ABSTRACT
Recent discussion of ‘resistance’, especially resistance to development intervention, has stressed that it is all too easy to overemphasise the opposition of the supposed resisters. To construe the actions of apparently less powerful groups as resistance leaves the developers at the centre of the analysis and defines agency in very limited terms. Put simply, what people do may be neither acquiescence nor resistance to development, but formed and influenced by all sorts of factors which are unconnected to development activity. Relatedly, a sharp division between those who resist and those who are resisted is not always tenable; relations of domination and subordination are not so fixed. As Ortner (1995) has pointed out, a weakness of many resistance studies is their ‘ethnographic thinness’; their partial and limited view of the constitution of complex societies.
