Introduction
During the last three decades, several works have focused on the attempts by Southeast Asian states to bring hill groups living in their margins under routine administration. But, while much has been written on the policies of integration and of assimilation that those states have implemented,Footnote 1 we know very little about the ways in which highlanders have responded to modern state policies,Footnote 2 except for accounts of short-lived millenarian rebellions. The relative lack of scholarly interest for this topic may be interpreted with reference to prejudices that theories of social evolution and narratives of civilization convey. According to a still dominant, but misleading, imagery, ‘backward’ hill tribes live entrenched in remote places, hemmed in by immemorial traditions. They are believed not to be amenable to change and progress, to be reluctant to adopt ‘stateness’, or to be the passive recipients of policies that escape their common understanding. Hill ‘tribes’, and more widely ‘ethnic groups’, are thought to be less capable of initiative than of impulsive reactions. In this view, modernity, openness to the world, and the development of nation-states are quite the opposite of the backwardness, primitivism, conservatism, and centrifugal forces that ‘ethnic groups’ are supposed to embody.
In a recent and self-proclaimed anarchist version of this duality, James C. Scott argues that the Southeast Asian Massif was not simply a refuge for political opponents of the state in pre-modern times but also a zone of refusal to be culturally taken over by the state.Footnote 3 In full convergence with the view of Pierre Clastres and his controversial Society against the state, Scott considers that hill peasants form state-preventing as well as state-repelling societies, because of typical features such as mobility, physical dispersion, and strong egalitarianism. Although antagonism to the state was undoubtedly an important factor contributing to the ethnogenesis of some Southeast Asian hill communities, it must be noted that most of them are not egalitarian. Strongly stratified societies have long existed in the Southeast Asian Massif, such as the Nosu of south-western Sichuan.Footnote 4 Social structure among hill peasants is systematically based on the elder/younger hierarchical dichotomy, which opens the way, together with economic disparities, to more or less elaborated forms of domination and alienation. Moreover, Scott’s assumption that hill groups are self-governing peoples resisting expansionary states and their heavy regime of taxation is too simplistic. The author minimizes the fact that a significant proportion of the mountain peoples living in south-western China have been subjected, from the Song Dynasty on, to the tusi system of indirect rule through native officials, which extended more or less successful state control and taxation to the margins. He also forgets that, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Karen were integrated into the Burmese and Thai kingdoms as taxpayers, and as major producers of the goods that entered Asia’s long distance trade.Footnote 5
The marginality of the hill peoples also needs to be debated. Scott is the first to admit that ‘peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economically to the lowlands and to world trade’, and that ‘they appear to have provided most of the products valued in international commerce’.Footnote 6 Hill societies were not only central in the worldwide trade of pre-modern times, they also played an important role, though a neglected one, in the building of modern nation-states. As E. Balibar pointed out, peripheries have never been marginal in the fabric of nations but are at their very centre.Footnote 7 They are sites where migrations are more or less regulated, where various ideologies and cultures intermingle, and where the feeling of social inequity reaches its greatest magnitude. This general statement applies to the Southeast Asian Massif, which for millennia was not only at the interface of contending states but was also the main transit corridor followed by people migrating from China to populate Southeast Asia. From this perspective, Scott’s idea that mountains divide in contrast with the sea’s unifying function needs to be considered with greater nuance.Footnote 8 Historically, the Massif was more an intermixing and linking zone than a dividing one. Although the centre may have a meaning related to state control, it also has another more fundamental meaning. This second meaning applies to sites where national identity is forged through intense interactions with cultural and political otherness. In such a perspective, hill societies of the interstate Southeast Asian Massif were likely to become as much nation-state-shaping as state-repelling and state-preventing societies. This article shows that hill peoples not only offered a foundation and a refuge to nationalist insurgents but that they also formed contingents of fighters for the advent of ‘popular democracies’, and at the ideational level they served as models or anti-models for defining the criteria of citizenship.
Intricacy is a salient feature of the highlanders’ political economy that Scott and other promoters of dualism fail to grasp. This is why I propose another approach, less obtrusive but hopefully more accurate. Its purpose is to offer a comprehensive view of the past and present interactions linking the hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia to their lowland neighbours and to the wider world. To achieve such a goal I consider their patterns of organization, the dynamics of their settlement, their land rights, and the asymmetric nature of their relationships with local states. Concerning these relationships, I take into account both the ways in which highlanders are perceived and instrumentalized by lowland societies, and the various responses that they have elaborated to external pressure and to the current process of cultural engulfment that they are facing. Finally, in the last part of the article, I question the future of the Southeast Asian Massif highlanders in the age of globalization, by examining the effects of their increasing access to transport facilities, extended trade networks, international contacts, flows of information, and the new synergies and partnerships that emerge from all these developments. Although I concur with Scott that, since the Second World War, the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies has changed the balance of power between hill peoples and nation-states,Footnote 9 the fact remains that hill peoples have been facing this challenge since the 1980s with new kinds of support and technologies, which modify the representations that they have of themselves and of their relationship with the state. During the last three decades, they have built complex partnerships with new agents coming from civil society or from the outside world, whose concerns and activities may conflict with local state policies, especially when they intend to ‘protect’ hill communities, their traditional way of living, and their natural environment. Among these agents are various relief and environmentalist NGOs, reporters working for national or international media networks, new Buddhist movements aimed at the development of remote areas, and promoters of ‘cultural’ tourism.
