With the bold assertion that virtually everything about the livelihood of Southeast Asian hill people can be read as strategic positioning designed to keep the valley-based state at arm's length, James C. Scott has once again presented a piece of work which almost certainly will rank among the classics within the field of Southeast Asian studies. Instead of the usual state-centric focus, Scott argues for the importance of understanding the co-evolution of hill and valley cultures. Zomia, the region covering the hilly areas in mainland Southeast Asia, is home to a range of cultures that all shared a common interest, Scott claims, in resisting the state. Many of these people were actually refugees who had chosen to escape from the increasing impositions laid upon them by the valley states, and, by settling in the hills, they had designed a way of living that purposely evaded state control. Their mode of subsistence – mainly slash-and-burn agriculture – is therefore a form of escape agriculture, and their social structure – unstable and egalitarian – is an escape social structure, Scott argues. The dialectic between hills and valleys that this perspective represents is not a new one, but Scott's book is a remarkably well-argued contribution to our understanding of historical change in the area.
After staking out his main argument in the first chapter, Scott uses the next chapter to analyse the rationale and dynamics of creating state spaces. Concentration of manpower and grain was the principal means of this process. There were, however, significant geographical constrains to the state-building as the ‘friction of terrain’ – a central concept in Scott's argument – set up sharp, rather inflexible limits to an effective transportation of goods and people. Irrigated wet-rice cultivation, therefore, became the agricultural foundation of the state. Now, the geographical limitations on state-making meant that states developed primarily in the alluvial plains where there was less friction of terrain. The political reach of these paddy states was diminishing with distance from the core – similar to Benedict Anderson's ‘light bulb model’ of Javanese kingdoms (Benedict Anderson, ‘The idea of power in Javanese culture’, in Culture and politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), pp. 1–70) – which meant that hill people remained virtually untouched by state control.
In chapter 3, Scott counters the contemporary school book narrative of the pre-colonial state as based on a gradual and peaceful ingathering of stateless people and portrays it instead as dominated by war, slavery and coercion. The state was a fragile entity that had to be held together by force. Access to manpower and grain had to be secured by slave raids into the hills and by eradication of modes of subsistence, such as swiddening, that were difficult to tax. However, the monoculture of irrigated rice that this regime produced was less environmentally resilient than dispersed, mixed cultivation as it was particularly prone to crop failures and pests. Likewise, concentration of people from slavery was likely to trigger epidemics. The valley states were structurally designed in a way, Scott argues, that was effectively self-liquidating, and with the ever-present possibility of fleeing to the hills, the state had to carefully balance the coercion it enforced on its population.
One aspect of state formation was the establishment of a discourse distinguishing between the valley state as civilised and the hill societies as unruly and barbarian. In chapter 4, Scott discusses how this discourse also was threatening the state since it provided a discursive option of state evasion. There was, then, a semiotic need of a barbarian frontier and when this need was met by characterising those beyond that frontier as backward and not yet included in the state, it represented a potential space of self-governance, mobility and freedom from taxation. Residence in this zone, thus, became a choice, a place where one could flee to when the burdens of remaining within the state became intolerable. Chapter 5 is devoted to the causes of this flight to the hills and the consequences it has had for the cultural complexity we find there today. When the burdens of taxation, corvée labour, conscription, war, raids and slavery became too heavy, there was always the possibility of escaping to the hills where not only the state could be held at a distance but also where the epidemics rampant in the crowded valleys could be avoided. Hence, contrary to the popular narrative of hill people as the ‘living ancestors’ of the valley population, Scott argues that this evolutionary sequence is untenable. Instead, he contends that contemporary hill people are descendants of runaways from the valley states whose agricultural practices, social organisation, modes of governance and legends must be understood as state-distancing practice. Scott also criticises the current narrative presented by historians and ethnographers of hill people as persecuted and reluctantly marginalised. ‘To leave the story here’, he argues, ‘is to miss the important intentionality – the agency – of these migrations’ (p. 172). Again, Scott emphasises the degree of choice involved in the position of hill people vis-à-vis the state. What hill people attempt to achieve with their state-evading cultural practices is to create political and cultural distance from the state. Scott contends that this act of dissimilation – the purposeful creation of cultural distance between societies – leads, when pursued over time, to ethnogenesis, a process that is discussed at length in the following three chapters.
