The Art of Not Being Governed - Wikipedia
The Art of Not Being Governed
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia is a book-length anthropological and historical study of the Zomia highlands of Southeast Asia written by James C. Scott and published in 2009.[1]
Contents
Argument[edit]
For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the nation state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée, epidemics, and warfare.[1][2] This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on nation-building whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless.
Scott's main argument is that these people are "barbaric by design": their social organization, geographical location, subsistence practices and culture have been carved to discourage states to annex them to their territories. Likewise, states want to integrate Zomia to increase the amount of land, resources and people subject to taxation - in other words, to raise their revenue.[3]
Zomia's ethnic groups were formed mostly by people running away from states, seeking for refuge, each of them with their own ethnicity. Adding the isolation of the terrain, these characteristics encouraged a specialization of languages, dialects and cultural practices.[3] Moreover, to remain stateless they have used this specialization along with agricultural practices that enhance mobility; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.[citation needed].
Scott admits to making "bold claims" in his book[4] but credits many other scholars, including the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres and the American historian Owen Lattimore, as influences.[4]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
^ Jump up to:a b "Refugees' Descendants in Southeast Asia Prove Stateless Society Is Possible". Truthout. Retrieved October 27, 2013.
^ "The mystery of Zomia". Boston.com. Retrieved October 27, 2013.
^ Jump up to:a b Scott, James (2009). The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press. p. 8. ISBN 9780300156522.
^ Jump up to:a b "The Battle Over Zomia". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved October 27, 2013.
External links[edit]
- Foreign Policy: Why It's Hard For Strongmen To Leave
- Reviews[edit]
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia review by Foreign Affairs
- History of people without history review by The Hindu
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia review by The Independent Institute
- Life on the Edge review by Reason
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia review by Reviews in History
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia review in Journal of Folklore Research Reviews
"James Scott has published a book making a far more ambitious argument: Zomia, he says, offers a sort of counter-history of the evolution of human civilization. . . . What Zomia presents, Scott argues . . . is nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress, in which human life has improved as societies have grown larger and more complex. Instead, for many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace."—Drake Bennett, The Boston Globe
"For those who live in states, savages are those who do not. Yet since the Enlightenment, there have always been Western intellectuals who want to find a critical role for the savage to play. The general idea has been to harness the otherness of indigenous or stateless people as a means of interrogating . . . the modern state. In the past twenty years or so, this project has dropped off drastically . . . . Scott has found a creative way to revive the tradition of critical thinking about the savage—and to highlight the social goals of equality and autonomy embodied in the Zomian social order that states routinely fall short of realizing."—Joel Robbins, Bookforum
"Scott’s panoramic view will no doubt enthrall many readers . . . one doesn’t have to see like a Zomian nor pretend to be an anarchist to appreciate the many insights in James Scott’s book."—Grant Evans, Times Literary Supplement
"While The Art of Not Being Governed makes an important contribution to the larger field of uplands studies (and not only the study of the Southeast Asian uplands), its merits lie ultimately in the questions that it raises and the trenchant skepticism with which it will leave the careful reader."—Bradley C. Davis, New Mandala: New perspectives on mainland Southeast Asia
"Scott's books is refreshingly welcome. . . . The author argues his case in a clear, comprehensible, and erudite fashion leaving readers in little doubt as to where he stands. . . . It has made a significant contribution by highlighting egalitarianism and independence as the ideals of hill societies. . . . Scott has provided us with a platform for rethinking ethnic identities and inter-ethnic relations."—Christian Daniels, Southeast Asian Studies
"If nothing else, James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed should cure the reader of putting too much faith in the smooth lines drawn on political maps. Scott's nuanced account doesn't romanticize the hill people, but he writes with sympathy about why they would want to have 'all the advantages of trade without the drudgery, subordination, and immobility of state subjects.'"—Jesse Walker, Reason.org
"In his dazzling, enlightening, and enjoyable new book, The Art of Not Being Governed, the Yale anthropologist and political scientist boldly challenges the age-old story of 'rude barbarians mesmerized by the peace and prosperity made possible by the king's peace and justice.'"—Tom Palmer, Reason
"It is a clearly and beautifully argued book. . . . The Art of Not Being Governed fits together nicely with its predecessor as a landmark work of early 21st century social science. . . . It casts patterns of history into sharp relief that would otherwise languish in obscurity."—Henry Farrell, The American Interest
"Scott's thesis puts people who have been an afterthought in Asian-area studies in the spotlight."—Ruth Hammond, The Chronicle of Higher Education
Received honorable mention for the 2009 PROSE Award in Government & Politics, presented by the The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers
Bronze medal winner of the 2009 Book of the Year Award in the Political Science category, presented by ForeWord magazine
Chosen as A Best Book of 2009, Jesse Walker, managing editor, Reason
Winner of the 2010 Fukuoka Asian Academic Prize, given by the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize Committee
A finalist in the category of Nonfiction for the 2010 Connecticut Book Award, given by the Connecticut Center for the Book
"James Scott has produced here perhaps his most masterful work to date. It is deeply learned, creative and compassionate. Few scholars possess a keener capacity to recognize the agency of peoples without history and in entirely unexpected places, practices and forms. Indeed, it leads him ever closer to the anarchist ideal that it is possible for humans not only to escape the state, but the very state form itself."—Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore
"A brilliant study rich with humanity and cultural insights, this book will change the way readers think about human history—and about themselves. It is one of the most fascinating and provocative works in social history and political theory I, for one, have ever read."—Robert W. Hefner, Boston University
"Underscores key, but often overlooked, variables that tell us a great deal about why states rise and expand as well as decline and collapse. There are no books that currently cover these themes in this depth and breadth, with such conceptual clarity, originality, and imagination. Clearly argued and engaging, this is a path-breaking and paradigm-shifting book."―Michael Adas, Rutgers University
"Finally, a true history of what pressures indigenous peoples face from these bizarre new inventions called nation states. Jim Scott has written a compassionate and complete framework that explains the ways in which states try to crowd out, envelop and regiment non-state peoples. He could take out every reference to Southeast Asia and replace it with the Arctic and it would fit the Inuit experience too. We need real applicable history that works, that fits. Truth like this, it's too darn rare."—Derek Rasmussen, former community activist in the Inuit territory of Nunavut, advisor to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
March 24, 2014
James Scott is well-known among cultural anthropologists for this and other works which challenge some long-held assumptions and axioms about traditional social structures in pre-developed regions of the world. This book, however, is also very important for general readers of history and culture and a nonacademic audience.
I leaned decades ago the general belief that minority and subordinate cultural groups surrounding or adjacent to dominant groups quite likely were driven to less-desirable and remote habitations in competition for land and resources. Scott illustrates convincingly that, in many cases, the dominant groups wanted those subordinate peoples close by to exploit them for labor, crops, taxes, and military recruitment, but that those groups commonly migrated away to avoid those same costs. In doing so, they purposely backtracked in what we would normally think of as normal cultural and technological evolution to more primitive standards, such as by going from settled farming and animal husbandry to swidden agriculture and foraging and hunting. In some cases, they even gave up literacy as less useful and less sustainable in their new lifestyles. While the dominant culture and its governors might have promised some stability and even military protection from bandits and raiders, the minority populations might have thought that, in balance, it was not a good deal.
Ground-breaking and fascinating. Scott's book is based on his long researches in Southeast Asia, but his conclusions are applicable all over the world.
I leaned decades ago the general belief that minority and subordinate cultural groups surrounding or adjacent to dominant groups quite likely were driven to less-desirable and remote habitations in competition for land and resources. Scott illustrates convincingly that, in many cases, the dominant groups wanted those subordinate peoples close by to exploit them for labor, crops, taxes, and military recruitment, but that those groups commonly migrated away to avoid those same costs. In doing so, they purposely backtracked in what we would normally think of as normal cultural and technological evolution to more primitive standards, such as by going from settled farming and animal husbandry to swidden agriculture and foraging and hunting. In some cases, they even gave up literacy as less useful and less sustainable in their new lifestyles. While the dominant culture and its governors might have promised some stability and even military protection from bandits and raiders, the minority populations might have thought that, in balance, it was not a good deal.
