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The dialectical relationship between the nation state and zones of relative autonomy isn’t unique to mainland , but it is of particular salience there, demarcating the social cleavage that shapes much of the region’s history: that between hill peoples and valley peoples. It led to a process of in valleys and peopling of hills, and left the latter largely absent from the historical record.

‘Stilled to silence at 500 metres’: making sense of historical change in Southeast Asia

James C. Scott (edited by Lee Gillette). in the valleys, where wet mono-crop- Thai border and the Hani in northern Viet- ment, constituting a relatively free, state- the colonial era, Europeans underwrote the ping often prevails. Swiddening (slash- nam are recognisably the same culture less population of foragers and farmers. hills’ autonomy as a makeweight against ‘Non-state spaces’ are where the state has and-burn agriculture), which requires though separated by more than 1,000 kilo- Zomia’s location at nation state frontiers lowland majorities resentful of colonial difficulty establishing its authority: moun- more land, clearing new fields and shifting metres, having more in common with each has contributed to its isolation and thus to rule. One effect was that hill peoples typi- tains, swamps, mangrove coasts, deserts, settlement sites, is far more common in other than either has with valley people its autonomy, inviting smuggling, contra- cally played little, no or an antagonistic role river deltas. Such places have often served the hills. Social structure is more flexible 50 kilometres away. Thus Zomia coheres band and opium production, and spawn- in anti-colonial independence movements. as havens of refuge for peoples resisting and egalitarian than in the hierarchical, as a region not by political unity, which it ing ‘small border powers’ that maintain a Lowland states have therefore sought or fleeing the state. Only the modern state codified valley societies. Hybrid identities, utterly lacks, but by comparable patterns tenuous quasi-independence.4 to exercise authority in the hills: military possesses the resources to bring non-state movement and social fluidity are common. of diverse hill agriculture, dispersal, mobil- occupation, campaigns against shifting- spaces and people to heel; in Southeast Early colonial officials were confused to ity and egalitarianism. Resistance, refusal, refuge cultivation, forced settlements, promoting Asia it represents the last great effort to encounter hill hamlets with several mul- What most distinguishes Zomia from Politically, Zomia’s hill populations have, lowlander migration, religious conversion, integrate people, land and resources of the tilingual ‘peoples’ living side-by-side, and bordering lowland regions is its relative according to van Schendel, ‘resisted the space-conquering roads, bridges and tel- periphery and make them contributors to both individuals and groups whose ethnic statelessness. While state-making projects projects of nation-building and state-mak- ephone lines, and development schemes the gross national product. The state might identity had shifted, sometimes within a have abounded there, few have come to ing of the states to which it belonged’. This that project government administration dub it ‘development’, ‘economic progress’, single generation. Territorial administra- fruition. Hill peoples, unlike valley peoples resistance has roots in the pre-colonial cul- and lowland cultural styles. ‘literacy’, ‘social integration’, but the real tors were constantly frustrated by peoples have neither paid taxes to monarchs nor tural refusal of lowland patterns and in low- objective is to make the economic activity who refused to stay put. tithes to a permanent religious establish- landers seeking refuge in the hills. During The hills, however, are also a space of of peripheral societies taxable and assess- cultural refusal. If it were merely a mat- able – to make it serve the state – by, for But one factor brought order to what ter of political authority, hill society might example, obliging nomads or swidden seemed to the outsider an ‘anarchy’ of resemble valley society culturally except for cultivators to settle in permanent villages, identity: altitude. As Edmond Leach sug- the former’s terrain-imposed dispersed concentrating manpower and foodstuffs. gested, looking at Zomia in terms of lateral settlement. But hill populations don’t Thus the padi-state was an ‘enclosure’ of slices through the topography elucidates a generally resemble valley centres cultur- previously stateless peoples: irrigated rice certain order.3 Many groups settled at a ally, religiously or linguistically. Zomia’s agriculture on permanent fields helped particular altitude range and exploit the languages, while exceptionally diverse, are create the state’s strategic and military agro-economic possibilities within that distinct from those of the plains. Hill peo- advantage. In fact, the permanent associa- range. The Hmong settled at high alti- ple tend to be animists who don’t follow tion of the state and sedentary agriculture tudes (1,000-2,000 metres) and plant the the ‘great tradition’ salvation religions of is at the centre of this story (a story by no , opium and that thrive there. lowland peoples. When they do, however, means confined to