CHAPTER 8
Prophets of Renewal

And since it would be good to give a name to this seeker of salvation in Burmese Buddhism, however unclassifiable he may be, why not—inspired once again by the Weberian expression—simply call him the enchanter of the world.
—Guillaume Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance

But it is a world permanently in quest of opportunities for enchantment, and often ready to identify and respond to the most fugitive of cues: not just the youth, energy, and the determination of Tony Blair but the cinematic vigor of Arnold Schwarzenegger or the entrepreneurial momentum of Silvio Berlusconi.
—John Dunn, Setting the People Free

The mere enumeration of the hundreds, nay thousands, of rebellions mounted by hill people against encroaching states over the past two millennia defies easy accounting. Cataloguing them in some tidy Linnaean classification scheme seems even more daunting.

These uprisings, usually led by people styling themselves (and/or taken to be) wonder-working prophets, shoulder their way to the front of the historical record by virtue of how large they loom in the archives. Precisely because they menaced the routines of administration and tributary relations and because they contradicted the civilizational narrative of a peaceful ingathering of peoples, they have demanded attention. Each uprising provoked its own particular blizzard of military and police reports, finger-pointing, trials and executions, commissions of inquiry, policy changes, and administrative reforms. Thus it is that most uplanders appear in the archives of Han, Viet, Siamese, and Burman states either as contributors to the routine statistics on tribute, corvée labor, and taxation or as barbarians in open rebellion against the state. The sheer volume of the paper trail dealing with uprisings makes it possible for an unwary scholar to write a history of many a hill people as if it consisted largely of rebellions—and, of course, to narrate that history largely from the perspective of those charged with suppressing them.

The study of rebellion in Zomia has, as we shall see, much to teach us about resistance to the lowland states. But to focus largely on these flash points is to overlook processes equally as important to the evolution of hill society but far less dramatic. It is to overlook, for example, the deep history of migration and flight, sometimes in the aftermath of rebellion but, just as often, as an alternative to a military confrontation. It is to overlook the equally important processes of accommodation with and assimilation into lowland states and peoples. Those taking this path, of course, typically become, over time, Thai, Mon, Han, Burman, and Kinh and therefore disappear from the historical record as Karen, Hmong, Mien, Shan, and so on. But we have no reason to assume that they were any less numerous than those who remained identified with hill societies. And finally, to dwell on rebellions is to overlook the hill allies, auxiliaries, and mercenaries of the valley states who took part in the suppression of the rebellions. Providing that we are not mesmerized by the paper trail into thinking that the hills were in permanent rebellion, then the prophesies and ideas animating the hill risings against lowland states provide a powerful instance of the fractious dialogue between states and peripheral peoples.

A Vocation for Prophecy and Rebellion: Hmong, Karen, and Lahu

Some peoples in the massif seem to have a vocation for prophets and rebellion. To judge by the literature, the Miao/Hmong, the Karen, and the Lahu fall into this category. Their rebellions are also the best documented. For the Miao/Hmong, who number nearly 9 million, and the Karen, who number more than 4 million, this may be in part an artifact of their size vis-à-vis other minorities, such as the Lahu (population about 650,000) or the Khmu (568,000), who seem similarly inclined but less numerous.

Hmong

The deepest historical record of rebellion surely belongs to the Miao/Hmong.¹ They, for their part, trace the origin of their conflicts with the Han to the legendary defeat of their king Chi-You by the equally legendary Yellow Emperor of the Han, Huang Di, in the third millennium BCE! In the two centuries after 400 CE, Herold Wiens has calculated, there were more than forty Miao rebellions, as the Miao contested with the Han for control of the lowlands between the Yellow and Yangzi river basins. Other rebellions followed, and most authorities agree that the past two thousand years of Miao history has been one long skein of rebellion, defeat, migration, and flight.² Until the mid-fourteenth century, Miao history involves a lot of guesswork, inasmuch as Miao was often used as a portmanteau term to label many stateless peoples who resisted Han administration. In addition, in this period, the Miao and the Yao/Mien were not sharply distinguished.³

The staccato of rebellion, repression, and flight from 1413 on, when the Ming authorities sought to enlarge their control and promote large-scale military settlement in Guizhou, is, however, not in dispute. During the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911) there was “hardly any time … when suppression or pacification campaigns were not being undertaken against the Miao and Yao.”⁴ Two historians of this period, not given to hyperbole, characterize these as campaigns of “extermination.”⁵ There were large-scale uprisings in 1698, 1733–37, 1795–803, and, finally, the massive “Miao Rebellion,” which swept Guizhou from 1854 to 1873, overlapping with the largest peasant revolt in history in central China, the great Taiping Rebellion. The Miao Rebellion was crushed only with great difficulty, some areas remaining under rebel control for more than a decade. Its defeat, in turn, set in motion a large-scale exodus of Hmong and Taiping remnants moving into the hills of northern Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

Having fled forced assimilation and sought autonomy across China’s southern borders, the Hmong found themselves similarly threatened by the French in Indochina and the Siamese in northern Thailand. There followed a long series of rebellions against the French in 1904, 1911, 1917–18, 1925, 1936, and 1943, and against the Siamese authorities in 1901–2 and 1921.⁶ Two features of virtually all these rebellions, as well as those of the Lahu and Karen, which we shall explore later, bear emphasis: they were led by prophetic figures appealing to millenarian expectations, and they tended to appeal, as well, to other, neighboring upland peoples.

Karen

The Karen have an equally impressive, if less well-documented, history of rebellion and prophetism. Their history serves to illuminate the pervasiveness of a culture of liberation and dignity fashioned, for the most part, from the cosmology of the lowland states. Located along the Burmese-Thai border, the Karen number roughly 4.5 million and represent the most numerous highland minority in both countries. Some Karen are Buddhists, some animist, and some Christian. Indeed, the cultural diversity among the Karennic groups is so great that many studies of them begin by pointing out that there is no single trait that all of them share. The Baptist missionary D. L. Brayton, however, disagreed: “It is a trait in the national character of the Karen to have prophets rising up among them.”⁷ No matter what their religious convictions, the Karen have shown, again and again, a devotion to wonder-working, charismatic, heterodox healers, prophets, and would-be kings. As Jonathan Falla, who worked as a nurse in a Karen rebel camp in the late 1980s, noted, the tradition is still very much alive: “They are millenarians, forever generating warrior leaders, sects, ‘white monks’ and prophets, all persuading themselves that the Karen kingdom is, once again, at hand. Animists talk of the coming of Y’wa, Baptists of the coming of Christ, and the Buddhists of the Arrimettaya, the future Buddha. Somebody is imminent, Toh Meh Pah is coming, something will happen. ‘Remember the Israelites in Egypt, Jo. Forty years in the wilderness, and then the Promised Land. The same will happen for the Karen, when forty years have passed.’”⁸

It was the good fortune of the Baptist missionaries to have brought the Bible to a people who had long believed in messiahs. It was their mistake to imagine that the Baptist messiah was the last messiah the Karens, in their impatience, would be needing.

Each of the prophetic traditions embraced with such enthusiasm by the Karen envisions a new mundane order in preparation for the divine coming. Frequently, a holy man—whether a healer, a priest, a hermit (yà thè—), or a monk—will be the herald of the coming order and be seen as the “field of merit” around whom the faithful gather.⁹ What is heralded might, depending on the circumstances, be the imminent king (mín laún—) or embryo-Buddha, the Ariya Mattreya (cakkavatti) or a Karen king/savior figure such as Toh Meh Pah, Y’wa, Duai Gaw/Gwae Gaw (a former rebel leader), or another. Virtually all of these cosmologies of charisma have lowland analogues. Mín laún rebellions in Burma and phu mi bun “holy man” rebellions in Siam bear a close resemblance and might fairly be said to constitute the “once-and-future-king” traditions of the Burmese and the Siamese. The Karen kingdom invokes a silver city and a gold palace to which the righteous shall go when the millennium arrives. Verses from the Karen prophetic tradition recorded by missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century capture the spirit of these aspirations:

That a Karen King would yet appear

The Talain [Mon] Kings have had their season

The Burmese Kings have had their season

And the foreign Kings will have their season

But the Karen King will yet appear

When the Karen King arrives

There will only be one monarch

When the Karen King arrives

There will be neither rich nor poor

When the Karen King arrives

Every thing [creature] will be happy

Lions and leopards will lose their savageness.¹⁰

The pervasive idea of a reversal of fortunes, of a world turned upside down, of the conviction that it is the Karen’s turn to have power and the wealth, palaces, and cities to go along with it, animates a long tradition of rebellions.

The locus classicus for mín laún rebellions among the Karen appears to lie in the mid-eighteenth century, amid the wars between the largely Mon kingdom of Pegu/Bago in southern Burma and Ava, the largely Burman kingdom in the north.¹¹ A mín laún from a Karen village north of Pegu appeared in 1740; his name was Tha Hla, though he was called Gwe Mín.¹² He may or may not have been Karen, but there is no doubt that he had a strong Karen following.¹³ What began as a revolt against the high taxes imposed on Peguans by the Burmese governor ended with Gwe Mín being proclaimed king of Hanthawaddy (Pegu region) and taking the official title S’mín Dhaw Buddahekheti dammaraja: Buddha field of merit. His tenure was brief but he was “their” king. He was deposed by his first minister in 1747, and his reign was followed by the Ava-Pegu Wars, culminating in the comprehensive defeat of Pegu by the new Burman king Alaunghpaya in 1757. The devastation of this period is known in Karen oral tradition as the “Alaunghpaya Hunger.” Many thousands of Mon and Karen fled persecution by withdrawing to remote hills to the east or by placing themselves under the protection of the Siamese.

From then on, the mín laún and rebellions came thick and fast. Another mín laún, perhaps nearly contemporaneous with Gwe Mín, called Saw Quai Ren was the first in a line of at least ten mín laún said to constitute a dynasty.¹⁴ Subsequent mín laún and their followers expected Saw Quai Ren to reappear with an army. In 1825–26, a Karen prophet proclaimed the imminent return of Y’wa and, taking advantage of the Burmese defeat in the first of three Anglo-Burmese Wars, threw off Burmese rule for four years before finally being defeated. In 1833 Adoniram Judson, an early missionary and founder of what later became the Rangoon University, met a Sgaw Karen prophet with a large following, Areemaday. The prophet expected a great war after which a king would restore a Buddhist peace. Resisting the importuning of Christian missionaries, the prophet and his entourage established a small zone of religious order and later allied with a Kayah prince to fight a Burmese force in 1844–46. Areemaday, who had declared himself mín laún, was killed in the battle along with many of his followers. In 1856 another Karen imminent king in the Salween Hill tracts gathered Shan and Karenni recruits and refused to pay taxes to the Burman official of the young British colony.¹⁵ In 1867, in the mountains near Papun, a self-proclaimed mín laún rose among the Karen, although he was stigmatized by the colonial authorities as a bandit. A mín laún typically declared himself by inaugurating a pagoda and hoisting the finial (t’í—) of its spire into place, a monarchical privilege.