Ground-breaking and fascinating. Scott's book is based on his long researches in Southeast Asia, but his conclusions are applicable all over the world.
May 5, 2012
A Review
The Art of Not Being Governed
Modern Society in the 21st Century has adopted the perception that anarchist principles are beliefs that can only exist outside the concepts of civilization. Hence, it is customary to equate such conditions to those peoples that embrace the freedom and liberties that exist outside of a defined Nation-State. Peoples that fall within that category are generally considered to be untamed barbarians, savages, anti-state or otherwise classified in similar derogatory terms which translate into being outside the norm. Conventional wisdom, at least in the minds-eye of 21st Century adherents is that those living outside State control are primitive, backward societies existing in the backwaters of ever advancing civilizations.
In this book, author James C. Scott dispels many of these myths and suggests strongly that those people living outside the confines of statehood do so of their own conscious, deliberate actions to avoid the onerous dictates of those who would seek to enslave them. Obviously, his expertise is in the examination of societies in that portion of the world that he terms Zomia, i.e. those regions comprised of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Siam, Burma, Southern China and portions of India and Afghanistan. Obviously, as an anthropologist and political scientist, he is well qualified to comment with some authority on the subject. He does not however neglect to comment on similar conditions amongst other societies that have shunned civilization to avoid the onerous effects of confiscatory taxation, forced corvette labor, military conscription and enforced religious edicts.
In the cited example of Zambia, he classifies the two groups simultaneously dwelling in the region as Valley people and Hill people. The distinction is primarily based on the altitude inhabited by the two distinct groups; the Hill people are further stratified by the approximately how many meters of altitude segregate various bands or groups one from another.
The Valley people that occupy the lower terrain are principally identified as being fixed grain producing farmers that cultivate wet-rice (irrigated) crops. Hence they are much easier to identify, catalogue, and transformed into tax paying subjects owing allegiances to their rulers. Consequently, they are transformed into not necessarily willing members of the State and are considered part of a civilized society. The downside of this upward gain in status is the attendant increase in their exposure to exorbitant often confiscatory taxes, forcible servitude as corvee laborers, military conscription, and put at the risk of becoming fair game for slave traders in either the commercial sense or as enslaved by adjacent Nation-States.
The Hill people, on the other hand, living at higher altitudes in much rougher terrain are best adapted to hunting and foraging, swindling, cultivation of root crops that are less observable by the tax authorities, and living in much smaller groups; all factors that greatly enhance their mobility. Therefore they can escape the less than tender mercies of the Valley people's rulers. While they may dwell within the boundaries of the territories established by the Valley rulers, a combination of the Hill people's impenetrable terrain and the other factors mentioned make them essentially non-statists.
Scott theorizes that when conditions in the Valley deteriorated or became more onerous the Valley people would tend to migrate into the hills and renounce their claim to statehood. Hence, in frequent waves of migration the Hill People's population would increase somewhat in proportion to the severity of social/economic conditions in the valleys. These new immigrants would tend to settle at lower elevations and the established Hill People would move into bands of lands at higher elevations. The point being that by relinquishing their statehood, so-called civilized members of society would consciously and deliberately join the stateless barbarians to escape persecution by their rulers. He also notes that in the dying days of the Roman Empire a considerable number of ex-Roman citizens sought refuge and asylum amongst the ranks of the barbarians. So his observations as they relate to Zambia are apropos to similar conditions in many other parts of the world. Persecuted settled societal groups would become nomads or herdsmen, etc, etc.
The balance of Scott's thesis is a detailed examination of how and by what means the residents of Zambia adapted their living conditions, their culture, their religions, and even their language patterns in order to avoid being absorbed by the State. This adaptation has been going on for a long time - a time-frame measurable in centuries - from pre-colonial times up to and including the colonization by European States. And, continues up into the present day and age.
In today's 21st Century World there are fewer and fewer regions that are suitable uninhabited to lend themselves to those seeking to escape tyranny. In America, for example, and in many parts of Western Europe there are scant places were a liberty-minded or freedom-loving people can escape absorption and the States imposed enforcement and coercion that accompanies their forced adoption of state-hood. At best perhaps is the ability to distance ones self from the grasp of the State as much as possible.
There is, of course, a rather radical solution which is finding favor amongst a growing number of individuals who are willing to become expatriates and migrate to other countries where onerous taxation, over-regulation and the erosion of liberties are less stifling. It could be expected that as monetary controls expand and the freedom of mobility are eroded the flight to more hospitable social/economic climes will cease to be a trickle and become a gush.
R. David Read
Abbeville, Louisiana
May 5, 2012
Word count: 919
The Art of Not Being Governed
Modern Society in the 21st Century has adopted the perception that anarchist principles are beliefs that can only exist outside the concepts of civilization. Hence, it is customary to equate such conditions to those peoples that embrace the freedom and liberties that exist outside of a defined Nation-State. Peoples that fall within that category are generally considered to be untamed barbarians, savages, anti-state or otherwise classified in similar derogatory terms which translate into being outside the norm. Conventional wisdom, at least in the minds-eye of 21st Century adherents is that those living outside State control are primitive, backward societies existing in the backwaters of ever advancing civilizations.
In this book, author James C. Scott dispels many of these myths and suggests strongly that those people living outside the confines of statehood do so of their own conscious, deliberate actions to avoid the onerous dictates of those who would seek to enslave them. Obviously, his expertise is in the examination of societies in that portion of the world that he terms Zomia, i.e. those regions comprised of Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Siam, Burma, Southern China and portions of India and Afghanistan. Obviously, as an anthropologist and political scientist, he is well qualified to comment with some authority on the subject. He does not however neglect to comment on similar conditions amongst other societies that have shunned civilization to avoid the onerous effects of confiscatory taxation, forced corvette labor, military conscription and enforced religious edicts.
In the cited example of Zambia, he classifies the two groups simultaneously dwelling in the region as Valley people and Hill people. The distinction is primarily based on the altitude inhabited by the two distinct groups; the Hill people are further stratified by the approximately how many meters of altitude segregate various bands or groups one from another.
The Valley people that occupy the lower terrain are principally identified as being fixed grain producing farmers that cultivate wet-rice (irrigated) crops. Hence they are much easier to identify, catalogue, and transformed into tax paying subjects owing allegiances to their rulers. Consequently, they are transformed into not necessarily willing members of the State and are considered part of a civilized society. The downside of this upward gain in status is the attendant increase in their exposure to exorbitant often confiscatory taxes, forcible servitude as corvee laborers, military conscription, and put at the risk of becoming fair game for slave traders in either the commercial sense or as enslaved by adjacent Nation-States.
The Hill people, on the other hand, living at higher altitudes in much rougher terrain are best adapted to hunting and foraging, swindling, cultivation of root crops that are less observable by the tax authorities, and living in much smaller groups; all factors that greatly enhance their mobility. Therefore they can escape the less than tender mercies of the Valley people's rulers. While they may dwell within the boundaries of the territories established by the Valley rulers, a combination of the Hill people's impenetrable terrain and the other factors mentioned make them essentially non-statists.
Scott theorizes that when conditions in the Valley deteriorated or became more onerous the Valley people would tend to migrate into the hills and renounce their claim to statehood. Hence, in frequent waves of migration the Hill People's population would increase somewhat in proportion to the severity of social/economic conditions in the valleys. These new immigrants would tend to settle at lower elevations and the established Hill People would move into bands of lands at higher elevations. The point being that by relinquishing their statehood, so-called civilized members of society would consciously and deliberately join the stateless barbarians to escape persecution by their rulers. He also notes that in the dying days of the Roman Empire a considerable number of ex-Roman citizens sought refuge and asylum amongst the ranks of the barbarians. So his observations as they relate to Zambia are apropos to similar conditions in many other parts of the world. Persecuted settled societal groups would become nomads or herdsmen, etc, etc.
The balance of Scott's thesis is a detailed examination of how and by what means the residents of Zambia adapted their living conditions, their culture, their religions, and even their language patterns in order to avoid being absorbed by the State. This adaptation has been going on for a long time - a time-frame measurable in centuries - from pre-colonial times up to and including the colonization by European States. And, continues up into the present day and age.
