The art of not being governed by James C. Scott

JAMES C. SCOTT

The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009

442pp. ISBN  978 0 300 15228 9, £20

Reviewed by Nicholas Tapp, Australian National University

Scott’s new book, tantalising parts of which have been leaked through various seminars in the last few years, is a glorious romp through the ‘state-repelling’ spaces of what Van Schendel (2002) called ‘Zomia’, and an argument against classic theories of social evolution. There is lots of Lattimore, Wheatley, Leach, Lehman, Condominas, Wolters, Lieberman, Braudel  – but also Clastres, Richard White (1991), and ethnographers such as Michaud, Benjamin, Keyes, Jonsson, Evans, Von Gesau, Fiskesjö, Kaup, and Mueggler. Scott combines disciplines in an anthropological history and a geographical political science, ranging over several millennia with comparative examples from the Roma, Berbers, Cossacks, Seminole and Maroon, Siriono and many others. Focusing alternately on the expansion of the Han Chinese Empire and on the emergence of Tai and Burmese kingdoms, with some reference to Malay areas, the work is influenced by Burmese ethnography.

The boldness of his case (pp. xi, 32) seems to have been deliberate. Almost always a provocative statement is followed by pages of denser argument complexifying the point. More nuanced distinctions are drawn later in the book, such as between state-repelling and state-avoiding strategies (p. 278), between the state’s symbolic, political and economic ‘reach’ (p. 304), or between the symbolic, political and economic ‘reach’ of the state (ibid). Scott notes that the overall argument is ‘not novel’ (pp. xi; 130). Parts of it were anticipated by discussions on the notion of tribe in the 1960s, and the work of Morton Fried (1975), besides Braudel (1966), Clastres (1977) and Beltrán (1979). But in this form, and with reference to the regional sources it draws on, its emphasis is original.

The argument is that Zomia, comprising the hilly areas of northeast India, Bangladesh, the adjacent parts of China/Tibet and all mainland Southeast Asia (pp. 13-16) is one of the world’s ‘longest-standing and largest’ zones of refuge for peoples not yet fully incorporated into states (p. 325). Scott argues this new area is defined by ‘ecological regularities and structural relationships’ (p. 26) rather than nation-state boundaries or strategic considerations. The history of such ‘zones of refuge from the state’, comparable to the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina/Virginia, the Iraqi Marshlands, even the bandit country of China’s ‘Water Margin’ (p. 170), has been obscured by the emphasis on nation-states and the failure of the oral traditions of its stateless peoples to be recorded in written or enduring forms (26;34). Using Beltrán’s (1979) ‘regions of refuge’ and reflecting on the expansion of the Han Chinese state, Scott depicts Zomia as a ‘vast state-resistant periphery’ (p. 130). Statelessness was the normal condition for most people in the past, but this statelessness should be seen as a conscious choice by people who ‘actively resisted incorporation’ (p. 19). This region was characterised by an abundance of land and a shortage of labour, where large settled populations were the ‘key to authority and power’ (p. 42). Agrarian padi states emerged in the valleys based on the ‘logic of manpower’ (68), a concertina-like (pp. 94; 164) ‘galaxy of waxing and waning contending centres’ (p. 58) characterised by frequent raiding, slaving and instability. As a result of tyranny, slavery, corvée, taxation, conscription, warfare, famines and disease, large sections of original populations fled to the hills to take up alternative forms of agriculture, particularly shifting cultivation, which was less amenable to state control and extortion, ‘legibility and appropriation’ (p. 76). Besides early populations who had never been part of states, early valley refugees were joined later by all sorts of political rebels and heterodox cult leaders and their followers in ‘pulses of migration’ (p. 326). This resulted in an ethnic ‘vertical stacking’ of the hills (p. 141), a ‘segmentation of cultural pulses’ (p. 167), with the Akha at the top whose culture seems to have represented ‘a comprehensive rejection of states and permanent hierarchies’ (p. 177). These ‘barbarians by design’ (p. 8) are not remnants of a primitive past who somehow failed to achieve state forms of political organisation or represented less civilised states of social being, although they retained traces of an archaic past which they brought with them when they fled lowland states. Scott suggests their fluidity of ethnic identification, the heterodox religious practices they adopted, their segmentary lineage kinship structures, their egalitarian values, multiple histories and even their oral traditions were all to some extent conscious political and cultural refusals of state authority, ‘secondary adaptations’ to it. Symbols of state authority nevertheless floated up into the hills and lowland structures were poached audaciously (p. 322) by hilly social structures in a subversive ‘mimicry’. This provided a ‘dark twin’ to the state-making project (p. 326), ironically reflecting contrasts between egalitarian and hierarchical political structures in their own social organisations and religious movements (p. 289). Prophetic movements and religious heterodoxy provided the agency for substantial self-reinvention and ‘collective ethnic reformulation in the hills’ (p. 314) rising above kinship (and ethnicity) to form a ‘charismatic mode of resistance’ for acephalous societies. There was constant dialogue and exchange (p. 105) between hills and valleys in such ways (p. 26); the hills provided the manpower lowland states needed (p. 108). Scott details the processes of assimilation of lowland populations into states at the same time as the splintering of fragments of these populations into disaffected highlanders (pp. 126; 245). And he notes that the relationship of wet rice with lowland states was not invariable, as in the cases of Ifugao or Hani rice terraces (pp. 64, 192). But overall, while valleys homogenized, the hills continued to ‘fabricate … differences, heterogeneity, and new identities’ (p. 253).

