Professor James C. Scott Receives RAI President’s Lifetime Achievement Award

The Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale’s MacMillan Center is delighted to announce that James C. Scott, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Anthropology and longtime member of the council, has been awarded the 2023 President’s Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) of Great Britain and Ireland. 

 

The RAI President’s Lifetime Achievement Award is given “to a person who, in the opinion of the judges, has made a fundamental, sustained, and outstanding contribution to the discipline of anthropology over the course of their career.” The award may be given to a person of any nationality, and from any sub-branch of anthropology.

 

The RAI commendation described Professor Scott as “one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century at the intersection of political science and anthropology, and much of it foregrounds the importance of long term comparative ethnographic research. Arguably, his two most influential books are Weapons of the Weak and Seeing Like a State. Overall, he has made a lifetime seminal anthropological contribution to interdisciplinary agrarian economic, social, and political development studies which has shaped international development studies over the past half century and more.”