The Art of Not Being Governed

This covers mostly peoples of Southeast Asia, such as Karen, Miao/Hmong, Wa, Kachin, Lisu, Lahu, Akha, Tai, but also in very different regions of the world, Berber, Yanomano, Siriono, Tupo-Guarani, Iroquois, Algonquin, Cossack, Gypsy...

Preface

Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thaliland, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan).

1. Hills, Valleys, and States: An Introduction to Zomia

A World of Peripheries

The Last Enclosure

Creating Subjects, p. 9

Grain farming is inherently expansionary, generating, when not checked by disease or famine, a surplus population, which is obliged to move and colonolizae new lands.

The Great Montain Kingdom; or, “Zomia”; or, The Marches of Mainland Southeast Asia, p. 16

Fernand Braudel was able to to show that the coastal societies around the Mediterranean Sea constituted a region [...]
On these grounds, hilly Zomia would seem to be a “negative” region.

p. 18

Swiddening (or slash-and-burn agriculture), which requires more land and requires clearing new fields and occasionally shifting settlement sites, is far more common in the hills.

p. 19

Resistance came especially to light after the creation of independent states after World War II.

Zones of Refuge

The Symbiotic History of Hills and Valleys

Toward an Anarchist History of Mainland Southeast Asia, p. 33

Subjects who were sorely tried by conscription, forced labor, and taxes would typically move away to the hills or to a neighboring kingdom rather than revolt. Given the vagaries of war, succession struggles, crop failures, and monarchical delusions of grandeur, such crises of state-building were unpredictable but, sooner or later, inevitable.

The Elementary Units of Political Order

2. State Space: Zones of Governance and Apropriation

The Geography of State Space and the Friction of Terrain, p. 41

Although wet-rice (padi, sawah) cultivation may offer a lower rate of return to labor than other subsistance techniques, its return per unit of land is superior to almost any other Old World crop. Wet rice thus maximizes the food supply within easy reach of the state core.

Mapping State Space in Southeast Asia

3. Concentrating Manpower and Grain: Slavery and Irrigated Rice

The State as Centripetal Population Machine

The Shaping of State Landscapes and State Subjects

Eradicating Illegible Agriculture

E Pluribus Unum: The Creole Center

Techniques of Population Control, p. 92

There is an important distinction to be made between the total population and [...] the “fiscal population” — the population which is administratively legible.

p. 93

Both the Thai and Burman crowns, in the era before internal passports and identity papers, hit on the device of tattooing much of the male population to indelebly mark one's status.

p. 95

The greater the pressure exerted on [the population], the more likely it would simply flee out of range or, in some cases, rebel.
[There are] many examples of this pattern —of the padi state, in effect killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

4. Civilization and the Unruly

Valley States, Highland Peoples: Dark Twins

The Economic Need for Barbarians

The Invention of Barbarians

The Domestication of Borrowed Finery: All the Way Down

The Civilizing Mission

Civilization as Rule

Leaving the State, Going over toe the Barbarians

5. Keeping the State at a Distance: The Peopling of the Hills

p. 127

The 9/11 Commission [...] called attention to the novel location of the terrorist threat. Rather than coming from a hostile nation-state, it came from what the commission called “sanctuaries” in the “least governed, most lawless,” “most remote,” “vast un-policed regions,” in “very difficult terrain”.
[...] What they failed to note was that much of the existing population in such areas of sanctuary were there precisely because these areas had historically been an area of refuge from state power.

p. 128

On [a] charitable view that currently prevails, such populations are thought to have been ”left behind” culturally and materially [...]
A view of hill peoples as state-repelling societies — or even antistate societies — makes far more sense of agricultural practices, cultural values, and social structure in the hills.

Other Regions of Refuge, p. 132

Despite the reversal of altitudes in the case of Inca civilization, both the Inca and the Spanish states gave rise to a state-resisting, “barbarian” periphery [...] Ironically, they even succeeded admirably in fooling an earlier generation of ethnographers into believing that scattered people such as the Yanomamo, the Siriono, and the Tupo-Guarani were the surviving remnants of ur-primitive populations.

