1. Guiyang Prefectural Gazetteer, quoted in Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 236–37.
2. Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, vol. 1, part 1 (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893), 1: 154.
3. Elizabeth R. Hooker, Religion in the Highlands: Native Churches and Missionary Enterprises in the Southern Appalachian Area (New York: Home Missions Council, 1933), 64–65.
4. Valley peoples and states may make further vernacular distinctions between those who are sedentary and live in villages and those who live in the forest and are presumptively nomadic.
5. The relationship between Bedouin pastoralists and urban Arabs, as it concerns state-making and civilization, pervades the writings of the great fourteenth-century Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun.
6. Recent archeological evidence appears to indicate that widespread copper mining and metallurgy on an industrial scale, associated elsewhere with state formation, was practiced in northeast Thailand without any evidence of state centers. It appears to have been an off-season craft of agriculturists on a surprising scale. See Vincent Pigott, “Prehistoric Copper Mining in Northeast Thailand in the Context of Emerging Community Craft Specialization,” in Social Approaches to an Industrial Past: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Mining, ed. A. B. Knapp, V. Pigott, and E. Herbert (London: Routledge, 1998), 205–25. I am grateful to Magnus Fiskesjö for bringing this to my attention.
7. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 15. China, less Tibet, at 37 persons per square kilometer was more densely populated than the South Asian subcontinent at 32 per square kilometer. Europe at that time had roughly 11 persons per square kilometer.
8. Richard A. O’Connor, “Founders’ Cults in Regional and Historical Perspective,” in Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Polity, and Identity, ed. Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, Yale Southeast Asia Monograph Series no. 52 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 269–311, quotation from 281–82. For a quite different and largely unilinear account of the rise of states generally, see Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
9. Richard A. O’Connor, “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asian States: A Case for Regional Anthropology,” Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 968–96.
10. See, in this connection, Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63–70.
11. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 162.
12. Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest “state project,” a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation. It was at the center of Chinese statecraft for millennia through the Maoist period, when People’s Liberation Army soldiers by the thousands were digging terraces to get the “wild” Wa to plant irrigated wet rice.
13. Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2000).
14. Sanjay Subramanyum, “Connected Histories: Notes toward a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 735–62.
15. For an excellent account of this process in Vietnam and Indonesia, see Rodolphe de Koninck, “On the Geopolitics of Land Colonization: Order and Disorder on the Frontier of Vietnam and Indonesia,” Moussons 9 (2006): 33–59.
16. The colonial and early postcolonial regimes, like the classical states, had considered these areas terra nullius or inutile—as in the traditional distinction between La France utile and La France inutile—in the sense that they did not repay the costs of administration in terms of grain or revenue. Though forest and hill products might be valuable and though their populations might be captured as slaves, they were considered to lie well outside the directly administered, profitable grain core on which state power and revenue depended. These areas were, under colonialism, typically governed by so-called indirect rule, whereby traditional authorities were supervised and made tributary rather than replaced. Under Han administration from the Yuan Dynasty through much of the Ming, such zones were governed, as we shall see, under the tusi system, a Chinese form of indirect rule.
17. Hill populations have in quite a few cases, and for their own reasons, adopted lowland religions as their own. The symbolic appropriation of lowland religions has, however, not necessarily implied incorporation in the lowland state. See, for example, Nigel Brailey, “A Reinvestigation of the Gwe of Eighteenth Century Burma,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (1970): 33–47. See also the discussion in Chapter 8.
18. Patricia M. Pelley, Post-Colonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 96–97.
19. This official account has been effectively contradicted in Keith Taylor’s “Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Region,” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 949–78.
20. These four groups, each now represented by a nation-state, have absorbed all of the many earlier states of the region with the exception of Cambodia and Laos, which have, for their part, incorporated nonstate spaces of their own.
21. Geoff Wade, “The Bai-Yi Zhuan: A Chinese Account of Tai Society in the 14th century,” paper presented at the 14th IAHA Conference, Bangkok, May, 1996, appendix 2, 8. Cited in Barbara Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 12.
22. Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Southeast Asia from the Fringes,” a paper for the workshop Locating Southeast Asia: Genealogies, Concepts, Comparisons and Prospects, Amsterdam, March 29–31, 2001.
23. Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2006), 5. See also Jean Michaud, ed., Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000).
24. Michaud, Historical Dictionary, 2. Adding the lowland populations now in the hills would raise the figure by perhaps another fifty million, a figure that is increasing daily.
25. Ernest Gellner, “Tribalism and the State in the Middle East,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 109–26, quotation from 124. Analogies to the Pashtuns, Kurds, and Berbers are less apposite because, in these three cases, the people in question have—or better, are assumed to have—a common culture. No such cultural cohesion is presumed for the great mountain kingdom discussed here, although some of its peoples (for example, Dai, Hmong, Akha/Hani) are far flung across the region. But for a perceptive account of Islamic sectarianism in the hills, see Robert LeRoy Canfield, Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu-Kush, Anthropological Papers, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 50 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973).
26. Laos is a partial exception inasmuch as, like Switzerland, it is largely a “mountain state” with a small valley plain along the Mekong that it shares with Thailand.
27. See, in this connection, Sidney Pollard’s suggestive Marginal Europe: The Contribution of Marginal Lands since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
28. Other explicit proponents of a systematic view from the periphery include Michaud, Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, especially the Introduction by Michaud and John McKinnon, 1–25, and Hjorleifur Jonsson, Mien Relations: Mountain Peoples, Ethnography, and State Control (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
29. F. K. L. Chit Hlaing [F. K. Lehman], “Some Remarks upon Ethnicity Theory and Southeast Asia, with Special Reference to the Kayah and Kachin,” in Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma, ed. Mikael Gravers (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007), 107–22, esp. 109–10.
30. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
31. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 1.
32. Van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing,” 10, puts it nicely: “If seas can inspire scholars to construct Braudelian regional worlds, why not the world’s largest mountain ranges?” But this did not happen. Instead, excellent studies of various parts of Zomia continued to be done, but these did not address an audience of fellow “Zomianists,” nor did they have the ambition to build up a Zomia perspective that could offer a new set of questions and methodologies to the social sciences.
33. The “anarchy,” of course, was entirely in the eye of the beholder. Hill peoples were in no doubt about who they were, even if, for the colonial official, they were illegible.
34. E. R. Leach, “The Frontiers of Burma,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3 (1960): 49–68.
35. For a fine analysis of gender relations among the Lahu, see Shanshan Du, Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwest China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
36. Nan Chao/Nan-zhuao and its successor, the Dali Kingdom in southern Yunnan, from roughly the ninth century to the thirteenth; Kengtung/Chaing-tung/Kyaing-tung, a trans-Salween/Nu kingdom in the Eastern Shan States of Burma, independent from roughly the fourteenth century until its conquest by the Burmese in the seventeenth; Nan, a small independent kingdom in the Nan River Valley in northern Thailand; Lan-na, near the present site of Chiang Mai in Thailand, and independent from roughly the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. It is diagnostic that each of these kingdoms was dominated by the padi-planting, Tai-speaking peoples most frequently associated with state-making in the hills.
37. Janet Sturgeon, “Border Practices, Boundaries, and the Control of Resource Access: A Case from China, Thailand, and Burma,” Development and Change 35 (2004): 463–84.
38. Van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing,” 12.
39. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1: 32, 33. Braudel fails here, I think, to note those peoples who carry, as it were, their civilizations on their backs wherever they go: Roma (Gypsies) and Jews, for example.
40. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., trans. Franz Rosenthal, Bollinger Series 43 (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 1: 302.
41. O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 32. Wolters’s citation is from Paul Wheatley, “Satyanrta in Suvarnadvipa: From Reciprocity to Redistribution in Ancient Southeast Asia,” in Ancient Trade and Civilization, ed. J. A. Sabloff et al. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), 251.
42. Quoted in Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 4.
43. Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 469–91, quotation from 475.
44. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954).
45. Thomas Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, Terrance N. D’Altroy, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11–41. Karl Marx identified such parasitic, militarized peripheries engaged in slave-raiding and plunder on the fringe of the Roman Empire as “the Germanic mode of production.” For the best account of such secondary state formation by the Wa people, see Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000.
46. I borrow the term from Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, who argues that much of the post-conquest indigenous population of Spanish America could be found “in areas that are particularly hostile or inaccessible to human movement” and marginal to the colonial economy. For the most part, he has in mind rugged mountainous areas, although he includes tropical jungles and deserts. Aguirre Beltrán tends to see such areas more as “survivals” of precolonial populations rather than environments to which populations fled or were pushed. Regions of Refuge, Society of Applied Anthropology Monograph Series, 12 (Washington, D.C., 1979), 23 and passim.
