groups, particularly Asef Bayat’s work, one member of the audience responded that this is not relevant to feminism and women’s movement. Nobody provided a counter argument, but a young male student mentioned another work by Bayat, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, where he discusses the agency of ordinary women in the Iranian post-revolutionary society. He briefly discussed the relevance of Bayat’s work to the exploration of women as a subaltern group. In Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, Asef Bayat (2010) introduces the quiet encroachment of the ordinary. Drawing on James Scott’s everyday forms of resistance, Bayat discusses how subaltern groups such as the poor and women seek “life chances” through quiet encroachment in daily life in post-revolutionary Iran. He claims that “in many authoritarian Muslim states, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, where conservative Islamic laws are in place, women have become second-class citizens in many domains of public life. Consequently, a central question for women’s rights activists is how to achieve gender equality under such circumstances” (Bayat 2010: 96). Bayat answers this question in the framework of Scott’s theory: “Women resisted these policies, not much by deliberate organized campaigns, but largely through mundane daily practices in public domains, such as working, playing sports, studying, showing interest in art and music, or running for political offices” (Bayat 2010: 97). Bayat calls this “feminism of everyday life” (2010: 96). This short narrative brings me to the point that I want to discuss in this paper: the application of theories of political action and the resistance of subordinate groups in feminist and gender archaeology. I briefly discuss the relevance of subaltern studies generally and James Scott’s “everyday forms of resistance,” then turn to the methodological and socio-political outcomes of this expansion for feminist and gender archaeology. Finally, I discuss two examples to demonstrate the significance of daily life as a site of conflict and resistance.

James C. Scott, political scientist and anthropologist, passed away on 19 July 2024 at the age of 87. He was Sterling Professor of Political Science and Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University – and a farmer. His scholarship focused on agrarian societies, state power, and forms of political resistance. Scott conducted extensive fieldwork in southeast Asia. A prolific writer (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott), Scott’s books inspired scholars across many fields – and many of us in the editorial collective of Forum Kritische Archäologie (FKA) as well. His work has influenced our perspectives on the mechanisms of state power and ways of resisting or avoiding it. His challenges to traditional narratives of state formation and state control and the alleged powerlessness of the marginalized have helped us as archaeologists to think about material traces of ‘everyday forms of resistance’, ‘hidden transcripts,’ and ‘weapons of the weak.’

