Anna Praz - 11301 Master Degree in Development Studies

The Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland

________________________________________________________________________________ Geneva, April 11, 2011

Course: Topics in Globalization, Transnationalism and Post-colonialism

Instructor: Professor A. Monsutti Teaching assistant: F. Nuoffer Spring Term 2011

J. C. Scott and “The Art of Not Being Governed”

State-centered societies, today dominant, are by far the last to develop in the history of mankind.

“Zomia” a term coined in 2002 by the historian W. V. Schendel1, is currently to be reckoned as one of

the broadest areas still remaining outside the grip of state structures. This region covers the highlands

of South-East Asia, China and India including Vietnam, Laos, a little corner of Cambodia, Northern

Thailand, Northern Burma, North Eastern India, and the large Southern provinces of China.2 Despite

still labeled as “primitive people”, the populations living in Zomia do not happen to live “at the

margins” by chance: they have deliberately fled state structures. This is the main argument of James C.

Scott, in his recently published work: “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic history of Upland

Southeast Asia”.

J. Scott is a current and well-renown American anthropologist, Sterling Professor of political science at

Yale University and coordinator of its Agrarian Studies Program. His work has focused extensively on

Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and Burma, where he has carried out field work and looked closely

at local indigenous peoples, minority ethnic groups and peasant societies. This author has to be

inscribed in the trend of Subaltern Studies emerged at the end of the 80s, with the purpose of

1 J.C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University Press, 2009,

preface 2 Ibid., p.21

approaching history and realities “from the margins” of modern post-colonial societies.3 “The Art of Not

Being Governed” comes at the apogee of the J.C. Scott’s achievements in this realm.

The study looks at the inhabitants (about 100 million people)4 of the hills touching the borders of

eight Southeast Asian nations-states, and explores both the motives for their escape and their social,

political and economic systems in relation to the ones of the below valleys. These hills, about 200-250

meters above the level of the sea, have represented for more than a millennium both a zone of

resistance and a zone of refugee. Their inhabitants have chosen to live in the uplands at the periphery

of states in order to evade the manifold afflictions that these centralized structures would impose on

them.

Several factors have urged such populations to run away from states’ incorporation. Throughout

Southeast Asian history, central states, argues the author,5 have appeared as predatory “centripetal

population machines” which would not have consolidated without forcibly agglomerating a large

number of people together on flat lands. States have systematically replenished manpower through

mechanisms of forcible resettlement, slave acquisition, kidnapping and general use of force. The same

search for arable land and subjugable populations has been at the core of states’ instability, inasmuch

both civil wars and wars of conquest have been somehow functional to the consolidation of their

sovereignty. Conflicts increased scarcity and famines, whose major victims were normally peasants -

often not in control of the yields they harvested. In order to build up their apparatuses states levied

heavy tax on their populations, installed systems of conscription, forced labor and other forms of

centralized exploitation. In response to such conditions, fleeing up in the hills has represented

historically a very convenient move for those populations.

With respect to livelihoods strategies, if valleys were characterized by fixed agriculture, especially rice-

cultivation (padi fields) in order to centralize manpower, hill people’s subsistence routines have

3 D. Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies. Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia,

London, 2001, introduction

4 J. C. Scott, op. cit., preface

5 Ibid., p.64

deliberately avoid permanent settlement and fixed-field farming. In order to avoid raiding, plundering,

state-making and state appropriation, these populations have been practicing swiddening cultivation

and shifting agriculture.6 Swiddening cultivations offer the advantage of a relative autonomy and

freedom, and allow farmers to dispose of their own labor and its fruits. 7 In this respect the argument

the author advances is very strong: the agricultural techniques of these populations, different from the

ones in the mainland, are not a symptom of backwardness8 but they are political choices with

comparative economic advantages. Common property, dispersed and small cultivations, and the choice

of crops privileging low storability and labor intensity, are all strategies in order to avoid state

appropriation and exploitation. However, the diversity in the economic provision of uplands

populations does not per se imply complete isolation from valleys’ economies. Trade, purchase and

exchange of commodities between the cores and the peripheries has occurred in the past and is

inevitable now, in a time of globalization and erosion of states borders.9

Just as there are economic landscapes that are resistant to appropriation and subordination, so there are

social organizations alike. In the uplands of South East Asia peripheral political structures are always

variable and adjusting to the state systems that make up their immediate environment.10 Broadly

speaking, in order to evade incorporation, societies tend to move towards simpler, smaller and more

dispersed social units, which are acephalous aggregates of households relating to each other on

equalitarian basis. Populations in Zomia are less to be understood as peoples rather than they are as

tribes.11

These populations have been characterized by an extreme equalitarianism, and have found several ways

to avoid the creation of hierarchical structures: firstly by emphasizing the equality of status competition, 6 Ibid., p.185

7 J. C. Scott, op. cit., p.191 8 As evolutionist theorists would claim with the assumption that the degree of societal advancement has gone

along with the degree of sedentariness of an agriculture. Ibid., p.187 9 Ibid. p.205

10 Ibid., p.207 11 The author stresses that tribes should not be understood as a prior to states, but as social formations in response to them. In this regard a particular social mechanism is a stake in Zomian societies: “Divide and not be ruled”. Division into very elementary structures is not a sign of primitivism, but a choice this population make in order to avoid the formation of central-state apparatuses. Ibid., p.209:

and refusing to allow too prominent or wealthy families to aspire to the chiefdom status. Secondly, by

creating a sort of political structure that dissimulates chiefly authority, without real substance – for

instance in assigning symbolic power to a family and real economic one to another one. Finally by

promoting societal structures that repudiates any form of hereditary wealth accumulation and class

difference.12 In a few words, equality, autonomy and mobility are probably the three terms better

characterizing the socio-economic structures of hill populations.13 In particular the term “mobility” is

well applicable to their very ethnic identity. Who are actually Zomia’s inhabitants? How can they be

described in terms of ethnicity?