Are the concepts of Zomia, as proposed by van Schendel and Scott, or of a Southeast Asian Massif (Michaud) useful to such a problématique? These notions undoubtedly share a commendable intention, which is to extract the studies on minorities of the transnational borderland between India, China, and Southeast Asia from their academic marginality. However, one of the difficulties raised by the term Zomia is that its boundaries as a physical space and as a social space are not coextensive. As a physical space, Zomia encompasses lowland states or statelets and hill societies, both living in close connection within the same ecological transect. For example, Chiang Mai, Kengtung, or Jinghong, which were for centuries the capitals of powerful Tai lowland states, are part of the zone. As a consequence, to use Zomian as a label for highlanders may be reductionist and misleading. From this point of view, the notion of a ‘Southeast Asian Massif’ is more accurate, and that is why I shall refer to it in the following pages.
Another difficulty lies in the fact that the promoters of Zomia, or of the Southeast Asian Massif studies limit their perspective to upland communities of the past. Entirely focused on the ethnohistory of mountain peoples, they convey the idea that they do not exist any more in the features that characterize them in contrast to state societies. Thus the various works published by Jean Michaud deal with highlanders before the Second World War.Footnote 10 As for Scott, he recognizes, in his most recent book, that Zomians may have ceased to exist after 1945, because sovereign nation-states now project their power to their outermost territorial borders.Footnote 11 Following such an approach, Zomians tend to alliterate with zombies: that is, destructured peoples whose adaptation to modernity is uncertain. In fact, these peoples cannot be considered as ‘the last of the Mohicans’. They are certainly more integrated in local nation-states than before, but they fight with new tools to maintain their specific identities.
Finally, Zomia is less useful as a physical space or a career machine under processes of institutionalizationFootnote 12 than it is as a site of the production of knowledge. Willem van Schendel is right in considering it more as a theoretical problematic, offering new sets of questions and methodologies, than as an object of inquiry.Footnote 13 This acceptance makes the perspective of van Schendel akin to the attempts of previous Dutch scholars to combine the Area Studies approach, typical of Boasian particularism, with European structuralism inherited from the universalist Durckheimian school. I refer here to J. P. B. Josselin de Jong’s concept of a ‘field of ethnological studies’. By this term Josselin de Jong meant ‘certain areas … with a population whose culture appears to be sufficiently homogeneous and unique to form a separate object of ethnological study, and which at the same time apparently reveals sufficient local shades of differences to make internal comparative research worth while’.Footnote 14 The author identified the peoples of eastern Indonesia and the aborigines of Australia as two interesting fields of ethnological studies in this sense, but the hill societies of the Southeast Asian Massif could justify an equal use of the concept. This could be done from the very moment that their specific situation was questioned, not only with reference to residual remains of a petrified past but also in connection with contemporary aptitudes for cultivating their difference. This is precisely what I intend to do in the present article.
The political economy of highlanders
According to a widespread view, nation-states in Southeast Asia, and the kingdoms that preceded them in history, are wet-rice states, which blossomed in ecologically suitable plains, valleys, and plateaus. The peoples living in those zones, though incorporating large proportions of strangers, were subjected to a dynamic process of cultural homogenization. As Scott points out,
monoculture fosters uniformity at many levels. In the case of irrigated rice, cultivators were bound to roughly the same rhythm of production. They depended on the same, or comparable, sources of water; they planted and transplanted, weeded, cut and threshed their crops at roughly the same time in roughly the same way. … The uniformity in the field, in turn, produced a social and cultural uniformity.Footnote 15
Mountainous peripheral zones partly surround these agrarian heartlands. Although their inhabitants do not deliberately eschew paddy agriculture, the topography is more favourable to the extensive practice of slash-and-burn shifting cultivation. Relief in these hilly areas is varied, and the population is culturally heterogeneous. For centuries, such ‘shatter zones’Footnote 16 served as a refuge for groups of people coming from various cultural backgrounds, who were fleeing slaving, natural disasters, and state coercion. The low population density that characterized Southeast Asia for most of its history,Footnote 17 the mobility encouraged by the abundance of available land, and ‘drop by drop’ migrations of small clusters coming from various ethnic groups led to cultural mosaics in the hills. Their main features were a bewildering fragmentation and intermingling of communities claiming distinct histories and traditions. Whereas lowland open spaces, based on irrigated rice fields, were favourable to the ‘fabric’Footnote 18 of national cultures, through the duplication and expansion of similar organizational patterns from one place to another, mountainous areas were, for their part, a place of organizational and ethnic diversity. In other words, they were places of cultural encounters.
The complex patchwork of ethnic groupings in the hills impeded the hatching of strong ethnonationalist movements. In the first place, this was because nationalist ideology is linked to the symbolic use of a ‘homeland’, and most highlanders lacked a clear territorial unity to support this ideology.Footnote 19 Moreover, they could not claim customary land rights as a mark of autochthony. Mobility and spreading out were strong impediments to the expression of a strong territorial rooting, which could lead to indigenous demands. Although the Thai, Lao, and Khmer kings formally acknowledged the status of ‘earth lords’ of Austro-Asiatic ‘first settlers’ whom they had subjugated, this recognition was very ambiguous. Indeed, the ritual prerogatives that expressed it were concomitant with the effective appropriation of the whole land by kingship. State rituals in some societies actually dramatized this process of subjugation. Such was the case for the enthronement ritual, depicted by Sai Samong Mangrai, which the Shan of Kengtung performed in pre-modern times. According to this account, Lawa chiefs from villages around Kengtung were invited to attend the ritual and to sit down on the throne during the midday meal. While taking their meal, they were chased out and the newly enthroned king took their place.Footnote 20 More generally, still-active remains of ‘feudal’ structures opposed the emergence of indigenous movements similar to those that blossomed in South America or Oceania. Another impediment to ethnonationalism is the frequent coexistence of members of several ethnic groups within the same village, which favours cooperation rather than conflict. With the exception of feuds and fights for the control of ecological niches, and of the state of terror generated locally by Wa and Naga headhunting, hill peasants of the Massif have rarely entertained antagonistic relationships with each other, whose long-lasting persistence would have crystallized strong separate ethnicities. Significantly, most rebellions against the state that involved highlanders of the Southeast Asian Massif during the nineteenth century were multiethnic coalitions.