47. Michaud, Historical Dictionary, 180, quotation from 199. Elsewhere, writing about the hill populations of Vietnam (the “montagnards”), he echoes the theme. “To some extent montagnards can be seen as refugees displaced by war and choosing to remain beyond the direct control of state authorities, who sought to control labor, tax productive resources, and secure access to populations from which they could recruit soldiers, servants, concubines, and slaves. This implies that montagnards have always been on the run.” Michaud, Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, 11.
48. See Christine Ward Gailey and Thomas C. Patterson, “State Formation and Uneven Development,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. J. Gledhill, B. Bender, and M. T. Larsen (London: Routledge, 1988), 77–90.
49. Fiskesjö, “Fate of Sacrifice,” 56.
50. The classic texts elaborating this argument include Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1987); Aguirre Beltrán, Regions of Refuge; Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Adjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–502. For a review of recent evidence, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005).
51. Felix M. Keesing, The Ethno-history of Northern Luzon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, rev. ed. (Quezon City: New Day, 1974).
52. See, for example, Bruce W. Menning, “The Emergence of a Military-Administrative Elite in the Don Cossack Land, 1708–1836,” in Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Walter MacKenzie Pinter and Don Karl Rowney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 130–61.
53. Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems, and Annemarie Cottaar, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-historical Approach (London: Macmillan, 1998).
54. Martin A. Klein, in “The Slave Trade and Decentralized Societies, Journal of African History 42 (2001): 49–65, observes that rather more centralized African societies often became predatory slave-raiders themselves (further reinforcing centralizing tendencies) and that decentralized societies often retreated to hills and forest zones of refuge when they were available, as well as fortifying their settlements to evade slave raids. See also J. F. Searing, “‘No Kings, No Lords, No Slaves’: Ethnicity and Religion among the Sereer-Safèn of Western Bawol (Senegal), 1700–1914,” Journal of African History 43 (2002): 407–29; Dennis D. Cordell, “The Myth of Inevitability and Invincibility: Resistance to Slavers and the Slave Trade in Central Africa, 1850–1910,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane A. Diouf (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 50–61; and for an attempt at a statistical analysis, Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga, “Ruggedness: The Blessing of Bad Geography,” special section of the American Historical Review devoted to “Geography, History, and Institutional Change: The Causes and Consequences of Africa’s Slave Trade,” March 2007.
55. The term mandala, borrowed from south India, describes a political landscape of court centers radiating power outward through alliances and charisma, but having no fixed frontiers. It is an inherently plural term in the sense that it conjures up a number of contending mandalas jockeying for tribute and allies, with each mandala’s sway waxing and waning—or disappearing altogether—depending on the circumstances. See I. W. Mabbett, “Kingship at Angkor, Journal of the Siam Society 66 (1978): 1058, and, especially, Wolters, History, Culture, and Region.
56. Scholarship on Southeast Asia as a whole is far less guilty of this charge than, say, scholarship on India or China. As a crossroads and contact zone, the borrowing and adaptations of religious beliefs, symbols of authority, and forms of political organization that originated elsewhere could hardly be overlooked. Mandala elites themselves flaunted such trappings. The “hill effects” on valley culture and social organization, however, are typically ignored.
57. The cases of the Minagkabau and the Batak on Sumatra, who long cultivated irrigated rice and developed an elaborate culture but did not create states, reminds us that while irrigated rice is nearly always a precondition of state formation, it is not sufficient.
58. The same process is roughly applicable, it seems, to our understanding of the formation of the Han system at a much earlier period.
59. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 360.
60. Clastres, Society against the State. There are many such shatter zones in Africa that developed as populations threatened with capture for the slave trade fled into areas of relative safety. One such area is the Lamé-speaking zone along the current Guinea-Liberian border. Michael McGovern, personal communication, November 2007.
61. M. P. Griaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia, trans. James Hogarth (New York: Cowles, 1969), 97–98, 131–33, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 430.
62. Lattimore, “Frontier in History,” 472.
63. Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 1–2.
64. Ibid., 1–2, 14, 31.
65. Quoted in Richard Tapper, “Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople on Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48–73, quotation from 66.
66. The stripping down of social structure to simpler, minimal forms, just as the resort to variable and mobile subsistence practices and fluid identities, has been shown to enhance adaptability to a capricious natural and political environment. See in this connection Robert E. Ehrenreich, Carole L. Crumley, and Janet E. Levy, eds., Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Society, no. 6 (1995).
67. This point is missed, I think, in the perennial debates about whether Southeast Asian classical states were more dependent on trade or on manpower. A positional advantage at a river junction, a mountain pass, a jade or ruby mine had to be held militarily against rival claimants.
68. Georges Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1968), originally published in France in 1948.
69. J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society (The Hague: V. van Hoeve, 1955), 261.
70. John Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2 (1961): 72–102.
71. Peter Bellwood, “Southeast Asia before History,” chapter 2 of The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 1, From Early Times to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 90.
72. Compared with other cultural zones, the maritime states of Southeast Asia, located at or near the estuary of rivers, left little in the way of physical evidence behind. The long search for the remains of Srivijaya is perhaps the most striking case in point. See in this context Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary, 9, who notes that both building materials and burial practices in the hills leave little in the way of archeological traces. In this connection it should be added that, even in the lowlands, commoners were often forbidden to build structures with brick, stone, or even teak, lest it become a potential fortification in a rebellion. Hjorleifur Jonsson, personal communication, June 6, 2007.
73. The obverse of this fact is that a kingdom that does not leave a paper trail is unlikely to appear in the record at all. Georges Condominas notes that the Lua’ kingdom(s) of highland and Khmer Southeast Asia, despite leaving ruins and oral legends of its founding by the marriage of a Lawa king and a Mon queen who brought Buddhism to the hills, has left hardly a trace because it apparently had no writing system. From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces, trans. Stephanie Anderson et al., an Occasional Paper of Anthropology in Association with the Thai-Yunnan Project, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra: Australian National University, 1990).
74. Such chronicles do, then, the symbolic work of the state. I am indebted to Indrani Chatterjee for pointing this out to me.
75. One major exception is found in the Burmese Sit-tans, administrative records that are devoted largely to providing an inventory of taxable property and economic activity and population according to their tax status. See Frank N. Trager and William J. Koenig, with the assistance of Yi Yi, Burmese Sit-tàns, 1784–1826: Records of Rural Life and Administration, Association of Asian Studies monograph no. 36 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979).
76. Richard A. O’Connor, “Review of Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation” (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), Journal of Asian Studies 56 (1997): 280. A telling example is the official Burmese court version of a diplomatic letter from the Chinese emperor in which it appears that the Chinese emperor as the emperor of the East is addressing the Burmese king as the emperor of the West and that the two are coequals bestriding the civilized world. As Than Tun remarks, “In all probability, this Burmese version of the address from China is quite different from its original though it is the one acceptable to the Burmese king who admits no other monarch as his superior.” Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598–1885, part 1, A.D. 1598–1648, ed. Than Tun (Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), 3: 1. Official court histories remind me of my high school newspaper, The Sun Dial, whose motto was “We Mark Only the Hours That Shine.”
77. One of the first efforts to correct this myopia may be found in Taylor, “Surface Orientations.” It should be noted that the important work of demystifying nationalist histories is, finally, well under way in Southeast Asia.
78. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 255–56. I am grateful to Charles Lesch for bringing this to my attention in his unpublished paper “Anarchist Dialectics and Primitive Utopias: Walter Benjamin, Pierre Clastres, and the Violence of Historical Progress,” 2008.
79. See Herman Kulke, “The Early and Imperial Kingdom in Southeast Asian History,” in Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and A. C. Milner (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1986), 1–22. Bronson makes a related point that the northern two-thirds of South Asia has, over the past three millennia, produced “exactly two moderately durable, region-spanning states: the Gupta and the Mughal. Neither of these nor any of the smaller states lasted longer than two centuries and anarchical interregna were everywhere prolonged and severe.” Bennett Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), 196–218.
80. Anthony Day, “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in premodern Southeast Asia.” Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996): 398. Day is here criticizing the state-centric aspect of the important historiographic work by Anthony Reid and Victor Lieberman.
81. See Taylor, “Surface Orientations.” Taylor imaginatively examines several periods in the early history of the area now called Vietnam, while scrupulously avoiding reading back modern national or regional narratives for which there is no contemporary evidence.