In today's 21st Century World there are fewer and fewer regions that are suitable uninhabited to lend themselves to those seeking to escape tyranny. In America, for example, and in many parts of Western Europe there are scant places were a liberty-minded or freedom-loving people can escape absorption and the States imposed enforcement and coercion that accompanies their forced adoption of state-hood. At best perhaps is the ability to distance ones self from the grasp of the State as much as possible.
There is, of course, a rather radical solution which is finding favor amongst a growing number of individuals who are willing to become expatriates and migrate to other countries where onerous taxation, over-regulation and the erosion of liberties are less stifling. It could be expected that as monetary controls expand and the freedom of mobility are eroded the flight to more hospitable social/economic climes will cease to be a trickle and become a gush.
R. David Read
Abbeville, Louisiana
May 5, 2012
Word count: 919
November 29, 2018
This is a great description of a little-known area of the world and the ways in which the people there have created self-government.
Scott, politically cautious as usual, stops short of advocating for complete freedom. But this book may inspire readers to think more deeply about the role government plays in our lives and to seek out other polities where individuals quietly live in peace and liberty.
Scott, politically cautious as usual, stops short of advocating for complete freedom. But this book may inspire readers to think more deeply about the role government plays in our lives and to seek out other polities where individuals quietly live in peace and liberty.
March 26, 2011
Professor Scott's history of stateless peoples in SE Asia is thought-provoking and relevant. Scott provides examples of peoples who persistently avoid the strictures and confines of the traditional state. This work is valuable for providing a glimpse into the lives of those who chose to truly "opt out." Given the pressures of the state, the days of these people are probably numbered; Leviathan continues on the march.
In the concluding chapter, Scott nails the challenge facing humanity: "For virtually all my readers it will seem a very far cry indeed from the world they inhabit. In the contemporary world, the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it."
This is an important, approachable book and highly recommended.
In the concluding chapter, Scott nails the challenge facing humanity: "For virtually all my readers it will seem a very far cry indeed from the world they inhabit. In the contemporary world, the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it."
This is an important, approachable book and highly recommended.
October 25, 2018
I make this required reading for all my students in public policy and development
July 9, 2014
This is a historical study of the symbiotic relationships between the rice-growing valley civilizations of south and east Asia and the hill tribes along their periphery until the modern er. Far from primitive, the author explains how the hill tribes found ways to make themselves difficult to govern. This was somewhat easier to do in the days when an ox cart could carry grain sufficient to support a team for ten days--the limits of authority were restricted by logistics to a couple of hundred miles or about ten days' travel in one direction. The world of hill tribes and valley cultures really doesn't exist anymore, as advances in agriculture, communications, transportation and power projection have enabled nation states to dominate the globe without regard to terrain or distance. "The Art of Not Being Governed" provokes us to think about how and why societies organize. The author speculates that China's Great Walls did more to keep tax payers and laborers within the governed space than it did to repel invaders. The book suffers however from pedantic argument and repetition, all too common in academic texts. Read more at:
http://bookmanreader.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-art-of-not-being-governed-by-james.html
http://bookmanreader.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-art-of-not-being-governed-by-james.html
February 12, 2014
Scott’s fascinating study bears on everything we do, think and say. The arena for his inquiry is the valleys, rivers, hills and mountains of S.E. Asia. He has lived there and is familiar with the region. The wet nice irrigated paddy states occupy the valleys, hill people, his favorites; the ungoverned, forage and practice slash and burn agriculture in the hills and mountains. These are very different cultures yet they depend on each other by trading, slaving, waring and people go back and forth as they tire of a way of life. In America hippies and the establishment somewhat resemble these groups. If South East Asia seems remote remember it was not too distant for the Vietnam war.
After a few chapters Scott convinced this reader that “progress” which we so admire is really suitability to the “state”. He throws doubt on the accomplishments of the irrigated nice “paddy states”, their pagodas, cultures and wars emerge from an abundance of easily confiscated rice. Weary of such theft by officials some peasants head for the hills. The state producing, irrigated agriculture region contrasts with rugged hills where cassava grows on marginal soil. The cassava’s edible tubers are underground, out of sight, unavailable to “officials” waiting to be dug up by foragers who planted them.
Scott unravels how irrigated rice and casually cared for cassava produce entirely different cultures. These are so adamantly adhered to by their citizens that only they recognize there is a time to switch. Scott explains the permeable walls to such emphatic categories. The book is about who we are and emphasizes the uncertainty of an answer. We are several things and switch back and forth. It is a help that all this goes on on the other side of the earth. We can awake to Scott’s alarming truths about people and their societies gradually not blinded by patterns and their consequences close at hand. An odd sidelight to the paddy states and the hill people who trade with each other and form alliances in their frequent wars is that each points at the other as a primitive ancestors, “earlier we were like that.”
Fascinating asides in his book include mention that a stone age tribe who lived in abject primitiveness in Bolivia was not a relic from long ago but recent survivors of European diseases and theft holding on as best they could. Once they lived in villages and practiced agriculture. In South Africa he reveals the much observed hunter gatherer Bushmen to be recent refugees from modern states, a genetic amalgam of African’s and even Europeans. Listen to Scott – here is his last sentence: “If they merely substituted “State subject” for civilized and “not-state subject for uncivilized”, they would have it about right.
After a few chapters Scott convinced this reader that “progress” which we so admire is really suitability to the “state”. He throws doubt on the accomplishments of the irrigated nice “paddy states”, their pagodas, cultures and wars emerge from an abundance of easily confiscated rice. Weary of such theft by officials some peasants head for the hills. The state producing, irrigated agriculture region contrasts with rugged hills where cassava grows on marginal soil. The cassava’s edible tubers are underground, out of sight, unavailable to “officials” waiting to be dug up by foragers who planted them.
Scott unravels how irrigated rice and casually cared for cassava produce entirely different cultures. These are so adamantly adhered to by their citizens that only they recognize there is a time to switch. Scott explains the permeable walls to such emphatic categories. The book is about who we are and emphasizes the uncertainty of an answer. We are several things and switch back and forth. It is a help that all this goes on on the other side of the earth. We can awake to Scott’s alarming truths about people and their societies gradually not blinded by patterns and their consequences close at hand. An odd sidelight to the paddy states and the hill people who trade with each other and form alliances in their frequent wars is that each points at the other as a primitive ancestors, “earlier we were like that.”
Fascinating asides in his book include mention that a stone age tribe who lived in abject primitiveness in Bolivia was not a relic from long ago but recent survivors of European diseases and theft holding on as best they could. Once they lived in villages and practiced agriculture. In South Africa he reveals the much observed hunter gatherer Bushmen to be recent refugees from modern states, a genetic amalgam of African’s and even Europeans. Listen to Scott – here is his last sentence: “If they merely substituted “State subject” for civilized and “not-state subject for uncivilized”, they would have it about right.
July 15, 2018
This author's style of writing is not very readable for me (a retired PhD). While books and articles on various H&G societies interest me VERY much because they give glimpses of what human societies were like before the rise of "civilizations," governments, and cities, I'll have to hunt and peck my way through this book to see if I can form a view of what H&G societies were like in this area of Asia. So far, I've not found any accounts of typical life in these H&G societies; instead all I've found so far is this author's generalizations without any description of the life he is forming those generalizations from.
The Art of Not Being Governed:A great resource for my Masters Program in International Relations at the University of Oklahoma!
May 15, 2017
The Art of Not Being Governed: A great resource, arrived in great condition, with no pages missing or mark-ups. A great resource for my Masters Program in International Relations at the University of Oklahoma -- Go Sooners!
August 29, 2017
Oh, this is such an interesting book. Having traveled to Thailand and Cambodia, I wish I had read the book prior to visiting there. It is chock full of very interesting information about southeast Asia and the people who live there. What languages do they speak? What religions do they use? How do they deal with governments? I went back after finishing the book and made notes about what I had learned. These people are amazing. They want to avoid the use of force in their lives so they find ways to avoid those who want to use force. There is a lot to be learned from these people. The book is well written and well worth reading. If nothing else, learn another way to deal with the intricacies of life.
Showing 1-30
May 09, 2012Hadrian rated it really liked it
Shelves: thailand, history, china, politics-and-foreign-policy, nonfiction, burma
This volume is a history of Southeast Asia from three thousand feet - or rather, the lives of the 'hill peoples' who lived in the more mountainous and forested areas of southwest China, Himalayan India, northern Burma, Laos, and Thailand. This broad mass of land, with a current population of almost 100,000,000 people, is called 'Zomia'.