With the notable exceptions of the Karen and the Chin,Footnote 21 the societies of the Massif failed to satisfy the structural criteria that, according to Anthony Smith, are decisive for the creation of strong nationalist movements.Footnote 22 In his view, three criteria are of paramount importance: first, an ‘infrastructure’, consisting of an identified territory, a political authority, and an administration able to homogenize the population living in this bounded space; second, a cultural core, based on language, but also on myths and cults celebrating a common origin, and, in the specific case of urban elites, a partial secularization of their traditions; third, movement bearers whose emergence jointly results from the growth of an urban middle class, from its exclusion of the ruling elite, from its alliance with other dominated social forces (the intelligentsia, status groups, and social classes), and from the penetration of market forces. Smith adds that the most important among these factors are bureaucratic authority, the myth of a common history, and the rise of a local intelligentsia. Access to bureaucratic authority and the rise of a native intelligentsia remained insignificant among most highlanders of the Southeast Asian Massif, so neglected was public instruction among these minorities, during colonial times and after. As for myths of origin, they share basically the same themes in both nations and ethnic groups.
In such a context, the rise of a strong Karen ‘nationalism’ resulted from very specific conditions. First, the Karen formed a constellation of linguistically and culturally akin groups (Sgaw, Pwo, Kayah, and so forth),Footnote 23 whose denomination as a whole mainly rested on their multisecular and geopolitical control over the Tennasserim range, a mountain chain separating the competing Thai and Burmese states. In other words, they could claim a territorial unity. This territory was full of valuable resources, such as elephants, teak, and a wide range of other forest products, to the point that the Karen were among the main producers of the goods that went into long distance trade in pre-modern Burma.Footnote 24 When the British annexed the country, the Karen and their territory quickly appeared of special interest to the new rulers. As Jonathan Falla pointed out, teak extraction was one of the main reasons for the colonization of Burma. This resource was partly located in the Tenasserim range, and the Karen were the chief elephant drivers, without whom teak extraction would have been impossible. In return, and in a context of ancient confrontations with the Burmans, the Karen sided closely with the British. About a quarter of them (mostly Sgaw) progressively converted to Christianity. American Baptists formalized a script for Sgaw Karen in the 1830s; missionaries also opened schools in every Christian village, and the main Christian seminary in Rangoon ‘became in effect a Karen university’.Footnote 25 The outcome was the rise of a middle-class of educated and Westernized Karen who gained various skills in modern administration by working as civil servants or military officers under the British rule, and who soon cultivated national aspirations. A Karen National Association was founded in 1881, and this was the first modern political organization of Burma. A Karen National Union (KNU) followed in 1947. In the meantime, Baptist missionaries had invented new myths of origin by combining elements of their pre-millennialist beliefs with Karen millenarian themes. According to a version of this new narrative, the Karen once had a script and a written literature of their own, but they lost these attributes of civilization and stateness because of their intrinsic laziness and stupidity. As a consequence, they were obliged to wait for the white brother to return, bringing them the Golden Book (the Bible) and the Silver Book (education), and reinstating them in the status of God’s elect waiting for Christ’s second coming. A Christian speculation even made them one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. As we can see, Christian missionaries not only helped the Karen to qualify for modernization through mass education but also tied them strongly to the West by refashioning their mythology.Footnote 26 When, after the Second World War, independence became a major issue of the political agenda, Karen Christian leaders tried to negotiate the creation of an autonomous status with Aung San. However, after the assassination of this Burmese leader, the atmosphere deteriorated rapidly, and the KNU founded a de facto autonomous state, called Khawthoolei (Flowerland). For a while, the Karen succeeded in keeping the Burmese at bay, but they progressively lost ground. The situation became worse when General Ne Win launched his ‘four cuts’ policy in the mid 1970s, aiming to cut the rebels off from their own people, cut off access to the outside world, cut the Karen army supply lines, and cut off their heads. The KNU were then increasingly pushed towards the Thai border. Finally, with the assistance of the breakaway Democratic Karen Buddhist Association, the Burmese overran the remainder of Karen-controlled territory in 1997. Undermined by divisions and defections, outnumbered by the enemy, drawn more tightly into the Burmese economic stranglehold, and ignored by the outside world, the Karen found their national project to be an unsustainable utopia.
The lowlanders’ attitude: the art of instrumentalizing the ‘savage’
Since time immemorial, lowland rice-growing peasants have despised ‘tribesmen’ living in nearby hills. But at the same time as they negated their cultural existence, while their rulers attempted to assimilate these backward peoples, they were pragmatic enough to take advantage of their economic resources and of their situation as ‘bordermen’. Burmese, Thai, and Lao are known to have used highlanders as scouts, spies, mercenaries, and buffer forces at their borders. Shan princes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entrusted Lahu and Akha with the mission to guard the eastern limits of their domains.Footnote 27 By 1845, Karen and Mon were appointed by the Siamese king, Rama III, to be in charge of the posts bordering British Burma and the Burmese kingdom.Footnote 28 Let us also mention the Hmong, Yao, and Akha of Laos, who were massively recruited by the CIA to fight against Pathet Lao forces during the Second Indochina War.Footnote 29 The Thai government, for its part, manipulated residual groups of Hmong rebels between 1975 and 1992, in the hope of weakening the Laotian regime.
In pre-modern times, local rulers also used highlanders as a forced labour pool. Slaves, according to Scott, were the most important ‘cash crop’ of precolonial Southeast Asia, and the ‘fields’ to be cropped were the peasantries of defeated states and hill communities.Footnote 30 Victor Lieberman noted that, at the end of the seventeenth century, more than a third of the people in central Siam were descended chiefly from trade and war captives.Footnote 31 The cynicism of lowland state rulers toward hill societies was thus overtly expressed. On the one hand, they used these minorities as human shields against potentially hostile neighbours; on the other hand, they plundered their manpower to secure their state’s economic base, in a context of underpopulation and underproduction.