82. See in this connection Sara (Meg) Davis’s critique of Condominas, “Premodern Flows and Postmodern China: Globalization and the Sipsongpanna Tai,” Modern China 29 (2003): 187: “Villagers shifted between villages and towns, federations of villages and states split and reformed, and the nobility was sometimes compelled to travel far and wide to hold a constituency together.… Such continual and steady movement and change make the region difficult to characterize, though we can note three constants: Village affiliation, strong traditions of independence, and freedom of movement.”
83. Anthony Reid, “‘Tradition’ in Indonesia: The One and the Many,” Asian Studies Review 22 (1998): 32.
84. Akin Rabibhadana, “The Organization of Thai Society in the Early Bangkok Period, 1782–1873,” Cornell University, Thailand Project, Interim Report Series, no. 12 (July 1969), 27.
85. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
86. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972).
87. Basile Nikitina, quoted, in French, by Tapper in “Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople,” 55; my translation.
88. Sir Stamford Raffles, cited by Reid in “‘Tradition’ in Indonesia,” 31.
1. Quoted in Yong Xue, “Agrarian Urbanization: Social and Economic Changes in Jiangnan from the 8th to the 19th Century,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2006, 102. The logic invoked here is derived directly from the standard formulations of “central-place theory” as elaborated by Johann Heinrich von Thünen, Walter Christaller, and G. W. Skinner. The logic, precisely because it is so schematic, is also occasionally faulty. For example, what if free spring pasture is available along the transportation route? In this case the draft animals might grow fatter at no cost along the way and, for that matter, may be themselves part of the cargo, as it were, if they are sold at the destination!
2. As Peter Bellwood notes, the density of population in wet-rice cultivation is roughly ten times as great as swidden/slash-and-burn, rain-fed, hill rice: a decisive advantage, as we shall see, for the state. “Southeast Asia before History,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 1, From Early Times to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1: 90.
3. Should they wish to, of course, officials can also punish the cultivator or the entire village by burning the dry, ripe crops to the ground.
4. Notice, as well, that a store of grain allows armies to march long distances (Julius Caesar’s legions, for example) while feeding themselves, and, in turn, it allows besieged defenders of a fortified state core to hold out longer. Premodern invasions were often planned to coincide with the grain harvest so that the army could provision itself en route rather than having to carry all its rations in its pack train.
5. See, in general, Jonathan Rigg, The Gift of Water: Water Management, Cosmology, and the State in Southeast Asia (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992), and, especially, in that volume, Philip Stott, “Ankor: Shifting the Hydraulic Paradigm,” 47–58, and Janice Staargardt, “Water for Courts or Countryside: Archeological Evidence from Burma and Thailand Revisited,” 59–72. The point of that volume is, in part, to lay permanently to rest the thesis of hydraulic societies proposed by Karl Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976, 9th ed.), for Southeast Asia at any rate. Among other things, the demographic realities and the possibility of flight prevented any large-scale mobilization of forced labor. The scholarly consensus is best expressed by Clifford Geertz in his examination of the complex Balinese system of terracing and irrigation. “In fact the state role in … construction seems to have been minor at best.… In the first place, the growth of the subak system was almost certainly a very gradual, piecemeal process, not an all-at-once collective effort demanding authoritative coordination of huge masses of men. By the nineteenth century, the system was essentially complete, but even before the nineteenth century its expansion was slow, steady, and almost imperceptible. The notion that impressive irrigation works need highly centralized states to construct them rests on ignoring this fact: such works are not built at one blow.” Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 197. See also the references in Geertz and, also for Bali in particular, Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power and the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
6. Barbara Watson Andaya, “Political Development between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Tarling, Cambridge History, 1: 402–59, quotation from 426.
7. Jan Wisseman Christie, “Water from the Ancestors: Irrigation in Early Java and Bali,” in Rigg, Gift of Water, 7–25, quotation from 12.
8. Andaya, “Political Development,” 426.
9. I owe this insight to Edward Whiting Fox, History in Geographical Perspective: The Other France (New York: Norton, 1971), 25.
10. One imagines that the “shock and awe” effect of elephants in a military campaign might have been more decisive than their value as pack animals. I am grateful to Katherine Bowie for reminding me of the use of elephants in war.
11. The Man Shu (Book of the Southern Barbarians), trans. Gordon H. Luce, ed. G. P. Oey, data paper no. 44, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, December 1961, 4–11.
12. See table 1. I am grateful to Alexander Lee for assembling and calculating this information. C. Ainslie, Report on a Tour through the Trans-Salween Shan States, Season 1892-’93 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1893).
I have selected two parallel routes surveyed by Ainslie from Pan Yang to Man Pan. “There is another,” he writes, “via Long Lawk which runs high up among the hills and is said to be a very bad road, even for loaded men.”
Ainslie also notes the presence or absence of camping sites. Many of the good ones (clear, flat areas near to a water source) are flooded in the wet season. The standard unit of the table is the “stage” or day’s march.
13. The figures for travel by foot and the carrying capacities of porters and bullock carts are taken from Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 57. Jeremy Black, writing about military movements in seventeenth-century Europe, gives fifteen miles (twenty-four kilometers) a day as the upper limit for an army on the march. European Warfare, 1660–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 37. A larger army requiring a baggage train would average only ten miles (sixteen kilometers) a day (hence the tactical importance of swift-moving cavalry). John A. Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 1993), 21.
14. See the calculations for a cart pulled by a team of four horses in Lynn, Feeding Mars, 19. Perhaps because of the famed roads of the Roman Empire, Peter Heather calculates that an oxcart traveling over level terrain could cover forty kilometers a day (nearly twenty-five miles). Diocletian’s Prices Edict, however, records that the price of a wagon of wheat doubled for every fifty miles (eighty kilometers) it traveled. See Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107, 111.
15. Fox, History in Geographical Perspective, 25.
16. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma: Kayah Society as a Function of the Shan-Burma-Karen Context,” in Contemporary Change in Traditional Society, 3 vols., ed. Julian Steward (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 1: 1–104, quotation from 13.
17. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2: 54.
18. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 178.
19. George Fitzherbert, review of Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, vol. 2, The Calm before the Storm, 1951–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 2008, 24.
20. The simile “as the crow flies” is a nearly perfect expression of relatively frictionless movement through the air, though, of course, with its storms, drafts, and prevailing winds, the air is hardly a frictionless medium.
21. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 31.
22. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
23. Here William’s invasion of Great Britain is the exception that proves the rule, in as much as most of Great Britain is close to the navigable routes to the sea.
Table 1 Walking Times in Eastern Shan State, 1892–93
24. Andaya, “Political Development,” 427. Andaya cites similarly impressive figures for the armed manpower of Mataram (Java) and Ava (Burma).
25. Flood retreat agriculture was, and is, practiced along such rivers, but it appears less stable and reliable than irrigation on smaller perennial streams. See Staargardt, “Water for Courts or Countryside.” It is an ironic comment on Karl Wittfogel’s widely discredited thesis that while extensive irrigation can, and has, been constructed independent of the state, the extensive drainage required to open deltaic lowlands to cultivation may, in fact, require a different sort of “hydraulic-state” and the provision of credit to pioneers.
26. E. R. Leach, “The Frontiers of Burma,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3 (1960): 49–68, quotation from 58.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 56.
29. Relevant here is G. William Skinner’s development of the standard market area, from the work of von Thünen and Christaller, as a unit of social and cultural integration; see “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 270–81. Since Skinner’s model is based on a standardized flat terrain, it would have to be corrected for the varying influence of navigable rivers, on the one hand, or for that of swampy or mountainous terrain on the other. For a telling example of a religious movement that traveled more easily downriver than laterally across the hills, see Charles F. Keyes’s description of the Telakhon, Karen, prophetic movement in the hills behind Moulmein/Mawlemyain. Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: ISHII, 1979), 66–67.
30. Leach, “Frontiers of Burma,” 58.
31. Benedict Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
32. Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598–1885, part 1, A.D. 1598–1648, ed. Than Tun (Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), 72.
33. O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, in cooperation with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1999), 28.
34. Thongchai, Siam Mapped.
35. Thongchai, ibid., 88, claims that this was Cambodia’s strategy as a tributary to both Siam and Vietnam in the nineteenth century.
36. Ibid., 73, 86. Thongchai also notes that the small kingdom of Lai paid tribute simultaneously to China, Tonkin, and Luang Prabang (100). The now classic study of such zones of fractured sovereignty and the social and political flux of identities they throw up is Richard White, The Middle Ground: Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
37. See Royal Orders of Burma, 3: vii.
38. One might imagine river travel to be a major exception to this rule. During the months of high rainfall, however, major rivers were often in spate and difficult to navigate, not to mention the added difficulty of a return voyage against a swift current.