In chapter 6, Scott stresses the importance of the location, physical mobility, modes of subsistence, social organisation and settlement patterns as escape strategies. Shifting cultivation is, because of the mobility it enables, particularly resistant to state appropriation and the crops cultivated – tubers, sweet potato, cassava and other root crops – cannot be stored long, have low value per unit of weight and are harvested when needed which make them not suitable for transportation and difficult to tax. Moreover, this mode of subsistence requires less co-operation, which, together with mobility, encourages a social structure that is particularly resistant to incorporation by the state. Nevertheless, hill social structure cannot be understood as totally independent from the state. Rather, Scott advocates a dialectical view where the social organisation of hill people is the outcome of a strategic choice of positioning vis-à-vis the state. The same can be said about the lack of writing found among these people. It is Scott's contention that they should not be understood as pre-literate people, but rather as post-literate, since it appears that they have actively abandoned writing for the advantages of orality. The flexibility and adaptability facilitated by orality compared with writing is a resource, Scott argues, in a system were state control is to a large degree based on the fixity that writing ensures. One such fixity was the enumeration by the state of tribes inhabiting the hills. On this subject of ethnicity, Scott assumes a radical constructionist position and argues in chapter 7 that ethnic identity must again be understood as a strategic choice, as a positionality vis-à-vis the state and other groups in the hills. The plasticity of social structure is paralleled by an ambiguity in ethnic identities, and this ambiguity is used by hill people as a political resource, as it affords outsiders no easy institutional access. A similar plasticity is found, Scott argues in chapter 8, in the hill religions, both with reference to nat (spirit) worship as well as other prophetic religions. As the Buddhist clergy tended to congregate in, and be associated with, the centre of the valley states, nat worship emerged as a powerful mode of resistance, which Scott reckons is reflected in the legends of the nats' earthly lives as rebels against the king. Prophetic forms of both Buddhism and Christianity evoked images of restoring the former world order of equality between hill and valley people, and these movements also served to facilitate intra-ethnic coalitions that could be tapped in collective resistance to the state.
Scott's general argument is that the state and its shatter zone in the hills of mainland Southeast Asia are mutually constituted. The cultural practices of the hill people are designed to evade state control, and can no longer be understood in terms of an early evolutionary of civilisation, as the popular narrative claims.
Scott has written a book that presents a clear argument and which will certainly make many people rethink the relations between hill people and the valley state. Notwithstanding the interesting perspective that the book presents, there are a few problems that weaken its argument. First, Scott emphasises repeatedly the importance of ‘friction of terrain’ in limiting the reach of state control in the hills ‘often to the vanishing point’ (p. 63). If this was so, why did the hill people need to elaborate all kinds of escape practices? Scott does not address this question well enough in my opinion. These practices might very well have the effect of being state evading. Still, Scott is unclear about the link between the deliberate design on the one hand and the effect of state-evading practices on the other. It is a considerable weakness of the book that Scott comes close to committing the familiar fallacy of deriving cause from effect. The bold statement that the cultural practices of hill people are consciously designed as a political strategy to evade the state, even down to the choice of what crops to grow, seems to me to lack sufficient empirical evidence. Again, this does not take credit away from Scott's point that the best way to understand hill societies and valley states in mainland Southeast Asia is through a relational perspective where positionality vis-à-vis each other is important for their mutual constitution. Overall, I think it is beyond dispute that this book will contribute significantly to establishing this perspective as the dominant one within the field of Southeast Asian studies.