The Peopling of Zomia: The Long March

The Ubiquity and Causes of Flight, p. 154

The greatest upheaval [in the nineteenth century was] the Taiping Rebellion from 1851 to 1864, certainly the largest peasant rebellion in world history [...]
In the twentieth century, a successful rebellion — the Communist Revolution in China — produced a new stream of migrants: defeated Republican-Kuomintang troops..

p. 158

When the Romans who controlled the province of Ifriqiya [Africa] became Christianized, the highland Berbers (whom they never fully subjugated) also became Christians — but Donatist and Arian heretics [...] When Islam swept the area the Berbers became Muslims, but soon expressed their dissent [...] by becoming Kharijite heretics.

Farmers [as opposed to hunter-gatherers] tend to breathe out nastiers germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments better able to wage wars of conquest.

[Jared Diamond]

p. 172

[Two assumptions about people living in Zomia: first] that they would prefer to be valley cultivators; [second] that they would want to avoid the stigma of “barbarity”.

p. 173

Dissimilation — not to be confused with dissimulation — refers to the more or less purposeful creation of cultural distance between societies.

6. State Evasion, State Prevention: The Culture and Agriculture of Escape

An Extreme Case: Karen “Hiding Villages”

Location, Location, Location, and Mobility

Escape Agriculture, p. 191

Shifting cultivation was a fiscally sterile form of agriculture: diverse, dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to tax or confiscate [...] The features that made swiddening anathema to states were exactly what made it attractive to state-evading peoples.

p. 195

It is not uncommon for shifting cultivators to plant, tend, and encourage as many as sixty or more cultivars.

p. 196

The Irish in the early nineteenth century grew potatoes not only because they provided many calories from the smallplots to which farmers were confined but also because they could not be confiscated or burned and, because they were grown in small mounds, an [English!] horseman risked breaking his mount's leg galloping through the field.

MAIZE

CASSAVA/MANIOC/YUCCA

Social Structures of Escape

6½. Orality, Writing and Texts

Oral Histories of Writing

The Narrowness of Literacy and Some Precedents for Its Loss

7. Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case

The Incoherence of Tribe and Ethnicity, p. 242

Lacking sharp, discontinuous changes in ritual, dress, building styles, or even language, any line of demarcation was arbitrary.

p. 245

“One might even argue that the peoples with the most powerful and lasting sense of what might be called ‘tribal’ ethnicity not merely resisted the imposition of the modern state, national or otherwise, but very commonly any state”

[E.J. Hobsbawm]

State-Making as a Cosmopolitan Ingathering

Valleys Flatten

Identities: Porosity, Plurality, Flux

Radical Constructionism: The Tribe Is Dead, Long Live the Tribe, p. 257

States and empires have been founded by peoples conventionally understood as tribes — Jinggis Khan, Charlemagne, Osman, the Manchu. And yet it would be far more correct to say that states make tribes, that to say that tribes make states.

Tribe-Making, p. 260

Depending on their location, they [Cossacks] settled among the Tatars, Circassians (whose dress they adopted), and Kalmyks, whose horseback habits and settlement patterns they copied.

p. 261

Many ethnicities can be understood as asserted structural oppositions between binary pairs: serf-versus-free Cossack, civilized-versus-barbarian, hill-versus-valley, upstream (hulu)-versus-downstream (hilir), nomadic-versus-sedentary, pastoralst-versus-grain producer, wetland-versus-dryland, producer-versus-trader, hierarchical (Shan, gumsa)-versus-egalitarian (Kachin, gumlao).

Genealogical Face Saving

Positionality

Egalitarianism: The Prevention of States

8. Prophets of Renewal

A Vocation for Prophecy and Rebellion: Hmong, Karen, and Lahu

Theodicity of the Marginal and Dispossessed

Prophets Are a Dime a Dozen

“Sooner or Later...”

High-Altitude Prophetism

Dialog, Mimicry, and Connections

Turning on a Dime: The Ultimate Escape Social Structure

Cosmologies of Ethnic Collaboration

Christianity: A Resource for Distance and Modernity

9. Conclusion

p. 324

The world I have sought to describe and understand here is fast disappearing [...] In the contemporary world, the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.
The world evoked here [...], on a long view, was the world most of mankind inhabited until recently.

State Evasion, State Prevention: Global-Local

Gradients of Secession and Adaptation

Civilization and its Malcontents