ABSTRACT
The indirect and nonviolent, but very real and well recognized, challenges that avoidance protest poses for the existing order contrast with the hidden, non-disruptive occurrence of everyday resistance. The attention given to “everyday resistance” and “avoidance protest” has developed into a fundamental reassessment of the approach to peasant societies and rural protest that dominated the work of social scientists through much of the 1960s and 1970s. When peasants or other subordinate groups turn to responses that involve open confrontation with those whom they identify as the source of their suffering, they do so because everyday and avoidance tactics are ineffective. Riots and rebellions signal the breakdown of the uneasy and ever-shifting networks of dominance and dependency that provide the essential contexts for everyday and avoidance protest. Both tactics of everyday resistance and modes of avoidance protest are key ways by which peasants and other subordinate groups test and challenge, and sometimes force changes in, hegemonic systems.