Southeast Asia, which From overhead or on a map groups appear it’s likely either different from (e.g. Chris- this article targets). The vast ‘barbarian’ randomly scattered because they occupy tianity) or a distinctly heterodox variant of periphery became a vital resource: human mountaintops and leave mid-slopes and lowland religions (e.g. Karen or Lahu mil- captives formed a successful state’s work- valleys to others. Specialisation by altitude lenarian Buddhism). The absence of large, ing capital. Avoiding the state used to be a and niche led to this scattering, but travel, permanent religious and political estab- real option. Today it is quickly vanishing. marriage alliances, similar subsistence lishments makes for a flat, local socio- patterns and cultural continuity fostered logical pyramid compared to valley society Zomia: stateless highlanders coherent identities across considerable A Hmong village. where status and wealth distinctions tend Southeast Asia’s non-state spaces are distances. The Akha along the Yunnan- to be supra-local and enduring, while in much diminished, yet one of the world’s the hills they’re confined and unstable. largest is the vast Southeast Asian massif. Sprawling 2.5 million square kilometres But something more fundamental is at across mainland Southeast Asia, China, work. Fernand Braudel cites an unbridge- India and Bangladesh, it’s home to 80 mil- able cultural gap between plains and lion people,1 hundreds of ethnic identities : and at least five language families. It occu- pies altitudes of 200 to 4,000 metres and ‘The mountains are as a rule a world can be thought of as a Southeast Asian apart from which are an , except that it’s not a nation; it urban and lowland achievement. Their lies far from major population centres and history is to have none, to remain always is marginal in almost every respect. Willem on the fringes of the great waves of civi- van Schendel argues that these cumulative lization…which may spread over great nation state ‘shards’ merit consideration ZOMIA distances in the horizontal plane but are as a distinctive region, calling it ‘Zomia’, powerless to move vertically when faced a term for ‘highlander’ common to sev- with an obstacle of several hundred eral Tibeto-Burman languages.2 It seems meters’.5 an unlikely candidate for region status. Its complex ethnic and linguistic mosaic has Compare Braudel’s assertion that civilisa- presented a puzzle for ethnographers and tions can’t climb hills to Oliver Wolters’s historians, not to mention would-be rulers. nearly identical assertion about pre-colo- Yet it’s impossible to provide a satisfactory nial Southeast Asia: account of the valley states without under- standing the central role played by Zomia ‘…many people lived in the distant high- in their formation and collapse. This co- lands and were beyond the reach of the evolution of hill and valley as antagonistic centers where records survive. The man- but connected is essential to making sense dalas [i.e. court centres of and of historical change in Southeast Asia. power] were a phenomenon of the low- lands...Paul Wheatley puts it well when Hill populations are far more dispersed he notes that “the Sanskritic tongue was and culturally diverse than valley popu- stilled to silence at 500 meters”’.6 lations, as if the terrain and isolation encourage a ‘speciation’ of languages, Scholars have been struck by the limits the dialects and cultural practices. Forest terrain, particularly altitude, has placed on resources and open, if steep, land allows cultural or political influence. Paul Mus more diverse subsistence practices than Map courtesy of Willem van Schendel. noted, of the spread of the Vietnamese

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and their culture, that ‘…this ethnic adven- of mainland Southeast Asia are best relationship is also contemporaneous and ‘…“marginal” tribalism…[is]…the type If this fluidity inconveniences historians, ture stopped at the foot of the high coun- understood as a fugitive population that quasi-oppositional. Older understandings of tribal society which exists at the edge state rulers find it well-nigh impossible to try’s buttresses’.7 Owen Lattimore also came to the hills over the past millennium and popular folklore about hill ‘tribes’ por- of non-tribal societies…the inconven- exercise sovereignty over people constant- remarked that Indian and Chinese civilisa- and a half not only from the Burman, Tai, tray them as ‘our living ancestors’, ‘what iences of submission make it attractive ly in motion, with no permanent organisa- tions travelled well across plains – ‘where and Siamese states but especially from the we were like before we discovered wet-rice to withdraw from political authority and tion or allegiances, ephemeral leadership, concentrated agriculture and big cities are Han Empire when the Tang, Yuan, Ming agriculture, learned to write, developed the the balance of power, the nature of the pliable and fugitive subsistence patterns, to be found’ – but stopped cold at rugged and Qing dynasties pressed into south- arts and adopted Buddhism’. This grossly mountainous or desert terrain make it and who might shift linguistic practices hills.8 west China. Their location in the hills and distorts the historical record. Hill socie- feasible. Such tribalism is politically mar- and ethnic identity. And this is just