Organizer and Chair: James C. Scott, Yale University
Discussants: Pam McElwee, Arizona State University; F. K. Lehman, University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
By introducing the term “Zomia”, this panel proposes to break
with the standard nation-state format of scholarship and focus, instead, on
an interstate region defined by its distinctive agro-ecological, cultural, and
political characteristics. “Zomia” (“zo” = “hill” in
some dialects along the Burma-India/Bangladesh border) as a whole refers to
the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and lower ranges that run from the
Central Highlands of Vietnam through most of Laos, southwest China, northern
Thailand, northern Burma, and into Northeastern India. This vast interstate
zone in distinctive in several ways: adaptation to mountainous habitats, hill
agriculture, physical mobility, great linguistic and cultural diversity, egalitarian
social structure, and a history of resistance to state incorporation. “Eastern” Zomia,
the subject of this panel, alone crosses the borders of eight nation-states;
it is at the periphery of each and its inhabitants often have more in common
with one another than with the dominant populations of the valley states that
nominally rule them. The purpose of this panel is to explore the possibilities
for “area” scholarship organized in this novel fashion, as proposed
by Willem van Schendel, who coined the term “Zomia”. On a long historical
view, much of the region may perhaps be described as a “zone or refuge” for
peoples who have chosen to place themselves at a safe distance from expanding
valley states, especially, but not only, the Han-Chinese state. All of the panelists
have worked, avant la lettre, in “Zomia Studies” and have produced
important examples of the promise of such an approach.
Jean Michaud, Universite Laval, Canada
In area studies circles, cross-border panels are in general only modestly
successful. When their object actually bridges two or more major sub-fields
(such as East and Southeast Asian studies here, or virtually all of Asian
studies in the case of ‘Zomia’) they appear to lack significance in the
eyes of most area-focused observers. Several may ask: Isn’t the apparent
social and cultural resemblance between highland minority groups in those
mountains merely an illusion due to the fact that what they only really share,
beyond the use of a common ecosystem, is to not be one of the dominant lowland
majorities ruling the region for centuries? Based on geographical, historical,
cultural, economic, as well as political evidence, I review the arguments supporting
the thesis that the Southeast Asian massif, in spite of the staggering diversity
distinguishing its 85 million minority inhabitants, can be conceived of as
an operational notion for social research.
James C. Scott, Yale University
The hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia have been viewed, until recently,
by scholars and valley peoples, a ‘backward population’ that has
failed to make the transition to settled, wet-rice cultivation and incorporation
into state structures. This paper, instead, treats the hill-dwellers as essentially
a maroon, runaway, state-fleeing population which has, over the past two millennia,
peopled the hills. Moving away, especially from Han expansion, into this ‘zone
of refuge’, hill people are best conceived of as a “state-effect”.
Their social structure, agricultural practices, and cultural values make most
sense in this light. The concept of “escape agriculture” is introduced
to explain how swiddening and foraging are practiced, in large part, because
they are resistant to appropriation, unlike irrigated, wet-rice cultivation
which is tailor-made for appropriation. The concept of “escape social
structure” is introduced to account for practices of dispersion, fission,
and acephaly designed to evade capture by slave-raiding and incorporation into
state structures. The history of conscription, warfare, epidemics, crop-failure,
taxes and corvée in the valley states is examined to show how they may
account for patterns of demographic flight from lowland state cores. Much of
the distinctiveness of the “hills” as an agro-ecological and cultural
zone, I argue, stems from the fact that the hills have been populated by
those who have voluntarily fled or have been driven out of the alluvial valleys.
Christian C. Lentz, Duke University
By focusing on a rebellion in Vietnam’s northwest, this paper challenges
the nationalist historiography of Vietnam’s revolutionary past. Known
widely as setting of the Viet Minh’s 1954 victory over French-led forces,
Dien Bien Phu is an apt location to study the contradictory social processes
involved in state formation. On the one hand, located on the mountainous Lao
border, Dien Bien as place was distant from the capital and populated with peoples
different from the dominant Kinh ethnic group. On the other hand, remembered
as the “great victory” in the struggle over colonialism, Dien Bien
as memory has become central to the idea of Vietnam as a source of legitimacy
for the Communist Party. How Dien Bien became part of Vietnam is a story of
how state and society negotiated this tension between center and periphery,
between memory and place to produce a national political formation. This national
formation emerged locally through the wake of the anti-colonial struggle. Yet,
even after the French surrender, this new state formation did not go unchallenged.
Kinh cadres worked to restore Dien Bien’s productive landscape and erect
a socialist state. Yet their program of centralizing authority initially foundered
on the shoals of a multi-ethnic, polylingual society that acknowledged alternative
forms of sovereignty. In the late 1950s, Hmong commoners hailed the arrival
of a new king. These episodes of “calling for the king” tested the
authority of the rising power based downstream in Hanoi. And, theoretically,
they provide opportunity to question the telos of the nation.
Janet C. Sturgeon, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Upland Akha farmers in southern Yunnan in China have long maintained strong
cross-border relationships with kin in Burma through marriage, exchange of
agricultural tasks for shifting cultivation, and sharing fields and pastures.
Many elderly Akha recall moving to Burma and then back again in their lifetimes,
extending their “homeland” across national boundaries. Recent hardening of
borders have curtailed, but not eliminated, these movements and trans-border
activities. In spite of stricter border regulation, lowland Akha and Tai farmers
in Xishuangbanna, China, have recently intensified connections with relatives
in neighboring Laos to get access to land for share-cropping rubber. Through
farmer-to farmer relationships, rubber has been rapidly spilling across the
border, even as Chinese state rubber farms have been stymied in their attempts
to gain large-scale concessions in the northern Lao provinces of Oudomxay, Luang
Namtha, and Phongsaly. Drawing on long-standing relationships in Muang Sing
district in Luang Namtha, until recently part of China, these ethnic minority
farmers are forging new kinds of collaborations in a commodified and indeed “globalized” world.
In the face of long-held official categorizations of Akha and Tai as backward,
subsistence farmers, these minority cultivators are remaking Zomia, turning
ethnic identity and cross-border links into the qualifications for getting
rich.
Jodi L. Weinstein, College of New Jersey
Southwest China’s Guizhou Province, with its ethnically diverse population
and mountainous terrain, represents the eastern edge of “Zomia.” Like
their counterparts elsewhere in this interstate zone, Guizhou residents traditionally
relied upon illegal activities such as robbery, raiding and banditry to meet
their basic needs. As long as the state presence in Guizhou remained light,
local residents could pursue these subsistence strategies with impunity.
In the 1720s, however, the Qing government imposed a new social and political
order designed to transform the people of Guizhou into law-abiding Qing subjects
and end the violence for which the province was notorious.
Drawing on archival sources, this paper examines local
responses to this enterprise. I argue that Qing efforts to subdue and incorporate
this corner of “Zomia” only
strengthened existing patterns of subsistence and gave rise to new forms of
resistance. Some individuals continued to practice the more traditional form
of these strategies, usually involving petty theft and murder, while others
developed more sophisticated schemes with a strong anti-Qing flavor. I conclude
that for many residents of Guizhou, the demands of day-to-day survival superseded
any sense of fealty to the imperial dynasty. Despite the Qing government’s
administrative and military interventions, Guizhou retained the defining characteristics
of “Zomia.”
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