Another contribution of upland societies to the economy of lowland states comes from the forest products, of which they have always been the main providers. Although Scott asserts that ungoverned Zomia and its people were fiscally sterile,Footnote 32 the fact remains that hill societies sent to lowland states valuable and taxable products, such as elephant tusks, medicinal herbs, livestock, animal organs, feathers, ivory, aromatic weeds, and opium, which were much sought after in Chinese and Western markets. Among these products, opium merits special mention. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Hmong, Yao, and Tibeto-Burman groups were incited by Chinese and French colonial authorities to cultivate poppies on a large scale to supply expanding markets, without, however, receiving a substantial reward for such an activity.
Local states were not alone in taking advantage of the resources that highlanders were able to provide. Colonial states, nationalist insurgents, and various opponents to established regimes also found support there. Europeans were prompted to instrumentalize the frustrations that marginality aroused among highlanders to strengthen their power and their economic exploitation of mainland Southeast Asia, hence the preferential treatment that some Hmong and White Tai lineages enjoyed in French Indochina, and the Karen in British Burma.Footnote 33 Later on, following a trend that is in no way specific to Asia and whose aspects have been analysed by Anthony Smith, radical segments of the local intelligentsia formed guerrilla groups that benefited from the difficult terrain of the Massif.Footnote 34
For their part, highlanders of the Southeast Asian Massif were logically inclined to promise support to anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements. They brought to power nationalists who had found shelter among them as rebels and fugitives. Thus, Laotian and Vietnamese Hmong backed the Viet Minh and Pathet Lao guerrillas during the two Indochina wars. They not only played a key role in financing the operations of the Viet Minh through the opium they producedFootnote 35 but also actively assisted the guerrillas by acting as guides and porters. They proved critical to success in the crucial Dien Bien Phu battle against the French, by eagerly scouting the ridges for ideal gun emplacements.Footnote 36 Also noteworthy is the fact that a significant number of the Khmer Rouge fighters were members of minority groups from north-eastern Cambodia.Footnote 37
The involvement of these montagnards in the conflicts from the 1950s to the 1970s was less the result of ideological indoctrination than of resentments against centuries of oppression and extortion by lowland states, either colonial or local. Like the Andean highlanders supporting the Sendero Luminoso, or the Tibeto-Burmans backing the Unified Communist Party of Nepal, the hill peasants involved in Southeast Asian liberation movements believed in the Marxist or Maoist slogans only insofar as they announced the coming of a providential society, more egalitarian and fraternal. They were all the more inclined to believe in such a utopia because it strongly echoed central themes of their recurrent millenarian rebellions. In some circumstances, revolutionaries were observant enough to instrumentalize such themes. Nicholas Tapp thus reports rumours that were circulated by Pathet Lao cadres in the 1960s that a Hmong king had been born and was summoning his followers to a cave in Chiangrai province (northern Thailand). It was said that the king had been born to save the Hmong from suffering and misfortune. In this cave, everybody would be equal and nobody would have to work anymore. The Hmong who believed the prophecy, and went to the cave, found themselves in a base area of the Communist Party of Thailand.Footnote 38
More generally, the highlanders’ hopes for a bright future were betrayed. When communists or socialists came to power, they only reluctantly acknowledged the contribution of these backward peoples to their ascension. In their view, the ‘true’ communist proletarian or ‘new man’ had to be a member of the lowland hegemonic society.Footnote 39 In China, Vietnam, and Laos, ‘political unity’, organized along the cultural norms of lowland ‘civilized’ society, was systematically privileged. The same ‘civilizational’ narratives motivated the policies of the Burmese military junta after 1962. Because most nationalist leaders were members of the urban middle class, they were prompted to endorse dominant prejudices against hill peoples. Their policies proved to be either paternalistic or arbitrary, and were unreceptive to highlanders’ grievances. Another objective of their political agenda was to turn the highlanders away from their traditional ways of living. As noted by Scott, as well as by Peter Crossly, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, the first aim of Chinese and Southeast Asian governments was both an engulfment of hill peoples and a connected process of making them ‘enter into the map’.Footnote 40
A noticeable exception to this position was the Khmer Rouge policy of the ‘new people’, which developed a political agenda with reference to the rural, frugal, and autarkic model provided by those – mostly hill peasants – who had remained for a long time on the outside of Cambodian society. However, the extreme levelling down of the population to poor-peasant status proved to be a total failure, and was an aberration with regard to the criteria for a sustainable nation-state.Footnote 41 It did not fit the expectations of the hill peasants either. Michael Vickery is certainly correct to write that
in April 1975, after the end of the war, Cambodia’s base peasants probably wanted to resume the lives they had known minus the exploitation they had previously suffered. They were also probably happy to exploit the city folk in return. They were certainly not happy about communal eating, excessive work regimentation, or the loss of ownership of their property; and they were probably dissatisfied when they realized that exploitation of the urban folk was not going to make their life significantly easier, that on the contrary they would eventually be forced down to the same level.Footnote 42
The highlanders’ attempts to ‘enter the map’ of the nation-state with dignity – that is, with full citizenship and without disowning their way of life and cultural distinctiveness – was also closely linked to their relationship with the lowland dominant religion. In countries such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, where 60–90% of the total population is Theravada Buddhist, state conceptions are inseparable from the values and ideals that this religion puts forward. In contemporary Southeast Asia, the monks’ political involvement has clearly crossed into the secular realm, sometimes challenging state authority and sometimes compensating for its breaches through the implementation of alternative models of societies. This is notably the case in Myanmar, where ‘people of merit’ (hsayadaw), some of them of Karen origin, have founded ‘ideal cities’ on the margins of the country.Footnote 43 Another good example is the experiments of the phra nakpathana, the development monks, in Thailand.Footnote 44 In both examples, the objectives pursued by the monks are ambiguous. On the one hand, they work for the improvement of the highlanders’ material lives and for the protection of their natural environment, but, on the other hand, they assume an apostolic mission through campaigns of conversion. For these monks, and for a majority of Buddhists, adherence to the Çakyamuni doctrine comes first among the civilizational criteria, and is believed to be a decisive sign of integration into the national community. The status and political treatment of minority groups is then directly related to their categorization as Buddhists and non-Buddhists. According to a current opinion among adepts of Theravada societies, the ‘good’ citizen is a ‘good’ Buddhist, and vice versa. As noted by Richard O’Connor in the Thai context, ‘Mainlanders link religion to agriculture, agriculture to ritual, and ritual to ethnic identity. When hill farmers like Karen, Lawa, or Kachin take up valley wet rice, they find its proper wet rice cultivation requires Tai rituals.’Footnote 45 The ensuing, though implicit, belief is that non-Buddhists are to be treated as second-class citizens. In such a context, the claim to be Animist, Christian, or Muslim sounds like an act of resistance, whereas authorities interpret adherence to Buddhism, quite often formal and heterodox,Footnote 46 as an act of political allegiance.