the many of their economic and cultural prac- ties have always been in touch with impe- ginal. It knows what it rejects’.12 point! Their economic, political and cul- Such hills also helped make Zomia a region tices could be termed a ‘state-effect’. This rial states in the valleys or via maritime tural organisation is a strategic adaptation of refuge.9 Far from being ‘left-behind’ by is radically at odds with older prevailing trade routes. Valley states have always But in Southeast Asia the view from the to avoid incorporation in state structures. the valleys’ progress of civilisation, hill peo- assumptions of a primeval hill population been in touch with the non-state periphery valley gains credibility because the modern And since state structures (or their ruins) ples have chosen to place themselves out abandoned by those who moved downhill – what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the local nation state has, since the Second World write history, they leave such people out of of state reach, finding freedom from taxes, and developed civilisations. Meanwhile, mechanisms of bands, margins, minori- War, increasingly occupied the ungoverned it. corvée labour, conscription, and the epi- the valley centres of wet-rice cultivation ties, which continue to affirm the rights of periphery. Before that, however, the valley demics and crop failures associated with may be seen as a ‘hill-effect’ because, segmentary societies in opposition to the view is at least half wrong, as life outside James C. Scott population concentration and mono-crop- historically speaking, the valley states are organs of state power’. Such states are, in the state was more available and attrac- is Sterling Professor of Political Science and ping. They have practiced ‘escape agricul- new structures, dating back to the middle fact, ‘inconceivable independent of that tive. Oscillation, not one-way traffic, was and Director of the Program ture’: cultivation designed to thwart state- of the first millennium C.E.; because they relationship’.10 the rule. This largely untold story has been in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, New appropriation. Even their social structure were formed from an earlier in-gathering obscured by the hegemonic civilisational Haven, Connecticut. could be called ‘escape social structure’ in of diverse peoples not previously part of Griaznov made the same case for the narrative, despite its historical impor- [email protected] its design to aid dispersal and autonomy an established state; and because early Central Asian steppes: the most ancient tance, mainly because of how history gets and ward off subordination. Hill peoples mandala states were less a military con- nomads had abandoned cultivation for written. are generally not remnants of ‘ab’-origi- quest than a cultural space available to political and demographic reasons.11 This text is distilled from part of a nal peoples but ‘runaways’ from lowland those who wished to conform to its reli- Lattimore insisted that pastoral nomad- Toward an anarchist history manuscript to be published by Yale state-making. Their agricultural and social gious, linguistic and cultural format. Per- ism arises after farming, drawing grass- Though Southeast Asia has been marked University Press in 2009 with the practices are techniques to make good on haps because such identities were newly land-edge cultivators who ‘had detached by the relative absence of states, histories tentative title of The Last Enclosure. this evasion. confected from many cultural shards, the themselves from farming communities’. of states persistently insinuated them- selves in place of histories of peoples, Notes because state centres, and their charac- 1 Michaud, Jean. 2006. Historical Dictionary teristic sedentary agricultural settlements, of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif. are the political units that leave the most Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press. physical evidence. The more rubble you 2 van Schendel, Willem. 2001. ‘Geographies leave behind, the larger your place in the of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: historical record. Dispersed, mobile, egali- Southeast Asia from the Fringes’. Work- tarian societies, regardless of sophistica- shop Paper for ‘Locating Southeast Asia: tion, and despite being more populous, are Genealogies, Concepts, Comparisons and relatively invisible in the record because Prospects’, Amsterdam, 29-31 March.. they spread their debris widely. The same 3 Leach, Edmond. 1960. ‘The Frontiers of logic applies regarding the written record. Burma’. Comparative Studies in Society and In a truly even-handed chronology of pre- History 3(1): 49-68. colonial, mainland Southeast Asia, most 4 Sturgeon, Janet. 2004. ‘Border Practices, of the pages would be blank. Are we to Boundaries, and the Control of Resource pretend that because there was no dynasty Access: A Case from China, Thailand, and in control there was no history? Moreover, Burma’. Development and Change 35(3), official mandala histories systematically 463-84. exaggerate the dynasty’s power, coher- 5 Braudel, Fernand. 1966. The Mediterranean ence and majesty (as Indrani Chatterjee and the Mediterranean World in the Age of pointed out to me, such chronicles thus do Philip II, Volume I. Translated by Sian Rey- the symbolic work of the state). If we take nolds. New York: Harper and Row. them as fact, we risk, as Richard O’Connor 6 Wolters, Oliver. 