39. Desawarnana (Nagarakartagama), quoted in Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 36.
40. See, for example, “Glass Palace Chronicle: Excerpts Translated on Burmese Invasions of Siam,” compiled and annotated by Nai Thein, Journal of the Siam Society 5 (1908): 1–82 and 8 (1911): 1–119.
41. Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, vol. 1, part 1 (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893), 136.
42. Perhaps the most striking colonial example was the strangulation of the French fort at Bien Bien Phu by North Vietnamese forces with help from hill peoples. But for a more representative example, see William Henry Scott’s fine account of Igorot strategies against the Spanish in Northern Luzon, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, rev. ed. (Quezon City: New Day, 1974), 31–36, 225–26.
Epigraph from Nicholas Gervaise, The Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam, trans. John Villiers (Bangkok, 1987), 27, quoted in Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27.
1. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 20. Owen Lattimore, in a discussion of state cores and frontiers, suggests a graded series of subsistence patterns from most extensive to most intensive: hunting-gathering, pastoral nomadism, rain-fed agriculture, and irrigated agriculture. The last, by virtue of the concentration of manpower and grain it represents, is, he believes, most hospitable to state-making. “The Frontier in History,” in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 469–91, esp. 474.
2. Richard A. O’Connor, “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asian States: A Case for Regional Anthropology,” Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 988 n11 O’Connor credits F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Empiricist Method and Intentional Analysis in Burmese Historiography: William Koenig’s The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819, a Review Article,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6 (1991): 77–120.
3. In practice, padi farmers might have rain-fed fields and swiddens as well as irrigated rice fields. For the cultivators, this mixed portfolio of subsistence routines offered some flexibility. They could ease some or all their tax burden by planting less land to heavily taxed padi and shifting to less heavily taxed crops.
4. Georges Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces, trans. Stephanie Anderson et al., an Occasional Paper of the Department of Anthropology in Association with the Thai-Yunnan Project, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra: Australian National University, 1990). Michael Mann, in The Sources of Social Power, employs a strikingly similar metaphor of “social cageing” to describe the efforts of the earliest states to circumscribe a population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 54–58.
5. Quoted in Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 104.
6. See Frank N. Trager and William J. Koenig, with the assistance of Yi Yi, Burmese Sit-tàns, 1784–1826: Records of Rural Life and Administration, Association of Asian Studies monograph no. 36 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979). Trager and Koenig point out that even district histories in precolonial Burma focus on what they term “the shadow of the throne,” where “the hinterland appears but mainly to serve the purpose of the royal center” (1). The notable exception to this are the sit-tàns (usually translated as “inquests”), which consist of locality-by-locality reports by headmen of their area of jurisdiction, the land and the crops sown on it, and, above all, the sources of annual revenue it provides to the crown. They are essentially a revenue inventory with particular attention devoted to the most lucrative land: irrigated riceland bearing one or two crops annually.
7. Quoted ibid., 77–78.
8. The term is Robert Elson’s in “International Commerce, the State, and Society: Economic and Social Change,” chapter 3 of The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 131.
9. R. L. Carniero, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970): 733–38.
10. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 24.
11. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 164.
12. Barbara Watson Andaya, “Political Development between the Sixteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries” in Tarling, Cambridge History, vol. 1, From Early Times to 1800, 402–59, esp. 422–23. The term Dato/Datu in the Malay world meant “lord with vassals.” Burmese officials above the level of village chiefs were often designated the beneficiaries of a locality’s revenue (the often cited town-eater or myó-sà). This was not the same as ruling the district, and such revenue was often given in fractional shares to many dignitaries. Nor was such an entitlement generally inheritable. It also seems that those officials who did rule a locality or benefit from its revenue retained jurisdiction over such people or claimed their taxes after they had moved to another location. Hence the puzzlement of the British to discover that the subjects of a single locality owed allegiance or taxes to several different claimants.
13. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, “The Age of Transition: The Mid-eighteenth Century to Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Tarling, Cambridge History, 1: 883–84.
14. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 108.
15. Quoted ibid., 1: 129.
16. See in this connection the remarkable evidence assembled by Kenichi Kirigaya in “The Age of Commerce and the Tai Encroachments on the Irrawaddy Basin,” draft paper, June 2008, and the models of center-periphery relations in Noboru Ishikawa’s “Centering Peripheries: Flows and Interfaces in Southeast Asia,” Kyoto Working Papers on Area Studies no. 10, JSPS Global COE Program, Series 7, In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa, Subseries 8, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, December 2008.
17. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 88.
18. Amar Siamwalla, “Land, Labour, and Capital in Three Rice-growing Deltas of Southeast Asia, 1800–1840,” Yale Economic Growth Center, discussion paper 150 (July 1972), emphasizes the efforts of the core states centered in Mandalay, Bangkok, and Hanoi to prevent mass migration to southern delta areas outside their control. In the crudest “transportation-economy” terms, it nearly always makes sense to move people to fertile land rather than the products of fertile land to the capital. People are easier to move than grain; for one thing, they walk and, once resettled, they produce a surplus that does not have to be moved far.
19. See, for example, Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), chapter 5; Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 9–15; and Richard Whiting Fox, History in Geographical Perspective: The Other France (New York: Norton, 1971), chapter 2. England is, of course, the glaring exception. Its success as a largely maritime power rested, Black suggests, on its massive wealth from trade, which allowed it to subsidize others to do much of its fighting for it.
20. Quoted in Akin Rabibhadana, “The Organization of Society in the Early Bangkok Period, 1782–1873,” Cornell University Thailand Project, Interim Report Series, no. 12 (July, 1969), 16–18.
21. The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma, trans. Pe Maung Tin and G. H. Luce, issued by the Text Publication Fund of the Burma Research Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1923), 177.
22. Quoted in Rabibhadana, “Organization of Society,” 16–18.
23. Glass Palace Chronicle, 177, 150.
24. See, for example, the long list of retainers of Queen Thirusandevi ibid., 95.
25. The ruler of Palembang in 1747 observed: “It is very easy for a subject to find a lord, but it is much more difficult for a lord to find a subject.” For an illuminating discussion and a list of adages (including some quoted here), see Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Precolonial Southeast Asia,” in Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 156–81, esp. 157–60.
26. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), e.g., 67, 96, 221, 513, and 535. Thucydides goes out of his way to praise the Spartan general Brasidas for negotiating the peaceful surrender of cities so as to increase the Spartan tax and manpower base at no cost in Spartan lives.
27. Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants, 104, quoting the late-fourth-century BCE Guanzi jiping.
28. Ibid. 104, quoting from The Book of the Lord of Shang.
29. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 18.
30. Igor Kopytoff, The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40. Kopytoff’s excellent essay is very suggestive for understanding manpower-starved political systems.
31. Quoted ibid., 62, 53.
32. Ibid., 62.
33. Richard A. O’Connor, “Rice, Rule, and the Tai State,” in State Power and Culture in Thailand, ed. E. Paul Durrenberger, Yale Southeast Asia monograph no. 44 (New Haven, 1996), 68–99, quotation from 81.
34. Thant Myint U, “The Crisis of the Burmese State and the Foundations of British Colonial Rule in Upper Burma,” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1995, 46–47.
35. For more on this theme, see my Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes for Improving the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), especially chapters 1 and 2.
36. The sit-tàns provide evidence of the agro-ecological specialization by ethnic group. Thus the Karen population of Hanthawaddy/Pegu were mostly swiddeners and foragers, taxed as much for their honey and silver production as for their small grain yields. See Toshi-katsu Ito, “Karens and the Kon-baung Polity in Myanmar,” Acta Asiatica 92 (2007): 89–108.
37. John S. Furnivall, The Fashioning of Leviathan: The Beginnings of British Rule in Burma, ed. Gehan Wijeyewardene (1939; Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1991), 116.