Last but not least, highlanders of northern Thailand became, more recently, the paragons of symbiotic relationships with nature for the Thai urban middle class, with the latter consumed by the romanticism and primitivism of the ‘hill tribes’, and in the context of a major ecological crisis felt at the national level.Footnote 47 The expansion of road networks to remote places, the growth of tourism, decades of silent but efficient resistance to the state policy of assimilation, as well as to the erosion of social values, have conferred an unprecedented visibility to the chao kao, the Thai hill peoples. Anne Kammerer is certainly right in considering that Thai nationalism has so far excluded the concept of ‘ethnic minority’ from its narrative, and has held back all forms of regionalism.Footnote 48 The fact remains, however, that a growing faction of the Thai intelligentsia, operating through NGOs, idealizes the communal values of these minorities in its quest for alternative models of society.
As a general rule, the attitude of the urban middle class toward highlanders is paternalistic. The ‘savage’, whose ‘traditional wisdom’ they praise, is a figure of the past. He is believed to have disappeared in his true form under the assault of market forces. His descendants are thought to be inevitably corrupted by selfishness and cupidity. Accordingly, the agenda of the NGOs’ activists consists of gathering what remains of ancestral knowledge and combining it with new technologies to equip hill communities with ‘sustainable’ solutions to both deculturation and impoverishment. This new kind of interaction, whatever the commendable intentions of its promoters, confines the relationship within a mould in which the ‘enlightened’ educated man teaches with compassion, but also with condescension, ‘true’ cultural being to the patronized uplander. Such a scenario shows how difficult it is for lowlanders to abandon their traditional patronizing attitude toward hill peasants.
The protection of elephants in Thailand offers a good example of this relational pattern. Elephants are a major symbol of Thai identity. Their position at the top of the animal kingdom links them symbolically to the king, a link that enhances the role that both played in pre-modern wars for the defence of the country, when royal armies used these pachyderms as war machines. According to a common belief, the prosperity of the kingdom depends on the number of wild elephants living in its forests. The problem is that, during the last three decades, wild and domesticated elephants have declined at a steady rate in Thailand and neighbouring countries, because of deforestation, poaching for ivory, catching baby elephants, lack of traditional employment in forestry and other occupations, and lack of income for the owners.
In northern Thailand, the domestication of the elephant and its use are closely associated with the Karen. It is from this ethnic group that a majority of mahouts come. As a consequence, they became the main target of NGOs seeking to conserve the near-extinct animal. The kind of cooperation that Friends of the Asian Elephants (FAE) has implemented with Karen mahouts is indicative of the general attitude of NGOs working in this field. Members of the Thai bourgeoisie and local veterinarians founded the FAE in 1993. It is well known in Thailand for rescuing pachyderms that are victims of human threats; it has notably conducted various spectacular and well reported surgical interventions on animals shredded by land mine blasts on the border with Myanmar; and it also established, in 1994, the world’s first elephant hospital, in Lampang province. The staff of the organization includes several Karen mahouts, in charge of animals abandoned by their owners. The hospital also hosts Karen who come to receive free medical treatment for their elephants. The medical staff learns from the Karen their etiological and therapeutic knowledge, while in return educating them in modern medical treatments. The paternalism of the staff becomes clear when they intend to teach the mahouts how to take care of their animals with humanity by avoiding ill treatment and over-exploitation. Furthermore, the management of the hospital makes apparent that the Karen are considered to be second-class partners. They are excluded from the lunches and dormitories of the Thai, and perform unrewarding jobs.Footnote 49
The highlanders’ response: how to face ostracism
How do the highlanders reply to the prejudices, forms of social discrimination, and state policies that force them to ‘enter the map’ while keeping them at distance? Before dealing with this question, let us reiterate that the thesis of a collective subject, expressing the goals of the whole ethnic group through common strategies, is less defendable in the Southeast Asian Massif than in other contexts. Such a fictional subject, a ‘primitive Leviathan’, which haunts most debates on relationships between tribe and nation, is complicated in the Southeast Asian Massif by the great diversity of livelihoods that peoples of the same ethnic group experience, depending on local history, ecology, and human environment. As Scott noted,
the trait-based desiderata of ethnicity find little traction in Highland Southeast Asia. … The great variety of subsistence techniques, keyed in large part to altitude, only encouraged this diversity. Add to this the exchanges of populations within the hills by slaving, raiding, intermarriage, and adoption, and the complexity of identities is compounded, helping to explain the crazy-quilt pattern encountered by colonizers.Footnote 50
In these conditions, convergent interests leading to unitary actions hardly stretch outside a village, a small ecological region, or a localized group of lineages. Because, in most cases, ethnic categories in the hills lack territorial unity and political sovereignty, they largely remain a ‘kind of ideological exoskeleton’, distant and secondary.Footnote 51 Although ethnic identity becomes meaningful in some circumstances, in most current situations it gives way to more immediate and palpable identities, which rest on neighbourhood, kinship, and religious affiliation. Accordingly, the charisma of leaders hardly transcends the limits of the village, or of the lineage organization.