1982. History, Culture, and noted, ‘impos[ing] the imperial imagin- Religion in Southeast Asian Perspective. Sin- ings of a few great courts on the rest of the gapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Stud- region’.13 ies. 7 Hardy, Andrew. 2003. Red Hills: Migrants When the nation state was born, many hill What if we replaced these ‘imperial imag- and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam. people continued to conduct their cross- inings’ with a view of history as dominated Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. border lives as before. The concept of by long periods of normative and normal- 8 Lattimore, Owen. 1962. ‘The Frontier in ‘Zomia’ marks an attempt to explore a new ised statelessness, punctuated by short- History’. Studies in Frontier History: Col- genre of ‘area’ studies in which the justifi- lived dynastic states which left in their lected Papers, 1928-1958. Oxford: Oxford cation for designating the area has nothing wake a new deposit of imperial imagin- University Press. to do with national boundaries (e.g. ) ings? Anthony Day points us in this direc- 9 Beltran, Gonzalo Aguirre. 1979. Regions of or strategic conceptions (e.g. Southeast tion: Refuge. Washington: The Society of Applied Asia) but is rather based on ecological reg- Anthropology Monograph Series no. 12, 23 ularities and structural relationships that ‘What would the history of Southeast and passim. cross national frontiers. Asia look like…if we were to take the tur- 10 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A bulent relations between families as nor- Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo- The symbiotic history of hills mative rather than a departure from the phrenia. Translated by Brian Massum. Min- and valleys norm of the absolutist state which must neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Examining lowland societies as self- “deal with disorder”?’14 11 Griaznov, M.P. 1969. The Ancient Civiliza- contained entities adopts the hermetic tion of Southern Siberia. Translated by James view of culture that lowland elites wish An Akha woman. Photography by Thorpi Hennar. He’s talking about establishing the ele- Hogarth. New York: Cowles. to project. In reality, lowland states have mentary units of political order. Depending 12 Gellner, Ernest. 1969. Saints of the Atlas. existed in symbiosis with hill society, thus on location and date, such units might : Weidenfeld and Nicolson. it’s impossible to write a coherent history resulting valley self-representations were Far from being stages in social evolution, indeed range from nuclear families to 13 O’Connor, Richard. 1997. ‘Review of of one that ignores the other. Many valley at pains to distinguish their culture from such states and nomadic peoples are born segmentary lineages, bi-lateral kindreds, Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A people are ‘ex-hill people’ and many hill populations outside the state. Thus, if hill simultaneously and joined in a sometimes hamlets, larger villages, towns and their History of the Geo-body of a Nation’. Journal people are ‘ex-valley people’. Movement in society could be termed a ‘state-effect’, val- rancorous but unavoidable embrace of hinterlands and confederations. All were in of Asian Studies 56:1 (February): 280. one direction or the other didn’t preclude ley culture could be seen as a ‘hill-effect’. paired symbiosis and opposition. nearly constant motion; dissolving, split- 14 Day, Anthony. 1996. ‘Ties that (Un)Bind: subsequent moves. Groups have disen- ting, relocating, merging, reconstituting. Is Families and States in Pre-modern South- gaged from a state and later re-affiliated Despite this symbiosis, including a centu- Ernest Gellner offered a long overdue cor- an intelligible history possible under such ’. Journal of Asian Studies 55:2: themselves or been seized by the same or ries-old, brisk traffic in people, goods and rective to ‘the view from the valley’ or ‘the circumstances? It’s surely more daunting 398. another state; a century or two later they culture between hills and valleys, the cultur- view from the state centre’ which deems than dynastic history, but studies exist that 15 See: Leach, Edmond. 1954, 1965. The Politi- might again be beyond state grasp. Such al divide remains stark and durable. Both the ‘barbarian periphery’ a diminishing seek to grasp the logic behind the fluid- cal Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of changes were often accompanied by shifts populations generally have an essentialist remnant drawn sooner or later into ‘civi- ity.15 That’s the challenge for a non-state Kachin Social Structure. Boston: Beacon in ethnic identity. understanding of their differences that lisation’. Political autonomy is, Gellner centric history: specifying conditions for Press. appears at odds with historical evidence. insists, a choice, applying the term ‘mar- the aggregation and disaggregation of its Facets of either society have often been How can we make sense of this paradox? ginal tribalism’ to emphasise how margin- elementary units. an effect of the other. The so-called hill First, by emphasising that their symbiotic ality can be a political stance:

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