If the operationalization of tribes and ethnicity often follows the lines of a culture, language, religion, in

a relatively rigid way, it is very hard to say the same for the populations living in the uplands. Beside the

tendency of these population to speak more than two languages, they can almost described as

amphibians, living closely in symbiosis with one another, and absorbing whatever treat they deem

appropriate in order to avoid cultural incorporation by states. The constant interflow of languages,

ideas, adapted traditions, makes it very difficult to identify them as modern “nations”. Although it has

happened that the rise of nationalism and institutional hegemony of the nation-state has urged some

Zomian groups to aspire to their own nation-statehood, this has not become the rule in the region,

whose historical trends have rather shown a propensity towards ethnic fluidity. Again, a choice that

remains essentially political.14

Non-literacy is another feature of these populations. The term “non-literacy” is not to be confused with

the one of illiteracy. Uplands populations do not lack cultural life (illiteracy) but rely extensively on oral

tradition. The absence of written texts has avoided any stigmatization of power relations and has

provided freedom of maneuver in adapting, according to the situation, to different traditions. Moreover

written texts have usually served state elites for the purpose of administration, fiscal control and

accountability, which do not touch the people in Zomia. On the other hand their oral traditions are, not

12 Ibid., p. 214 13 Ibid., p.217 14 Ibid., p.241

only of a more democratic nature - the ability to tell stories does not require particular schooling and it

can be learnt in simple environments - but also of a richer and more flexible one: they entail singing,

gestures and rituals that would not be fully expressible by the sole written text, and survive through the

process of retelling. They do not arise to stabilize or assert a claim to power, but are living expressions

of societies that capture adjustments, modifications and new interpretations in the course of time, thus

remaining always full of meaning.

In the last chapters of the book J. Scott expands its analysis of “state-resistance” beyond the socio-

political and economic realms. Resistance has not only been ideological but also physical: the difficulty

of keeping out of the state has entailed a certain number of uprising and insurgencies from the part of

the hill populations. States used to stigmatize them for their backwardness and made such

stigmatization instrumental for getting control over lands, livestock and trade routes. The local

reactions have sometimes been violent, especially from the side of populations like the Hmong, Karen

and Lahu which are renown in the region to have a particular vocation for rebellion.15 Such uprising

were led by prophetic figures able to call their people out to resistance with their charisma and their

faith. In this regard hermit monks, shamans and would-be prophets have played a central role for social

cohesion in most hill societies, prompting them to resist states’ invasions and to “reinvent” themselves

outside their primary context, when the situation required it. To what kinds of beliefs did these figures

refer? Once again, extreme mobility has distinguished religious affiliation of such populations. If,

usually, most emancipatory messages have rested upon local legends, it could happen that also lowland

religions like Buddhism, and even Christianity may be infused with them.

Overall, the author argues, Zomia represents one of the largest and longest standing “shatter zone”16,

where populations have fled in search for shelter away from state structures. Demographically,

economically, politically, socially and culturally speaking these uplands have represented a conscious

strategic choice against modern nation states’ exploitation and absorption. From the standpoint of the

15 J. C. Scott, op. cit., p.284 16Ibid., p.326

modern world these populations are still called “savages”, “uncivilized” or “barbarian”.17 At a closer

analysis, their “uncivilization” is rooted in the relation core-periphery, and in the association of

peripheries with backwardness or under-development. J. Scott suggests, this needs to be put in

perspective. In the first place the term “periphery” itself comes from a state-centric optic. In this paper

“periphery” has been used to indicate populations living “at the periphery of states”, inasmuch the

inhabitants of Zomia actually happen to live at the borders of modern-nation states. By no means the

intention of the author is to belittle their importance. On the contrary the J. Scott shakes our notion of

“periphery” and “civilization” by emphasizing the main value that those populations prioritize when

fleeing from state structures: freedom. Their living outside the schemes of profit maximization,

individualism, modern rationality, is a deliberate choice to preserve their identity from the oppression

of modernity. By rejecting the modern nation-state, these populations have agency over the dominant

system and are not its simple by-product. The current “civilization narrative” can only remain in place

if a simplistic view of the world – the view of the dominants – is advanced with the claim that

“dominant” means in a way “better”. Once this notion it is deconstructed, the populations living in the

hills of Southeast Asia utterly lose their “barbarity”, and can be clearly perceived as another beautiful

and different expression of mankind.

ANNEX

Zomia

J. C. Scott, op. cit., p.17

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale University

Press, 2009

The Art of Not Being Governed, J.C. Scott, interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwrUsib4vU

retrieved April 11, 2011

D. Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies. Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization of South Asia, London 2001.