38. A homely analogy from beekeeping may be helpful here. Until roughly a century ago, the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if captured swarms were kept in straw hives, extracting the honey usually meant driving off the bees with fire or smoke and often destroying the colony in the process. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive, making the harvest complex and wasteful. The modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s problem. A device called the queen-excluder separates the brood chambers below from most of the honey supply above, by preventing the queen from entering and laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which allow easy, frame-by-frame extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Harvesting is made possible by observing “bee space”—the precise distance between frames (three-eighths of an inch) that bees will leave open rather than bridging the frames with honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, “legible” hive allowing him or her to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge the honey production (usually by weight), enlarge or contract the size by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully. And just as the beekeeper raids the hive when it is heavy with honey, so were invasions timed seasonally to coincide with the beginning of the dry season and crops ripe for plunder and provisions. (Thucydides noted that invasions occurred when the grain on the route of march was ripe and that it was a potentially fatal miscalculation to invade too early, when the grain was green. In the case of a punitive raid, an invading army could also burn the ripe grain [impossible in the case of root crops] and thereby scatter or render destitute an enemy population. Peloponnesian War, 173, 265, 267.) Without pushing this analogy further than it merits, the concentration and uniformity of monoculture—in this case padi rice—does for the tax man and military recruiter roughly what the modern hive does for the beekeeper.
39. Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 288. Hardy is citing both a work in Vietnamese by Mai Khac Ung and, among others, Masaya Shiraishi, “State, Villagers, and Vagabonds: Vietnamese Rural Society and the Phan Ba Vanh Rebellion,” Senri Ethnological Studies 13 (1984): 345–400.
40. Quoted in Hardy, Red Hills, 240–55. Hardy also has a good discussion of French policy, as does Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003). See also Jean Michaud, ed., Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the Southeast Asian Masssif (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), and Pamela McElwee, “Becoming Socialist or Becoming Kinh: Government Policies for Ethnic Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” in Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities, ed. Christopher R. Duncan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 182–21. For an account of the resettlement policy of the ill-starred Saigon regime, see Stan B-H Tan, “Dust beneath the Mist: State and Frontier Formation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the 1955–1961 Period,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 2006.
41. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture and Frontier in Early Modern China (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). See especially the contributions by John E. Herman, David Faure, Donald Sutton, Anne Csete, Wing-hoi Chan, and Helen Siu and Lui Zhiwei.
42. Grant Evans, “Central Highlands of Vietnam,” chapter 2 of Indigenous Peoples of Asia, ed. R. H. Barnes, Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kingsbury, Association of Asian Studies monograph no. 48 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
43. Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38. See also William Robert Geddes, Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao [Hmong Njua] of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 259.
44. Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, 31, 34.
45. The pattern in mainland Southeast Asia is repeated in the Malay world to the south. Sultans in Perak (Malaysia) have constantly insisted that the lowland but highly mobile Semai form permanent settlements. In Sarawak the Malaysian government has tried consistently “to make the Punan conform to the norms of farming peoples.” “Progress and development mean standardization on the model of the farmers: rice farming to the point of self-sufficiency.” See Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 47. See also Robert Knox Denton, Kirk Endicott, Alberto Gomes, and M. B. Hooker, Malaysia and the Original People: A Case Study of the Impact of Development on Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Survival Studies in Ethnicity and Change (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997); John D. Leary, Violence and the Dream People: The Orang Asli and the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960, Ohio University Center for International Studies, Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asian Studies no. 95 (Athens: Center for International Studies, Ohio University, 1995); and Bernard Sellato, Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest: The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down, trans. Stephanie Morgan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 171–73.
46. Kevin Malseed, “‘We Have Hands the Same as Them’: Struggles for Local Sovereignty and Livelihoods by Internally Displaced Karen Villagers in Burma,” unpublished research paper, Karen Human Rights Group, 2006, 9.
47. O. W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, in cooperation with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1999), passim, esp. 58–67.
48. Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, especially Helen Siu and Liu Zhiwei, “Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta,” 285–331. The authors suggest that the way in which the “Dan” became “Han” is a process that typifies early Han state-building as well.
49. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 86.
50. The Tai linguistic family incorporates a large number of peoples all the way from northern Vietnam to northeastern India. In eastern Burma (the Shan states), much of northern Thailand, and southern Yunnan, they tend to be a padi-planting, state-forming, Buddhist people. It is these Tai I am referring to here. There are Tai peoples throughout the region (sometimes called “hill Tai”) who are non-Buddhist swiddeners living outside state structures.
51. David Wyatt, quoted in Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 128n 10.
52. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 271–73, 318–19.
53. Ibid., 1: 319. Here I believe Lieberman may imply too much in the way of ethnic and religious consciousness. It is more likely that identities were more fluid, their bearers versed in two or more languages, and more identified, perhaps, with a place of origin or residence rather than having a firm linguistic or ethnic identity.
54. Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 201. Heather, with this example, endeavors to show that the Romans at the Celtic periphery of their empire could nevertheless prevail culturally despite their small numbers.
55. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, 65–72.
56. Ibid., 41.
57. Mentioned in passing by Mandy Sadan in “Translating gumlau: History, the ‘Kachin,’ and Edmund Leach,” in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach, ed. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3, Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 76.
58. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (1954; Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 39.
59. “In the Tay [Tai] social formation only the chiefs and the free peasants have wet rice fields and the non-Tay may not have them.” Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, 83.
60. See the insightful analysis of Jonathan Friedman, “Dynamique et transformations du système tribal, l’example des Katchins,” L’homme 15 (1975): 63–98. In southwest China, the numerous small Tai states that arose were invariably based on a fertile plateau that might be at a fairly high altitude. Such plateaus were called bazi by the Chinese, a term that might be translated as “valley basin” or “flatland on mountainous plateau.” I am grateful to Shanshan Du for her explanation of these terms.
61. The Malay state, if one were comparing precolonial Southeast Asian states in terms of their thirst for manpower, would qualify almost as a limiting case. It was exceptionally open, pluralistic, and assimilative, with the formula for assimilation being more of a state affiliation than a thick, cultural identity. Speaking Malay (a language of trade like Swahili), professing Islam, and being a subject of a Malay state was virtually all it took. Inclusion in this hyper–manpower state did not preclude coercion. Melaka and the other Malay states were responsible for most of the enormously rich slave trade in the region. Though the classical Malay state was, typically, a trading port mediating between forest products and international trade, the most valuable cargoes in its ships’ holds were human captives sold or kept as slaves.
Just how cosmopolitan the Malay state was at the beginning of the sixteenth century (just before the Portuguese conquest) is reflected in Tome Pires’s claim that eighty-four distinct languages could be heard on the streets of Melaka. It not only rivaled and perhaps surpassed Venice and Constantinople for sheer diversity, but it was a social and political system open to talent. The greatest of Melaka’s rulers, Sultan Mansur, appointed to manage his finances a “heathen king” from India who converted and founded a famous dynasty of court counselors. The same Sultan also elevated one of his non-Muslim slaves from Palembang, who, in turn, founded the powerful Laksamana Dynasty. As Reid emphasizes, outsiders could quickly be incorporated and rise to prominence. “Some foreign traders, sharing religion and language, could cross the boundary into the local aristocracy very quickly, while all could do so within a generation if willing to accept the dominant religion and culture.”
Like the Tai padi state, the Malay negeri was an effective centripetal population machine. One consequence of its success was the fact that most Malays were—in contemporary parlance—“hyphenated Malays”: Bengali-Malays, Javanese-Malays, Chinese-Malays, Minagkabau-Malays, and so on. Even the earliest settlements in the Malay world appear to have been drawn from diverse ethnic sources and established to take advantage of trading opportunities. Thus each Malay negeri had its own cultural flavor, determined in large part by the local populations it had absorbed, not to mention the slaves and merchants who had been incorporated. Malayness was, in these terms, something of an achieved status, a performance (sometimes under compulsion!): less an ethnic identity than the minimal cultural and religious conditions for membership in the trading state and its hierarchy. If anything, Malay identity was even more fluid than Tai identity, but at the core of each was becoming the subject of a state that had every incentive to absorb as many subjects as possible.
62. See Michael Aung-Thwin, “Irrigation in the Heartland of Burma: Foundations of the Precolonial Burmese State,” Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, occasional paper 15 (1990), and Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1: 20, 22.
63. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 90.
64. Ibid. Here, as well, I wonder whether Lieberman isn’t retrospectively assigning identities that, owing to bi- and trilingualism and physical mobility, may have been far more indeterminate than this list implies. He suggests as much elsewhere when he discusses Burmese and Mon identities in the eighteenth century, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 12 (1978): 455–82.
65. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 114.
66. See, for example, Thant Myint-U, “Crisis of the Burmese State,” 35.
67. Reverend Father Sangermano, A Description of the Burmese Empire, trans. William Tandy (Rome: John Murray, 1883).
68. Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma.”