This research reconstructs the historical process of the formation of local political power and the state in the department of Chocó, Colombia. Throughout the text, the idea of the state as a homogeneous and aseptic entity is challenged, and it is rather understood in terms of its ambiguous and contradictory features in its practices, which even become "illegitimate". The first chapter seeks to understand the process of state formation and local power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The configuration of local power in those years represented a tense interaction between the minority 'white' political power in the territory and the majority black and indigenous population, but with limited access to the state apparatus and its institutions. In the midst of this, a relationship with Bogotá was established that positioned the territory as peripheral and abandoned throughout the twentieth century. This chapter examines the role of roads and rivers as instruments of power over the territory, since they were and are spaces through which the daily lives of the Chocoan people passed and through which the state made its way in the process of configuration. This was the perception of the local and regional powers, who had a desire to control them and to establish a particular domination over the territory. However, this attempt at domination did not go smoothly and the fires, as an apparent response of resistance to white power, show the level of confrontation and dispute that took place in the territory. Despite these disputes, at the beginning of the 20th century these conflictive relations began to change as the local political power, in its claim for autonomy from the tutelage of Bogotá, began to recognise the black population as fundamental to the development of local political life and a "better" relationship with the Andean power. In addition, the extractive processes, which involved confrontations between large mining companies, black people (artisanal miners) and local powers, highlighted the use of state instruments by the population to defend the forests and acquire mining titles. These conflicts were part of the beginning of the rapprochement between local traders, who were part of the local power, and the black mining population, as both groups were building the extractive and commercial economy from which they also benefited. Although the two sectors had different relationships with the state, this interaction is in itself evidence of the inhomogeneous and contradictory character that characterised the state-building process of those years. The second chapter shows the process of reconfiguration of political power in the territory between 1920 and 1950. These were the years of the rise of black power in the territory. The process of state 231 formation in those years was linked to the type of governance that emerged in Chocó as a result of the processes linked to the mining circuit and the department's position as the border of the recently separated Panamanian territory. This allowed for a certain capacity to negotiate with the power in Bogotá. The local power demanded autonomy, and although they obtained some, it was limited and under the watchful eye of Bogotá. This showed the capacity of the state to be present in the territory and linked the local powers to the national project. The participation of black people in mining gradually opened the way for them within the state and political power, and made concrete their intention to be part of the institutional game of the state, and the channel used was the political parties. These were central to local government. The presence of the parties led to a significant politicisation of the territory, as evidenced by the frequent electoral disputes. Thus, while the parties played a central role in access to the state and the national project, blacks who had made their fortunes in mining, trade and agriculture gradually entered popularly elected and appointed bureaucratic positions. The presence of black people and the role of commerce were central to the constitution of the territory as a liberal majority. Because access to the state was mediated through the role of political parties, the territory, like the rest of the nation, was caught up in the dynamics of partisan violence. This violence was also a manifestation of Chocó's connection to national dynamics. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church sided with the conservatives in an attempt to whip up sentiment against the liberals. However, the church's limited roots in a predominantly black area meant that its impact was limited. The rise of black power also transformed the church in the area. These changes and manifestations showed a shift in power relations within the territory. The emergence of workerism and the promotion of public education led to the definitive rise of black power in the political scenarios of the territory, coinciding with the revaluation of the black and the Chocoano, in contrast to the stereotypes coming from outside the territory. However, the rise of this new power was not without contradictions. Ethnic tensions intersected with class tensions. The rise of the blacks did not mean a break with white demands for traditional political power; on the contrary, many of them were taken up. Despite the denunciations of the state's dysfunctionality, its legitimacy does not seem to have been lost, but rather continually sought. The arrival of blacks in positions of power coincided with the rise of socialist discourse, which generated a discussion of the black question in local power circles. Moreover, this rise was indicative of a transformation that was taking place in the territory, leading to the departmentalisation of the territory. 232 The third chapter discusses the role of local power in Chocó during La Violencia and the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship between 1948 and 1957, and how different forms of social mobilisation emerged in response to political repression. Half a century of violence had a moderate impact compared to the dynamics of the Andean world. The characteristics of Chocó's liberals and conservatives showed an "affinity" to statehood in the years of the recently won departmentalisation, which in part would have distanced the possibility of confrontation with the state, although the discourse of La Violencia was used as a channel of communication with the national. Likewise, the socio-economic structure of the Chocó, with the absence of a hacienda model and the dominance of the Liberal Party, whose local militancy had no one to confront. However, the expansion of the conflict from the borders with Antioquia showed how the territory was linked to national dynamics. The violence served as a channel for the emergence of new forms of governance, in which the state of siege provoked the retreat of the Liberal Party, which capitulated to Bogotá and submitted to the temporary power of the military. Meanwhile, the conservatives were unable to capitalise on their electoral power, despite their dominance of the local state administration, because the absence of elections limited their ability to build a bureaucracy that could guarantee their permanence in local political power. Despite the low level of violence in Chocó, its existence affected the territory's relationship with the central government. The liberals were temporarily excluded from local power and the autonomy mechanisms achieved through departmentalisation were not implemented, while the imposition of military mayors was a sign of state control based on violence. Local political power was able to make traditional demands for infrastructure and state presence in the early years of the Rojas dictatorship. The figure of the governor and the Comité de Acción Chocoana were the intermediaries for these demands. Beyond the dictatorship, local power was able to consolidate its hold on the territory. The military also consolidated local political and state power in the area by attempting to dismember the department. The lack of services and infrastructure provoked a constant demand from the state, and local power, through the parties, continued to become the intermediary of this demand. In this way, Chocó was more than just a marginal territory; it had an important articulation with the process of state formation during this period. The fourth chapter focuses on the local impact of the National Front and the decentralising reforms of the Colombian state and the emergence of the violence of the armed conflict. During this period, 233 the territories were put on an equal footing in terms of their articulation with the political system. It shows that local administrations were put on an equal footing in terms of local governance and the implementation of the new regime. These changes were preceded by the death of one of the most important political leaders in Chocó and the departure of the traditional white families and the former Syrian-Lebanese traders due to the fire in Quibdó. One of the effects of the new regime was to equalise the bureaucracy, despite the fact that Chocó was a predominantly liberal area. The state thus homogenised the territories without taking into account local electoral dynamics, and the population and political power do not seem to have rebelled against such a situation. The new regime brought with it the expansion of the state and the arrival of new resources in the territory. The aim was to rehabilitate areas affected by violence and to accelerate the growth of areas lagging behind in order to prevent the outbreak of new violence. As a result of this expansion, the central, departmental and municipal governments grew, along with a decentralised parastatal bloc and the expansion of the legislative and judicial branches. This expansion brought with it the creation of new offices and bureaucracies for the territory and meant a local struggle for its control during the National Front and later years. As a result, ideological labels and party affiliations were lost in the search for access to the bureaucracy. Politics in the Chocó was reduced to the administration of elections, and it became increasingly clear that the parties were preventing social change, with the result that the support of the Chocoanos for elections, which had always been the mechanism for legitimising the political and party system and one of the main channels for linking the population to the institutions of the state, was declining. As in the rest of the country, the Chocó saw an increase in social protests, mainly demanding the extension or implementation of public services. Despite these popular demonstrations and denunciations of the absence of the state and of corruption, the leftist parties did not achieve major electoral successes, but the demands did provoke a response from the state that led to the search for a broadening of the political system. 234 The reaction of the traditional parties to the possibility of a democratic opening triggered the intensification of violence, which began to escalate in the 1980s. The "opening", however, did not mean any significant changes for the parties, for the local authorities or for the improvement of the administration of the state at the local level. Despite the denunciations of bad administration, political power continued to be shared amidst the traditional disputes within the party, which did not undergo any unfavourable changes in the eighties in terms of the electoral aspect. The point of arrival is the emergence of the violent reaction of local power and the state to the attempt to open up the state itself. It is part of the beginning of the violence of the armed conflict in Chocó.

