A Special Screening of “In A Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott”

“The film draws from nearly thirty hours of oral history interviews with Professor Scott and affiliated scholars at Yale and UC Berkeley to trace the intellectual journey of the award-winning social scientist from his childhood in New Jersey through each of the ground-breaking works he produced throughout his accomplished career.
The Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, with appointments in anthropology and the school of forestry and environmental studies, is regarded by many as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. Throughout his career, his scholarship became a series of major interventions that impacted dozens of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.”
The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.
This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.
It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

Todd Holmes is a Historian and Associate Academic Specialist with the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in California and the American West, his work focuses on the history of politics, business, environmental regulation, and agriculture in the region.
His documentary “In a Field All His Own: The Life and Career of James C. Scott” offers an unprecedented look at the famed Yale political scientist.