One imagines that many smaller-scale prophets, because they were politically passive or never attracted enough followers to qualify for a place in the colonial archives, were active among Buddhist Karen but escaped notice. They are also a religious fixture of twentieth-century Karen Buddhist society. Shortly before the Japanese invasion, a Karen calling himself Phu Gwe Gou founded a millenarian movement in the Salween area. He was assassinated by the British-organized Force 136 in the course of the war.

Among Karen in the Burmese-Thai border area, Mikael Gravers identifies two distinctive millenarian cosmologies. Adherents of one, calling themselves Pwo Karen of the Yellow Thread Movement, are followers of a hermit who prescribed their rites and practices. They are enjoined, among other things, to cease raising pigs and drinking alcohol, to wear a seven-threaded yellow wristband, to erect a pagoda with the pole in front dedicated to the Earth Goddess (Hsong Th’ Rwi), who protects Buddhist merit-making before the arrival of the Ariya. This tradition, called Lu Baung, is locally led by the hermit’s disciple who, under certain conditions, might proclaim himself the mín laún and touch off a rebellion. As late as the year 2000, a clash between Lu Baung Karen villagers and the Thai border police patrol led to the murder of five policemen.¹⁶

A second millenarian Buddhist cosmology that circulates among the Karen is represented by the Telakhoung tradition. While it shares many features with the Lu Baung, it is distinctive in its “dynastic” descent line from the original hermit-prophet, Saw Yoh, and in the exclusion of women from its rituals. Gravers regards the Telakhoung as a more hierarchical, “valley” version of the Lu Baung, with its statelike structures and a vision of the future in which all religions will combine. It appears that just as hill peoples often have a dualistic social structure—some variants more egalitarian and others more hierarchical—so do their prophetic movements share an analogous duality.

Lahu

The Lahu, speakers of a Tibeto-Burman tongue related to Akha, Hani, Lisu, and Lolo (Yi), are a highland swiddening people whose “heartland” is in the southwestern corner of Yunnan. Ninety percent of the Lahu population of roughly 650,000 is to be found in western Burma and Yunnan between the upper reaches of the Salween (Nu) and Red rivers. They are, even by hill standards, an exceptionally egalitarian society with little or no political unity beyond the hamlet level, and, to judge from the ethnographer most familiar with them, very little effective authority even within the hamlet.¹⁷ What they do have in abundance, however, are prophets and a deep prophetic tradition. They have deployed this prophetic tradition with its Mahayana, animist, and, now, Christian elements to assert themselves against a variety of lowland foes: Han, Thai, the British, and the Burmans.

This brief account of Lahu prophetism is meant to serve three purposes. First, it puts a necessary, though abbreviated, historical and ethnographic footing under the religious cosmology that animates Lahu prophets and their followers. Second, it illuminates how a confection of syncretic religious ideas, many of them from state centers, and a mimicry of lowland-state institutional forms can be reshaped so as to oppose lowland agendas. Finally, it illustrates how such ideas and their carriers can, on occasion, provide the social cohesion necessary for collective action, not only among the otherwise atomistic Lahu but also between them and other hill societies such as the Wa, Karen, Lisu, Akha, and even Tai.

The movements of the Lahu southward and to higher ground over the past four centuries, largely in response to pressure from Han authorities and settlers, are reasonably well established. Before then, during the early Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), it appears that at least one branch of the Lahu (the Lahu Na) contended with the Tai for control of the fertile bottom land along the Lincang River in southwestern Yunnan. The Tai prevailed and the Lahu were driven into the hills, where many became tributaries to the larger Tai polities. Thus, like quite a few other hill peoples, the Lahu, who now appear as ur-swiddeners and opium cultivators, may have become swiddeners only following a defeat and perhaps to avoid being absorbed by the Tai as serfs.

The larger and more threatening presence looming over the Lahu was the aggressively expansionist early Qing Dynasty. An early Qing account of the Lahu, quoting even earlier sources, makes it clear the degree of contempt in which they were held by Han officials: “They are black, ugly, and foolish. They eat buckwheat as well as tree bark, wild vegetables, vines, snakes, insects, wasps, ants, cicadas, rats and wild birds. They do not know how to build houses but live in rock caves. They are of the same kind as the ye ren [wild men].”¹⁸ It was also common lore among the Han that the Lahu were born with tails, which dropped off after a month.

Under the Ming policy of “ruling barbarians with barbarians,” the Lahu were ruled fairly lightly by Tai chiefs appointed over them. This practice changed dramatically when the Qing began to apply their new policy of direct administration by Han civil magistrates in Lahu areas. To implement direct rule, the Han authorities dismissed Tai officials, conducted a cadastral survey of cultivated lands by soil fertility, and began registering households with a view toward imposing a systematic tax regime. This policy, applied first in 1725, touched off a series of major rebellions beginning in 1728 and lasting six years. They all involved interethnic coalitions of Lahu, Tai, Hani, Lopang, and Yi opposed to the new taxes and the encroaching Han settlers, as well as the imperial monopoly on tea. In the later phases of these rebellions, the Lahu were led by a Tai monk “who claimed supernatural ability to deliver them from oppression.”¹⁹

The central role of wonder-working monks or what have been called Lahu “god-men” becomes unmistakably clear at the turn of the century in a series of uprisings (1796–1807) by Lahu, Wa, and Bulang, this time against the taxes and corvée exacted by their remaining Tai overlords. A revered Mahayana monk of Han ethnicity, known locally as the “Copper and Gold Monk,” was instrumental in rallying the Lahu to the rebels’ cause. The crushing of this rebellion by imperial troops appears to have set off a large-scale migration southward into Burma’s Shan states. Those Lahu who remained in the area of the uprisings have subsequently become increasingly Sinicized.

By 1800 a kind of cultural template had been established for Lahu rebellions, which were innumerable. They were almost always led by holy men seen by the Lahu as god-kings who could cure illnesses, purify the community, and constitute a Buddhist “field of merit.” Thanks to the careful reconstruction of this cultural complex by Anthony Walker, we can identify the key elements of Lahu cosmology that make up this amalgam.

Like many of their neighboring hill societies—the Kachin, Lisu, Akha—the Lahu have a legendary creator-god, a dualistic male-female figure who formed the heaven and the earth.²⁰ This pre-Buddhist tradition became, by the mid-nineteenth century at the latest, thoroughly fused with Mahayana Buddhism (not the Theravada of the Tai), to which the Lahu were converted by a succession of charismatic monks who established temples (fofang) in the Lahu hills. The second of these monks, A-sha, and his sister were also credited by legend with defeating the Wa, converting them to Mahayana practices, and subordinating them to the Lahu. Mahayana brought with it the Golden Land tradition of a new world of equality, peace, material abundance, and autonomy from outside rule. Above and beyond bringing millenarian beliefs, Mahayana monastic structure provided something of a pan-Lahu organizing grid that served both as a social mechanism for dispute settlement and, at the same time, a supravillage network for rebellion. The teacher-disciple relationship so central to Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism led to “daughter” temples linked in discipleship and doctrine to the fofang of the most revered founding monks.

Lahu prophets subsequently were virtually all charismatic monks who saw themselves, and were seen, as the incarnation of the Lahu creator-spirit, Gui-sha, and simultaneously the Buddha Sakyamuni (Burmese s’eq k’yà mín—) come to restore an ethical, peaceful world. The two figures become one and the same: an imminent divinity representing both the Lahu ancestral spirit and the conquering, wheel-turning, imminent Buddha. As Walker understands it, “A recurrent phenomenon of the Lahu experience, often disturbing the ritual routine … is that of a holy man who, invoking his oneness with Guisha’s divinity, seek[s] to surmount the limitation of a village-based social organization in order to challenge the hegemony of externally imposed political control.”²¹ As in the case of the Karen prophets, Lahu prophets arise both to restore traditional ethical principles and to resist subordination to valley states—in this case, Han or Tai.

The frequency of Lahu prophetic movements allows us to identify something of a “career trajectory,” even for an activity so decidedly unroutine as becoming a god-man. A local village priest has a mystical experience—perhaps as the result of an illness—and claims healing powers through the use of trance or possession. If his claim is accepted and he gains a substantial extravillage following for his curing powers, he may claim (or his followers may claim) that he has Gui-sha’s divine nature. He is then likely to insist on ritual and doctrinal reforms (diet, prayer, taboos) to cleanse the community and prepare for a new order. A final step, one that will invariably catapult him into the archives of his lowland neighbors and perhaps sign his death warrant, is when, as god-man, he proclaims a new order and unites his followers in defiance of the lowland state.

Walker provides accounts of those twentieth-century god-men who made it into the archives. The Chinese records describe a Lahu prophet–led uprising in 1903 preceded by a monthlong assembly with gourd-pipe dancing and chanting. Its prophet was killed in the subsequent fighting. A Karen assistant to Harold Young, an American Baptist missionary, reported meeting a Lahu man north of Kengtung “who claimed to be a messianic king” and whose following included Akha and Shan as well as Lahu. In 1918 Lahu rebels attacked a Chinese magistrate’s office (yamen), some of them carrying paper portraits of the Maitreya Buddha. By the 1920s, as Christianity began to make inroads among the Lahu, an American missionary reported that a Yunnanese convert with a reputation for prophecy and healing had attracted a huge following, for whom he had prescribed new dietary laws. Although the account is fragmentary, this Christian god-man appears to have followed much the same script as had Lahu Buddhist prophets before him.

In 1929 a Lahu healer near Kengtung with a large multiethnic following suddenly fortified his village, refused to pay taxes, and prepared to attack and seize the small Tai statelet of Muang Hsat for the Lahu. British colonial troops intervened at this point to destroy his fort and disperse his armed followers. Another Lahu prophet, active from 1930 to 1932, attacked a local Wa chief and then retreated into the inaccessible Awng Lawng mountains, along with his numerous followers. There, he ruled a partly independent kingdom.

