It is difficult to expound in any pithy fashion on the imprint that James C. Scott's work has had on writing history in the orbit of Asia. Where to start? From The Moral Economy of the Peasant all the way to Against the Grain,Footnote ¹ Scott's work has found receptive and fertile ground among his peers in Asian studies, who have often proudly pointed out to their non-Asianist colleagues that Scott is “one of their own.” This has certainly been true “internally” as well, in the ways that Southeast Asianists have spoken to their fellow professionals in the larger, allied subdisciplines of South and East Asian studies. It does not matter that Scott's books have touched on a wide variety of subjects: the central concerns with power, agency, space, and the essence of a shared humanity have all resonated with his professional interlocutors.

In this contribution, I consider some of the ways that the notion of Zomia—as elucidated most forcefully and completely in Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed—has inspired work in Asian studies by thinkers across a range of disciplines.Footnote ² Most of the scholars mentioned here have written on historical themes, even if not all of them are card-carrying historians. Because a number of us have been asked to write for the Journal of Asian Studies, I will focus only on Zomia here, though one easily could orient a piece toward any number of other topics, vis-à-vis Scott and his outsize influence on the field.

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You might realize that a book of yours has “arrived” when an entire issue of a journal—in this case the Journal of Global History, not even in Scott's purported discipline of political science, or even his “adopted” discipline of anthropology (although who adopted whom is up for debate)—is devoted to your monograph. Yet this is what happened in July 2010, roughly a year after The Art of Not Being Governed was published, when scholars working across different Asian geographies were asked to weigh in on Scott's new book. One of these scholars, an anthropologist, looked at Scott's notions of Zomia (developed in discussion with Willem van Schendel, a nod that Scott rarely, if ever, forgets to make) in the Himalayas and asked whether his ideas worked there, in a mountain range seemingly to the west of the Zomia massif.Footnote ³ Another queried the function of the main lines of the argument in Wa mining country in northern Burma, an enclave of notorious “lawlessness” on the China frontier.Footnote ⁴ Still another penetrated further into China, taking the argument into Sichuan and Yunnan, across Southeast Asia entirely, and into a Sinic sphere of action.Footnote ⁵ Finally, a fourth lost sight of the specifics of geography entirely and asked whether a new term needed to be invented for the patterns that Scott elucidated, since the minority populations he studied stretched across all of these landscapes.Footnote ⁶ The range of the essays gives some sense of what was at stake: how could Scott possibly be applied across all of this mountainous topography?

That query may, in fact, be one of the main points of reading The Art of Not Being Governed; it is destabilizing to its very core. Scholars have called Scott's musings a “Post-Modern History of Nowhere,”Footnote ⁷ while other academics have noted that his book interrogates what we think we know about the notion of “place” and may in fact have hastened the decline of area studies, which was already suffering at the time Scott was writing in the wake of new forms of globalization and transnationalism.Footnote ⁸ Scott's ruminations on the uplands of Southeast Asia called into question long-accepted categories of regional classification and led to fretting about where parts of Asia should be located, if his deep-seated historical ethnography was correct.Footnote ⁹ One could almost feel the map of Southeast Asia, and parts of adjacent southwest China and northeastern India (both of which I will talk more about in a moment), heaving, twisting, almost churning on a slow boil. The Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands needed to create a new chapter—“Zomia and Beyond.”Footnote ¹⁰ The author of that essay asked elsewhere, “What's (Written) History For?,” when it was clear that the act of inscribing many of these upland peoples into lowland knowledge—what is called “history,” in other places—was clearly an act in and of itself that needed serious explaining.Footnote ¹¹

