Art of Not Being Governed
they lack the substance: a taxpaying subject population or di- rect control over their constituent units, let alone a standing army. Hill polities are, almost invariably, redistributive, com- petitive feasting systems held together by the benefits they are able to disburse. When they occasionally appear to be rela- The Art of Not Being tively centralized, they resemble what Barfield has called the Governed “shadow-empires” of nomadic pastoralists, a predatory periph- ery designed to monopolize trading and raiding advantages at An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia the edge of an empire. They are also typically parasitic inthe sense that when their host-empires collapse, so do they.45 James C. Scott Zones of Refuge There is strong evidence that Zomia is not simply a region of resistance to valley states, but a region of refuge as well.46 By “refuge,” I mean to imply that much of the population in the hills has, for more than a millennium and a half, come there to evade the manifold afflictions of state-making projects in the valleys. Far from being “left behind” by the progress of civiliza- 45 Thomas Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeol- ogy and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, Terrance N. D’Altroy, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–41. Karl Marx identified such para- sitic, militarized peripheries engaged in slave-raiding and plunder on the fringe of the Roman Empire as “the Germanic mode of production.” For the best account of such secondary state formation by the Wa people, see Mag- nus Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History,” Ph.D.
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