Ziel des Meilensteins M14 ist die Verstetigung der im Rahmen von Health-X entstandenen Strukturen und Geschäftsmodelle über die Projektlaufzeit hinaus. Für die nachhaltige Weiternutzung der Ergebnisse aus Health-X wurde ein aus drei Organisationen bestehendes „magisches Dreieck“ institutionalisiert, welches im Rahmen der European Health Data Space (EHDS) Gesetzgebung operieren wird. Als erste Institution wurde der European Health Data Alliance Verein (EHDA e.V.) gegründet, der als gemeinwohlorientierte Interessensvertretung für europäische Gesundheitsdatenräume agiert, Kooperationen fördert und die Weiterentwicklung des entstandenen Tech Stacks unterstützt. Somit treibt der EHDA e.V. die Entwicklung von bürgerzentrierten Gesundheitsdatenräumen in Europa voran, wobei er Regeln für Standardisierung und Interoperabilität definiert, um EHDS-konforme Gesundheitsprodukte und Services zu ermöglichen. Der EHDA e.V. legte außerdem 12 zentrale Regeln für unter anderem Datenschutz, -sicherheit und Governance fest, an die sich alle Vereinsmitglieder sowie Organisationen im magischen Dreieck bei der Nutzung des Tech Stacks halten müssen. Als zweite Institution ist derzeit die European Health Data Platform GmbH (EHDP) als mehrheitliche Tochter des EHDA e.V. in Gründung. Die EHDP wird den in Health-X initial entwickelten Tech Stack für föderierte Datenräume und sichere Verarbeitungsumgebungen im Sinne des EHDS kontinuierlich weiterentwickeln und gemeinwohlorientiert betreiben. Somit bietet die EHDP die technisch-organisatorische Grundlage für interoperable Gesundheitsdatenräume. Als Intermediär zwischen Datenanbietern und -nutzenden stellt sie notwendige Infrastruktur- und Managementservices bereit und ermöglicht den Aufbau und den Betrieb spezifischer EHDS-konformer Gesundheitsdatenräume. Durch den Aufbau solcher Datenräume werden als dritte Instanz verschiedene kommerzielle Servicegesellschaften entstehen, die EHDS-konforme sichere Verarbeitungsumgebungen für verschiedene Anwendungsfälle anbieten. Dieses Modell sichert eine dezentrale und partizipative Governance, die sich an Werten wie Datensouveränität, Fairness, Offenheit und Transparenz orientiert. Somit schafft das magische Dreieck die Basis für eine nachhaltige und föderierte Gesundheitsdatenökonomie im Sinne der Europäischen Union.

Gerschenkron (1962) argued that public institutions such as the State Bank of the Russian Empire spurred the country’s industrialization. We test this assertion by exploiting plant-level variation in access to State Bank branches using a unique geocoded factory data set. Employing an identification strategy based on geographical distances between banks and factories, our results show improved access to public banking encouraged faster growth in factory-level revenue, mechanization, and labor productivity. In line with theories of late industrialization, we also find evidence that public credit mattered more in regions where commercial banks were fewer and markets were smaller.