A lot was moving in these Scottian landscapes, several hundred meters above sea level. One of the most important of these things was opium; Zomia and what has often been called the “Golden Triangle” nicely overlap on many maps. The transit of illicit commerce such as opium, local and translocal politics, and frontiers all influenced each other organically as the nineteenth century unfolded, especially as imperialism came to the region.Footnote ¹² Britain was particularly interested in these landscapes, in its colonial contest with France, but also in the mercantilist idea of a “backdoor” route to the riches of China. But the Burmese and Siamese courts were also, of course, implicated in these processes, as each of these state actors tried to bring highland peoples to heel, and to use them for their own purposes. Zomia became a vast upland arena where commodities and people and contraband flowed in larger and larger quantities, circulating up and above the clouds, and above the reach of many lowland states as well, at least to tax or control.Footnote ¹³ Arjun Appadurai's elegant phrase “the social lives of things” helps us understand how opium, munitions, and (yes) slaves as human commodities helped make this world-at-altitude function for a long period of time.Footnote ¹⁴ The fact that this was a liminal space was absolutely crucial to the functioning of the whole system; Zomia was born out of this sort of dissident history. It managed to maintain this outlaw quality in a world more and more governed by rules for a far longer period of time than most other places.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the rules around Zomia being Zomia started to change. Thongchai Winichakul has shown how state fascinations with mapping and territorial control—almost unknown in this part of the world—began to give way to more Western, Westphalian notions of command and control.Footnote ¹⁵ Earlier concepts of “mandalas” and overlapping jurisdictions were no longer tenable in the age of High Imperialism; land grabbing and extraction, not to mention the establishment of routes to greater riches, such as Yunnan Province in China, made these earlier spatial “ways of being” obsolete.Footnote ¹⁶ Though lowland Southeast Asian courts participated in these transvaluations reluctantly at first, they were quick learners, and they understood the utility of some of these concepts in advancing their own power in relation to the upland peoples of the region. What had been relationships of “give and take” became less give, more take; mapping could be used to try to force exclusive claims—on rice and other crops, on sons (for military use), and on daughters (for royal harems).

Zomia's quixotic existence as a free space among what were, in fact, larger closing spaces began to change. By the late nineteenth century, after a series of three punitive wars in the 1820s, 1850s, and 1880s, there was precious little Burmese territory left that had not been reached by advance agents of colonial British rule, be they missionaries, scholars, statesmen, or soldiers.Footnote ¹⁷ Northern Vietnam and Laos were also being pressed from the opposite direction, by Gallic soldiery and civil servants eager to expand the bounds of French Indochina.Footnote ¹⁸ Through the early twentieth century and up until World War II, these processes continued more or less unabated, in a widening embrace of landscapes and people who had previously operated almost with impunity in regional patterns of politics and exchange.

These were not just artifacts of historical relationships in this arena, however. Alfred McCoy was one of the first to call global attention to the modern history of this region, and to the convoluted material and political pathways of the poppy in our own lived histories, writing at the time of the Vietnam War in the 1970s. McCoy's seminal work, which went beyond the academy in its scope and readership, was followed by that of Bertil Lintner, Edith Mirante, and others.Footnote ¹⁹ It immediately became clear that these were not simply historical pathways, though the trade in poppies in this part of the world goes back quite a long time, as we have seen, to an era of mule caravans that crisscrossed Zomia into the political spaces of kingdoms that were far outside of Southeast Asia proper.Footnote ²⁰ It is also clear that opium is still an enduring part of the historical present in many of these landscapes, despite vigorous attempts at its suppression. This is the case in places such as Omkoi, an enclave in northwestern Thailand, where opium is still the principal crop that people cultivate to survive, despite eradication regimes.Footnote ²¹ It has also been vital to the rise and fall of warlords, such as Burma's Khun Sa, who used the highland crop of Zomia as a form of arbitrage in dealing with the differentials (political, economic, developmental) of neighboring massif societies, and the Burmese lowlands as well.Footnote ²²

