The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: In The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, author James C. Scott describes a massive expanse of mountainous terrain in upland southeast Asia that he calls "Zomia", which includes parts of modernday India, Burma, China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.Scott asserts that until the mid-twentieth century, Zomia served as a "zone of refuge" from pre-modern states and colonial regimes.Utilizing dynastic records, reports of pacification efforts, European records of hill populations, oral histories and the fieldwork of ethnographers such as Edmund Leach, F.K. (Chit Hlaing) Lehman, and Richard O'Connor, Scott argues that many of the agro-ecologies, social structures, religious practices, location and mobility of highland ethnic groups in mainland southeast Asia can be understood, at least in part, as strategies for maintaining autonomy from historical lowland padi states.The geomorphology of the southeast Asian massif plays an essential role in this analysis.Scott describes lowland rice-growing areas as "state space"-a relatively flat, uniform and compact landscape that facilitated transportation, the appropriation of surplus grain and the compulsion of peasant labor.The power and influence anchored in these rice-growing lowland centers dwindled with increasing elevation and the "friction" (or difficulty) of terrain.For state-subjects, the upland interior was an always-present physical "outside" to the state that impeded both centralized taxation and administration, and offered opportunities for escape and autonomous social reproduction.Scott characterizes a broad range of state-making projects (including the Han Dynasty) as dependent on and preoccupied with the accumulation of tribute and subjects.Taking what he calls a "radical constructionist" approach to highland ethnicity, Scott argues that within these "man-power" states, "ethnicity" was deployed, along with accusations of "backwardness" and barbarism, as a code word for peoples that avoided state administration, rather than a description of any kind of stable socio-cultural unit or identity.Refugees, religious heretics, runaway soldiers and slaves, and others fled from lowland rice-growing areas to the mountainous terrain of Zomia to escape taxation, slavery, military service, plague, famine and corvée labor.Lowland and highland populations, therefore, historically moved among one another, combined and dispersed, with ethnic frontiers defined more by one's relationship to the state than by any stable, essential characteristic.While Scott acknowledges that many highland ethnic groups maintained tributary, trade and other relationships with lowland states, he points to an entire suite of technologies that often made such relationships strategically advantageous
Source: Antipode
Authors: GEOFFREY BOYCE, CONOR J. CASH, SARAH LAUNIUS
Institution: University of Arizona
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2008738832