Owing to these structural limitations, there are few hill societies whose leaders are able to mobilize sufficient resources to challenge state power in the political, military, economic, and bureaucratic spheres. If manipulation and appropriation of resources exists on the side of highlanders, it is in the religious, though symbolic, domain that they are most significant. The ethnography of the Massif abounds with case studies that highlight the adaptation by highlanders of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist ideologies to their own religious systems of beliefs.Footnote 52 For instance, I have shown elsewhere that, in the aftermath of their ‘conversion’ to Buddhism during the eighteenth century, the Lahu Shi of Nanduan (on the border between Myanmar and China) have patterned their new cults along the lines of older beliefs and religious practices.Footnote 53 Thus, the term pha shi khu used to refer to their monks was applied originally to the priests in charge of the cult of Guisha, the pre-Buddhist Lahu supreme being. Like these priests, the ‘monks’ are not subjected to an ascetic way of life. They live with their wives, are directly involved in the practice of shifting cultivation, and do not receive ordination, which is in contrast to the monks of lowland societies. The Lahu ‘monks’ are in charge of the cult to the tevala (from the Thai thevada and indirectly from the Sanskrit devata). These tevala form a trinity – Kashia/Choba/Chaliba – whose characteristics evoke respectively the figures of Buddha, Maitreya, and Avalokiteshvara. These three gods are, nevertheless, symbolized in households and in the village pagoda by stones and pillars rather than by statues; stones and pillars that were traditionally manifestations of earth gods.
As a general rule, the indigenized forms that highlanders produce arouse curiosity or suspicion rather than approval from the lowland side. They are at best considered as heterodox and, accordingly, ‘simple-minded’ and ape-like versions of the ‘true’ dogma. This lack of recognition has a dampening effect. The quest for social promotion and cultural assimilation to valley societies, or the exploitation of millenarian themes to claim the status of world-redemptor, are simple wishful thinking. This statement does not mean that they are totally ineffective. These strategies have centripetal implications, from the moment that they begin to reinforce collective mobilization and affiliation. But their social and political impact is internal. Usually, they do not significantly change the balance of power between lowland societies and uplanders.
In the hills, some of these religious movements often turned into social upheavals, under the leadership of wonder-working prophets. Recurrent millenarian Hmong rebellions in southern China and Laos are well-known illustrations of this phenomenon.Footnote 54 Among the hundreds of prophetic uprisings mounted by hill people, we could also mention the Lahu Shi, who deployed a prophetic tradition with Mahayana and Animist elements, to assert themselves against lowland foes in the eighteenth century.Footnote 55 During the same period, several uprisings in Lower Burma involved Karen ‘heads of merits’, in an attempt to create a Karen kingdom and to drive the Burmese out of the country.Footnote 56 Entire regions thus escaped state control for months or years. For example, in the early twentieth century, the Sedang uprising headed by ‘men of merit’ (phu mi bun), prevented the French colonial authorities from exploiting the Bolovens Plateau in southern Laos for more than thirty years.Footnote 57 All these rebellions, however, were severely quelled, without any significant concessions made by the state to the insurgents.
From this statement, and from the existence of dynamic processes of acculturation in the hills, I infer that montagnards compromise with valley states more efficiently than they oppose them. The apparent adherence of highlanders to concepts, values, and expressive norms of lowland societies cannot mechanically be interpreted as a step toward assimilation. Frequently, acculturation has the effect (if not the intent) of laying the foundations that I have recently called ‘cross-cultural aggregates of shared meanings’.Footnote 58 This compound, used as a conceptual tool, results from the observation that culture is concerned with questions of shared meanings. Meaning, however, is always ambivalent and ambiguous. It is generated through the dialectical quality and evaluative accent of signs, within a two-sided relationship between addresser and addressee.Footnote 59 The central argument is that ethnicity mainly rests on the ‘multiaccentuality’ of signs,Footnote 60 as they are negotiated through discursive processes of language-and-action operating within the context of interethnic relationships. This context has been suggestively called the ‘intermediate space of transcultural mixing’ by Paul Gilroy.Footnote 61 By using the term ‘aggregate’ for such mixing, I assume that the groups in contact are able to adjust their respective relational patterns and images of ‘we-and-they’ through a perennial combination of interlocking signs. Although these aggregates pave the way for cooperations and cultural hybridities, they usually generate prejudices and one-sided symbolic manipulations, which give the leading part to each of the interacting groups. In so doing, they maintain or even reinforce the social boundaries of the groups in contact. Saturated with emotional overtones and judgments of goodness and badness, cross-cultural aggregates of shared meanings form a common-sense platform for ethnocentric interpretations.
Finally, because minority groups of the Southeast Asian Massif, as in other parts of the world, endorse symbols and values of the majority groups upon which they depend, they sometimes find a way to make their voices heard by elites, public opinion, and authorities of the national societies. Of course, hill people can hardly be taken for credible zealots of universal religions whose elements they have formally adopted. The adaptation from one cultural context to another of such complex religious doctrines inevitably leads to distortions of form and meaning. More easy and fruitful is the use of expressive and stylistic norms, as well as the manipulation of key elements of the dominant ideology. Although hill peoples adjust their narrative to adhere to the expressive and stylistic norms of the dominant group, which may be interpreted as a sign of cultural subjection and political submission, the fact remains that this adaptation gives them the means to hold conversations with emergent forces of the national society, and possibly to reduce their feeling of political domination by reasserting their distinctive identities and dignity.