Now these areas have been targets of anthropological study for decades. What's newer here is Scott's assertion that these areas are populated by refugees from beyond the reach of predatory kingdoms and other states. They left to avoid the burdens which living in these petty monarchies entailed - that is, conscription and forced confiscation of agriculture, or a higher risk of disease.
Therefore, Scott asserts that many of their living habits were deliberately developed to be resistant to exterior control - shifting patterns of agriculture, isolated location, or rejecting the languages or familial inheritance patterns of their larger neighbors. The greatest strengths of the book are where Scott shows the shifting patterns of reaction and counter-reaction between the state and the rest of the people.
Scott is somewhat pessimistic about the future of these groups. But if the current situation of Pakistan or Burma today is of any indication, they may be even more resilient than even he suggests. (less)
Now these areas have been targets of anthropological study for decades. What's newer here is Scott's assertion that these areas are populated by refugees from beyond the reach of predatory kingdoms and other states. They left to avoid the burdens which living in these petty monarchies entailed - that is, conscription and forced confiscation of agriculture, or a higher risk of disease.
Therefore, Scott asserts that many of their living habits were deliberately developed to be resistant to exterior control - shifting patterns of agriculture, isolated location, or rejecting the languages or familial inheritance patterns of their larger neighbors. The greatest strengths of the book are where Scott shows the shifting patterns of reaction and counter-reaction between the state and the rest of the people.
Scott is somewhat pessimistic about the future of these groups. But if the current situation of Pakistan or Burma today is of any indication, they may be even more resilient than even he suggests. (less)
Oct 26, 2012James rated it it was amazing
Masterful, and even though I've been studying many aspects of history for forty years, for me it lives up to the front cover blurb by one reviewer who said it would "change the way readers think about human history - and about themselves." It's dry in places, and it took me a while to get into it, but once I did it kept me up at night reading it.
The author's theme is that in many places, peoples who have historically eked out subsistence livings in isolated and rugged environments have not been unfortunate, backward, uncivilized semi-savages, as they've been portrayed by neighboring civilizations in terms like 'our living ancestors', but rather people who've chosen to make themselves hard-to-reach and unappealing targets for control, taxation, involuntary military service, slave raiders, and so on; that they've more often than not lived contentedly and lived longer, healthier, freer lives than most people - typically poor farmers - in the 'civilized' lands they've avoided or fled; and that despite the scorn with which the farming societies in the valleys below their mountains have written about them, the two have almost always been trading partners, with the hill peoples having the upper hand in those trading relationships.
Scott focuses on highland Southeast Asia, but notes parallels in many other places. He makes his case with an incredible amount of supporting data from cultural history to linguistics to botany to trade records. He concludes, sadly, with the fact that this kind of life is rapidly becoming impossible as technology has made the hard-to-reach places accessible and population growth has kept pushing more people into areas that had always been thinly settled.
This book has been an eye-opener for me, and I'm very glad the title caught my eye. I enthusiastically recommend it for anyone interested in history, sociology, economics, and/or anthropology. (less)
The author's theme is that in many places, peoples who have historically eked out subsistence livings in isolated and rugged environments have not been unfortunate, backward, uncivilized semi-savages, as they've been portrayed by neighboring civilizations in terms like 'our living ancestors', but rather people who've chosen to make themselves hard-to-reach and unappealing targets for control, taxation, involuntary military service, slave raiders, and so on; that they've more often than not lived contentedly and lived longer, healthier, freer lives than most people - typically poor farmers - in the 'civilized' lands they've avoided or fled; and that despite the scorn with which the farming societies in the valleys below their mountains have written about them, the two have almost always been trading partners, with the hill peoples having the upper hand in those trading relationships.
Scott focuses on highland Southeast Asia, but notes parallels in many other places. He makes his case with an incredible amount of supporting data from cultural history to linguistics to botany to trade records. He concludes, sadly, with the fact that this kind of life is rapidly becoming impossible as technology has made the hard-to-reach places accessible and population growth has kept pushing more people into areas that had always been thinly settled.
This book has been an eye-opener for me, and I'm very glad the title caught my eye. I enthusiastically recommend it for anyone interested in history, sociology, economics, and/or anthropology. (less)
Jun 28, 2015André rated it liked it · review of another edition
Recommended to André by: Patrick McCormick, Mathias Jenny
Shelves: not-my-own
Just as promised, the book changed my understanding of human history indeed. At least of the history of "Zomia", the mountainous region stretching all over continental Southeast Asia. And also other commentators here were right: The author *is* very repetitive. So repetitive in fact, that I now wish I hadn't spend all that time reading through every chapter. The introduction and the conclusion chapters might have been sufficient to get the general idea Scott wanted to bring across: namely that the people living in the hilly areas in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Yunnan aren't actually pre-civilized and not as highly developed (agri-)culturally and politically as the large and relatively rich lowland states, but in fact chose to live in this way - far away from the reach of the states with their taxes, slave raids, military services etc. They fled there or stayedin the region voluntarily, escaping thus the power the state has on them. James C. Scott describes why this is the case, how it came about, and what measures the inhabitant of Zomia (Kachin, Chin, Karen, Akha, Lisu, Kinh and many more) took to be able to live off the radar. He also references Leach's work and describes in what ways the peoples in that area shift their ethnicity, culture, affiliations with smaller "statelets" and sometimes language (although I wished he would have mentioned more on language).
It's a very interesting perspective and sounds very convincing to me, however, I prefer books with more inner structure, perhaps some more conclusions inbetween and less repetition of the same facts. (less)
It's a very interesting perspective and sounds very convincing to me, however, I prefer books with more inner structure, perhaps some more conclusions inbetween and less repetition of the same facts. (less)
Dec 11, 2012Bryn Hammond rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: steppe-history
So. I've always been an anarchist in principle (didn't Merlin say in The Once and Future King, every decent person is?) and I come to this, not with a special interest in upland SE Asia, but after this on hunter-gatherers Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior and after this on pastoral nomads Pastoralists: Equality, Hierarchy, And The State, and after a brave foray into the classic Pierre Clastres too. Wherein I've learnt statelessness is common, and clung to stubbornly, which gives me hope for the species.
This one is about defections from civilization, that are much more common than our ‘civilizational discourse’ has allowed us to see. As such, its relevance is far wider than SE Asia. He draws in others' work from other areas, ethnographers' examinations of cultures wherever they have found these political strategies. At the close he says: “I have come to see this study of Zomia, or the massif, not so much as a study of hill peoples per se but as a fragment of what might properly be considered a global history of populations trying to avoid, or having been extruded by, the state.” My own area of study is steppe history, for which I have found this of the most fantastic use. I'll declare it a need-to-read, in another geography altogether.
It covers far too much to try to sum up. I found the most thought-provoking chapters to be the three last. Though in fact he calls one of them chapter 6 ½, because he's just feeling his way: it's on 'Orality, Writing and Texts', and talks about possible attitudes to writing that go dead against civilized assumptions. Might a people reject writing, the orthodoxy of a text, that is a foundation-stone of states, and feel they are better off with oral history? That was fascinating, and the next chapter is 'Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case' on the artificiality or fictionality of tribes. He comes at this from two sides. Administrators have to order populations into tribes that weren't there beforehand; but the peoples themselves have uses for a fictional ethnicity – several uses that Scott explores. This chapter includes the why of state mimicry, or what he calls 'cosmological bluster' – where tribal peoples take on the trappings of states, in ways that may be more subversive than subservient. Lastly, 'Prophets of Renewal', on the question of how and why (and what type of) religion has served in revolts of the marginal and the dispossessed. This is a terrific chapter, that does begin on explanations, and those might not be what you thought.
In the end, even though my eye was caught by that title, I wonder whether we have to call this an anarchist history? It’s a history – a neglected history, one we have been blind to, exciting to discover. (less)
This one is about defections from civilization, that are much more common than our ‘civilizational discourse’ has allowed us to see. As such, its relevance is far wider than SE Asia. He draws in others' work from other areas, ethnographers' examinations of cultures wherever they have found these political strategies. At the close he says: “I have come to see this study of Zomia, or the massif, not so much as a study of hill peoples per se but as a fragment of what might properly be considered a global history of populations trying to avoid, or having been extruded by, the state.” My own area of study is steppe history, for which I have found this of the most fantastic use. I'll declare it a need-to-read, in another geography altogether.
