BOOK REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed

Louis

BOOK REVIEW: THE ART OF NOT BEING GOVERNED

the following is a book review: of JAMES C. SCOTT. 

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

The State of the State of Nature: Modernity and the Closing of the World

The modern state has come closer than ever to achieving the “end of history”. Increasingly, “non-state” spaces are being brought into the fold of “civilization.” Eschewing the normal protagonist, the nation-state, James C. Scott presents his subject: Zomia – a massive chunk of mountainous territory forming a transnational “non-state” region in upland Southeast Asia. Zomia represents a final frontier, or hold-out zone where progress, development, “civilization” and the state have yet to gain full control.

 The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia offers a new account of state building that seeks to overturn conventional understandings of both civilization and un-civilization. Scott's revisionist narrative aims to correct, “the huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, [which] pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness.”1

Scott's history of Zomia provides a narrative of “those who got away” from the taxes, conscription, disease and hierarchy of the state. Scott argues, “the signal, distinguishing trait of Zomia, vis-a-vis the lowland regions it borders, is that is relatively stateless.”2 A closer look at the “nomadic”, “tribal”, swiddening peoples of Zomia indicates that state building took place alongside an opposing “anarchist history” in which people looking to escape the state and its demands fled to the hills establishing more mobile, egalitarian, and consequently variable societal, political and cultural structures.

“State-Space” vs “Nonstate Space”: a Geographic Model of State Power

For most of human history the state “occupied a miniscule portion of the world's landscape.”3 From this perspective the state remained limited by a geographical dependence on “fixed-field grain agriculture [which] has been promoted by the state and has been, historically, the foundation of its power.”4 Fixed agriculture allowed for settled populations, which enabled the state to “ensure that economic activity was legible, taxable, assessable, and confiscatable.”5

The state “typically arose where there was a substantial expanse of arable land.”6 Concentrated grain production allowed for, settled, permanent populations on which to build a tax base and military apparatus. Areas suitable for “wet rice cultivation”, Scott deems “state-spaces” which he contrasts to “non-state space” or “locations where, owing largely to geographic obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority.”7 For Scott, “the ungoverned periphery...was...a constant temptation, [as] a constant alternative to life within the state.”8

Run to the Hills: Slavery, Taxes, and the Fiscal Demands of Centralized Rule

Maintaining state space required two things: [1] manpower [2] grain. Scott argues, “The concentration of manpower was the key to political power in premodern Southeast Asia.”9 Military superiority required access to “concentrated manpower” which could support “densely packed cultivators of permanent grain fields who produce a considerable annual surplus.”10 The surplus feeds the state as “they and their rice fields are, above all, fixed in space. legible, taxable, conscriptable, and close at hand.”11

The concentration of manpower needed to feed the state was not voluntarily exchanged. Scott wants to make very clear that the state did not function in terms of a Lockean social contract. Rather, populating the rice fields required slavery. So much so that no “states flourished except by slave-raiding on a substantial scale.”12 States were sustained by “taxes” which often depended on the value generated from slave based agriculture. According to Scott, the state was often “inclined to press...to the limit”, and when “pushed to the breaking point, the subject” was likely to run to the hills.

Hill Peoples: “Backwardness” as a Political Choice

Conventional narratives treat “hill peoples” as backward, barbarous, primitive vestiges of a pre-civilized era. Scott argues this narrative is wrong and instead insists that “hill peoples” are, and have always been “barbarians by design.”13 Hill peoples sought to position themselves outside the scope of state power or to prefer tribality to peasantry.14

To avoid the state “hill peoples” practice both [1] state evasion and [2] state prevention, which involve the adoption of a distinct set of economic, political, social and cultural practices. State evading characteristics are traits “that make it difficult for a state to capture or incorporate a group... or... appropriate its material production.”15 State preventing traits are “those that make it unlikely that a group will develop internally durable, hierarchical, state-like structures.”16

The characteristics of “hill peoples” are: [1] location at the margins [2] physical mobility [3] swiddening agriculture [4] flexible social structure [5] religious heterodoxy [6] egalitarianism and [7] nonliterate cultures. These characteristics should be understood “on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation.”17 Being “uncivilized” in this respect represents a “political choice” to evade “the hard power of the fiscal state, its capacity to extract direct taxes and labor from a subject population.”18

The Triumph of the Modern State: the End of History or a Symbiosis Lost?

In an “anarchist history” the state and the non-state have for the larger part of history been a constant fixture in human organization. States made non-states, and non-states made states. Trade in both people and goods, sometimes voluntary,sometimes coerced created a deep interdependency between “civilization” and the “barbarians.” Classical padi states were forged from an cosmopolitan mixture of slaves, and immigrants. Non-state spaces were populated by a diverse array of fugitives from state power. Both state and non-state were essential to the process of human “progress.”

Scott's subject, “Zomia represents one of the world's longest-standing and largest refuge of populations who live in the shadow of states but who have not yet been fully incorporated.” But, even Zomia has been slowly brought under State control as technological advancement eradicates distance, and gives states even greater power to penetrate into the once inaccessible backwoods. At the periphery, non-state spaces, such as Zomia served as a “shatter zone”, or release valve for the social tensions endemic to the hierarchy of state-style social organization.

 Scott concludes that “in the contemporary world, the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.”27 “An anarchist history” requires that we think deeply about the broader consequences of “high modernism” and the ubiquitous triumph of the modern state; where escape to the “periphery is not much more than a folkloric remnant.”28  If “valley states” and “hill peoples” have always existed as “reciprocal and contemporaneous” what does the loss of “non-state” space entail for the future of the human condition?26 When the weight of the state becomes unbearable, what do we do when there is no where left to run?

CITES to PAGE NUMBERS

1p.x

2p.19

3p.5

4Ibid..

5p.5

6p.13

7p.13

8p.6

9p.64

10Ibid....

11Ibid...

12p.85

13p.8

14p.183

15p.278

16Ibid....

17p.9

18p.330

19p.199 he speaks of other escape crops such as maize and yucca.

20p.208

21p.295

22p.289

23p.227

24p.228

25p.226

26p.28

27p.324

28p.324 --- I borrow the term “high-modernism” from Scott. James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press. New Haven, CT.