Moreover, in some cases these expressive or stylistic adjustments appear to become a form of silent resistance to state repression. They may, for instance, maintain the collective memory of important rituals that the society cannot perform any more. A case in point is the Wa of Xuelin (Lancang district, Yunnan province, China), among whom I conducted fieldwork in 1997. Since the 1960s, these Wa have woven bags that they wear in everyday life with new geometric patterns. These bags have become the main category of goods that the local Wa sell to Chinese tourists, who are visiting their villages in increasing numbers. The Chinese see these bags as a nice expression of Wa crafts. What they fail to understand, however, is that the geometrical pattern adorning the bags is particularly meaningful to the Wa. It symbolically depicts the rite of life regeneration that concluded Wa headhunting campaigns, though both headhunting and the ritual were banned by the Chinese authorities in the 1960s. This ritual was a major event on the Wa religious calendar. It involved the participation of members of the six clans that, in principle, composed Wa society. Representatives of these six clans would beat in unison two long, monoxyle drums, one male and the other female, drums that symbolized a mythical snake whose sharing of the flesh had been at the origin of the Wa clans and of their respective religious, political, and military functions. If this ritual was so important for the Wa, to the point that they allegorically depict it on their bags, it is because it contributed to the regeneration of life by periodically reinstating a fecund interaction with gods, but also because it was the main occasion for the Wa to display and reassert their existence as an organic whole.Footnote 62
Toward new horizons
To conclude these remarks, I will now discuss the changes likely to occur as a result of the growing integration of the Southeast Asian highlanders into exchange and communication networks operating at national and international levels. A steadily decreasing number of hill communities, still located in remote parts of Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Vietnam, remain out of range for global infrastructures. The first all-weather road to approach their villages is still several days’ walk away. They have no electricity, television, or accessible primary schools, and state agents visit twice a year at best. However, the situation for most of them could change during the next decade, as a consequence of the ‘growth quadrangle’, jointly developed by China, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar from the late 1980s, with the aim of bringing down the infamous ‘Golden Triangle’. Accordingly, an increasing number of hill villages could experience, twenty years on, similarly drastic changes to those that highlanders of northern Thailand experienced in the 1990s, following the electrification of their villages and the linking of their communities to national road networks. These alterations brought about a change of ‘style’ in the way that the ‘hill tribes’ of Thailand imagined themselves and were influenced by their environment.Footnote 63 This is particularly true for the tens of villages that were integrated, during the 1980s, into trekking circuits, and were therefore submitted to an increasing number of tourists coming from all over the world.
To define more accurately the impact of these changes on the relationships that the montagnards of northern Thailand experience with the outer world, which certainly prefigured wider mutations among highlanders of the Massif, we can draw from the thesis of Arjun Appadurai about the effects of globalization.Footnote 64 According to him, the combined impact of mass migrations and mediations, both electronic and audiovisual, offers new perspectives, namely an augmentation of technical capacities and an ability to promote new images of the collective self. In the case of ethnic minorities, collective imagination – that is, the production of clichés turned toward new perceptions and new forms of action – would expand beyond the particular expressive spaces around which ethnic minority identities were traditionally built, such as art, myth, and ritual.Footnote 65 This unprecedented level of contact with other orders of reality would lead to fluid, unpredictable, and disjunctive relations with cultural otherness. The centre–periphery model utilized by development theorists, which has so far frequently been used to analyse the political economy of developing world countries, is, accordingly, broken down by the multiplication of both relations of spatial proximity and of electronic affinities. Appadurai, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, defines this process as ‘rhizomic’. It is important to stress that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the main features of the ‘rhizome’ are the following:
It connects any element with any other, each of them not necessarily referring to convergent traits; it involves different regimes of signs and even states of non-signs. Rhizome can neither be reduced to uniqueness nor to series. … It is not made of elements but of dimensions, which could be more relevantly considered as fluctuating directions. … Against structure, which can be defined as a set of points, positions, and binary relationships between these points, as well as biunivocal relations between these positions, a rhizome is not only made of lines of segmentarity, stractification, as dimensions, but also of vanishing or deterritorializing lines.Footnote 66
Appadurai chooses to represent this complex relationship through a canvas of five kinds of ‘landscapes’: ‘ethnoscapes, technospaces, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes’. Their unsteady interaction, entailing possible splits, threatens the fragile cohesion of the state. For Appadurai, the nation-state as a political formation will become obsolete, whereas mass migrations and the proliferation of diasporas are becoming crucial phenomena and forces of our age.Footnote 67 In the conclusion to his book, he criticizes a long tradition of ethnographical works, writing: ‘Drawn into the very localization they seek to document, most ethnographic descriptions have taken locality as ground not figure, recognizing neither its fragility nor its ethos as a property of social life. This produces an unproblematized collaboration with the sense of inertia on which locality, or a structure of feeling, centrally relies.’Footnote 68 According to him, ethnographers should move from historical accounts of neighbourhoods to the history of the techniques for the production of locality.
If we now turn back to the situation of the ‘hill tribes’ of Thailand, they experience very diversified ‘ethnoscapes’ (that is, fluctuating social spaces). On the one hand, they were historically located in the Golden Triangle, and along the multisecular axes of communication connecting hinterland China to the Malay world, thus prefiguring the transnational relationships induced by modern globalization.Footnote 69 On the other hand, generations of highlanders looking for job opportunities have migrated to the lowlands.Footnote 70 In return, massive flows of tourists, in pursuit of cheap exoticism, are travelling the length and breadth of northern Thailand.