The transnationalization of financial markets impacted on the fragmentation and recomposition of value chains which induced comprehensive processes of outsourcing and the commodification of bank services. This paper explores how this translates into the sectoral and internal reorganization of Brazilian banks and how work organization and social relations are affected. The case of (bank-owned as well as outsourced) call center not only reflects changes in the importance and form of service relations but also shapes a neotayorist reorganization of the labor process and the respective modes of control. As a result, a complex process of precarization and segmentation of the work force can be observed which impacts on new lines of inequality related to categories like gender, class and race. The analysis is based on a theoretical approach which refers to Michael Burawoy’s concept of the “politics of production” and categories of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory like symbolic violence. This allows an analysis of power relations which also includes the dimension of identities. Thus a more fine-grained insight can be gained on how transnational restructuring affects redistribution on a macro, meso and micro level.

This article explores how archaeo-politics generates violence woven into everyday life by analysing Israel’s archaeological apparatus in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). In light of former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to the Tell Seilun archaeological site, I examine how state and non-state actors exploit archaeology to legitimise territorial claims. I argue that archaeo-politics is not limited to a revisionist self-awareness and the way that current politics uses, misuses, and abuses archaeology. It encompasses the subtle and pervasive ways in which violence is embedded in state structures, norms, and power dynamics, ultimately perpetuating not only spatial injustice and exclusion but also becoming a factor in fuelling ongoing cycles of Israeli settlers’ oppression and direct violence against Palestinian subjects. The article investigates how archaeo-political violence is materialized through Israel’s archaeological state and non-state apparatus operating within frameworks of settler colonialism and entrepreneurism. By scrutinising American officials’ fixation on archaeological sites in internationally recognised occupied territories, I question the motives behind these activities and explore the forms of violence they engender that go beyond physical harm. This analysis contributes to understanding how archaeology is weaponised within contested landscapes, revealing the complex relationship between heritage, power, and structural violence in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and military occupation.

Zum dritten Mal erscheint mit dieser Ausgabe der Jahresbericht „Gute wissenschaftliche Praxis an der Freien Universität Berlin“. Von einer Tradition zu sprechen, wäre vielleicht etwas verfrüht. Nach drei Jahren Datenerhebung lassen sich allerdings – bei aller gebotenen Vorsicht – erste Vergleiche anstellen und Entwicklungen beobachten. Um dies zu ermöglichen, wurde die Struktur des Berichtes beibehalten, einschließlich der Kategorisierung des Fehlverhaltens. Da sich die relevanten Prozesse und Strukturen durch die Novellierung der Satzung zur Sicherung guter wissenschaftlicher Praxis im Februar 2024 nicht geändert haben, wurde erneut auf deren Beschreibung verzichtet – die Leser*innen seien hier auf den ersten Jahresbericht aus dem Jahr 20222 verwiesen. Das Sonderkapitel des vorliegenden Berichtes widmet sich diesmal dem Nagoya-Protokoll. Die Verbindung zur guten wissenschaftlichen Praxis (kurz: gwP) ist vielleicht nicht für alle Leser*innen sofort ersichtlich. Nimmt man jedoch in den Blick, dass die Berücksichtigung ethischer und rechtlicher Rahmenbedingungen einen Aspekt der gwP darstellt, so wird deutlich, dass die Befolgung des wichtigsten internationalen Abkommens zur Nutzung genetischer Ressourcen – eben das Nagoya- Protokoll – durchaus relevant für die Freie Universität ist, und zwar nicht nur für die Biowissenschaften. Wie die eingangs zitierte Denkschrift der DFG pointiert festhält, ist die gwP letztlich die conditio sine qua non aller wissenschaftlichen Bemühungen. Vor diesem Hintergrund hoffen wir, dass der vorliegende Jahresbericht nicht nur von den Ombudspersonen und unseren mit der gwP befassten Kolleg*innen studiert wird. Alle unsere Lehrenden und Forschenden sollten ein Interesse daran haben, wie es um die gwP an der Freien Universität steht, wo wir gut aufgestellt sind und wo es noch Herausforderungen gibt. Mit dem vorliegenden Jahresbericht wollen wir eine Datengrundlage liefern und damit einen kleinen Beitrag zu einer möglichst offenen, eben wissenschaftlichen Diskussion dieses Themas leisten.