Although the archives, written from a state perspective, often describe rebels and uprisings as essentially irrational, it is not hard to reconstruct more plausible precipitating factors, such as the desire to defend autonomy against valley-state incursions. This was surely the case in the massive and comparatively recent clashes in 1973 between Burma’s military government and the Lahu near Kengtung.²² The spiritual and secular leader of the Lahu, revered for the past sixty years as endowed with Gui-sha’s divinity and hence the guardian of the Lahu moral order, was Maw Na Pau Khu. The proximate reasons for the clash were the campaign by Burma’s army to disarm the Lahu, take over the opium trade, and impose taxes on households, livestock, and the slaughter of animals for market. For Burmese authorities, the prophet represented an intolerable zone of autonomous power they were determined to break. After two Lahu traders were arrested, the fighting began. Thousands of Lahu were involved; hundreds were killed, in part owing to their initial belief in their invulnerability. The Burmese losses in the more than fifty engagements that ensued were also considerable. There even appears to be a direct link between this particular rebellion and a subsequent anti-Han prophetic movement in Yunnan in 1976.²³

That Christians, particularly Baptists, should have made many converts among the Lahu is not surprising. Generally receptive to prophetism, many Lahu saw in Baptism a way to general health (“everlasting life”) and a powerful ally in their age-old attempts to free themselves from Han and Tai domination. The opening of schools and the acquisition of a prophetic book promised to put them on an equal footing with valley societies that stigmatized them for their backwardness. And in fact, many early Lahu converts who heard William Young’s sermons understood him to be another wonderworking divinity calling, as had other prophets they followed in the past, for a return to ethical conduct (giving up alcohol, opium, gambling) in preparation for a new dispensation. In other words, the Lahu who converted could retain virtually all their cosmology and prophetic expectations with little adjustment. That the promise of being delivered from subordination to their Tai and Han overlords was paramount was astutely registered by two Presbyterian observers of Young’s success: “We mention first [the political phase of the movement] because in our judgment political considerations such as exemption from taxes, mitigation of forced labor and relief from the necessity of bringing gifts to their [Tai] rulers were the most prominent considerations in the minds of most of the Lahu State who have been baptized.”²⁴

Theodicy of the Marginal and Dispossessed

In a world with the odds stacked so massively against them, surely the astounding fact about marginal hill peoples and many of the world’s dispossessed is that they should so often believe and act as though their deliverance were at hand. Though it so often ends tragically, this radical bias for hope, the conviction that the world is headed their way, is worthy of our careful attention and perhaps even our admiration. It is hard to imagine what the world would be like if the dispossessed, knowing the long odds, were all hard-headed realists. Marx, even in the context of his critique of religion, was not above a certain admiration. In a passage of which only the very last phrase is generally quoted, he wrote, “But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world; because they are in an inverted world.… Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”²⁵ The repeated insistence among so many hill peoples on reading the world in their favor, on believing in their imminent emancipation, bears an unmistakable family resemblance to the expectations of other dispossessed and stigmatized peoples: the Anabaptists of the Reformation civil wars, the cargo cults of Melanesia, the belief of Russian serfs that the tsar had issued a decree freeing them, the conviction among New World slaves that a redeemer was at hand, and hundreds of other millenarian expectations of a coming (or returning) king or god, by no means confined to Judeo-Christian settings. Ironically, these mis-readings of the world were occasionally so widespread and massive that they touched off rebellions that in fact changed the odds.

Given their elements of divine intervention and of magic, it is all too easy to exoticize prophetic movements cast in religious garb. This is a temptation that should be resisted. It should be resisted because virtually all popular struggles for power that today would qualify as “revolutionary” were, before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, generally understood in a religious idiom. Popular mass politics was religion, and religion was political. To paraphrase Marc Bloch, millennial revolt was as natural to the seigneurial (feudal) world as strikes, let us say, are to large-scale capitalism.²⁶ Before the first two avowedly secular revolutions in North America and France in 1776 and 1789, virtually all mass political movements expressed their aspirations in religious terms. Ideas of justice and of rights and, indeed, what we might today call “class consciousness” were religiously phrased. If, then, we are interested in popular aspirations and subaltern politics, we will rarely find them dressed in completely secular clothing. That such aspirations should take an extramundane form is not trivial, as we shall see. But when is politics not, at some level, a theological debate about moral order?

The strong and continuing animist substratum of popular religion, not excluding the salvation religions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, also ensures that “real-existing” practical religion does not ignore mundane concerns. Animist religious practices, after all, are largely about influencing worldly affairs: ensuring good crops, curing disease, influencing the hunt, succeeding in love and war, thwarting enemies of all kinds, succeeding in exams, ensuring human fertility. Most of the actual practice of the salvation religions, as opposed to the high doctrine, reflects this animist preoccupation with worldly results. The cult of the nats and the phi in Burmese and Siamese Theravada practice, respectively, is so deeply embedded that ordinary practitioners rarely experience a tension between this popular animism and canonical Buddhism.²⁷

Prophets Are a Dime a Dozen

A prophetic rebellion is often named, reasonably enough, after the prophet who appears as its central, charismatic figure (for example, the Saya San Rebellion in lower Burma, 1930–31). This practice seems to me an unfortunate misplacing of emphasis. First, while most prophetic movements do revolve around single charismatic figures, on many occasions a generalized millenarian activity lacks a single leader, or has a series of figures, none of whom appears to play a decisive role.

A second and far more important objection is that prophets seem rarely to be in short supply. Only those whose activities reach a level that catapults them into the archives, newspapers, and police and court records commend our attention. As Guillaume Rozenberg notes in the case of Burmese hermit monks, “We haven’t even considered the innumerable failures, this crowd of unknown forest monks who aspired and aspired in vain to sainthood.… It’s true that the anonymous destiny of those who failed in their quest for sainthood remains much more difficult to grasp than the striking trajectory of the glorious victors.”²⁸ One imagines that in early-first-century Roman Palestine there were innumerable would-be messiahs, each believing himself the fulfillment of the ancient Judaic prophecy.²⁹ Yet the cult of only one, Jesus of Nazareth, later became institutionalized as a world religion.

Charisma is, above all, a specific cultural relationship between a would-be prophetic figure and his or her potential following. And because it is a relationship or an interpersonal resonance, we cannot claim that an individual has charisma in the same way we might say that someone has a gold coin in his pocket. What constitutes a charismatic connection is always somewhat elusive, but what is charismatic in one cultural setting is unlikely to be charismatic in another, and what is charismatic at one historical moment might well be merely incomprehensible at another. Underpinning the individual gifts or radiant personality of a single figure, then, lie the more durable cultural expectations and desires that create, as it were, a kind or repertoire into which a prophet might fit. Thus from this perspective, a charismatic connection might be conceived as a specific congregation looking for a preacher whose message it can wholeheartedly embrace and whom it believes it can trust. It is as if the destination is largely known and specified (however ambitious it may be), and the congregation is in search of reliable transportation. The prophet is, in this sense, a vehicle. By the same token, a specific prophecy—for example, a new world will arrive when fifty white pagodas are built—is less interesting, since it is always disconfirmed, than is the underlying readiness to entertain certain kinds of futures. This readiness, having structural and historical causes, is likely to outlive the failure of a specific prophecy and to surface again in a new form. Why is it, in other words, that certain groups appear to have a vocation for millenarian expectations? Why are so many societies in the hills veritable cottage industries for the manufacture of utopian futures? There would seem to be something generic about many upland societies that is generative of prophecy.

It is the society within which a successful prophet appears that, in effect, lays down the basic script that shapes the prophet’s repertoire. We saw, in this connection, that it was possible to set out something like a standard career pattern for a Lahu prophet. How this process of reciprocal influence might work can be likened to the influence that an audience might have on a medieval bard. Let us imagine a bard who lives exclusively by the voluntary contributions of ordinary people in the marketplace. And let us assume, for the sake of argument, that each of those who like what he sings gives him an identical small “copper.” Having conjured up a bard who wants to please a large audience, let us further imagine that this bard has a repertoire of, say, a thousand songs and stories from which to select. Assuming that his audience has definite tastes, I imagine that, little by little, as the bard comes to know his audience, the actual songs he sings in the market square—perhaps even the order and style in which he sings them—will come to more closely approximate the distribution of tastes among his audience. Even if our bard is not adept at reading the expressions and enthusiasms of the crowd, the size of the pile of coppers at the close of the market will provoke adjustments in his repertoire.

Like any analogy, this one has its limitations. It allows too little for the creativity of the prophet and his capacity to add to the repertoire and to change tastes. By using the rather banal activity of singing in the public square as an analogy, I most certainly miss the huge stakes and high passions that animate a prophetic movement. Nonetheless, the analogy does illustrate the way in which the cultural expectations and historical understanding of a charismatic public—often misunderstood as mere putty in his hands—can play a decisive role in influencing the script of a successful prophet. This stochastic process of successive adjustment is familiar enough; it is the stock in trade of most successful politicians and preachers.³⁰

“Sooner or Later …”

Any social hierarchy creates, by its very existence, a stratification of wealth, privilege, and honor. Each principle of stratification may yield a slightly different ranking: the Confucian scholar or the Buddhist abbot may top the ranking for prestige but may be materially poor. For most societies, of course, the correlations of rankings are high and, over time, many rankings are, to use the financial term, fungible. This social hierarchy is manifested by a pattern of ceremony, ritual, and consumption, often glossed as civilized conduct. Certain ways of celebrating marriages and funerals, certain clothes, housing styles, certain patterns of feasting, of ritual and religious behavior, of entertainment come to be seen as proper and worthy. Those who have the means to acquit themselves honorably by these standards come to see themselves, and are usually seen, as more exemplary and honorable than those who lack the means to emulate them.³¹

When Max Weber writes of the “religion of non-privileged classes,” he has this sort of social and cultural distinction in mind. The stigma and dishonor experienced by the nonprivileged in a stratified order is less a question of calories and cash than one of standing and social esteem. They are daily reminded that their diet, their rites, their funerals, and by extension they themselves are inferior to the privileged. “It is immediately evident,” as Weber notes, “that a need for salvation in the widest sense of the term has as one of its foci… dis-privileged classes.” In contrast, “Turning to the ‘sated’ and privileged strata, the need for salvation is remote and alien to warriors, bureaucrats, and the plutocracy.”³²

The disprivileged have the least interest in maintaining the current distribution of status and wealth and potentially the most to gain from a radical reshuffling of the social order. Little wonder, then, that they should be disproportionately attracted to movements and religions that promise a completely new dispensation. The lively interest of the disprivileged strata in a “world turned upside down” is, as it were, formally recognized in the Jewish tradition of the Jubilee Year, when debts are forgiven, slaves redeemed, and prisoners released. This message of the Old Testament, as well as the idea of an escape from Egyptian bondage and a Promised Land, was taken to heart by North American slaves, for whom a Jubilee Year and redemption were taken literally. This interest is also manifested in annual rituals of reversal such as Carnival in Catholic countries, the feast of Holi in Hindu India, and the Water Festivals of Southeast Asia, where, for a brief period, the normal social order is suspended or reversed. Far from being mere safety valves serving harmlessly to release tension, the better to impose hierarchy the rest of the year, these ritual sites have always been zones of struggle, threatening to spill over into actual revolt.³³

Weber tried to be more precise in specifying those among the disprivileged who would be most likely to believe that “sooner or later there would arise some tremendous hero or god who would place his followers in the positions they truly deserved in the world.” He believed that among the peasantry, for example, the appeal of a revolutionary religion was greatest for those at the edge, those “threatened by enslavement or proletarianization, either by domestic forces (financial, agrarian, seigneurial) or by some external political power.” That is, it was not so much penury that led peasants to radical religious sects as the imminent prospect of losing their status as independent smallholders and falling into abject dependence as landless laborers or, worse, someone’s serf. Not particularly religious to begin with, let alone orthodox, peasants (etymologically, the term pagan, meaning nonbeliever, comes to us directly from the Latin paganus, meaning country-dweller) turned to anti-establishment revolutionary sects when their economic and social independence was menaced. Among others, Weber pointed to the Donatist sects of Roman North Africa, the Taborites (aka Hussites) of early-fifteenth-century Bohemia, the Diggers of the English Civil Wars, and Russian peasant sectarians as examples of the prophetic tradition of agrarian radicalism.³⁴

Weber’s insight will prove useful when it comes to a close discussion of prophetic movements in the hills. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that peasant communities already incorporated into a state-based order are prone to support radical prophetic movements whenever their relatively autonomous village order (local dispute settlement, managing grazing rights and common land, selecting their own leaders) is threatened by an intrusive centralizing state. Again, it appears to be less a question of income and food supply than one of autonomy.³⁵

Religious heterodoxy and prophetism with millenarian overtones are, historically at least, as common in the lowlands and within populations already part of lowland states as they are in the hills. In fact, as indicated earlier, the millenarian ideas circulating in the hills are, for the most part, assembled from fragments that have been imported from valley states.