69. The case can be, and has been, made for the historical origins of cultural distinctions that are, today, represented as both essential and of great antiquity. Thus Ernest Gellner asserts that many of the Arabic-speaking regions of North Africa also contain populations composed “in large part of Arabized Berbers.” Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 13. Nicholas Tapp, with respect to southwest China, claims that the “Sinicization process … was not so much the result of an invasion of southwest China by Han Chinese from the north as it was the result of indigenous peoples, especially in lowland areas, becoming Chinese.” Tapp writes, “Thus many of the ‘Chinese’ in this area were not descendants, in a biological sense, of groups of northern Han Chinese; rather, they had adopted the Chinese role when it became advantageous to do so.” Sovereignty and Rebellion, 172.
70. Richard A. O’Connor, “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession,” passim.
71. Reid, Introduction to Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency, 27.
72. Thomas Gibson, “Raiding, Trading, and Tribal Autonomy in Insular Southeast Asia,” in An Anthropology of War, ed. Jonathan Hess (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 125–45.
73. This discussion comes from Katherine Bowie’s fine article “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand: Archival Anecdotes and Village Voices,” in Durrenberger, State Power and Culture, 100–138.
74. Ibid., 110.
75. Between 1500 and 1800 there was a steady flow of African slaves, many of them skilled artisans and seamen, moving eastward across the Indian Ocean. This little-known aspect of the non-Atlantic slave trade has only recently been examined.
76. Bowie, “Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand,” quoting Archibald Ross Colquhoun, Amongst the Shans (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), 257–58.
77. Insular Southeast Asia was an analogous case with two variations. First, maritime slaving expeditions swept the small islands and the coastal strands clean of captives, forcing others to retreat inland, often upstream and into the hills. Watchtowers were commonly erected on the beaches to warn the strand residents of pirate-slavers. Second, Muslims were forbidden to enslave other Muslims, though this stricture was often breached. To my knowledge, the role of this prohibition in encouraging conversion to Islam has not been examined; it must have been a powerful incentive. Early-seventeenth-century Mataram followed the mainland script; it destroyed rebellious tributaries (for example, Pajang, Surabaya) and moved their populations to Mataram. It raided the hills. “As a non-Islamic population, the Tengger highlands were fair game for enslavement.… Between 1617 and 1650 Mataram forces made repeated forays into the mountain territories … to seize slaves.” Hefner, Political Economy, 37.
78. Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, vol. 1, part 1 (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893), 432.
79. Gibson, “Raiding, Trading, and Tribal Autonomy,” works this out nicely for insular Southeast Asia, describing the Buid (Philippines) as an example of a society preyed upon and the Iban as organized slave raiders. For the best treatment of maritime slaving, see James Francis Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768–1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1981).
80. Charles Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 318.
81. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, 53.
82. Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, 28; Grant Evans, “Tai-ization: Ethnic Change in Northern Indochina,” in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), 263–89, quotation from 4. See also Karl Gustav Izikowitz, Lamet: Hill Peasants in French Indochina (Gothenburg: Ethnografiska Museet, 1951), 29.
83. Peter Kunstadter, “Ethnic Group, Category, and Identity: Karen in North Thailand,” in Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen and the Thai Frontier with Burma, ed. Charles F. Keyes (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 154.
84. Izikowitz, Lamet, 24.
85. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Turton, Civility and Savagery, 122–58. In insular Southeast Asia, most if not all of those groups called “hill tribes” today bear a cultural memory in which the fear of abduction and slavery is powerful. What we know about the Penan/Punan and the Moken (the boat people, or “sea gypsies” of Burma’s west coast) suggests that avoiding capture is at the center of their pattern of livelihood. The most documented case is that of the so-called Orang Asli (Semai, Semang, Jakun, Batek, Senoi, Temuan), who were actively hunted until the 1920s. They had reason to flee again during World War II and the subsequent Emergency, when they risked capture by those who wished to turn them into auxiliary soldiers, trackers, and porters or, just as they feared, to round them up forcibly and settle them in guarded camps. Many of these groups had earlier devised forms of silent barter and were careful, when trading with lowlanders, to conceal the route back to their location in the forest, lest they be followed by slave-raiders.
86. “Glass Palace Chronicle: Excerpts Translated on Burmese Invasions of Siam,” compiled and annotated by Nai Thein, Journal of the Siam Society 8 (1911): 1–119, esp. 15.
87. It is hard to know exactly what to make of the numbers reported, for example, in the Glass Palace Chronicle. Its account of the late-sixteenth-century invasion of Siam claims that more than half a million troops set out from Hanthawaddy. This claim seems, from what we know about premodern warfare, preposterous on its face. It is perhaps a case of the “cosmological bluster” we shall examine below. Elsewhere an invasion of Chiang Mai, not much later, reports an army of 630,000, with 120,000 coming from the king of Ava and his Shan tributaries, 120,000 from Hanthawaddy, 120,000 from Prome, 150,000 from Anawrata’s column, plus another 120,000 (origin unspecified). The coincidence in numbers is surely exaggerated and reflects, I suspect, some combination of diplomacy, conventions of chronicle writing, and astrologically auspicious numbers. Journal of the Siam Society 5 (1908): 1–82, esp. 20, 32.
88. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginnings to 1923,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979, 143–44.
89. See Trager and Koenig, Burmese Sit-tàns, and Victor B. Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, 1580–1760 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
90. James Z. Lee, The Political Economy of a Frontier Region: Southwest China, 1250–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
91. William J. Koenig, The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: Politics, Administration, and Social Organization in the Early Kon-baung Period, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asian Studies, no. 34 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 160.
92. For the richest documentation, see Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles, esp. 152–77.
93. Koenig, Burmese Polity, 224.
94. Quoted in A. Thomas Kirsch, “Cosmology and Ecology as Factors in Interpreting Early Thai Social Organization,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 253–65.
95. R. R. Langham-Carter, “The Burmese Army,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 27 (1937): 254–76.
96. King Taksin (1768–82) introduced the tattooing of subjects of the crown to prevent them from being reappropriated by princes and nobles as “private property.” On the subject of technologies of identification in general in the Thai context, see the fine article by Pingkaew Laungaramsri, “Contested Citizenship: Cards, Colours, and the Culture of Identification,” manuscript, 2008.
97. Koenig, Burmese Polity, especially chapter 5, “The Officials.”
98. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 61; Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, 141.
99. Quoted in Malseed, “‘We Have Hands the Same as Them,’” 14.
100. Ibid., 14.
101. The argument is most carefully and convincingly elaborated in Lieberman’s Burmese Administrative Cycles. See also Koenig, Burmese Polity, and Rabibhadana, “Organization of Society.”
102. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 156.
103. Thant Myint-U, “Crisis of the Burmese State,” 5.
104. Andaya, “Political Development,” 447.
105. At an earlier stage, when its population was both smaller and had easy access to a land frontier, China faced similar dilemmas of statecraft. See the discussion of population control in the Han Dynasty in Patricia Buckley Ebery, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 73–75.
106. For more detail see James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), especially chapter 4.
107. There is also no easy, rational accounting for General Than Shwe’s brusque decision in 2006 to move Burma’s capital from Yangon to remote Nay Pyi Daw.
Epigraphs from Charles Richard, “Etude sur l’insurrection du Dahra (1845–46),” in Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World, ed. Michael Gilsenen (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 142, cited in Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 95; Mann to superintendent of Indian Affairs, September 28, 1865, rpt. in Dale Morgan, “Washakie and the Shoshone: A Selection of Documents from the Records of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs,” Annals of Wyoming 29 (1957): 215; Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 87.
1. These claims were above all cosmological; they constituted the idiom in which monarchical claims were asserted. Thus the comical spectacle of two petty, would-be universal monarchs ruling adjacent kingdoms that held sway over a few villages beyond what each understood to be his palace walls.
In Burma and Thailand the influence of Brahminical arts, especially astrology, is still widespread both among popular classes and among elites, including Burma’s military rulers. See, for example, A. Thomas Kirsch, “Complexity in the Thai Religious System: An Interpretation,” Journal of Asian Studies 36 (1972): 241–66. As Kirsch claims, popular Brahminism and nat/phi worship have come to represent the “this-worldly,” secular side of an otherwise resolutely salvational Theravada Buddhism. See also Ni Ni Hlaing, “History of the Myanmar Ponna,” M.A. thesis, University of Mandalay, 1999.
2. F. K. Lehman (Chit Hlaing) points out that the Thai and Lao states were “galactic” in the sense that the paramount king had, in principle, lesser kings beneath him, on the model of Indra having thirty-two devatas (lesser deities), while Burma was a more unified imperial state. Personal communication, January 2008.
