The Art of Not Being Governed

An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott

Bibliographic Data

ID5823034
AuthorsGerard Boyce (0000-0001-7713-9084, University of Arizona), GEOFFREY BOYCE, Conor J Cash (University of Arizona), Sarah Launiu, Sarah Launius (University of Arizona)
Year2011
Volume43
Issue4
Pages1434-1436
Publication date2011-08-08
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntipode (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4812 • E-ISSN: 1467-8330
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00916.x
OpenAlexW2008738832
LanguageEN
References cited9

James C. Scott , The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia . New Haven : Yale University Press , 2009 . ISBN 978-0-3001-5228-9 In The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, author James C. Scott describes a massive expanse of mountainous terrain in upland southeast Asia that he calls "Zomia", which includes parts of modern-day India, Burma, China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Scott asserts that until the mid-twentieth century, Zomia served as a "zone of refuge" from pre-modern states and colonial regimes. Utilizing dynastic records, reports of pacification efforts, European records of hill populations, oral histories and the fieldwork of ethnographers such as Edmund Leach, F.K. (Chit Hlaing) Lehman, and Richard O'Connor, Scott argues that many of the agro-ecologies, social structures, religious practices, location and mobility of highland ethnic groups in mainland southeast Asia can be understood, at least in part, as strategies for maintaining autonomy from historical lowland padi states. The geomorphology of the southeast Asian massif plays an essential role in this analysis. Scott describes lowland rice-growing areas as "state space"-a relatively flat, uniform and compact landscape that facilitated transportation, the appropriation of surplus grain and the compulsion of peasant labor. The power and influence anchored in these rice-growing lowland centers dwindled with increasing elevation and the "friction" (or difficulty) of terrain. For state-subjects, the upland interior was an always-present physical "outside" to the state that impeded both centralized taxation and administration, and offered opportunities for escape and autonomous social reproduction. Scott characterizes a broad range of state-making projects (including the Han Dynasty) as dependent on and preoccupied with the accumulation of tribute and subjects. Taking what he calls a "radical constructionist" approach to highland ethnicity, Scott argues that within these "man-power" states, "ethnicity" was deployed, along with accusations of "backwardness" and barbarism, as a code word for peoples that avoided state administration, rather than a description of any kind of stable socio-cultural unit or identity. Refugees, religious heretics, runaway soldiers and slaves, and others fled from lowland rice-growing areas to the mountainous terrain of Zomia to escape taxation, slavery, military service, plague, famine and corvée labor. Lowland and highland populations, therefore, historically moved among one another, combined and dispersed, with ethnic frontiers defined more by one's relationship to the state than by any stable, essential characteristic. While Scott acknowledges that many highland ethnic groups maintained tributary, trade and other relationships with lowland states, he points to an entire suite of technologies that often made such relationships strategically advantageous to highland populations, and allowed them to flee to less accessible terrain when these relations went sour. Scott describes highlanders as practitioners of "escape agriculture", both a preferred low-labor alternative to wet-rice agriculture and a state-evading strategy utilizing shifting-field cultivation techniques for a higher return per unit of labor and little infrastructure. Such agricultural practices facilitated movement and dispersal, and could be used to produce "reserves" capable of being stored in-field for up to 2 years. Moving on from his discussion of agro-ecology, Scott discusses how the organization of marriages, leadership and inheritance in a number of Zomian cultures deliberately limited accumulation of property and esteem. This leads to one of Scott's most radical arguments-that the oral traditions and abbreviated genealogical memories of many highland ethnic groups such as the Lisu or the Karen are just this: strategies to prevent centralized organization or any attempt to establish hereditary claims to power. In a somewhat schematic way, the above arguments are complementary to, and represent roughly the inverse of, those that Scott develops in his previous book, Seeing Like a State. Through his meticulously researched arguments, Scott makes some interesting statements about the historical record in general, reminding readers that written documents often reflect both the interests and biases of the states they were produced to serve. Because evasion was a common strategy among those attempting to avoid subjugation, their histories tend to be lost or invisible. Scott ends his argument with an examination of highland millenarian religious traditions, suggesting that such beliefs and practices were, among other things, technologies for uniting otherwise physically dispersed and culturally diverse peoples to resist subordination and inherited power relations. Many of Scott's conclusions are challenging to the way that politics are typically conceptualized. In his approach there is an ethical mandate to locate hidden strength in apparent weakness and to look for strategic decisions in political fragmentation. Scott's "Zomians" (like many of the figures in his "Everyday Resistance" trilogy) display a prosaic intelligence that reveals the irony in pronouncements about their "backwardness": "[t]he effective coordinates ... for figuring out who is civilized and who is not, turn out to be not much more than an agro-ecological code for state appropriation" (336). While Scott cites Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari only once, his arguments share a theoretical affinity with and provide concrete referents for a number of ideas developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Indeed, Scott explicitly frames his historiography around a (professedly limited) assortment of nomadic and semi-nomadic groups-what Deleuze and Guattari call nomadology. The object of analysis, for Scott as much as for Deleuze and Guattari, is not power as such, but rather the material arrangements and social regimes that develop out of processes of "capture" and "escape". Similar to discussions amongst autonomous Marxists of capitalism as a thermodynamic process that seeks to turn human activity into work from which profit can be derived, Scott's proto-states represent "apparatuses of capture" accumulating subjects for the purpose of reproducing the power relations of the state through the appropriation of labor and material surplus. In his conclusion, Scott argues that modern "distance demolishing" and surveillance technologies render state-repelling and state-evading technologies relatively ineffective against the demographic, political and economic expansion of the contemporary nation-state. For this reason, Scott cautions that his analysis has limited purchase for understanding contemporary power relations within sovereign states. Yet as geographers we'd like to suggest that Scott reads space too narrowly; that contrary to his concern that "the last great enclosure" is at hand, there are always possibilities to re-constitute a commons; that neoliberal capitalism, in its abandoned infrastructure, frequent crises of governance and ease of capital flight, has constituted multiple Zomias, or zones of "refuge"; and that the "friction of terrain" continues to shape geo-political conflicts as diverse as the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, piracy along the Horn of Africa and organized crime along the US-Mexico border. As ongoing counter-insurgency efforts in highland Burma would suggest, Zomia itself remains a region of refuge for resistant ethnic and politico-military groups, albeit one that is shrinking and imperfect. In the end, Scott argues that the emancipatory project now is not to "escape Leviathan, but to tame it". We wonder why it's not desirable to do both. Given his commitments and oeuvre, we hope that Scott will be sympathetic to this critique, and suspect that he may have more to say on the topic. Regardless, The Art of Not Being Governed makes a series of compelling arguments about the histories of the highland ethnic populations examined, and their complex political relations with lowland states. As Scott argues, this model of analysis could be applied in many other geographic contexts to understand the historical constitution of (and relations between) states and non-state peoples, challenging teleological myths of "development" and backwardness to suggest a political logic underlying a host of diverse socio-spatial practices

Appropriation · Mainland · Peasant · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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