It covers far too much to try to sum up. I found the most thought-provoking chapters to be the three last. Though in fact he calls one of them chapter 6 ½, because he's just feeling his way: it's on 'Orality, Writing and Texts', and talks about possible attitudes to writing that go dead against civilized assumptions. Might a people reject writing, the orthodoxy of a text, that is a foundation-stone of states, and feel they are better off with oral history? That was fascinating, and the next chapter is 'Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case' on the artificiality or fictionality of tribes. He comes at this from two sides. Administrators have to order populations into tribes that weren't there beforehand; but the peoples themselves have uses for a fictional ethnicity – several uses that Scott explores. This chapter includes the why of state mimicry, or what he calls 'cosmological bluster' – where tribal peoples take on the trappings of states, in ways that may be more subversive than subservient. Lastly, 'Prophets of Renewal', on the question of how and why (and what type of) religion has served in revolts of the marginal and the dispossessed. This is a terrific chapter, that does begin on explanations, and those might not be what you thought.
In the end, even though my eye was caught by that title, I wonder whether we have to call this an anarchist history? It’s a history – a neglected history, one we have been blind to, exciting to discover. (less)
Feb 02, 2012Jill rated it it was ok · review of another edition
I'd read Scott's Seeing Like a State and had absolutely loved it - in my review, I'd described my experience reading it "as if someone's opened a window to let the light in". I wanted to love The Art of Not Being Governed and ten pages in, I had high hopes for the book - just as Seeing Like a State sought to provide a new lens with which to understand how our landscape/operating context is shaped and managed, The Art of Not Being Governed seeks to provide a new lens with which to view the relationship between the "civilised" and the "uncivilised", through the example of Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries).
Scott argues that the conventional view - that those who live in the rice-growing valleys are the civilised, while those who live in the higher altitudes, who subsist by foraging and growing crops in swiddens, have yet to be touched by civilising influences - is misguided. It is inaccurate to view the two groups as opposite ends of an evolutionary spectrum that dovetails nicely with "social Dawinism". Rather, the latter are those who have chosen to live beyond the controlling grip of the state and their social organisation (small, highly mobile groups that were highly egalitarian), agricultural practices (which emphasised mobility e.g. swiddens and crops that were easy to grow but hard for the state to appropriate e.g. root vegetables), and use of oral traditions rather than writing as a medium for transmitting knowledge are designed to evade state detection and capture. To regard the "civilised" e.g. the Hans, the Shan, the Tai, etc and the "uncivilised" e.g. the Karen, the Cossacks, the Hmong, the Miao, as monolithic entities is also misguided; both the civilised and the uncivilised were amalgamations of many different ethnic groups that were either captured or absorbed to swell the ranks, or who had chosen one side or the other for political or economic reasons. Indeed, terms for such "ethnic" groups e.g. the Miao, was often less meaningful as a term to designate a group of people who shared some common genealogy, culture or language, than it was as a term to designate "the other", in this case "not under Han control". So while we might regard the Great Wall(s) and the anti-Miao walls of Hunan as barriers to barbarism, Scott points out that "they were built just as surely to hold a taxpaying, sedentary cultivating population within the ambit of state power".
So far so brilliant? The problem was that in many ways, The Art of Not Being Governed felt like a rehash of Seeing Like a State. The context might be slightly different - Scott argues that in the European context, it is the size of a ruler's dominions that gives a sense of his power and importance. But in the Asian context, it is the manpower one could summon, than the sovereignty over land that had no value in terms of labour - that determined a ruler's effective power. But how the tension between the civilised and uncivilised was framed - the state's preference for padi, which had a predictable growing cycle and was easily valued, taxable and appropriable vs the preference of fugitive communities for swidden agriculture; the use of writing in states to shape and control the narrative and hence conception of the state, vs the pre/post-literacy of fugitive communities that preferred to use the more flexible and mutable oral tradition - was very much in the same vein as the arguments and examples in Seeing Like a State.
Moreover, I felt that that in the first few chapters of the book, Scott was essentially making the same point ad nauseum. Things picked up slightly in chapters 6 and 61/2 on "State Evasion, State Prevention: The Culture and Agriculture of Escape" and "Orality, Writing and Texts" respectively. In Chapter 6, Scott explains how "a society that cultivates roots and tubers can disperse more widely and cooperate less than grain growers, thereby encouraging a social structure more resistant to incorporation, and perhaps to hierarchy and subordination". What was interesting was his comment that it is not necessarily the case that it is in the valleys that the "civilised" dwell, while those seeking to escape the reach of the state had to flee to higher altitudes. This really depends on the characteristics of the crops that support/hinder resistance to incorporation and the altitudes at which they flourish best. The Incans for instance, lived at high altitudes while those seeking to escape their control fled to the lowlands. In Chapter 61/2, Scott argues that the lack of literacy in fugitive communities should not be seen as an indictment of their "uncivilised state"; literacy simply had no role in such societies, unlike in a state where literacy was used to codify law, for record keeping, for taxes and other economic transactions and to document the "official narrative" of the state. (Indeed, Scott reminds us that we should be wary of the version of history that we receive from the historical records, since this represents only one version, and not necessarily the most authentic version, of history).
"There is no place in any of the standard civilisational narratives for the loss or abandonment of literacy. The acquisition of literacy is envisaged as a one-way trip in just the same fashion as is the transition from shifting agriculture to wet-rice cultivation and from forest bands to villages, towns, and cities. And yet lieracy in pre-modern societies was, under the best of circumstances, confined to a minuscule portion of the population...It was the social property of scribes, accomplished religious figures, and a very thin stratum of scholar gentry in the case of the Han. To assert, in this context, that a whole society or people is literate is incorrect; in all pre-modern societies the vast majority of the population was illiterate and lived in an oral culture, inflected though it was by texts. To say that, demographically speaking, literacy hung by a thread would in many cases
be no exaggeration. Not only was it confined to a tiny elite, but the social value of literacy, in turn, depended on a state bureaucracy, an organised clergy, and a social pyramid, where literacy was was a means of advancement and a mark of status. Any event that threatened these institutional structures threatened literacy itself.
Overall, there were some lovely bits in the book but these mainly came early on in the book as Scott was framing his thesis and as I mentioned, in Chapters 6 and 61/2. Perhaps if I'd have liked this book better had this been the first book of Scott's that I'd read. But coming after Seeing Like a State, it was a bit of a disappointment. (less)
Scott argues that the conventional view - that those who live in the rice-growing valleys are the civilised, while those who live in the higher altitudes, who subsist by foraging and growing crops in swiddens, have yet to be touched by civilising influences - is misguided. It is inaccurate to view the two groups as opposite ends of an evolutionary spectrum that dovetails nicely with "social Dawinism". Rather, the latter are those who have chosen to live beyond the controlling grip of the state and their social organisation (small, highly mobile groups that were highly egalitarian), agricultural practices (which emphasised mobility e.g. swiddens and crops that were easy to grow but hard for the state to appropriate e.g. root vegetables), and use of oral traditions rather than writing as a medium for transmitting knowledge are designed to evade state detection and capture. To regard the "civilised" e.g. the Hans, the Shan, the Tai, etc and the "uncivilised" e.g. the Karen, the Cossacks, the Hmong, the Miao, as monolithic entities is also misguided; both the civilised and the uncivilised were amalgamations of many different ethnic groups that were either captured or absorbed to swell the ranks, or who had chosen one side or the other for political or economic reasons. Indeed, terms for such "ethnic" groups e.g. the Miao, was often less meaningful as a term to designate a group of people who shared some common genealogy, culture or language, than it was as a term to designate "the other", in this case "not under Han control". So while we might regard the Great Wall(s) and the anti-Miao walls of Hunan as barriers to barbarism, Scott points out that "they were built just as surely to hold a taxpaying, sedentary cultivating population within the ambit of state power".
