Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, running to about 230 pages of text, opens by making the important analytical point that in any political system the visible record, or “public transcript”, is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations. Rather, it is typically the self-portrait of dominant elites, reflecting how they would like their subordinates and the wider world to see them.

Alongside the public transcript is always a “hidden transcript” constituting what the powerless really think of the powerful. This finds expression in a wide variety of social practices, including rumour, gossip, folktale, song, gesture, humour and theatre. In many societies, it is the channel through which matters that often cannot be voiced aloud do in fact find an outlet. Infrapolitics, as Scott calls it, is disguised, unobtrusive and resistant. It is also the foundation on which visible political outbursts are built.

As an example, Scott cites (on page 212) the formation of the Solidarity trade union in Poland in August 1980: “Behind 1980, then, lay a long prehistory, one comprising songs, popular poetry, jokes, street wisdom, political satire, not to mention a popular memory of the heroes, martyrs, and villains of earlier popular protest. Each failure lay down another sedimentary layer of popular memory that would nourish the movement of the 1980s.” The Burmese pro-democracy uprising in 1988 is a direct parallel.

While those who lived through it still have solid memories, it is surely important to gather as much data as possible about the Ne Win era. What were the social spaces in which offstage dissent could be uttered? How were they reshaped as the powerful and the powerless struggled to control territory? What were the key social practices through which the hidden transcript was assembled? How did they change over time? What was contained in that transcript? By the end of the period, which sentiments were predominant? What were the slogans that captured the mood of the people?

I don’t know of any systematic attempt to create an archive of this kind. In democratizing Myanmar, where universities are slowly being reconstructed from the ruins left by the junta that dissolved itself in March 2011, I hope it will be possible to focus on this critical dimension of national history.