The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

"I love Scott, he’s one of my favourite authors. His fascination is with the way that states see populations and how people avoid being drawn into the eye of the state. This book focuses on ‘Zomia’—an area in southeast Asia crossing China, Vietnam, Laos, and other countries—where people were able to exist outside the reach of sovereign states. His argument is that what we now think of as the ‘tribal people’ or ‘minorities’—like the Hmong—were originally people who went up into the hills to avoid the reach of settled empires. These peoples, he argues, used all kinds of strategies to avoid becoming part of empires. His most controversial point—which he rather wonderfully says he’s not sure he even believes himself— is that some of these groups might even have deliberately given up literacy or not adopted literacy. If you have a written record of your past, you’re bound to it: ‘This is who we were before, these are the agreements we made.’ But if you rely on an oral tradition, you can have the kind of changing faith where you can say, ‘We’re actually Chinese, we’re actually Thai, we’re actually our own people…’ The Chinese empire has always had a very ambiguous relationship with the region. If you look at Chinese records, you’ll find this powerful antipathy for the southwest, even when it’s formally part of China. They describe Yunnan as malarial, hard to get to, hard to impose your will on. There’s constant rebellion, constant bucking against the power of the state, and the mandarins really dislike it. For the state, ethnic minorities in China now are all about categorization. After the People’s Republic of China was founded, there were 56 ethnic groups, including the Han, who are the majority. Everybody has one or the other listed on their identity card. It’s all about saying ‘You are this, you are that,’ whereas in the past it had been about flexibility, about splintering into smaller groups or smaller groups coming together. So, with modernity, the reach of the state has expanded. Villages are more connected, technology allows you to categorize or track people more easily. These flexible identities have disappeared for a lot of people, they’ve become fixed. Traditionally there’s been a lot of people crossing borders. For instance, people who lived on the China-Myanmar border would go over to the Myanmar side because the reach of the state there was weaker. There is still a lot of flexibility around those borders, there are a lot of people who have positioned themselves between states. The Chinese state wants them to be this quaint, backward people you can go see but who don’t have any actual agency of their own. They want them to be a tourist attraction where you see people doing their funny dances in their funny costumes. In Beijing you literally have an ‘Ethnic Minority Park,’ which used to have a sign outside in Chinglish saying, quite accurately, ‘Racist Park.’ Their experiences are reduced to the level of Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World After All.’ They’ve become exhibitions — a bit like Indian shows in the US in the early 20th century. Yet you also get practices that were once mainstream Chinese culture, that were destroyed by the PRC and Maoism, but have survived in southeast Asia and among the minority groups. These are traditions that were once mainstream Han practices but are now identified as ‘minority’ practices. For instance, Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down , which is about the Hmong in California, centers around the semi-shamanic tradition calling for the soul to come back to the body. This is very much portrayed as a Hmong tradition, which it is. But it was once standard Han Chinese practice, the jiao hun or soul-calling that you can find described in pre-20th century texts. It was wiped out under Communism because it was superstition. But it survived in little ethnic minority pockets. A European example would be the bagpipes. This was once a standard musical instrument across Europe, but it died out everywhere else and survived up in Scotland, in the hills. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"