So far so brilliant? The problem was that in many ways, The Art of Not Being Governed felt like a rehash of Seeing Like a State. The context might be slightly different - Scott argues that in the European context, it is the size of a ruler's dominions that gives a sense of his power and importance. But in the Asian context, it is the manpower one could summon, than the sovereignty over land that had no value in terms of labour - that determined a ruler's effective power. But how the tension between the civilised and uncivilised was framed - the state's preference for padi, which had a predictable growing cycle and was easily valued, taxable and appropriable vs the preference of fugitive communities for swidden agriculture; the use of writing in states to shape and control the narrative and hence conception of the state, vs the pre/post-literacy of fugitive communities that preferred to use the more flexible and mutable oral tradition - was very much in the same vein as the arguments and examples in Seeing Like a State.
Moreover, I felt that that in the first few chapters of the book, Scott was essentially making the same point ad nauseum. Things picked up slightly in chapters 6 and 61/2 on "State Evasion, State Prevention: The Culture and Agriculture of Escape" and "Orality, Writing and Texts" respectively. In Chapter 6, Scott explains how "a society that cultivates roots and tubers can disperse more widely and cooperate less than grain growers, thereby encouraging a social structure more resistant to incorporation, and perhaps to hierarchy and subordination". What was interesting was his comment that it is not necessarily the case that it is in the valleys that the "civilised" dwell, while those seeking to escape the reach of the state had to flee to higher altitudes. This really depends on the characteristics of the crops that support/hinder resistance to incorporation and the altitudes at which they flourish best. The Incans for instance, lived at high altitudes while those seeking to escape their control fled to the lowlands. In Chapter 61/2, Scott argues that the lack of literacy in fugitive communities should not be seen as an indictment of their "uncivilised state"; literacy simply had no role in such societies, unlike in a state where literacy was used to codify law, for record keeping, for taxes and other economic transactions and to document the "official narrative" of the state. (Indeed, Scott reminds us that we should be wary of the version of history that we receive from the historical records, since this represents only one version, and not necessarily the most authentic version, of history).
"There is no place in any of the standard civilisational narratives for the loss or abandonment of literacy. The acquisition of literacy is envisaged as a one-way trip in just the same fashion as is the transition from shifting agriculture to wet-rice cultivation and from forest bands to villages, towns, and cities. And yet lieracy in pre-modern societies was, under the best of circumstances, confined to a minuscule portion of the population...It was the social property of scribes, accomplished religious figures, and a very thin stratum of scholar gentry in the case of the Han. To assert, in this context, that a whole society or people is literate is incorrect; in all pre-modern societies the vast majority of the population was illiterate and lived in an oral culture, inflected though it was by texts. To say that, demographically speaking, literacy hung by a thread would in many cases
be no exaggeration. Not only was it confined to a tiny elite, but the social value of literacy, in turn, depended on a state bureaucracy, an organised clergy, and a social pyramid, where literacy was was a means of advancement and a mark of status. Any event that threatened these institutional structures threatened literacy itself.
Overall, there were some lovely bits in the book but these mainly came early on in the book as Scott was framing his thesis and as I mentioned, in Chapters 6 and 61/2. Perhaps if I'd have liked this book better had this been the first book of Scott's that I'd read. But coming after Seeing Like a State, it was a bit of a disappointment. (less)
A fairly interesting read on a region I knew little about, but this book has several problems. It feels pretty repetitive—Scott tends to make the same points over and over again. He also relies on a concept of political "choice" that is never really defined, but allows him to view pretty much all aspects of SE Asian hill societies as aligning with his own anarchist politics. Although (because?) I'm an anarchist myself, it doesn't make for a convincing or enlightening read. In many ways this book belongs to a long history of leftist idealization of societies outside civilization's reach. Oh, and don't expect a nuanced analysis of gender. However, the sections on ethnogenesis and the historical relationship between hill and valley societies were fascinating. (less)
An extensive description of ‘Zomia’, the highlands of South East Asia, spread across countries like Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, India and China. On the fringe, ungoverned, considered barbaric, but, as the author successfully argues, purposefully so.
The hills of South East Asia, like fringe societies everywhere, are regions of political resistance and cultural refusal. Not being remnants of the past, nor a homogenous ethnicity or tribe, they consist of individuals who actively avoided being taken in ...more
The hills of South East Asia, like fringe societies everywhere, are regions of political resistance and cultural refusal. Not being remnants of the past, nor a homogenous ethnicity or tribe, they consist of individuals who actively avoided being taken in ...more
Sep 25, 2014Dave rated it liked it
He has some really interesting things to say but basically just keeps repeating himself over and over. If this was something like a hundred pages it would be a lot easier for me to recommend it.
Apr 22, 2018Sebastian rated it liked it
Scott presents to us a history of Zomia: a contiguous region in southeast Asia, spanning Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, northern Myanmar, and southwest China (Yunnan, etc) whose topography and climate has made largely ungovernable. Only the book isn't really a history -- it's an anthropology. And Scott is not just talking about Zomia, but really lots of different places like the Tigris-Euphrates marshes, the American west, the Teutoburg Forest, the Darien Gap, the metaphorical woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the internet... OK, probably went too far on those last two but you get the idea.
The argument Scott is making is something like this:
- There has historically been a notion of state space and non-state space. State spaces are defined by a monopoly on coercive force within a geographic region (11).
- As time has gone the state space to non-state space ratio approaches infinity (Bir Tawil is still up for grabs!!!)
- The non-state to state transition is viewed as a sort of natural step on a continuum of human evolution. The Romans absorb the barbarians. Miao join the Han state. Etc.
- But -- and here's the real crux of the book -- this view of non-state people as pre-state people is totally wrong (337). It is an easy criticism to level given that many prefer oral to written history, practice swiddening agriculture if not hunting and gathering, lack dense cities, etc. But many of these humans are reacting to the state, forming a "purposeful statelessness". It's a choice. There is nothing that says humans have to organize into these weird, artificial state things and grow wheat in these nice rows and so forth. Civilization VI is a story written by the victors. The correct way to see these tribes is as in dialogue with the state, not suboordinate to it or andecedent on the Great Timeline of Man.
Scott talks a lot about the features of these "hill peoples" (c.f. the civilized "valley peoples"). They tend to be more egalitarian (157) -- acephalous groups are harder to co-opt into some state corvee scheme (208). Common property is the norm vs. enclosures. They prefer oral to written histories. They forage for a varied diet and practice polycropping vs. the predictable cereals of civilization. Etc. I think this goes on in a bit too much detail at a bit too much length. The important take away was that these features are so frequently cast as primitive or barbaric or pre-civilized. But what is inherently "barbaric" about oral history? What's wrong with anarchism? Enslaving ourselves to grain (Yuval Harari has a good passage about this) is arguably one of the worst things that humanity has ever done.
This point becomes even clearer when we consider that most of the non-state tribes are really just ... ethnic majorities who have fled the state. Not some long-separate and genetically distinct people. The Great Wall to some degree was in some part a program of the state to keep tax-paying citizens in the state so that their property could be more easily appropriated (173).
The frontier is actually a sort of check on state power and a place for experimentation. It should probably be a bit worrying that states have carved up the entire world. This is definitely a historical anomaly. (less)
The argument Scott is making is something like this:
- There has historically been a notion of state space and non-state space. State spaces are defined by a monopoly on coercive force within a geographic region (11).
- As time has gone the state space to non-state space ratio approaches infinity (Bir Tawil is still up for grabs!!!)
- The non-state to state transition is viewed as a sort of natural step on a continuum of human evolution. The Romans absorb the barbarians. Miao join the Han state. Etc.
- But -- and here's the real crux of the book -- this view of non-state people as pre-state people is totally wrong (337). It is an easy criticism to level given that many prefer oral to written history, practice swiddening agriculture if not hunting and gathering, lack dense cities, etc. But many of these humans are reacting to the state, forming a "purposeful statelessness". It's a choice. There is nothing that says humans have to organize into these weird, artificial state things and grow wheat in these nice rows and so forth. Civilization VI is a story written by the victors. The correct way to see these tribes is as in dialogue with the state, not suboordinate to it or andecedent on the Great Timeline of Man.