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Biota—both flora and fauna—have also been in widespread circulation in Scott's Zomia. The notion of this highland space as a “region of refuge” holds not just for people, but for all manner of plants and creatures from the natural world that have found a kind of sanctuary in the hills from the depredations of state-making processes and “development” more generally. Traditional knowledge of biodiversity, crop-yielding regimes, and usufruct of the forest all survive in the Southeast Asian massif. These are cognitive holdovers of a different time, when sedentarization was less common and people moved rhythmically with the seasons in unbounded highland spaces.Footnote ²³ Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the ways in which Asian elephants have been kept by Zomian peoples, used in the transit of cargo across wide spaces, but also in the passage of people across putative boundaries. At night, many of these “kept elephants” are let out to mate with their wild cousins in the forest, however, showing a kind of kinship between the imperatives of freedom for both people and animals that would make the theorist Bruno Latour proud.Footnote ²⁴ With elephants as with people, colonial agents of the state could only shake their heads; what seemed to be “controllable” by day would disappear into the forest at night. American patrols during the Vietnam War faced a similar logic as these colonial administrators half a century earlier. Their frustrations were perhaps given most eloquent voice by George Orwell, British civil servant in Burma, in his classic essay “On Shooting an Elephant.”Footnote ²⁵

Scott admitted in a telling interview how important the Burmese start to his career as a Southeast Asianist was to the progression of his thinking, not only about the region but also his larger conceptual ideas that eventually sprang from these experiences.Footnote ²⁶ In Orwell's classic essay, written as the Englishman faced up to a rogue elephant in musk in the 1930s (the high tide of British repression in that country), Scott learned something not only about the dynamics of colonialism in Burma, but about how power worked generally. Scott was already reading widely, and as he made his way through some of the classics of political science and sociology (Barrington Moore and many others), one can see the imprint of some of these thinkers on his sensibilities as a young academic. Michel Foucault's articulation of “power/knowledge” may have still been on the horizon as published work, but Scott was already thinking in some of these terms.Footnote ²⁷ Later on, and perhaps more centrally for any discussion of Zomia, Scott was also beginning a conversation with Willem van Schendel, a Dutch anthropologist, the majority of whose work had been on West Bengal and Bangladesh, two places outside the rubric of “Southeast Asia proper.”Footnote ²⁸ Both scholars had been thinking within larger concerns about where South and Southeast Asian “normative patterns” began and ended, in the shared landscape between their field sites. Both also had unorthodox ways of seeing their “own” regions, and they sought answers over horizons that seemed to suggest more continuity than any real, definable separations in history and culture.

The key to this shared vision was in some senses a simple one: altitude. The Zomia massif was a concept that was borne of geography stretching across putative boundaries. This was something that both scholars were seeing (from opposite sides of a landscape) drawn with lines that seemed to exist only tenuously in real space. Culturally, however, this outstretched topography seemed to have remarkable similarities over 300 meters or so, one of the most important being that the more one retreated to “remote” places, as least by the reckoning of lowland states, the more the patterns seemed to stand out.

The “frictions” of these spaces, which seemed to be forever moving away from valleys and centers, was something that later authors who sharpened the toolkit of “Zomia” continually alluded to in their writings.Footnote ²⁹ In this sense, places almost always described as “marginal” (the confederation of sparsely populated landscapes known as “Laos”; Hmong areas up in the hills of various parts of the region) became “central.”Footnote ³⁰ Eventually, these ideas, so radical and oppositional at their genesis, became acculturated into contemporary transfigurations of these landscapes in our own times by a variety of authors.Footnote ³¹ Some even began to talk about such spaces “seeking the state,” rather than fleeing it, as a kind of postmodern twist on the original idea.Footnote ³² This did not happen everywhere. But it did show the continuity and coherence of a notion that stretched clear across the confines of mainland Southeast Asia, from Burma to Vietnam, with every interconnected landscape of a certain altitude in between.

