Hills, Valleys, and States. In The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (James Scott)

James Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia” frames its argument around a “what if” question: how does our conception of history change if we question certain underlying assumptions?

Scott’s main argument challenges the belief of linear progression to statehood, upsetting the grand narrative of human progress, with the hill region of Zomia as his setting. For thousands of years, ethno-linguistically diverse groups have migrated to Zomia—a mountainous region spanning across mainland Southeast Asia roughly the size of Europe. This region became a refuge, or shatter zone, for those fleeing state expansions and its processes of slavery, conscription, taxes, epidemics, and war.

He proposes that “hill” people are “barbaric by design”. Their geographical location, mobile subsistence routine, flexible social organization, religious heterodoxy, and physical dispersion rather than being a mark of “primitives left behind civilization”, is better portrayed as an adaption to evade state capture. Hill cultural and social structures emerged out of a conscious effort to resist the valley state and to absorb the populations that flee from lowlands to the hills. Traditional conceptions of history and the state, as an evolution from statelessness, come under scrutiny by unearthing the history of hill culture that flourished in proximity to and contempt of the state.

Within Scott’s framework of anti-state social design lie complications. For one, neither state nor nonstate are unchanging concepts throughout history. Yet, both are treated as such in this chapter. The nature of polities within and across classical, early modern, colonial, and post-colonial epochs has changed drastically, but none of this political, social, and economic diversity is accounted for. Moreover, the state remains largely undefined, leaving room for interpretation.

It is clear that the permeability of state borders and flight from states was a key historical experience of interaction between state and stateless groups (hills and plains). But Scott encourages his readers to see this as the means to sustain the state-stateless dichotomy over time. In other words, to view the existence of hill culture as an adaptive mechanism of anti-state practice designed to discourage state formation. Yet, it seems quite possible, especially in premodern era, that many peoples both in and out of a given polity cared very little about the state.

Alternatively, state and stateless groups could be engaged in mutually beneficial relationship. As he himself notes, precolonial Southeast Asian states were dependent on long-distance trade, specifically of luxury forest products (aromatics, medicinals, resins) extracted and traded to lowland states by hill foragers. Thus, rather than working to destroy such groups, states may have been incentivized to form symbiotic relationships with nonstate actors to exploit key ecological niches.

When looking at the complex ethnolinguistic makeup of Zomia, it is difficult to see how the state, whatever that suggests, is the driving force behind this. While state processes certainly have forced people to seek refuge elsewhere, the adoption of new behavior practices may be influenced by many other factors.

Regardless, the book makes significant contributions to our understanding of early state formation, breaking down prior conceptions about the development of states and modern ideas of progress, while demonstrating a high degree of permeability between state and non-state groups.

Questions:

1.     How do differences in state organization (mandala, empire, city-state, nation-state) impact the interaction between state and non-state peoples

a.     This question was in response to quote 1.

2.     How do state and stateless interactions change as the state’s capacity changes?

Quotes:

1.     “The hegemony, in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate peoples. State power, in this conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle be fully projected to the very edge of its territory” (11).

2.     “Once we entertain the possibility that the barbarians are not just there as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure ot maintain their autonomy, the civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly” (8).

3.     The chapter also challenges assumptions about Southeast Asia (a topic related to last week’s classes). Scott redefines the concept of “Southeast Asia” in terms of “ecological regularities and structural relationships” rather than “national boundaries” or “strategic conceptions” (26).