If we take Burma as our Theravada example, it is clear that it has the full complement of heterodox practices and beliefs. There is a long tradition of weikza (adepts at alchemy, magic, flying, and immortality), hermit monks (yà thè), healers by possession and trance, astrologers (bedin saya), black magic practitioners (auk lan saya), and wonder-working monks, any of whom might be taken for an embryo-Buddha, Chakaveddi, Mettreya.³⁶

One of the basic oppositions within lowland Theravada Buddhism is that between the forest or hermit monk on the one hand and, on the other, the settled clergy living under the monastic discipline of one of the (nine) recognized orders.³⁷ The monk who decides to pursue a personal quest for spiritual powers as a hermit, a quest often accompanied by great austerities, rigorous fasting, and meditation in cemeteries and over cadavers, not only leaves the area of settled agriculture and government; he also enters the dangerous world of powerful spirits and nondomesticated nature. Those forest monks who become the objects of popular veneration, and are therefore known to us, are believed to have thereby acquired miraculous powers: to predict the future (including the winning lottery number!), to ward off death until the arrival of the next Buddha, to devise powerful medicines and protective talismans, to master alchemy and the ability to fly, and to confer merit on their faithful devotees. The fact that these powers are seen by settled lowlanders to have been acquired only by leaving, as it were, state space and the landscape of irrigated-rice cultivation for the forest and wilderness is something of an implicit tribute to the powers thought to reside outside the ambit of the padi state. The fact that a great many forest monks are themselves of non-Burman ethnicity is also a recognition of the appeal of hill heterodoxy.³⁸

All these roles might collectively be seen as the charismatic, heterodox wing of Buddhist practice. Precisely because they depend on inspiration and a charismatic connection, they have always been discouraged as a threat to the institutional, hierarchical clergy (sangha). Just as the Roman authorities looked with favor on the oracles of Apollo (who moved only in the best society) and banned the tumultuous revelries of the cult of Dionysus, much favored by women and lower-class men, so have Theravada authorities proscribed charismatic threats.³⁹ That such activities have constituted an ever-present danger is implied in the warning in the Buddhist ordination ceremony: “Again no member of our brotherhood can ever arrogate to himself extraordinary gifts or supernatural perfections, or through vainglory give himself out as a holy man, for instance, as to withdraw into solitary places or on pretense of enjoying ecstasies like the Ariya, afterwards presume to teach others the way to uncommon spiritual attainments.”⁴⁰ The founder of the Kon-baung Dynasty in the eighteenth century, Alaunghpaya, was concerned enough about this threat that those who failed to finish the prescribed course of study for the monkhood were tattooed and expelled “so that their heterodoxy could be verified by a mark.”⁴¹

How might we understand the logic behind Burmese religious syncretism within the lowland state? We might, I think, begin with Michael Mendelson’s observation that the Buddhist clergy is most densely clustered wherever wealth and padi cultivation are concentrated—that is to say, in the spaces most suitable for state-building. The wealthy lay public, officialdom, and the centers of official monastic learning gravitated to these same locations. Add to this close linkage another observation by Mendelson that the strength of Buddhism vis-à-vis other indigenous religious traditions (for example, animism) is directly related to the strength of royal authority—that is to say, the monarchical state. If we then read noncanonical Buddhism, the practices forbidden in the ordination ceremony, nat worship, and other animist practices as reflecting the seams, the ruptures, the fissures in the historical process of state-building, a certain logic is discernible. These variant religious practices and their practitioners represent zones of resistant difference, dissent, and, at the very least, failures of incorporation and domestication by state-promoted religion.

Just as the opposition party in the British Parliament has a shadow cabinet that replicates—in waiting—the actual cabinet, so does official canonical Buddhism have a set of alternative institutions that both shadow and bedevil it. In place of the iconic monastic school, there are the hermit and the forest monk, outside the state, who escape monastic discipline. In place of the official millennial expectations of Buddhism, there are the curers, the would-be mín laún, Mattreya, Setkyamin … who promise a double-quick utopia to their followers. In place of central pagodas and shrines, there are the local nat pwes (spirit ceremonies). In place of merit-making for salvation, there are mundane, here-and-now techniques for improving one’s luck in the world. In place of the bureaucratic, exam-passing sangha, there are charismatic monks assembling independent followings. Most Burman Buddhists move easily and quite unself-consciously between their household nat shrine and a reading of the Tripitika at a pagoda; the distinction I am making is thus, largely, an analytical one.

The warrant for seeing alternative forms of worship as representing the sutured-but-still-evident seams in the historical process of state-making is most evident in nat worship. Most nats are believed to be the spirits of real existing persons who died “green” or premature deaths and therefore have left behind powerful spirits that can protect or harm people. What is striking about many of the best known nats is that the legends surrounding their earthly lives are emblematic of disobedience or rebellion against the king.⁴² Two of the best known, “the Taungbyon brothers,” were said to have been fun-loving Muslims who, though they had helped the king acquire an important Buddhist relic, were too busy playing marbles to bring their two bricks to help build the pagoda to house it. For this act of lèse-majesté, the king had them killed by having their testicles crushed. The annual festival honoring them in Taungbyon village, twenty miles north of Mandalay, is a veritable bacchanal of eating, drinking, gambling, and open sexuality, threatening always to get out of hand. Speculating that the nats may represent the guardian spirit of different groups and localities conquered by the centralizing kings, Melford Spiro notes the political and religious oppositional tone of the Taungbyon cult: The nats “symbolize opposition to authority. Here in performing their cultus … the people are expressing their opposition to authority. But the nat[s] … also symbolize opposition to religious authority.… The nat devotees are afforded the opportunity to express their hostility to Buddhism and to satisfy needs which are prohibited by it.”⁴³ Other nats include those who were unjustly put to death by the king (the Mahagiri nats, brother and sister, for whom most households maintain a shrine), at least three regicides, and several libertines exemplifying anti-Buddhist behavior.

There is a central pantheon of thirty-seven nats (the number is the cosmologically correct one for devas and subordinate tributary kingdoms), which, in part, was centrally established. Mendelson believes that the pantheon represents an effort to appropriate a series of local cults under a monarchical Buddhist umbrella, much as the cults of particular saints in Catholic countries are often associated with pre-Christian deities. The purpose was to harness these powerful but essentially fissiparous spirits to a centralized monarchy.⁴⁴ And yet the desired alliance has been an uneasy one, with nat worship continuing to represent a spirit of resistance both to canonical Buddhism and to the unified state. As Mendelson summarizes it, “There is evidence for believing that, whenever Buddhism was strong, the nat cult was weakened—say, by measures prohibiting local nat cults—thus Buddhism goes along with a strong central monarchy while Animism coincides with the triumph of the forces of locality and rebellion.”⁴⁵ The ritual life of the Burmans, then, continues to reflect the still unresolved conflicts of state-making.

Quite apart from the nat cults, the cleavage between the bureaucratized, registered, exam-taking clergy—Weber’s routinization of charisma—on the one hand and the wonder-working, healing, amulet dispensing clergy on the other is still very much in evidence. Many village pongyi are, in keeping with the expectations of their lay supporters, hybrids of the two. At times of national crisis, it has been the prophetic stream that has represented lay aspirations. It would be impossible, in fact, to write a credible history of twentieth-century Burmese nationalism without this prophetic tradition. From the time, shortly after the colonial conquest, when U Ottama declared himself a pretender (mín gyi) and was hanged for his defiance by the British, there stretches an all but unbroken skein of would-be Buddhist world emperors (setkyamin) preparing for the Buddha’s return, up to the Saya San revolt in 1930. Although that revolt enters the archives under his name and he has become a state-sanctioned hero, presumably for his protonationalism, it is well to remember that he was one of three or four “would-be kings” in that rebellion.⁴⁶ Today, of course, it is the “undomesticated” clergy that represents the democratic aspirations of the lay public, while the captive clergy is kept in line by lavish personal and monastic gifts from the military high brass.⁴⁷ Ne Win, when he was alive and in power, banned any film featuring nat worship. Nat worship and prophetic forms of Buddhism are to the organized and tamed sangha, one might say, as swiddening and root crops are to irrigated padi cultivation. The former are illegible and resist state incorporation, while the latter lend themselves to centralization.

High-Altitude Prophetism

Lowland prophetic movements have, until recently, been as common as those in the hills. What distinguishes them, perhaps, from highland movements is that they represent a protest against oppression and inequality within an agreed cultural matrix. Such strategies may be, for all that, no less bitter and protracted, but they are, in a sense, lovers’ quarrels. That is, they are, to use a Western concept, about the terms of the social contract, not about whether there should be a social contract in the first place. The growing cultural, linguistic, and religious flattening of valley society since at least the twelfth century—a hard-won state effect—has left its scars, but there is rarely a naked bid for cultural or political secession. Within this cultural matrix, radical options are still imaginable for those who are impoverished and/or stigmatized. A radical reshuffling of the cards in which existing class and status distinctions might be abolished is thinkable. But it is, to pursue the metaphor, a question of redistributing the cards in an existing card game, not a question of whether to sit at the table at all or, for that matter, to throw the table over.⁴⁸

The sorts of precipitating conditions that seem associated with prophetic and millenarian activity are so varied as to defy easy accounting. Suffice it to say that each involves a sense of overwhelming collective peril to which the prophecy and the actions taken to realize that prophecy constitute an attempted remedy. The peril in question can take the form of a natural disaster—floods, crop failures, epidemics, earthquakes, cyclones—though the agency of the spirits or gods is typically seen at work, as in the case of the Old Testament Israelites. The perils may also be eminently man-made—as in the case of war, invasion, crushing taxes, or corvée—and integral to the history of most state peoples.