The Conclusion suggests an original ‘heterarchy’, or non-hierarchical social complexity, from which agrarian states emerged, dislodging some peoples and expelling others (p. 326), declaring again that the upland societies of today should not be seen as the originary stuff from which states were made, but seen ‘largely’ as a ‘reflexive product of state-making’ (p. 327) characterized by frequent mobility and migrations.

One of the most convincing parts of the book is its critique of conventional maps; Scott emphasises the ‘friction of terrain’ – the sheer difficulties colonial administrators, from the Chinese in Guizhou to the British in Burma, had in coming to terms with the difficulties of traversing the terrain and locating administerable populations. A ‘metric that corrected for the friction of terrain’ would massively shrink navigable riverways, coasts and plains while magnifying mountains, forests, swamps, like a ‘fairground funhouse mirror’ (p. 47).

Scott is concerned to challenge the ‘civilising discourse’ of such Zomic regions as China (barbarians vs civilized; raw vs cooked) and of Southeast Asia as in the Tai ‘Kha’ category. Both social evolutionism and local discourses have relied on false assumptions of hill people ‘beyond the pale’ representing archaic forms of social organisation. Although hill and valley societies formed a ‘composite system’ (pp. 108-9, 28), the civilising narrative of state discourse painted nature to culture as hill was to valley. Scott argues powerfully that swidden agriculture is not a primitive form but a ‘state effect’ which had advantages in evading the iniquities of being subjects of a state. But he has some sympathy with the discourse since he uses its own terms so much, and ends up by saying that they got it nearly right, except we should substitute ‘state-subject/not-a-state-subject’ for ‘civilized/uncivilised’ (pp. 337; 119). He also remarks that the civilisational narrative (which he sees as an ‘agro-ecological code’, p. 101), in which non-state people gradually move downslope to become assimilated and adopt wet-rice agriculture is ‘not inherently mistaken’ (p. 119); it did describe real historical processes but not the whole picture – which included importantly flight and migrations away from states. This raises questions perhaps unanswered by historians about the extent to which such indigenous perceptions about civilization should colour our own understanding of situations.

Scott is aware that in resurrecting the dichotomy between Southeast Asian hill and valley societies he might be accused of anachronism, and is careful to excuse himself from the last 50 years of history. Yet oddly, several of his examples of flight and evasion are taken from quite recent history: the Vietnamese highlands resettlement programme (p. 12), the Hmong caught between competing nationalistic claims (p. 78), the Chinese invasion of Tibet (p. 46), the ‘peace villages’ and ‘hiding villages’ of Karen guerrilla warfare against the Burmese (p. 179), even the terrorist ‘sanctuaries’ of 9/11 (p. 127). In a sense, this argument could only be historical; one cannot help wondering if the search for a domain entirely beyond the Law, ‘a form of social organization outside state-based hierarchy and tax’ (p. 125) has in a sense forced Scott into history. Yet after reading the book one is bound to ask, to what extent our current suspicions of simplified state-society oppositions, of the state as monolithic, or marked hill-valley oppositions in the region, are actually the result of the huge changes which have taken place over the last 50 years or so?

It is encouraging to see so much attention to the widespread myths of the loss of writing in the region (considered also by Stuart Blackman [2007], in a wider Tibeto-Burman context) in Chapter 6½, and to messianism in Chapter 8. These stories undoubtedly point to a long-standing awareness of and relationship with societies with literacy. Scott suggests literacy may ‘oscillate’ as regional social structures have been said to do. Yet talking about such a huge topic as oral traditions among such a broad sweep of cultures and peoples (pp. 229-34) sometimes elides important distinctions, like gradations of textuality within the oral tradition itself. Shamanic oral traditions may be a different sort of performance altogether from public oral recitations of genealogies and from legends or founding settlement tales. The point about literacy only ever having characterised a small minority of the population is an acute one but in the Chinese context does not take into account how the written tradition travelled through popular culture via public readings, or how local stories (like deities) found their way into writing and were codified and standardised. One sees here how Scott often overdraws his argument to make an overall point which is reasonable and illuminating; there may be some positionality regarding state formations in the continuation and retention of oral traditions. This is a convincing account of the advantages of an oral tradition, but it is still quite a leap to conscious choice.