The consequence of this intensification and diversification of exchanges with an enlarged outside world is that the highlander’s self-perception is more ambiguous and blurred than before. In the view of foreign tourists, rural development and social workers, international consultants, and other agents, Tibeto-Burman, Miao-Yao, and Austro-Asiatics are bedecked with the virtues of the ‘good savage’, living in close intimacy with nature and being remnants of an early stage of mankind. Alternatively, they are seen as people attired in backward-poor rags, who should abandon such a condition as soon as possible to follow the mainstream avenues of ‘development’. On the one hand, they are confined to the ghetto of a fetishized cultural self; on the other hand, they are invited to melt into the mould of the Thai homo nationalis. It is no wonder that, when facing such contradictions, many montagnards, especially individuals who have experienced cultural uprooting and disruptions linked to full-time education, try to give new meanings to their imagined community by creating syncretic forms of religiosity.
As highlanders become equipped with radio and television receivers, they see themselves portrayed in various programmes. They therefore discover prejudices that the pretences of face-to-face relationships usually obscure. Moreover, television displays a wide range of situations where highlanders are involved in noteworthy interactions with various categories of protagonists. Among them are police rangers, who destroy poppy fields or drive out illegal settlers from forestry reserves. Through the distant and objectivist journalistic lens, highlanders become aware of the harsh conditions and troubles faced by others within their group, problems that they would have ignored otherwise. Besides the fact that they have to position themselves in relation to new orders of realities, they are passive spectators of ethnic dramas that escape the traditions conveyed by their ritual orthopraxy. Actually, the circular theatricality of ritual contrasts with the succession of events that various media report, over which the people who are reported about have no hold. In the same vein, and more sharply than before, highlanders become aware that amalgams are promptly made, and that the image they give of themselves also depends on the attitude of others within the group, on whom they have no purchase.
For example, in January 2000, the Karen God’s Army took hostage several patients of a Ratchaburi hospital. This tragic incident, in which the members of the commando were killed by the Thai special forces, reflected on the image of the Karen held by the Thai and foreign public opinion, and on the way that the Karen of Thailand perceived their relationship with the state and with the Karen of Myanmar, from where the commando originated. Among other things, this event shows that the new perceptions and social praxis of the highlanders of northern Thailand are characterized by fluid, disjunctive, and unpredictable relations between ‘ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes’, each ‘landscape’ being subject to its own set of constraints and incitements.Footnote 71 The already fluctuating perception of themselves that highlanders elaborate and re-elaborate, depending on interactions with local out-groups, can be profoundly affected by the emotional images that unpredictable events generate, as was the case in the God’s Army attack.
Although the Karen activists of the God’s Army made headlines in the Thai media without ever controlling their image, local leaders in other contexts, with the capacity to find an audience larger than their own community, can take advantage of this position to build new collective images and myths, which the media broadcast. These have disjunctive effects on ‘ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes’ and on the ‘financescapes’ of their own ethnic group. The Naxi of the Linjiang area, in Yunnan, offer a good example. Charles McKhann, in the context of intensified touristic activity changing local ‘ethnoscapes’, has investigated the activities of the impresario of the popular and high-profile Dayan Association of Traditional Naxi Music.Footnote 72 In the 1990s, he began to tell his audience – mainly made up of Chinese and Western tourists – that the Naxi town of Zhongdian had served as the original model for Shangri-la, the paradise city depicted by J. Hilton in his famous novel, Lost horizon (1933), which was adapted for the screen by Frank Capra (1937). This Naxi exploited a theme coming from the fantasy of a Western novelist, but which had spread into his personal ‘mediascape’ because of his cosmopolitan contacts as the impresario of a popular music band. In so doing, he changed the ‘mediascape’ of his successive audiences, to the point that tourists rushed to Zhongdian in search of the Shangri-la archetype. The ‘ethnoscape’ and ‘financescape’ of this small town rapidly changed accordingly.
Lijiang township then complained about such competition. Even though McKhann does not provide information about it, the authorities of Lijiang certainly put pressure on the impresario. The fact is that he changed his narrative, claiming henceforth that Lijiang was the original Shangri-la. In response, the administration of Zhongdian organized a conference where scholars re-established the first version. The authorities of Lijiang retaliated by organizing a rival scientific event to promote their thesis. Last but not least, in 1999, the Lijiang municipality backed an exhibition in Lijiang city. Large advertising boards were put up at the main crossroads, depicting the American explorer, Joseph Rock, who is said to have inspired Hilton, thanks to his discovery reports for the National Geographic Magazine at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to analyse further the kind of deterritorializations in which highlanders of Zomia are involved. If we comprehend the term in its literal meaning – that of leaving a place for a new one – most Zomia highlanders have recurrently lived this experience for centuries, in connection with their great mobility and geographical scattering, mainly caused by political factors. In one sense they contradict the thesis of Arjun Appadurai, according to whom deterritorialization is a new phenomenon and one of the most typical features of globalization.
Most of the hill societies of Zomia have been diasporas for a long period of their history. They have reterritorialized themselves many times, to the point of forgetting, in most cases, their real places of origin. Hence, conflicting mythical constructions emerged among their members, concerning primitive homelands that are, in fact, lost paradisiacal horizons that nobody can locate precisely. Concerning this aspect, the Naxi case is instructive. Another consequence of their spreading out was the inability to preserve relatively homogeneous cultural forms, and puzzling variations observable within the same group. Because of their mobility and cultural heterogeneity, Zomia highlanders are at the forefront of important mutations that many rural communities around the world may experience in the near future. From this point of view, Zomian studies justify their emergence as a specific domain of research. Zomian highlanders notably offer an ideal of experimentation for new problematics whose starting hypothesis would be the fundamental complexity, instability, and permeability of sociocultural systems to external influences. They invite us to rethink cultures as hybrid realities, partly systemic and partly connected to process. They are continuously reconstructed, according to strength lines, but also to vanishing and breaking points.