What relatively autonomous hill peoples have historically faced, however, are the ominous choices forced on them by encroaching state power. This might mean the choice between enslavement and headlong flight, between the loss of direct control of their communities or subsistence activities and open revolt, between forced sedentarization and breaking up and scattering. Compared with the choices that valley populations face, these seem far more draconian, not to say revolutionary, and the information that hill peoples have on which to base their choices is often minimal. Imagine, to take a more contemporary example, the fateful choice of Hmong groups in the 1960s, between allying themselves with the Americans, supporting the Pathet Lao, or moving away. Hill peoples are by no means naïve when dealing with valley powers, but they often confront threats that are both hard to comprehend and fraught with grave consequences for their way of life.

Something of the difference can be appreciated from the different sorts of revolts along the Siamese-Lao borders from the late seventeenth century on. Revolts at the close of the seventeenth century were caused by commoner resentment over taxes, poor harvests, and an influx of Chinese tax collectors working for the Siamese. These revolts, though led by “miracle-working holy men with visions of local autonomy and social equality,” were rebellions of state populations determined to force a renegotiation of the terms of their incorporation.⁴⁹ By the late nineteenth century, however, the expansionist Chakkri kings were extending their power to the hills—enslaving large numbers of people, massacring those who resisted, and imposing direct administration on hill peoples. Prophetic rebellions broke out and culminated in Anauvong’s massive revolt, centered in Vientiane, against Siamese rule. These later rebellions, unlike the earlier ones by commoners (phrai), might be termed “virgin-land revolts” in the sense that many relatively independent populations were being threatened with absorption by the state for the first time. The issue at stake was not reforming the terms of incorporation but whether these populations would be administered at all.

Lest the hill peoples invoked here seem like the native peoples of the New World suddenly, in the sixteenth century, confronted by the organization and weaponry of a more technically advanced state, it must be emphasized that these populations were not naïve. They had long been acquainted with lowland states. Recall, in this context, the important distinction between the symbolic, the economic, and the political reach of the state. These people so vigorously resisting political incorporation had long been enthusiastic consumers of lowland cosmology—so much so that they had borrowed its traditions to create their own rebellious traditions. Symbolic commerce, perhaps because its goods are weightless and less impeded by the friction of distance, circulates most briskly. Economic exchange was nearly as brisk owing to the fact that hills and valleys are complementary ecological zones: each has products that the other needs. They are natural partners. Hill peoples had long enjoyed the advantages of voluntary symbolic and economic exchange while evading, if possible, the inconveniences of political subordination, most often in the form of slavery. It was this and only this involuntary “import” from the state they were resisting.

Prophetic, holy-man revolts were, parenthetically, not only deployed against lowland state intrusion. They were also deployed within the hills, often in the same ethnic group as a state-prevention measure. This much is implicit in Edmund Leach’s analysis of revolts against tyrannical village heads among the Kachin. It is also apparent in Thomas Kirsch’s account of a syncretic Chin “democratic” cult that successfully repudiated the community feasts monopolized by the chiefs and restored “private” feasts that allowed everyone to compete for ritual status. The cultural technique of prophetic movements can be as useful for state prevention as for state evasion.

Holy-man revolts in the hills might well be considered one of several techniques for thwarting state incorporation. The standard, lower-risk techniques we have discussed at great length: swiddening, escape crops, social fissioning and dispersal, and perhaps oral traditions might be together considered one-half the hill armory for state evasion. The other, perhaps last-ditch, high-stakes technique in the armory is rebellion and the prophetic cosmology that goes with it. This is precisely what Mikael Gravers intriguingly suggests for the Karen. As he put it,

The ambiguity of the Karen strategy between valley and hills can be described as a double strategy with a defensive dimension avoiding taxes, corvée and political suppression [and] subsisting on swidden agriculture, hunting, and collecting; or an offensive dimension emulating royal powers to resist state administration and coercion and also to construct their own polity. Both dimensions look for a moral leadership founded on Buddhist ethics and contain an emulation of the Buddhist states as well as a cultural (ethnic) critique of neighboring monarchies and states.⁵⁰

Dialogue, Mimicry, and Connections

The legends, rituals, and politics of hill societies can be usefully read as a contentious dialogue with the valley state that looms largest in its imagination. The closer and larger that state, the more of the conversation it will usurp. Most of the origin myths of hill societies assert a hybridity or connection that implies kinship. In some cases a stranger/foreigner arrives and forms a union with an autochthonous woman. Their joint progeny are this hill people. In other legends, hill and valley people are hatched from different eggs—of the same parentage—and are, hence, brother and sister. Already, a certain original equality between highland and lowland becomes part of the narrative. In the same fashion, the claim in many hill legends that their people once had a king, books, and writing, and that they planted wet rice in the valleys, is a claim of an original equal status that has been lost, treacherously withheld, or stolen. One of the central promises of many a prophet is precisely that he will be the king who will right this injustice and restore this equality, or perhaps even turn the tables. The Hmong version is a particularly strong one. Their king Chih-yu was, by legend, murdered by the founder of the Chinese state. A new king will arise one day to liberate the Hmong and inaugurate a golden age.⁵¹

The presumption of a cultural dialogue between hill and valley has at least two additional sources. First, both hill and valley societies were planets in a larger galactic system (Indic or Sinic) of mutual influence. Hill peoples may not have been political subjects of valley states, but they were active participants in the economic system of exchange and in the even wider cosmopolitan circulation of ideas, symbols, cosmology, titles, political formulas, medical recipes, and legends. As has been said of folk culture, hill peoples “continually incorporate into their fabrics significant parts of the sophisticated intellectual traditions … which are part of a super cultural area.”⁵² More frictionless than economic exchange, cheaper, and completely voluntary, this cultural buffet allowed hill societies to take just what they wanted from it and put it to precisely the use they chose.

Hill and valley are also firmly joined by a shared history. We must not forget that many hill peoples are descendants—in some cases fairly recent—of valley-dwelling state populations. They brought with them much of the culture and beliefs that prevailed in the places they left. Just as isolated Appalachian valleys have preserved older English and Scottish dialects, music, and dance long after they have disappeared from their place of origin, so do hill societies constitute something of a living historical archive of beliefs and rituals their ancestors brought with them or picked up en route in their long migrations. Hmong geomancy, for example, appears to be a faithful replica of Han practices several centuries ago. Their formulas of authority, insignia of rank, titles, and chiefly costumes might be museum pieces in a valley exhibit. Curiously enough, the valley prejudice that hill peoples represent “our past” turns out to be partly true, but not at all in the way imagined. Rather than being social fossils themselves, hill people have brought and often kept antique practices from the valleys. When one adds to this the constant flight to the hills of persecuted religious sects, hermit monks, dissident political factions, royal pretenders and their entourages, and outlaws, one can see how hill society did come to reflect back aspects of the valley’s often repressed past.

When it comes to cosmology and religion in particular, there would seem to be a plausible connection between dissident, charismatic religious movements in the hills and the disprivileged strata within state populations. Remarking that highlanders had remained largely aloof from the religions of the state cores in Southeast Asia (Buddhism, Islam), Oscar Salemink also astutely noted that highland religion “often labeled ‘animism’ has many beliefs and practices in common with lowland folk religion.”⁵³ If we in turn take note of the fact that when valley religions do make it to the hills—for example, Karen and Shan Buddhism—they are likely to take heterodox and charismatic forms, then something of a continuum between symbolic dissent by subaltern state populations and relatively independent hill societies emerges. It is among these peoples, dispossessed and marginal, respectively, that the more revolutionary, “world-upside-down” prophetic message makes its greatest appeal. And of course, it is with the fringes of the valley population that hill peoples are likely to have most contact. Arriving in the valleys for trade and work, hill visitors are in closest contact with the bottom of the valley social hierarchy. The lower echelons of the valley population, along with the “lumpen intelligentsia” of monks and hermits, are also the most likely to drift into the hills. Thus, in terms of structural position as well as of social contact, we should probably treat radical valley religious movements as different in degree but not in kind from hill prophetic movements. Both emphasize the mundane functions of salvation religion; both share myths of a just king or returning Buddha who will restore justice; and both have ample reasons (though not the same ones) to resent the valley state. Each is, finally, something of a social and historical archive of state-breaking cosmologies and practices.

Making a new state, a new order, which is exactly what nearly all prophetic movements aim at, requires, logically, breaking an existing order. On the surface of it, such movements are rebellions. They appropriate the power, magic, regalia, and institutional charisma of the valley state in a kind of symbolic jujitsu in order to attack it. The nature of the utopia a new king or Mettreya will bring can be read as the negation of state oppressions: all will be equal, there will be no corvée, taxes, or tribute, no one will be poor, wars and killing will cease, the Burman or Han or Tai oppressor will withdraw or be destroyed, and so forth. One can infer what is wrong with the present by the content of the promised future. Those expecting a new utopia, far from being passive, often prepare themselves ritually, announce their withdrawal of allegiance, refuse to hand over taxes, and launch attacks. The mobilization around a prophet is the idiom of both state formation and rebellion in premodern Southeast Asia, an ominous sign known well by rulers and their pundits.

A fair amount of ink has been spilled wondering whether the use of the dominant ritual discourse—say, by Karen millennial Buddhist sects opposing Burman rule, or by the Hmong opposing imperial Han rule—can be taken as subversive if it is so symbolically indebted to state rituals.⁵⁴ The question is, I think, a mere debater’s point, for reasons that will become clear. It is true, surely, that the only existing discourse for political order beyond a small league of villages was the discourse of monarchy—human or divine. But this was no less true of European rebellions until the late eighteenth century.⁵⁵ Virtually all states were monarchies, and the remedy for a bad king was a better king.

The precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial states of mainland Southeast Asia (and China as well) were in no doubt about the threat posed by wonderworking pretenders and their entourages. They have acted with dispatch to stamp out such movements wherever they arose and to support, in their place, a formal, orthodox, clerical hierarchy that could be supervised from the center. As Max Weber would have forecast, they have been implacably hostile to all charismatic inspiration with political overtones. In this respect, the fact that potential rebels deploy Buddhist cosmology and Han imperial insignia is not in the least reassuring to state officials.⁵⁶

We have often noted what might be called the great chain of mimicry that extends from Angkor and Pagan through pettier and pettier states right down to hamlet chiefs with the slightest pretentions among, say, the Lahu or Kachin. The classical states similarly modeled themselves after the states of South Asia in a process one might call the “localization of imperial ritual.”⁵⁷ It is pervasive as a process, although the proximate model for imitative palace architecture, titles, regalia, and ritual was generally the nearest larger political domain. What is important for our purposes is that the mimicry bore no relationship to the scope of power actually wielded. Clifford Geertz goes so far as to suggest that “what was high centralization representationally was enormous dispersion institutionally,” as if symbolic centralization could serve as a counterweight to the limits of “hard” power.⁵⁸

Much the same process, I suggest, is at work in the symbolic languages of rebellion as in local claims to rulership. It is as if there is “open-access software” freely available to any rebel claiming to be the “once and future king.” Whether he gathers a large following is another matter. Structurally, however, the chances of a Lahu prophet becoming the universal monarch are no greater than the Wa hamlet chief becoming emperor, despite the fact that they have the cosmology for it. The dispersal of populations and agricultural production, coupled with a geography that impedes, if it does not absolutely prevent, social mobilization on a large scale, work decisively against it.⁵⁹ F. K. Lehman aptly notes the “marked disparity between what the supra-local political system attempts to be, on the models provided it by its civilized neighbors, and what its resources and organizational capacity really permit it to achieve.”⁶⁰ Petty states can be and have been founded in the hills by charismatic figures (for example, the Kayah State in Burma), and larger kingdoms by valley prophets (Alaunghpaya), but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. The cosmological bluster is the dialect, the only idiom in which a claim to supralocal authority can be phrased. As an idea, it is surely an imperial legacy, an “as if” state whose essence remains unchanged, even as it rarely if ever corresponds to empirical reality. The “as if” state that lays claim to a cosmological hegemony as a center—a claim that typically obscures a fragmented and tenuous political situation on the ground—was by no means confined to highland strongmen. Such ritual sovereignty was typical of the valley kingdoms as well. In fact, it appears to have been the usual situation in South India, the locus classicus from which Southeast Asian valley kingdoms derived much of their cosmology.⁶¹

In the invocation of the “as if” state, in the mimicry of palace architecture, of ritual formulas, of getting the cosmology right, there is undeniably a kind of sympathetic magic at work. For those populations largely out of range of direct imperial power, the great state centers arrive in symbolic fragments that seem eminently appropriable. Their situation is not much different from that of the Japanese officials who toured the West at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration and who imagined that the key to Western progress was the constitution. If they got the constitution right, they reasoned, progress would more or less automatically follow. The formula itself was deemed efficacious. In this belief, highlanders were not one whit different than the founders and usurpers of lowland states whose Brahmin handlers made sure that their palaces, regalia, genealogies, and oaths were scrupulously correct down to the minutest detail. Like a magic spell, it had to be “word-perfect.”

Perhaps because of the symbolic magnetism of the valley state, charismatic leaders in the hills, rebellious or not, have been expected to demonstrate a knowledge of this wider world and a connection with it. They have been, virtually without exception, local cosmopolitans. That is, they have local roots but typically have traveled widely, speak many languages, have contacts and alliances elsewhere, know the sacred formulas of valley religions, and are skilled speakers and mediators. In one way or another, frequently many ways, they are savvy, to use the Native American pidgin term to capture the same qualities. It is quite extraordinary, in fact, how far this generalization travels. In the great Taiping Rebellion, in the hundreds of cargo-cult uprisings in the Pacific Islands, in the rebellions of New World prophets against Europeans, the key figures are often culturally amphibious translators who move relatively easily between the worlds they inhabit. The conclusion of Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, writing of early colonial revolts in South America, is fairly representative: “With amazing regularity, the leaders of messianic or millenarian frontier uprisings turned out to be mestizos who had opted for Indian life ways or, in the Andes, bi-cultural Indians whose social circumstances resembled that of mestizos.”⁶²

The function of translation between cultures can sometimes be understood more literally, given the diversity of vernacular languages in the hills. Nicholas Tapp describes a powerful Hmong village chief in northern Thailand who was widely admired for his linguistic command of Karen, Lahu, Chinese, Shan, and northern Thai.⁶³ Just as often, however, the cosmopolitanism derives from a knowledge of the lowland religions and their cosmologies. This helps explain why monks, ex-seminarians, catechists, healers, traders, and peripheral local clergy are vastly overrepresented in the ranks of prophets. They are, in the Gramscian sense, the organic intellectuals of the dispossessed and marginal in the premodern world. This too, as a generalization, travels well. Marc Bloch notes the prominent role of the country priests in peasant uprisings in medieval Europe. Their “plight was often no better than that of their parishioners but [their] minds could better encompass the idea that their miseries were part of a general ill, [they were] men well-fitted to play the time-honoured role of the intellectual.”⁶⁴ Max Weber termed this class “pariah intellectuals” and noted that it stood “on the point of Archimedes in relation to social convention … and was capable of an original attitude toward the meaning of the cosmos.”⁶⁵ In the highlands such religious figures play much the same role, articulating the aspirations of the community and, at the same time, able to command, or at least neutralize, the symbolic technology of the state.

The amphibious position of such leaders, with one foot in each of the two worlds, makes them potentially dangerous. They can, structurally, become a fifth column serving outside interests. Erik Mueggler describes a Yi village in Yunnan that, realizing this danger, took quite exceptional ritual and practical steps to contain it.⁶⁶ The crucial and potentially ruinous responsibility for hosting and feeding Han officials, sometimes accompanied by hundreds of troops, was rotated annually among a handful of prosperous families. During their year of service, the host couple was required to act as ur-Lahu and abjure anything culturally coded as Han. They wore clothing thought to have been worn by Lahu ancestors; they ate and drank from wooden vessels rather than ceramic ones; they drank only homemade wheat beer; they ate no meat associated with lowland diets (dogs, horses, cattle); and they were never to speak Chinese throughout their year of service. One could scarcely imagine a more comprehensive set of prohibitions designed to keep the host family hyper-Lahu and to keep the Han at arm’s length. Almost all social contact with the Han was relegated to a “speaker” who lodged free at the host’s house for the year. He, by contrast, drank and ate with the guests, dressed well and had cosmopolitan manners, spoke fluent Chinese, and generally entertained the dangerous guests. The speaker was, one could say, a village-level minister of foreign affairs whose job was to placate the guests, minimize their demands, and serve as a kind of cultural barrier between the Han and the internal affairs of the village. Knowing that a powerful and cosmopolitan local intermediary could as easily be a liability as an asset, the Lahu took pains to split the two roles and thus minimize the danger.

Turning on a Dime: The Ultimate Escape Social Structure

I am determined, in what follows, to “deexoticize” prophetic movements in upland Southeast Asia. Commonly, such movements are often treated as a phenomenon sui generis, a radical break with normal reasoning and action and therefore suggestive of a kind of collective derangement, if not psycho-pathology.⁶⁷ This is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it ignores the rich history of millenarian movements in the West that continues to this day. Second, and more germane in this context, it misses the degree to which prophetic activity is continuous with traditional healing practices and with village decisions about moving or splitting up. Prophetic activity can, I believe, fruitfully be seen as a strong and more collective version of these more quotidian activities—different in degree but not necessarily in kind.

The shaman or traditional healer treats patients who are troubled or ill, typically through trance and/or possession. The shaman identifies what is out of whack and then conducts rituals to persuade the spirit troubling the patient to withdraw. In the case of the prophet, however, it is the entire community that is, as it were, out of whack. Often the crisis and threat are such that the normal cultural paths to dignity and respect—diligence as a cultivator, bravery, successful feasting, good hunting, marriage and children, and locally honorable behavior generally—are no longer adequate to an exceptional situation. It is in this context that a whole community’s life world is at stake and cannot be made whole with minor adjustments. As Tapp has expressed it, “If the shaman is concerned with the health and well-being of individual patients and their families … the messianic prophet is ultimately concerned with the salvation of Hmong society as a whole.”⁶⁸ The role is more grandiose, the patient is a collectivity, and the stakes are far greater, but the prophet is, or proposes to be, the shaman for a whole community in trouble.

Treating prophetism as something altogether exceptional overlooks what is essentially a “minor league” version of prophet-inspired change: that associated with the fissioning or movement of an existing village site. Though it is hardly a daily occurrence, it is common enough to be the object of what might be called cultural routinization. Any number of perfectly reasonable circumstances might lead to the breakup or movement of a village and its fields: soil exhaustion, population growth, crop failures, political pressure by neighboring groups or states, an unpropitious death or miscarriage, an epidemic, factional rivalry, visitation by malevolent spirits, and so forth. Whatever the underlying reasons, two aspects of a potential move are important. First, it is always accompanied by a great deal of uncertainty, anxiety, and social tension. Even if, as is usually the case, a new site has already been selected, the potential dangers are still considerable—as they were historically in making alliances and choosing whether or not to go to war. For this reason, in most cases, the choice was made or announced via a prophetic dream. Among the Hmong, for example, a prominent woman or man, often a shaman, would have a dream telling her to move to a new place. If it were a question of fission, the “dreamer” would, with his or her followers, pick up and leave, sometimes founding a “daughter” village nearby.⁶⁹ For the Hmong, with their strong belief in geomancy, every change in landscape was, by definition, a change of luck.

Karen villages are likely to move or split in much the same way. If anything, Karen villages, like those of the Lahu, seem to be exceptionally fragile and apt to break up for any number of reasons. The breakup is, as in the Hmong case, typically announced via a prophetic vision, dream, or sign. It is not the case, then, that prophets come either in the form of world conquerors or not at all. Prophetism is a comparatively ordinary experience tied to important but less earthshaking decisions. On this reading, the prophets who make it into the archives are not the only prophets; they are, rather, the “major league” prophets with larger followings and more audacious goals.

What distinguishes a major league millenarian movement from small-scale prophetism is that its followers so frequently, as their prophet instructs, burn their bridges. Unlike relocating villagers who hope to restore, under better conditions, many of the routines they left behind, the followers of millenarian movements are both awaiting and instituting a new world. They often completely cease their previous practices. They may stop planting, sell their rice and land, give away their money, slaughter their livestock, radically change their diet, don new clothes and amulets, burn their houses, and break sacred taboos. After this kind of bridge-burning, there is no easy way back.⁷⁰ It also follows that revolutionary acts of this magnitude completely change the social hierarchy of a village community. Previous standing and prestige mean nothing in the new order, and the prophet and his acolytes, many of them perhaps of low status in the old order, are now elevated. Whether it brings a revolution in the external world, there is no doubt that it is revolutionary, in the full sense of the word, for the community that experiences it.

