The Art Of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History Of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott

Far more than most people, I have a deep and abiding interest in the people of upland Southeast Asia. I have spent some time in my life in the region, and for some time taught and got to know people from tribes like the Kachin, Lahu, and Karen, whose well-being I was deeply interested in. To these students, I was an agent of Western civilization, someone who provided them with an education that could help better their lives, and there were some people who eagerly sought after that knowledge. Sometimes, though, the behavior of students under a great deal of stress struck me as anarchic, and this book does a good job at explaining the nature of anarchy with regards to hill peoples when one compares them to the settled people of the valleys who have long sought to dominate them. I myself come from a background of the hill people of Northern Appalachia, and this gives me a further degree of sympathy and understanding for those who dwell at the periphery of dominating states with whom ordinary people have at best an ambivalent relationship. This book is a worthwhile exploration of a period where for a large part of human history people have sought to escape from lowland domination and have sought, in some way, to live their lives in freedom while also picking and choosing what they want from the settled societies around them.

This book is a bit less than 350 pages and is divided into a variety of thematic chapters. After beginning with a preface, the book then continues to an introduction to Zomia, the author’s term for upland Southeast Asia, specifically its hills, valleys, and states (especially Han, Tai, and Burmese states) (1). This is followed by a discussion of the state space of governance and appropriation of labor and resources and people (2). After this comes a discussion of the role of irrigated rice and systems of bondage like slavery as a means of concentrating food and people under state control (3). The author then discusses the tangled relationship of civilization and the unruly (4). This is followed by a look at the peopling of the hills by those who wish to keep the state at a distance (5). The author then talks about evading and preventing the state in the culture and agriculture of escapist hill societies (6). A digression follows on orality, writing, and texts, and their political involvement in state legitimacy (6.5). The author offers a somewhat radical constructionist case for the ethnogenesis of hill societies (7), after which a significant amount of space is sent talking about the fondness of hill peoples and other oppressed groups for millenarian prophets of renewal (8). The book ends with a conclusion, notes, glossary, and an index.

To be sure, this book is not really a matter of proving particular theories of which people are descended from where, but it does indicate that far from being merely ancestral, hill peoples have had a complex relationship with the lowland societies, including as a source of captives to be turned into agricultural laborers as well as a refuge for people seeking to escape from systems of domination and control or collapsing valley societies. If this book is by no means perfect, it is highly evocative in demonstrating that the anarchy of hill tribes is not an accident of history but a deliberate choice on the part of the people who live there. Not everyone wants to live under the control of lowland elites as unfree laborers with their culture wiped out, their autonomy taken away from them, and turned into drudges engaged in boring and frustrating agricultural and other forms of labor. Indeed, not everyone in contemporary societies want to live under the surveillance of governments or businesses or want their behavior to be controlled by governments. Not everyone wants to pay ruinous taxation or be regularly exploited by others like greedy landlords and cheating company stores designed to put and keep people in debt. The presence of spaces outside of central control allow people to be free, and present a check upon the rapacity of elites in the core of states. The knowledge that people can escape from intolerable tyranny and go to a more tolerable situation, whether that be another society or free territory where one can survive by foraging or hunting or different forms of agriculture, ought to be a check on the tendency of states to seek total domination of those people under their misrule.