Indeed, Burma and Vietnam are often represented as the bookend states of mainland Southeast Asia—the nominal polities that keep Zomia “in.” Yet, of course, the Zomia paradigm moves the boundary markers even further afield than the traditional designations on modern political maps. Both northeast India and southwest China have been included in the spatial terrain of this conceptual massif, both by Scott and by his admirers and critics. Northeast India figures historically, with scholars looking at specific events, such as the 1826 British treaty with the Khasi in the hills of this region,Footnote ³³ but there are also more recent formulations of resistance and independence in the easternmost extremities of the Indian geo-body.Footnote ³⁴ At least some scholars saw the absence of any systemic cartography of this region as emblematic of its status as part of the Zomia paradigm.Footnote ³⁵ Others have taken the argument farther west, beyond the accepted confines of what northeast India is considered by most academics today.Footnote ³⁶ We will return to that impulse in a moment, but it is safe to say that the tiny and often tumultuous states of eastern India are often associated with these ideas in ways that have made intellectual sense to many scholars working on these problems.

In southwest China—north rather than west of Southeast Asia “proper”—the parameters of inclusion have been even more complex. This has been so from the Miao Rebellion in Guizhou in 1795,Footnote ³⁷ to local variants of extension in the Sino/Vietnamese highlands, to Ruili on the Sino/Burmese frontier.Footnote ³⁸ On the remote and seldom-traveled corridor of China and Laos, there seems to be a particular affinity for seeing Scott's notions in local lifeways, precisely because of the relative remoteness of the location.Footnote ³⁹ Much of this has to do with movement and the ability of populations to cross the lines on maps that are put there by hopeful civil servants in faraway capitals. Yet even more sedentary arrangements such as marriages come into the equation here, particularly in border landscapes such as the Sino-Vietnamese frontier, where ethnic groups have been marrying across international divides (putative or actual) for generations upon generations.Footnote ⁴⁰ The point is that Zomia seems to have caught on in the literature, both as a utilitarian example of how “peripheries” deal with states and as a concept that might be applied widely if local circumstances fit larger theoretical designs. In both of these ways, it has been a formative idea in how praxis and the abstract can be brought to bear on the far-flung places where states meet.

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These vast dimensions of Zomia, almost accordion-like in their flexibility, make one wonder, perhaps, “is there a Zomia too far?” Do Scott's ideas really climb all hills and apply to all terrain? Would this all work on the Andean altiplano in South America, or in the Pyrenees (where France meets Spain), or in highland Ethiopia (where Christianity separates itself from the Muslim coasts of Eritrea)? It is an intriguing question, and one for an army of researchers—true believers and agnostics both—to try to ascertain. Even just staying in Asia, as we have been told to do in this forum, in the central Himalayan frontier of India with Nepal, arguments have been made for inclusion; maybe this is a district akin enough to Zomia, and close enough, too, to be included?Footnote ⁴¹ Afghanistan—where opium, altitude, and the invasions of successive lowland “civilizations” (British, Soviet, American) indicate patterns similar to Zomia in “greater Southeast Asia”—has certainly been referenced as an analogous space.

Yet Scott's arguments have also been tabled to look at similar processes in the Punjab, a mostly arid (and largely flat) landscape all the way on the other side of India, bordering Pakistan.Footnote ⁴² They have also been used in central India, far from any international frontier, to deal with the question of Maoist revolts on the Deccan. Sure, this is hilly country, and sometimes lawless country, but are the paradigms really the same?Footnote ⁴³ An argument has even been made to extend Zomia to the Amur River, in Russia's frozen Far East. This was attempted by two authors who felt that Zomia's characteristics worked even there, far from the monsoon south of Asia, and further still from the hilly massif whose topography Scott said helped dictate the norms of this region.Footnote ⁴⁴ It might not be that Zomia's teachings work everywhere, and at every time in history, despite the keen insights of the model. But I suspect that Scott would say, in characteristically generous fashion, that this is okay. It is the possibility of the notion, and the fertile ground of its applicability, that takes our collective breath away in thinking about what this concept has bequeathed to us all.