3. The major exception to this pattern is the Han-Chinese state, which did not have a religious criterion for membership unless one counts what passes as Confucianism as a state religion.
4. Patricia M. Pelley, Post-Colonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 89. Durong goes on to explain that the Miao/Hmong, living at the highest altitudes, were the most uncivilized.
5. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Routledge-Curzon, 2000), 122–58, quotation from 141–42.
6. In Great Britain, for example, students are said to “go up” to Oxford or Cambridge even if they are coming from the Welsh or Scottish hills.
7. Originally, of course, the term refers to Muhammad’s flight to Medina from Mecca. It came to mean a migration and the adoption of a new way of life and hence, in the Berber context, settling permanently.
8. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 105.
9. One is reminded of Robert Frost’s description of home, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” as “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
10. Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 25.
11. In the Kon-baung dynasty such vagrancy was associated with the leakage of people away from the crown’s service units (ahmudan) into private service. It had, originally, for this reason a strong fiscal and administrative rationale behind it. Lehman (Chit Hlaing), personal communication January 2008.
12. Pascal Khoo Thwe, From the Land of the Green Ghosts (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 184–85.
13. Quoted in Charles Patterson Giersch, “Qing China’s Reluctant Subjects: Indigenous Communities and Empire along the Yunnan Frontier,” Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1998, 75.
14. It is perhaps due to the fact that the padi core was surrounded by foragers and swiddeners that Burmese kings referred to their territories as being surrounded by a “ring of fire.” Barbara Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 25.
15. Quoted in Anthony R. Walker, Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 2003), 69–71, 88, et seq. See also Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
16. The Burmese equivalent for “raw” (Chinese shang) is lu seín (
:) and for “cooked” (Chinese shu) is lu c’eq (
). The former is translatable as greenhorn or stranger and the latter as cooked or mature.
17. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán makes the same observation about New World populations fleeing Spanish colonization for the remote, hilly regions. Regions of Refuge, Society of Applied Anthropology Monograph Series, 12 (Washington, D.C., 1979), 87.
18. Neither reverence for one’s (paternal) ancestors, an essentially private lineage ritual, nor the more public, Confucian code of conduct operates in anything like the same manner.
19. Giersch, “Q’ing China’s Reluctant Subjects,” 125–30.
20. Susan D. Blum, Portraits of “Primitives”: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Blum’s surveys among Han in Kunming shows that nomadism, living in the hills, not growing wet rice, going barefoot, and geographical remoteness are associated both with minority status and with a lack of civilization or development, which, in turn, is read as emulating the Han. There are “folkloric” minorities such as the Dai who are seen as “on their way” to becoming Han, as opposed to the Wa, who are seen as undesirable and the rawest of the raw. The most difficult minorities to classify were the Hui (Muslims) and the Zang (Tibetans), who, rather like the Jews in early modern Europe, are manifestly literate and civilized but have rejected assimilation.
21. Richard A. O’Connor, “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asian States: A Case for Regional Anthropology,” Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 968–96, quotation from 986.
22. As we have seen, the padi state, as a manpower state, could not afford to be choosy about whom it incorporated as subjects. Hilly subjects, it was assumed, would gradually assimilate into Burman lowland ways. At the level of the court, however, the crown readily welcomed Hindus, Portuguese, Armenians, and Chinese as civilized foreigners and made no special effort to convert them.
23. The literature on this subject is vast and sophisticated. For a schematic description of the pattern, see Bennet Bronson, “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes toward a Functional Model of the Coastal State in Southeast Asia,” in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Prehistory, History, and Ethnography, ed. Karl Hutterer (Ann Arbor: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 1977). Here we concentrate on upstream-downstream because the pattern is more analogous to inland-mainland systems of exchange. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the coastal (pasisir) state was often just as much a collection point for products foraged by seafaring people (the famous orang laut or sea gypsies) as for products from the hills.
24. Ronald Duane Renard, “The Role of the Karens in Thai Society during the Early Bangkok Period, 1782–1873,” Contributions to Asian Studies 15 (1980): 15–28.
25. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 259–60.
26. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma: Kayah Society as a Function of the Shan-Burma-Karen Context,” in Contemporary Change in Traditional Society, 3 vols., ed. Julian Haynes Steward (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 1: 1–104, esp. 22–24.
27. J. G. Scott provides a more complete list at the turn of the century for imports to Kengtung, an eastern Shan state polity, from various adjacent states. From Burma: cheap cloth from Manchester and India, rugs, velvet, satin, aniline dyes, mirrors, matches, kerosene, condensed milk, colored paper, candles, soap, lead pencils, enameled ware. From western Shan states: all kinds of iron implements, lacquer boxes, fish paste, and leaves for cheroot wrappers. From China: salt, straw hats, copper and iron pots, silk, satin, opium requisites, pigments, tea, lead, percussion caps. Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, vol. 1, part 2 (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893), 424.
28. Most of the work on Malay history over the past two decades converges around this interpretation. See, among others, Bernard Sellato, Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest: The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down, trans. Stephanie Morgan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994); Jane Drakard, A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom, Studies on Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1990); J. Peter Brosius, “Prior Transcripts: Resistance and Acquiescence to Logging in Sarawak,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997): 468–510; Carl L. Hoffman, “Punan Foragers in the Trading Networks of Southeast Asia,” in Past and Present in Hunter Gatherer Studies, ed. Carmel Shrire (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), 123–49. Hoffman claims, persuasively I think, that Punan is a portmanteau term covering many groups that are more closely tied to their respective downriver trading partners than to one another. He further claims that their subsistence activities are in the service of their essentially commercial collecting role rather than the other way around. They are, in other words, commercial speculators—hoping for the lucrative find.
29. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginnings to 1923,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979, 22.
30. The tradition, throughout much of the region, of “founders’ cults” recognizes the ritual (not political) primacy of the first settlers/clearers of the land, on whose relationship with the spirits of the place its auspiciousness and fertility depend. See F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing]’s “The Relevance of the Founders’ Cults for Understanding the Political Systems of the Peoples of Northern Southeast Asia and its Chinese Borderlands,” in Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, ed. Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, monograph no. 52 (New Haven: Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), 15–39.
31. See, for example, Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 50; Sellalo, Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest, 29, 39; William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, rev. ed. (Quezon City: New Day, 1974), 204.
32. A banal but telling contemporary example: the automobile bumper sticker reading “Proud to be an American” can be understood only as a reply to the unstated, but implicit, assertion: “Ashamed to be an American,” without which it would have no reason for being.
33. Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958, 469–91, quotations from 472–75. What Lattimore appears to miss in his account is the astonishing degree to which nonstate populations migrated over time from China south of the Yellow River to the west and southwest. The most striking, but hardly the only case, appears to be the Miao. See Herold J. Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics: A Discussion of the Southward Penetration of China’s Culture, Peoples, and Political Control in Relation to the Non-Han-Chinese Peoples of South China in the Perspective of Historical and Cultural Geography (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1954).
34. Lattimore, as noted, makes this point about the northern Great Wall(s). For the Miao walls, see the astute article by Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1 (1999): 139–68. Once again, it is crucial to recall that Han culture was itself a confection, an alloy of many cultural elements. Just as it was taken for granted that the Han changed nature while the barbarians “lived in it,” Mencius said that he had heard of Chinese changing barbarians but never of barbarians changing the Chinese. It is this last contention that Fiskesjö convincingly refutes (140).
35. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996, 231.
36. Michael Dove, “On the Agro-Ecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia,” Indonesia 39 (1985): 11–36, quotation from 35.
37. Benjamin and Chou, Tribal Communities in the Malay World, 44.
38. Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961), 186.
39. Georges Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, trans. Susan Brown Cowing (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1968), 33. What did spread, however, were Brahminical rituals and astrology in popular divination and the epic stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. F. K. Lehman (Chit Hlaing) believes, to the contrary, that Buddhist cosmology may have acquired, through Indian traders, an early popular authority such that anyone aspiring to kingship found it advantageous to adopt the rituals of Buddhist/Hindu kingship. Personal communication, January 2008. Others, such as Wolters and Wheatley, believe that the cosmology appealed initially to ambitious leaders as a way of enhancing their claims to authority—in a kind of theatrical self-hypnosis—that only later became rooted in popular culture.
40. Oliver Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 64.
41. M. C. Ricklefs, Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).
42. Sheldon Pollack, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literature, Culture, Polity,” Daedalus 197 (1998): 41–75.
43. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, in cooperation with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1999), 161.