As a social process, millenarianism of this kind is escape social structure of a high order. And although it is not sufficient to explain millenarian movement by the functions they may perform, one is driven to wonder whether such movements facilitate a rapid and massive adaptation to radically changed circumstances. Lehman seems to suggest as much: “The traditional habit of the Sgaw Karen … of throwing up millennial movements and leaders seems to function to permit these people to reorient themselves radically to new contexts of social and cultural relations.” He also notes that millennial movements among the Karen set in motion a kind of ethnogenesis: “To change their religion almost totally is exactly this, an alteration in ethnic identity in response to changing intergroup relations.”⁷¹

In his account of the rise of a recent Karen Buddhist sect under U Thuzana in southeastern Burma, Mikael Gravers emphasizes that it had the effect of repositioning these Karen in a zone of war and massive relocation: “These movements signify a continuous revaluation of cosmology and ethnic identity, aiming at creating order and overcoming crisis.”⁷² For every would-be prophet who manages to lead his followers to a zone of relative peace and stability—and subsistence—many others fail. But the coincidence of such movements with economic, political, and military crises suggests that they can be seen as desperate social experiments, a throw of the dice in a setting where the odds of a very favorable outcome are long.

We know, in fact, that charismatic movements can and have resulted in the creation of new states and new ethnic and political identities. The most striking and best documented is the founding, in the nineteenth century, of the two major Kayah states of Bawkahke and Kantarawaddy, the first later to form the basis of a new territory and realigned ethnic identity in the Kayah/Kerenni State in Burma. What we know about this history “clearly indicates that the founders both came out of the south and that they were typically charismatic personages capitalizing on the knowledge of the outside world. They founded a religious cult, on which the Kayah polity was explicitly based, strikingly reminiscent of the millennial ideology … among Mon and Burman Buddhist and plains Karen, both Buddhist and animist during this era.”⁷³ There were mundane considerations involved as well, not least, as we noted earlier, the fact that this area contained one of the last great stands of valuable teak. Nevertheless, it was a major ethnic repositioning within Karennic groups, and it was inaugurated by a charismatic prophet.

The Lahu, like a great many hill peoples, are subdivided into smaller factions usually identified by colors: the Red Lahu, Yellow Lahu, Black Lahu, and so on. The origin of these factions is lost in the mists of time and legends, but Anthony Walker believes that “some almost certainly originated with messianic leaders.”⁷⁴ It is probable that the prophetic movement has historically been the dominant mode of collective ethnic reformulation in the hills. If so, this process could be seen as resembling village fission on a far grander and more dramatic scale, but one not fundamentally different in kind.

As in the case of village fissioning, such political reshufflings nearly always involve a repositioning vis-à-vis adjacent ethnic groups and valley states. The Karen Buddhist sect leader U Thuzana sought to create a zone of peace for his followers. He was also decisively repositioning them closer to the Burmese state to the point where his fighters (the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, DKBA) became little more than mercenaries and profiteers under Burmese military supervision. Other fissioning, other charismatic movements, have led people to push farther into the hills, to move long distances, and to modify their culture to accommodate a new situation.

There is, at the very least, an elective affinity, to use Max Weber’s term, between the existential situation faced by many hill peoples in Zomia and the remarkable plasticity and adaptability of their social organization, ethnic affiliation, and religious identity. Such mobile, egalitarian, marginal peoples have, for the most part, long histories of defeat and flight and have faced a world of powerful states whose policies they had little chance of shaping. Just as petty sellers in the market are “price takers” rather than price givers or setters, so have these people had to thread their way through shifting and dangerous constellations of powers in which they have largely been pawns. Faced with slave raids, demands for tribute, invading armies, epidemics, and occasional crop failures, they appear to have developed not just the subsistence routines to keep the state at arm’s length but a shape-shifting social and religious organization admirably adapted to cope with a turbulent environment. The concentration of heterodox sects, hermit monks, pretenders, and would-be prophets in most hill societies has provided, in effect, the agency that allows many of them to substantially reinvent themselves when the situation requires it.⁷⁵

To stand back and take all this in, to wonder at the capacity of hill peoples to strike out, almost overnight, for new territory—socially, religiously, ethnically—is to appreciate the mind-boggling cosmopolitanism of relatively marginal and powerless people. Far from being a backward, traditional people in the presumptive grip of custom and habit, they seem positively protean (even Californian) in imagining themselves anew.

Cosmologies of Ethnic Collaboration

The first thing that strikes any observer of hill societies is their bewildering linguistic and political complexity over comparatively small distances. On a “stop-action” snapshot that freezes the historical flux, it is diversity that seems to dominate this scene as compared with that of the valleys. What was said originally about Balkan nationalisms—that they represented the narcissism of small differences—would be even more appropriate for Zomia. And in fact, all the valley powers—from the classical states to the colonial regimes to the U.S. Special Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Burmese ruling junta today—have exploited these differences for their own purposes.

The major and apparently long-standing exception to this rule is the mobilization of people across ethnic lines by charismatic figures deploying fragments of lowland, millenarian cosmologies. Charisma is, in this context, a qualitatively different form of social cohesion from the glue provided by custom, tradition, kinship, and ancient ritual. Thus before his death in 2007, the famous Pa’an-based monk Sayadaw Thamanya gathered around him some twenty thousand adherents of many ethnicities. He was born into a PaO family, but his followers were Karen, Shan, Mon, and Burman as well, all eager to participate in the powerful Buddhist field of merit he had created. Although his opposition to the military regime then in Rangoon was carefully coded, his movement was, for a time, the largest expression of mass antiregime sentiment seen since the democratic uprising of 1988. In this case, as in hundreds of others reported in the archives and colonial records, it appears that only charismatic religious prophets are capable of overcoming the innumerable divisions of hill societies and attracting a mass following that transcends ethnicity, lineage, and dialect.

Some of the greatest challenges to Han state expansion in southwest China and to colonial control of highland areas were posed by just such interethnic coalitions, each animated by a prophet announcing a just king and/or a golden age. Three exemplary rebellions illustrate the potentially massive dimensions of such mobilization.

The mid-nineteenth-century so-called Miao Rebellion in Guizhou (1854–73) was, in fact, a multiethnic uprising involving millions of people over nearly twenty years and claiming as many as five million lives. It coincided with an unparalleled outbreak of risings against Ming rule, all of them inflected by syncretic religious cults: the Nien Rebellion centered on Kiangsi, 1851–68; the “Muslim Rebellion” in Yunnan, 1855–73; and the great Taiping peasant rebellion, 1951–64. Given its duration and extent, the Miao Rebellion was inevitably decentralized and involved many disparate elements, including bandits, adventurers, ruined Han officials, and others. Nearly half the participants may have been nominally Han, with most of the rest drawn from ethnic hill minorities, among whom the Miao were the most numerous. Muslim Chinese (Hui) participated as well. It is clear that the main ideological element fusing this unwieldy coalition was a shared belief in a worldly religious redemption: “A final element that affected rebels of both Han and minority extraction was millenarian religion. To some degree, adherence to folk religious groups crossed ethnic lines. Quite a few Miao belonged to sects led by Han and, to a lesser extent, the reverse was true.”⁷⁶ Here we seem to have a manifestation of the appeal of radical prophetic religion to both lower strata of state populations (in this case, especially Han miners) and marginal hill populations. No doubt the content of their utopian expectations was different, but both groups hoped for an imminent emancipation.

A second example of a pan-ethnic prophetic movement was the so-called Dieu-python Rebellion, which convulsed the Central Highlands of Vietnam and parts of Cambodia in 1937.⁷⁷ What united the rebels was the belief that the python-god, a shared highland deity, had returned to earth to inaugurate a golden age. The dieu-python would destroy the French, and hence all taxes and corvée burdens, while those who followed the ritual prescriptions would enter the golden age and share French goods among themselves. Although the movement had a prophet of sorts, Sam Bram, who distributed holy charts and magic water, it spread throughout the highlands zone where the prophet had never been. Many hill groups, particularly the Jarai, stopped cultivating altogether for a time.

What took the French utterly by surprise was the pronounced multiethnic character of the uprising and its shared cosmology. Colonial ethnographers had invested great effort in cataloguing the different “tribes” of the Central Highlands, and the idea that these disparate peoples (some of whom were nominally Catholic!) would actually share a mobilizing cosmology was both astounding and troubling. The prophetic dimension of the rebellion did not prevent the geography of its incidence from following certain fracture lines of socioeconomic difference. Thus the violence was concentrated in those highland areas where French pacification efforts had been most brutal, where Theravada Buddhist influence was most pronounced, and among hill peoples whose livelihood was directly threatened. Ideologically speaking, however, Salemink shows that it was part of a longer lineage of “holy man” revolts that extended back well before the arrival of the French. Pan-highland messianic revolts against Lao princes inspired by a Buddhist monk from Laos had erupted in 1820. And in the years immediately before the dieu-python outbreak, two prophetic rebellions had been crushed: a Buddhist holy man’s revolt led by Ong Kommodam (inventor of a secret script) and also called the Kha Rebellion in the Boloven Plateau and a second uprising on the Cambodian-Cochin-Annam border, whose forces attacked French posts.⁷⁸ This last was crushed by a scorched-earth policy and aerial bombardment. Nor did the continuity of the rebellions end there. Many of the leaders in all three uprisings can be traced to the Pathet Lao and the Vietminh a generation later. The arrival of socialism in Vietnam did not signal the end of millenarian agitation. After the great military victory of the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu over the French (with help from highland forces), a broad millenarian movement erupted among highland minorities in 1956 that took two years for the Vietminh to crush. Whole villages stopped work, sold off cattle, attacked government offices, and moved en masse into Laos and awaited an imminent king.⁷⁹

Finally, virtually every one of the numerous Karen prophetic movements that have been documented has had a multiethnic following. Such was the case, for example, in the precolonial Karen-Mon rising in 1740 near Pegu/Bago, which included Burmans, Shan, and PaO; in the early colonial rebellion of 1867 near Papun that brought together Kayah, Shan, Mon, and PaO; in the multiethnic “White monk” anti-Thai movement in the 1970s; and, most recently, in the Hsayadaw Thamanya movement near Pa’an, led by a PaO but drawing in many hill and valley groups. When it comes to holy-man movements, the boundary markers of ethnicities and language groups so beloved of anthropologists and administrators appear to present no obstacle to cooperation.

Here it is worth noting that the leaders of prophetic movements are typically above, or at least outside, the normal kinship order. Shamans and monks are, by virtue of their special gifts and status, elevated above familial and lineage politics. Unlike others, they are not typically seen to be working for the parochial self-interest of their social group.⁸⁰ In a few cases, the Hmong and the Karen in particular, the role of the orphan as hero and eventually king may play a similar role. As someone who has no family and who rises by his wits alone, the orphan is uniquely positioned to be a unifier across lineage and even ethnicity.