Scott talks a lot about the features of these "hill peoples" (c.f. the civilized "valley peoples"). They tend to be more egalitarian (157) -- acephalous groups are harder to co-opt into some state corvee scheme (208). Common property is the norm vs. enclosures. They prefer oral to written histories. They forage for a varied diet and practice polycropping vs. the predictable cereals of civilization. Etc. I think this goes on in a bit too much detail at a bit too much length. The important take away was that these features are so frequently cast as primitive or barbaric or pre-civilized. But what is inherently "barbaric" about oral history? What's wrong with anarchism? Enslaving ourselves to grain (Yuval Harari has a good passage about this) is arguably one of the worst things that humanity has ever done.
This point becomes even clearer when we consider that most of the non-state tribes are really just ... ethnic majorities who have fled the state. Not some long-separate and genetically distinct people. The Great Wall to some degree was in some part a program of the state to keep tax-paying citizens in the state so that their property could be more easily appropriated (173).
The frontier is actually a sort of check on state power and a place for experimentation. It should probably be a bit worrying that states have carved up the entire world. This is definitely a historical anomaly. (less)
An honest attempt at an anarchist history, well-written, and full of detail about the highlands of Southeast Asia, a place I love deeply. It presents any number of radical theories about how supposedly “primitive” peoples came to be through intention rather than any kind of putative underdevelopment. Is this an interesting theory, and one with serious potential? Absolutely. Is it something that merits further, data-driven research? Totally. Is there much in the way of data? Not so much. For a se ...more
Jun 18, 2019Celeste Teng added it
“what, after all, is the history bearing social unit? [...] The relationship of a people, a kinship group, and a community to its history is diagnostic of its relationship to stateness.”
Apr 19, 2017Aj rated it it was ok
Interesting book, interesting premise. several hundred pages longer than it needed to be.
pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, a history book about how a number of nonstate peoples in upland southeast asia have limited the influence of various configurations of state power on their autonomy. Has a fair amount of details about agriculture and terrain, which I appreciate -- I like an eye to those kind of material conditions. I particularly got into the bit about the kinds of social structures fostered by different staple foods, I've been telling everybody that sweet potato is the food of a free people. more broadly, scott makes the case that we should look at the religious, social, ethnic, economic etc organisation of these societies not just as givens, but as adaptive responses that have allowed them to evade state power. it's a provocative point that challenges a lot of things I thought I knew, and definitely deserves further thought.
this was a really good thing to read after walled states, waning sovereignty. I mean, that's a great book. but I think wendy brown is wrong that national sovereignty has been eroded in recent years. there's this fairly prevalent idea in the Anglophone leftish theory world that all certainties, all sovereignties, all state powers are being eroded in this postmodern, post-communist age. scott's historically and materially grounded work is a pretty great reality check here.
one caveat: this is definitely a bit of a slog to read. it's quite dry, plus scott is very attached to his rather laboured metaphors, and misuses the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" (a hanging offence) at least three times. it's also not what you'd call an inspirational read; at times, it's downright depressing. the societies Scott looks at were far from utopian; in fact, a lot of them were economically reliant on the slave trade. moreover, the kind of fragmentation and flexibility that's allowed these societies to maintain their autonomy is not well adapted for direct confrontation with the state. with the technologically expanded capacity of state powers to actually exert their powers to the limits of their borders, nonstate peoples can't run or hide anymore, and it's not pretty. (less)
this was a really good thing to read after walled states, waning sovereignty. I mean, that's a great book. but I think wendy brown is wrong that national sovereignty has been eroded in recent years. there's this fairly prevalent idea in the Anglophone leftish theory world that all certainties, all sovereignties, all state powers are being eroded in this postmodern, post-communist age. scott's historically and materially grounded work is a pretty great reality check here.
one caveat: this is definitely a bit of a slog to read. it's quite dry, plus scott is very attached to his rather laboured metaphors, and misuses the phrase "the exception that proves the rule" (a hanging offence) at least three times. it's also not what you'd call an inspirational read; at times, it's downright depressing. the societies Scott looks at were far from utopian; in fact, a lot of them were economically reliant on the slave trade. moreover, the kind of fragmentation and flexibility that's allowed these societies to maintain their autonomy is not well adapted for direct confrontation with the state. with the technologically expanded capacity of state powers to actually exert their powers to the limits of their borders, nonstate peoples can't run or hide anymore, and it's not pretty. (less)
Aug 11, 2018Michael W. rated it it was amazing
I reviewed this in 2011 elsewhere: "Scholars, with the exception and vision of a few such as Jared Diamond and David Christian, do not usually cut such a huge swathe of territory and time as James C. Scott does in The Art of Not Being Governed. The present book though represents the latest installment of a series of studies by Scott that speak at least at some level to anyone interested in the relationship that society has with the state. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, although he admits that research for the current volume has rendered him a historian in a sense. Certainly, his ideas and conclusions are as relevant to historians as much as to anyone else.
Histories with lens wrought wide are popular both because they are accessible and because they are relevant. Anyone who reads this volume will find themselves frequently pausing to reflect on their own society and their relationship with state institutions. This is, in a more limited sense of the term grand history, although it is mainly limited to the historical period. It follows that there is little attention to individuals (King Bodaw-hpaya of Burma is one among several exceptions)– one will find few personalities here. The focus here is one huge generalizations, some of which will surely evaporate upon close scrutiny, but many that are truly – if not absolutely convincing – thought provoking. Scott admits as much in the introduction but argues that even if some of his assumptions are wrong, the basic ideas he has offered, he is convinced, will hold to be true.
In seeking to escape the state’s stamp on history and on the register by which we interpret (and have interpreted) the world around us, Scott is unable to escape it himself in his analysis. This is, after all, not a history outside of the state but, as Scott has aptly subtitled his book, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The state as leviathan captures free, mobile populations, and makes them sedentary, controllable, and taxable and the survivors, those not dragged heel before head by state administrators and armies, have sought refuge in topographies ever more distant from and difficult to the state, until we arrive at the last major remaining bastion of non-state space, the Southeast Asian massif (elsewhere more broadly defined by Willem van Schendel as Zomia).
It follows from such a broad handling of societies, states, and geography, on such a large terrestrial canvass that the reading has been relatively broad. One cannot, perhaps, hold one seeking to write an anarchist history to the task of dealing substantially with the general literature focused on the lowland states whose reach Scott’s highland refugees have thus far skirted. There are weighty volumes of documentation of highland groups that raided the lowlands for people and things and dragged both up into the hills despite the best efforts of lowland states to secure their frontiers. For Scott, this story is an illusion, the product of state-centred historical narratives to use Prasenjit Duara’s (a scholar who is clearly influential here) terminology or “standard civilisational narrative” to use Scott’s, that obscures and warps the story of people versus the state. That narrative, Scott argues, ignores two chief facts—many (and perhaps most) people in early states were only there “under duress” and that state subjects frequently ran away.
In the untold (until now) story, nearly all people lived outside of the early states (classical Greece or Republican Rome, for example). States were mere blips on the map whose existence would have been indiscernible to the untrained eye a
1
millennium ago: “To an eye not yet hypnotized by archaeological remains and state- centric histories, the landscape would have seemed virtually all periphery and no centers” (5). For the last thousand years and more, state administrations in Southeast Asia have steadily expanded, displacing non-state spaces with state spaces, close on the heels of fleeing populations that wanted to escape control by the state. In this view, what we have thus far seen as lowland political centres securing their frontiers was everywhere really simply an act of enclosure, an attempt not to keep out, but to cement in place, mobile populations. For Scott, then, populations in the highlands are not tribal groupings that push into the lowlands, but aggregates of centuries of escapees who seek and find a new life (and form together with others new ethnic cultures) on the frontiers of lowland states, the Cossacks on the edges of the Russian steppes being a good example (260-261).
Scott turns around the discussion of the cultural, ethnic, religious, and social legacy of state formation processes in Southeast Asia (most recently examined elsewhere at length by Victor Lieberman) by suggesting that many of those features of Southeast Asian highland groups that have been viewed as original and barbaric, from the perspective of lowland civilizations, can instead be seen as a reaction to the threat of state expansion and the state-making processes that are brought with it. As Scott asserts, “Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples ... far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on a long view as political adaptations of non-state peoples to a world of states...” (9).