Chapter 7 elucidates Scott’s ‘radical constructivist’ position towards ethnogenesis, arguing ethnic fluidity was itself a means of evading state control, forming ‘escape social structures’ which allowed Zomian ‘social shape-shifting’ (p. 210). Identities and social units were vague, plural and fungible (p. 211), and people were ‘culturally amphibious’ (p. 254). Adopting a ‘mixed portfolio’ of social structures as well as a mixed portfolio of subsistence techniques was adaptively advantageous (p. 211); a ‘repertoire’ or ‘bandwidth’ of identities was available to be performed to suit changing circumstances (p. 254). But the materials on North Thai ethnic fluidity (p. 243) sit uncomfortably with the creation of Zhuang identity in China under the 1950s Chinese Government classification project (p. 249), let alone the clearly defined ethnic identity of the Hmong. It is surely going too far to talk of their ‘capacity to form new resistant identities at the drop of a hat’ (p. 327)! Some history is given to us as well as chosen or invented. Still the general argument stands up well, because it is elsewhere qualified with remarks about how powerful such created identities may become, and how indigenism (after Christianity, socialism and nationalism) has become a new forum for strongly felt local identities (p. 323).

Chapter 8 deals with prophetic movements and messianism in the hills, envisaging the leaders of upland millenarian rebellions (which as he notes often cross-cut ethnic distinctions) as ‘local cosmopolitans’ (p. 309) importantly concerned with processes of symbolic incorporation from lowland states, a ‘mimicry’ which Scott sees unambiguously as subversive and forming a kind of ‘cosmological bluster’ (p. 308).  Unlike most commentators, Scott sees these movements as functional and effective in the reformulations of identity they accomplish.

I think there is some confusion between the ‘Miao rebellion’ (there were actually three major ones) and the ‘Panthay’ rebellion on p. 154, although there is no such confusion when it is mentioned again (p. 285). The acceptance of Nanchao as a Tai kingdom (p. 141) is odd, but a footnote notes differences from this view. I am not sure what the authority is for the remark that the Akha ‘were considered to be among the black-bone (raw, sheng) non-Sinicizing Yi-Lolo’ (p. 176). Probably the people known today as the Hani are meant, whose relations with Akha Scott discusses accurately elsewhere in the book, but the black-bone Yi/Norsu were a quite specific group and the ‘raw’ category was applied to southern minorities en masse; it is not a synonym for black-bone as this suggests. I am not sure the Akha were the highest mountaineers (p. 141); historically it was Miao and Yao groups, surely. And Miao intermarriages were certainly not common as Scott describes in the historical period he is talking about (p. 240). Yao adoptions, yes.

The book is part of continuing efforts to interrogate the modern nation-state, its hegemonic priority in studies, and its assumed inevitable evolution from more ‘primitive’ forms of political organisation. Scott has performed a valuable service in drawing to the attention of political scientists and historians the importance of interstitial and peripheral regions in world history. Wolf (1982) showed a similar concern for historical agency and the ethnogenesis of ‘colonial tribes’, but his emphasis on global connections in the formation of other societies contrasts with Scott’s stress on active disconnections. Scott is concerned to lend agency to those who have been thought to be without it, to see conscious political choices and strategising in the historical practice of swidden agriculture, segmentary kinship structures, and oral traditions. He is very good at showing the rationality of these systems, and argues passionately for the adaptive advantages of shifting cultivation and oral traditions in escaping the predatory state. This is a strikingly different picture from the generally accepted picture of these people as reluctant, hapless victims of state agency, losers in history, robbed of productive lands, or fossilised relics of some pre-historic past. Much evidence is on Scott’s side. But the apparent endorsement of ‘self-marginalization’ as a conscious strategy must lead to serious questions for some. Yes, swidden offers freedom and no tribute, but life is immeasurably harder, and it is difficult to envisage it as a free choice – except in quite modern conditions.

Scott has had a long interest in anarchist theory and anarchy seems to be in the air as at least one other collection is now under submission (Gibson and Sillander n.d.), while Scott’s own theories on Zomia will be examined by several articles in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Global History. This book is engagingly and charmingly written, full of memorable catch phrases and striking images. It is a deeply humanitarian book, and a masterpiece of meditation on dichotomies between hill and valley, state and stateless, egalitarian and hierarchical, charismatic and traditional-bureaucratic authority. The picture may be over-painted, but it is a powerful and compelling narrative precisely because of its broad brushstrokes, and a useful corrective to a historical picture of passivity in the face of the state.

References

Beltrán, Gonzalo 1979 Regions of refuge. Washington DC: Society for Applied Anthropology. (Mon. Ser. No.12).

Blackburn, Stuart 2007 ‘Oral stories and culture areas : from northeast India to southwest China’, in South Asia : Journal of South Asian Studies 30 (3): 419-37.

Braudel, Fernand 1966 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip II. Vol. I. (trans. Sian Reynolds). New York: Harper and Row.

Clastres, Pierre 1977 Society against the state : the leader as servant and the humane uses of power among the Indians of the Americas. New York: Urizen Books.

Fried, Morton 1975 The notion of tribe. Menlo Park CA: Cummings Publishing Co.

Gibson, Thomas and Kenneth Sillander (ed.) n.d. Anarchic solidarity: autonomy, equality and fellowship in Southeast Asia (Ms. Under Submission. See also https://sites.google.com/site/charlesjhmacdonaldssite/

Schendel, Willem van 2002 ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance : jumping scale in Southeast Asia, in Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 20: 647-68.

White, Richard 1991 The middle ground: empires and republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.