Zomia

A review of James C. Scott's books

Also available as a podcast and as a YouTube video:

Yale anthropologist/political scientist James C. Scott is the series editor of the agrarian studies series that my book is part of. He has written a series of books himself, focusing on the ways people dominated by empires cope and sometimes resist. The titles speak for themselves: The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Seeing Like a State: How certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017).  

Most of Scott’s examples come from Southeast Asia, where he says the cultures of the coasts and lowlands see themselves as “bearers of order, progress, enlightenment, and civilization.” State formation, Scott says, takes place in the valleys and the hills are “peopled” with folks trying to escape this state formation process and/or evade the power of these lowland governments as they’re forming. Or after they’ve formed. It’s notable that Scott’s interpretation potentially reverses the typical chronology: he sees the states possibly forming first and the hills filling up with fleeing people second. So the hill-people are not just remnants of more primitive folks who were left out when the civilization began. They’re potentially people who opted out once it had begun and they saw the cost of being part of the new thing.

Scott says, “The encounter between expansionary states and self-governing peoples is…echoed in the cultural and administrative process of ‘internal colonization’ that characterizes the formation of most Western nation-states.” Scott mentions the Romans, Ottomans, Han, and British, and also the treatment of indigenous populations in “white-settler” colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Algeria. I might add, this phenomenon is most visible but not necessarily limited to other races in these nations. The Progressive project of bringing civilization to farmers and the white trash of the Appalachians that culminated in eugenics, the sanitary/medical policies of the New Deal, and the TVA are some instances of “white-on-white” colonization.

Scott backs up a bit (especially in his most recent book) and reminds us that for most of human existence (the hundreds of millennia before recorded history), we were stateless. People organized themselves into families; sometimes into clans, bands, tribes. Occasionally into federations of tribes. Rarely into cities, states, or nations. So this encounter between nation-states and the self-governed is relatively recent in human experience. The last couple thousand years, max.

And until the transportation, communication, and armaments revolutions that began in the nineteenth century, “even the most ambitious states” faced huge impediments to projecting their power widely or effectively. People on the edges might be nominally subject to an empire, but how much contact did they have with it in daily life? How great was its impact on their lives? Usually not much, and if taxes and labor corvees got too oppressive, there was always empty land to flee to.

This has obviously changed in the 21st century, when modern states can surveil from space and kill from drones. But again, maybe it helps to think less of absolute categories like freedom and control. Could we imagine a spectrum of self-government vs. state control? Are there still places on the periphery where people encounter less intrusion, surveillance, and control? Do I live in one of them?

Scott observes that these “enclosures” of people are pursued by all states, regardless of their ideologies; leading him to conclude that “such projects of administrative, economic, and cultural standardization are hard-wired into the architecture of the modern state itself.” If the goal is to monetize values and control (and thereby tax) the flow of money, then this logic applies to a global market (central banks, credit cards, Apple, Nike, Coke) as well as state-controlled currencies, wage-labor and consumption (as opposed to barter, sharing, and mutual aid).

I’m interested in the Southeast Asian history Scott uses to support his analysis. But the more important issue for me is, does this analysis apply to other regions and times? Can this interpretation be used to understand colonialism and decolonization? That question of the inevitability of nation-states vs. other types of international organization? Most important, our own situation in the present and immediate future? I usually return to this question with everything – it’s why I named my blog and pod “History4Today”.

Throughout history the fringes were full, Scott says, of “fugitive, mobile populations whose modes of subsistence – foraging, hunting, shifting cultivation, fishing, and pastoralism – were fundamentally intractable to state appropriation.” These fringe people were often in contact with the “civilized” centers but tried to trade with them occasionally and on their own terms rather than becoming drawn into permanent relationships in which they were the inferior party to the trade. It was difficult to become wealthy without staying in one place (because things slow you down) and entering permanent relationships (and then the ones who became wealthy were the few who were the foci of these relationships, often at the expense of the rest).

For their part, the center viewed the “ungoverned periphery” as a taunt and as a “constant temptation” to the people it had already “enclosed.” The leaders of Jamestown and other early American colonies, for example, were constantly on guard against poor folk fleeing to live with the Indians. The rich literature of “capture and redemption” narratives was designed to scare people out of the idea of going to live with the uncivilized natives.

Scott says “shatter zones” were created “wherever the expansion of states, empires, slave trading, and wars” drove people to seek refuge in remote locations. It would be useful to map these historically. Maroon colonies, swamp refuges, gypsy camps and routes…

People choose, Scott suggests, to be more subsistence-oriented, more mobile, and culturally fluid in order to escape, remain free, and slide through cracks in the system. The state, in response, stigmatizes these characteristics of hill people, squatters, poachers, vagabonds, the homeless, savages, etc.

The historical event that first enabled state-formation on a large scale was staple agriculture. So “enclosure” is associated with agrarian societies, not primarily with being in the valley or on the hilltops. In the Andean altiplano, the agricultural breadbasket was at high elevations, and people fled to the lowlands of the Amazon to escape states. The Amazon jungle had the added advantage of being hard to travel quickly.

“As late as the eighteenth century, though they were no longer the majority of the world’s population, non-state people still occupied the greater part of the world’s land mass,” Scott notes. How is that changing nowadays (again in terms again of this spectrum of control), when the majority of the population is living in cities?  

“The hegemony, in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate peoples,” Scott says. Was this because of the relatively greater extent of empires and correspondingly looser control placed on subject populations? The fact that empires wanted only a tax, and not necessarily the “membership” of the people in their ideological, religious, or cultural institutions? This was also a feature of the premodern Asian land empires. How will this play out in the 21st century’s ongoing rush for resources as well as digital media that increases contact between the center and the periphery? Scott talks about a reduction of vernaculars: standardization of dialects, adoption of English, McDonalds, Toyota, Hollywood. It will be interesting to watch as that continues to develop, especially if the center shifts from the US to, say, China.