Some of his assertions will certainly, as Scott himself admits, invite controversy. Perhaps the best example, discussed at length by Scott, is his view of orality over literacy as a choice for a society, ensuring for a highly mobile society greater intellectual flexibility than is possible with (permanent and orthodoxy-buttressing) written documentation in rendering histories and constructing genealogies. Less convincing are Scott’s views on the relationship between religious orthodoxy/heterodoxy and upland/lowland distinctions, which is much more complicated and the areas of context located differently (relationally to the center of power) than suggested here.
This is overall an erudite book and one that will be relevant and important to anyone working on state and society in Southeast Asia, lowland and highland, premodern and modern. Its importance is not so much in its conclusions, but in the intellectual stimulation of reading the thoughts of an insightful man on a topic not often dealt with at this scale and level of analysis. The prose is so clear and unfettered with the usual social science jargon -- Scott is very self-aware as writer, includes myriad anecdotes, and makes frequent use of contractions -- the mesmerized reader has no choice but to lay down their guard. One has thus to avoid the temptation of replacing too quickly and without sufficient consideration one paradigm with another, however well crafted, once convinced by the latter’s internal logic. We are not at the end of the road here with this topic, but still at the beginning. Certainly, both the lay and the academic reader will find an intellectual engagement with the present volume immensely rewarding." (less)
Histories with lens wrought wide are popular both because they are accessible and because they are relevant. Anyone who reads this volume will find themselves frequently pausing to reflect on their own society and their relationship with state institutions. This is, in a more limited sense of the term grand history, although it is mainly limited to the historical period. It follows that there is little attention to individuals (King Bodaw-hpaya of Burma is one among several exceptions)– one will find few personalities here. The focus here is one huge generalizations, some of which will surely evaporate upon close scrutiny, but many that are truly – if not absolutely convincing – thought provoking. Scott admits as much in the introduction but argues that even if some of his assumptions are wrong, the basic ideas he has offered, he is convinced, will hold to be true.
In seeking to escape the state’s stamp on history and on the register by which we interpret (and have interpreted) the world around us, Scott is unable to escape it himself in his analysis. This is, after all, not a history outside of the state but, as Scott has aptly subtitled his book, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The state as leviathan captures free, mobile populations, and makes them sedentary, controllable, and taxable and the survivors, those not dragged heel before head by state administrators and armies, have sought refuge in topographies ever more distant from and difficult to the state, until we arrive at the last major remaining bastion of non-state space, the Southeast Asian massif (elsewhere more broadly defined by Willem van Schendel as Zomia).
It follows from such a broad handling of societies, states, and geography, on such a large terrestrial canvass that the reading has been relatively broad. One cannot, perhaps, hold one seeking to write an anarchist history to the task of dealing substantially with the general literature focused on the lowland states whose reach Scott’s highland refugees have thus far skirted. There are weighty volumes of documentation of highland groups that raided the lowlands for people and things and dragged both up into the hills despite the best efforts of lowland states to secure their frontiers. For Scott, this story is an illusion, the product of state-centred historical narratives to use Prasenjit Duara’s (a scholar who is clearly influential here) terminology or “standard civilisational narrative” to use Scott’s, that obscures and warps the story of people versus the state. That narrative, Scott argues, ignores two chief facts—many (and perhaps most) people in early states were only there “under duress” and that state subjects frequently ran away.
In the untold (until now) story, nearly all people lived outside of the early states (classical Greece or Republican Rome, for example). States were mere blips on the map whose existence would have been indiscernible to the untrained eye a
1
millennium ago: “To an eye not yet hypnotized by archaeological remains and state- centric histories, the landscape would have seemed virtually all periphery and no centers” (5). For the last thousand years and more, state administrations in Southeast Asia have steadily expanded, displacing non-state spaces with state spaces, close on the heels of fleeing populations that wanted to escape control by the state. In this view, what we have thus far seen as lowland political centres securing their frontiers was everywhere really simply an act of enclosure, an attempt not to keep out, but to cement in place, mobile populations. For Scott, then, populations in the highlands are not tribal groupings that push into the lowlands, but aggregates of centuries of escapees who seek and find a new life (and form together with others new ethnic cultures) on the frontiers of lowland states, the Cossacks on the edges of the Russian steppes being a good example (260-261).
Scott turns around the discussion of the cultural, ethnic, religious, and social legacy of state formation processes in Southeast Asia (most recently examined elsewhere at length by Victor Lieberman) by suggesting that many of those features of Southeast Asian highland groups that have been viewed as original and barbaric, from the perspective of lowland civilizations, can instead be seen as a reaction to the threat of state expansion and the state-making processes that are brought with it. As Scott asserts, “Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples ... far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on a long view as political adaptations of non-state peoples to a world of states...” (9).
Some of his assertions will certainly, as Scott himself admits, invite controversy. Perhaps the best example, discussed at length by Scott, is his view of orality over literacy as a choice for a society, ensuring for a highly mobile society greater intellectual flexibility than is possible with (permanent and orthodoxy-buttressing) written documentation in rendering histories and constructing genealogies. Less convincing are Scott’s views on the relationship between religious orthodoxy/heterodoxy and upland/lowland distinctions, which is much more complicated and the areas of context located differently (relationally to the center of power) than suggested here.
This is overall an erudite book and one that will be relevant and important to anyone working on state and society in Southeast Asia, lowland and highland, premodern and modern. Its importance is not so much in its conclusions, but in the intellectual stimulation of reading the thoughts of an insightful man on a topic not often dealt with at this scale and level of analysis. The prose is so clear and unfettered with the usual social science jargon -- Scott is very self-aware as writer, includes myriad anecdotes, and makes frequent use of contractions -- the mesmerized reader has no choice but to lay down their guard. One has thus to avoid the temptation of replacing too quickly and without sufficient consideration one paradigm with another, however well crafted, once convinced by the latter’s internal logic. We are not at the end of the road here with this topic, but still at the beginning. Certainly, both the lay and the academic reader will find an intellectual engagement with the present volume immensely rewarding." (less)
Jul 30, 2013Colin rated it it was amazing
This book is impressively multidisciplinary — the closest comparison that comes to mind is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel in the way it sets out to explore interlinked concepts across history, varying political systems, and the physical world. I have to acknowledge that my Southeast Asian history and political knowledge is minimal, one class in undergrad aside, so I’m not in a position to confirm or correct the historiography involved. That said, this book offered me insights relevant to the study of state-building; how communities at the periphery evade or resist the imposition of state authority; the intersections between ecology, agriculture, and human settlement patterns; the role of the “tribe” as a state-constructed concept; the process of community differentiation and ethno-genesis; the role of millenarian uprisings as a means of overcoming the collective action problems inherent to fractured periphery communities whose structures normally inhibit the consolidation of authority; and more.
There is some repetition between chapters of the author’s core themes and references, so if you are in a rush, the introductory chapter gives a decent summary of the argument; but I found the book as a whole to be very readable. Although subtitled an “anarchist history,” the book does not greatly over-romanticize the state-evading peoples that Scott studies, although his sympathies clearly lie with those residing outside the traditional narratives of “civilizing” state-building projects. Even though Scott cautions that the expansion of state authority in the post-World War II era (in part through technologies and new norms that have reduced tolerance for ungoverned spaces generally throughout the world) has eroded many of the social, political, and economic practices he suggests the hill people of Southeast Asia use to evade state incorporation, there are still many useful lessons here, particularly for disputed territories and not-yet-fully consolidated states elsewhere in the world. On the whole, this was a very interesting and provocative read. (less)
There is some repetition between chapters of the author’s core themes and references, so if you are in a rush, the introductory chapter gives a decent summary of the argument; but I found the book as a whole to be very readable. Although subtitled an “anarchist history,” the book does not greatly over-romanticize the state-evading peoples that Scott studies, although his sympathies clearly lie with those residing outside the traditional narratives of “civilizing” state-building projects. Even though Scott cautions that the expansion of state authority in the post-World War II era (in part through technologies and new norms that have reduced tolerance for ungoverned spaces generally throughout the world) has eroded many of the social, political, and economic practices he suggests the hill people of Southeast Asia use to evade state incorporation, there are still many useful lessons here, particularly for disputed territories and not-yet-fully consolidated states elsewhere in the world. On the whole, this was a very interesting and provocative read. (less)
No comments:
Post a Comment