Again and again, in the hills of Zomia and elsewhere, one encounters interethnic holy-man revolts as a characteristic form of resistance. Although I have not made anything like a systematic survey, there seems to be a strong association between stateless frontiers and such movements. We saw in the case of South America that frontier rebellions among displaced people normally took a messianic form with bicultural leaders. For the Middle East, the historian Ira Lapidus insists that for conquest movements, “kinship was a secondary phenomenon.” Lapidus writes: “Such movements were not based on lineage but on the agglomeration of diverse units, including individuals, clients, religious devotees, and fractions of clans … and the most common form of agglomeration was religious chieftainship under a charismatic, religio-political leader.”⁸¹ Noticing the same phenomenon of interethnic holy men–led rebellions, Thomas Barfield adds: “In the ethnically fragmented regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, the typical uprising was led by religious visionaries who claimed to be acting on God’s command to bring about some divinely inspired change.… Charismatic clerics … exploded on the political scene by rousing the tribes to resistance, asserting their success had been pre-ordained.”⁸²

In settings that range from Buddhist to Christian to Muslim to animist, messianic holy-man rebellions seem prevalent. It is surely worth considering the proposition that such movements are the characteristic form of resistance among small, divided, acephalous societies that have no central institutions that might help coordinate joint action. More centralized societies can and do organize resistance and rebellion through their existing institutions.⁸³ Acephalous societies, especially those that are egalitarian, porous, and dispersed, either do not resist collectively—perhaps the commoner situation—or, if they do, their resistance is likely to be temporary, ad hoc, and charismatic.

To put it somewhat differently, one might say that the shape-shifting and simplified forms of escape social structure among egalitarian groups had the consequence of stripping them of the structural means for concerted action. Mobilization was possible only through charismatic prophets who stood above and outside kinship and lineage rivalries. And the only cosmological grid, the only ideational architecture, as it were, for such ad hoc cooperation came from the idea of a universal monarchy appropriated, generally, from lowland salvation religion.

Spirit worship, by contrast, is not portable; once one is away from a familiar landscape, the spirits are alien and potentially dangerous. Only the universal valley religions claim a placeless refuge, infinitely portable.⁸⁴ Most hill societies have been shaped by escape—by dispersal, swiddening, collecting, fissioning—but the ubiquity of potentially violent prophetic movements suggest that when “cornered,” with their normal modes of escape closed to them, they have appropriated enough cosmological architecture to serve as the necessary glue for pan-ethnic rebellions. The heterodox and oppositional purposes to which they put this “as if” state—namely to resist actual incorporation into lowland polities—hardly permits us to imagine that they are in the hegemonic grip of lowland cosmology.

Christianity: A Resource for Distance and Modernity

With the arrival of Christian missionaries in the hills around the turn of the century, upland peoples gained access to a new salvation religion. Many of them seized it. It had two great advantages: it had its own millenarian cosmology, and it was not associated with the lowland states from which they might want to maintain their distance. It was a powerful alternate, and to some degree oppositional, modernity. Christianity enjoyed remarkable success in converting hill peoples in Zomia, a success that it could never repeat, with the partial exception of Vietnam, among valley populations.

Throughout much of South and Southeast Asia it has long been common for hill peoples, scheduled castes, and marginal and minority populations to maintain or adopt a religious identity at variance with that of core-state populations, whose culture they associate with their stigmatization. Thus where we find Hinduism in the valleys, we might find animism, Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism in the hills. Where, as in Java, we might find Islam in the valleys, we are likely to find Christianity, animism, or Hinduism in the hills. In Malaysia, where the rulers are Muslim, many of the minority hill peoples are Christian, animist, or Baha’i. Where hill peoples do adopt the prevailing lowland religion, it is often a heterodox version of lowland doctrine. In most cases, then, upland populations, while borrowing lowland cosmologies for their own purposes, have chosen to mark themselves off religiously from the lowlands.

For our particular purposes, Christianity in the hills bears on hill-valley relations in two ways. First, it represents a modern identity that confers the “uniqueness and dignity which the wider world … refused to acknowledge.”⁸⁵ This new identity, as we shall see, promises literacy and education, modern medicine, and material prosperity. It has, furthermore, a built-in millenarian cosmology that promises its own version of a conquering king who will destroy the wicked and uplift the virtuous. Second, the presence of Christianity as an institution as well as an ideology ought to be seen as an additional vector, another resource, for group formation. It allows a group or a fraction of a group to reposition itself in the ethnic mosaic. Like village fissioning or more modern techniques of social identity—the political party, the revolutionary cell, the ethnic movement—Christianity offers a powerful way of creating a place for new elites and an institutional grid for social mobilization. Each of these techniques can be put to the service of maintaining and emphasizing hill-valley distinctions—sometimes a kind of proxy for hill nationalism—or, more rarely, for minimizing them.

Until the arrival of Christian missionaries, Hmong prophetic rebellions drew on their own rich legend of a great king who would one day return to save his people, supplemented with elements of popular (Mahayana) Buddhism and Taoism that were compatible with these expectations. As substantial numbers of Hmong became familiar with the Christian scriptures, Jesus Christ, Mary, and the Holy Trinity were easily assimilated into the Hmong view of a coming liberation. It became as common for prophets in some areas to claim to be Jesus, Mary, or the Holy Ghost, or all three as to claim to announce the arrival of Huab Tais, the ancient Hmong king.⁸⁶ The eschatological message of scriptural Christianity mapped closely enough on Hmong millenarian beliefs that little adjustment was required.

The promise of literacy and the return of the Book (the Bible) were enormous attractions for the Hmong. Having had their book stolen, according to legend, by the Chinese, or having lost it, they looked to its recovery to lift the contempt in which they were held by such lowland peoples as the Chinese and the Thai. Largely for this reason, the American Baptist missionary Samuel Pollard, who devised a Hmong script still used today, was regarded as something of a messiah himself. The Hmong now had not just a script but a script of their own. Inasmuch as Hmong identity is understood as a series of negated contrasts with the Chinese, Pollard’s achievement allowed them to be, in principle, equally literate, but in a non-Chinese script. Previously the route to the secular trinity of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and literacy led through the Chinese and Thai lowlands. Now Christianity offered the opportunity to be modern, cosmopolitan, literate, and still Hmong.

On almost any view, the Hmong, from the extermination campaigns waged against them by the Qing and Ming, to large-scale pell-mell migration, to their ill-starred alliance with the American CIA’s Secret War, have had an astoundingly long run of catastrophic bad luck. For the past five centuries, the chances of premature death and/or forced flight must have been as great for the Hmong as for any identifiable people in the region.⁸⁷ In light of this history it is perhaps not so surprising that they have been so adept at moving at the drop of a hat, reshuffling their social organization, and shape-shifting between various forms of millenarian dreams and revolt. These are, in a sense, high-stakes experiments in social identity by a people hoping to change their luck. As their situation has worsened, they have developed escape social structure into something of an art form.

Lahu have converted as well in substantial numbers to Christianity in Yunnan, Burma, and Thailand, beginning around the turn of the twentieth century. According to Lahu legend, the first missionary, William Young, was prophesied by a Wa-Lahu religious leader a decade or so before his arrival. God and Jesus were immediately assimilated to the Lahu creator-god Gui-sha, whose return was anticipated. This amalgamation of pre-Christian deities with biblical figures was based in part on a Lahu appropriation of the Christian narrative and in part on the missionaries’ efforts to work their own deities into what they knew of Lahu legends. The Lahu, like African slaves in the New World, identified with the plight of the Israelites, their wandering, their subjugation, and, of course, their ultimate emancipation.⁸⁸

The second coming of Jesus was read as heralding the imminent liberation of the Lahu people. Shortly after the missionaries’ first successes in Burma and Thailand, a Lahu prophet, inspired by the Christian message and Mahayana prophesies, announced that 1907 would be the last year the Lahu would pay tribute to the Shan sawbwa of Kengtung, because the Lahu had a new Lord. He brought many Lahu into the church fold, but when he claimed to be a god and took several wives, he was “deposed” by church authorities and ended by leading a countermovement against Christianity.⁸⁹ Thus the cultural appropriation of Christianity as a set of beliefs and as an institution, to make it serve hill needs, often against valley adversaries and even the missionaries themselves, is obvious in the case of the Lahu, the Hmong, and the Karen. The following much-abbreviated account of the Christian nativity story in a Lahu (or Lahu-Wa) pamphlet shows the flavor of this mutual appropriation:

Jesus Christ … [was] a man whose mother was a widow. Before he was born some fortune tellers told his mother that she was going to have a son who would be strong enough to conquer the whole world. When the chief heard that, he was so angry that he decided to kill Jesus’ mother. With the help of the villagers, Mary escaped to a horse stable where Jesus was born in a horse manger. His mother took him home, and he jumped down from his mother’s arms. No sooner had he stepped on the floor … than there appeared a golden chair for him to sit in.⁹⁰

Stepping back from this historically deep and remarkably widespread incidence of millenarian activity, there is a realist school that would regard the entire record as an abject failure of essentially magical solutions. After all, the promised millennium never arrived, and those who answered the call were defeated, ruined, and scattered, if not killed. From this vantage point, the endless litany of prophetic movements over the centuries is itself testimony enough to their repeated futility. Surveying this ideological landscape of frustrated hopes and trying to draw something positive from it, many historians and anthropologists have found in it a protonationalism or even a protocommunism that paves the way for secular movements with many of the same objectives but a less magical, and hence more promising, idea of how to get there. This is the assessment of Eric Hobsbawn in his classic Primitive Rebels, where he notes that the revolutionary program of the Christian millenarian movements lacked only this element of realism.⁹¹ Replace Gui-sha, God, Mettreya, Buddha, Huab Tais, or the Mahdi with the vanguard party of the proletariat, and you would have the real thing.

If we see millenarian fervor as only the most comprehensive and ambitious form of escape social structure, it appears in a different light. It represents an audacious poaching of the lowland ideological structure to fashion movements that aim at warding off or destroying the states from which they are poached. To be sure, the millennium is never reached. Nevertheless, such movements have created new social groups, reshuffled and amalgamated ethnicities, assisted the founding of new villages and new states, provoked radical shifts in subsistence routines and customs, set off long-distance moves, and, not trivially, kept alive a reservoir of hope for a life of dignity, peace, and plenty in the teeth of very long odds.

Hill people have, in a sense, seized whatever ideological materials were available to them to make their claims and take their distance from the lowland states. At first, the raw materials were confined to their own legends and deities, on the one hand, and, on the other, the emancipatory messages they could make out in the lowland religions, especially Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism. When Christianity became available as a framework for dreaming, it was infused with the same prophetic messages. At different times, both socialism and nationalism have offered the same apparent promise. Today, “indigenism,” backed by international declarations, treaties, and well-heeled NGOs, offers some of the same prospects for framing identities and claims.⁹² Much of the destination remains the same, but the means of transportation has changed. All of these imagined communities have been charged with utopian expectations. Most have failed, and some have ended at least as badly as millenarian uprisings. Mimicry, fetishism, and utopianism are not a highland monopoly.