'Stilled to Silence at 500 Metres'

RESEARCH The dialectical relationship between the nation state and zones of relative autonomy isn’t unique to mainland Southeast Asia, 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 state formation 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 rice 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 maize, opium and millet 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 mountains: 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 civilizations which are an Switzerland, 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 civilization 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 IIAS NEWSLETTER # 4 9 A U T U M N 0 0 8 RESEARCH and their culture, that ‘…this ethnic adven- tribes 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

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