44. Ibid., quoting Ian Mabbett in Ian Mabbett and David Chandler, The Khmers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 26.
45. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region (1999), 12n 45, quoting David Chandler, A History of Cambodia (Boulder: Westview, 1992), 103.
46. For the phenomenon on the coastal plains, see Wheatley, Golden Kheronese, 294.
47. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 133.
48. G. E. Mitton [Lady Scott], Scott of the Shan Hills: Orders and Impressions (London: John Murray, 1936), 246. Bamboo, given its watertight properties and strength, was a common storage container for letters of appointment kept by lowland officials as well.
49. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 281.
50. Maurice Collis, Lords of the Sunset (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 83. See also comparable descriptions of the Shan palace at Mong Mit (203) and Kengtung (277).
51. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 286.
52. Lehman [Chit Hliang], “Burma,” 1: 15–18.
53. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 112–14.
54. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 151.
55. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67.
56. Quotation from Pelley, Post-Colonial Vietnam, 92. See also Keith Taylor, “On Being Muonged,” Asian Ethnicity 1 (2001): 25–34. Taylor notes that early French ethnographers first saw the Muong as a kind of proto-Kinh. See also Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, 285.
57. Pelley, Post-Colonial Vietnam, 92. Lest this claim seem exotic, it is worth recalling that at the turn of the twentieth century it was common for American scholars to think of the hill population of Appalachia as “our contemporary ancestors.” Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8.
58. Quoted in Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History, 57.
59. Quoted in “Autonomy, Coalition, and Coerced Coordination: Themes in Highland-Lowland Relations up through the Vietnamese American War,” mimeo; emphasis added.
60. Quoted in Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 431, in turn quoting Chandler, History of Cambodia, 126, 130. The featherbed metaphor perhaps meets its hill riposte in the saying of the Kachin: “Stone cannot be used as a pillow; the Han cannot become friends.” Quoted in Zhushent Wang, The Jingpo Kachin of the Yunnan Plateau, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph Series (Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1997), 241.
61. See David Faure, “The Yao Wars in the Mid-Ming and Their Impact on Yao Ethnicity,” in Empire at the Margins: Culture and Frontier in Early Modern China, ed. Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 171–89, and Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History, 195–97.
62. Alexander Woodside, “Territorial Order and Collective-Identity Tensions in Confucian Asia: China, Vietnam, Korea,” Daedalus 127 (1998): 206–7. Compare this with John Stuart Mill on why the Basque or the Breton should wish to join civilized France as a citizen, rather “than to sulk on his own rocks, a half savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.” Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London: Everyman, 1910), 363–64, quoted in E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34.
I want to express my deep thanks to Shanshan Du for her careful explanation of the history and workings of the tusi system in southwestern China; personal communication, July 2008.
63. Quoted in Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics, 219.
64. Quoted ibid., 251–52.
65. It is this hypocrisy to which George Orwell’s jaded protagonist in Burmese Days (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1962), Flory, most objects: “The pukka sahib pose … the slimy white man’s burden humbug.… It’s so simple. The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets” (39–40).
66. Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.
67. The term social fossils is from Magnus Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-Building in the 20th Century,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5 (2006): 15–44. As Fiskesjö observes, the absorption of such societies is, above all, hastened by the demographic envelopment of millions of Han settlers in the highlands.
68. One could discern, I believe, for the numerous language groups scattered across Zomia, something of a rough cultural watershed, north and east of which polities were drawn into a Han-Chinese civilizational orbit and south and west of which they were drawn into a Theravada-Sanskritic orbit. Presumably, as dynasties and states waxed and waned, this line shifted, but when and where the two orbits overlapped, the cultural and political room for maneuver left to hill peoples was larger.
69. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 39, and O’Connor, “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession,” 974–75.
70. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 114.
71. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians,” 143, 145, 148. I am very much in debt to Fiskesjö’s lucid and subtle analysis of these terms on Han-Chinese statecraft.
72. Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History, 56.
73. Anne Csete, “Ethnicity, Conflict, and the State in the Early to Mid-Qing: The Hainan Highlands, 1644–1800,” in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 229–52, quotation from 235.
74. A fifteenth-century document, for example, referring to the Yi on the Yunnan-Burmese borderlands, claims that these barbarians would “rejoice the day prefectures and counties are enumerated in their areas and they are finally governed by [Ming] officials.” Quoted in John E. Herman, “The Cant of Conquest: Tusi Offices and China’s Political Incorporation of the Southwest Frontier,” in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 135–68, quotation from 145; emphasis added.
75. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians,” 153.
76. Faure, “Yao Wars in the Mid-Ming.” See also David Faure, “The Lineage as a Cultural Invention: The Case of the Pearl River Delta,” Modern China 15 (1989): 4–36. The Yao claim a special dispensation from the Chinese emperor, recorded on a decree they preserve, that exempts them from corvée labor and taxes and recognizes their right to move at will within their territory.
77. Norma Diamond, “Defining the Miao: Ming, Qing, and Contemporary Views,” in Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Steven Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 92–119.
78. Gordon H. Luce, trans., The Man Shu (Book of the Southern Barbarians), 37.
79. Wing-hoi Chan, “Ethnic Labels in a Mountainous Region: The Case of the She Bandits,” in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 255–84. Chan also makes the case that the ethnogenesis of the famously peripatetic Hakka may be explained similarly. She also means unirrigated hill rice fields, and thus the “ethnic” name also describes a mode of subsistence and a “hilly” habitat.
80. Benjamin and Chou, Tribal Communities in the Malay World, 36.
81. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 28. The hill swiddens of the Meratus are also described as an agriculture that is not-yet-ordered (pertanian yang tidak terator).
82. Felix M. Keesing, The Ethno-history of Northern Luzon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 224–25.
83. Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), chapter 1.
84. Lois Beck, “Tribes and the State in 19th- and 20th-Century Iran,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 185–222.
85. Bennet Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 203–10, quotation from 200. Much of this paragraph is an elaboration of Bronson’s argument.
86. This and the following two paragraphs are drawn from Thomas S. Burns’s excellent Rome and the Barbarians, 100 BC-AD 400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
87. Stephen T. Driscoll, “Power and Authority in Early Historic Scotland: Pictish Symbol Stones and other Documents,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. J. Gledhill, B. Bender, and M. T. Larsen (London: Routledge, 1988), 215.
88. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 182. A far darker vision of Roman expansion as it might have looked to the barbarians is evident in the words Tacitus puts in the mouth of the defeated British chief Calgacus: “To robbery, slaughter, and plunder they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.” Cited ibid., 169.
89. Quoted in Charles Patterson Giersch, “Q’ing China’s Reluctant Subjects: Indigenous Communities and Empire along the Yunnan Frontier,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998, 97.
90. Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Introduction to Empire at the Margins, 6.
91. Wing-hoi Chan, “Ethnic Labels in a Mountainous Region,” 278.
92. Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 469–508, quotation from 493.
93. The same tight association between direct rule by Han authorities and civilized status held in the Pearl River Delta. Household registration itself (entering the map) “transformed identities from alien (yi) to commoner (mín).… In times of dynastic crisis, it was not uncommon to find households abandoning their registered status to avoid taxes and conscription. They became bandits, pirates, and aliens in the official records.” Helen F. Siu and Liu Zhiwei, “Lineage, Marketing, Pirate, and Dan,” in Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins, 285–310, quotation from 293.
94. Quoted in Woodside, “Territorial Order and Collective Identity Tensions,” 213. For evidence that Vietnamese commonly moved into upland society and assimilated to its culture, see Taylor, “On Being Muonged,” 28.
First epigraph is quoted in Mark R. Woodward and Susan D. Russell, “Transformations in Ritual and Economy in Upland Southeast Asia,” in Ritual, Power, and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia, ed. Susan D. Russell, Monograph Series on Southeast Asia, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, occasional paper no. 14 (1989), 1–26, quotation from 9. Compare the following passage from the Tao Te Ching:
The great Way is very smooth
but people love bypaths
The court is very well kept
the fields are very weedy
the granaries very empty.
Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 110.
Second epigraph is from Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–58 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 469–91, quotation from 469–70. Lattimore continues: “The maximum of difference [in two distinct societies separated by a frontier] is to be sought near the center of gravity of each … and not at the frontier where they meet. A frontier population is marginal.… They inevitably set up their own nexus of social contact and joint interest. Men of both border populations … become a ‘we’ group to whom others of their own nationality, and especially the authorities, are ‘they.’ … It is often possible to describe the border populations … as a joint community that is functionally recognizable though not institutionally defined” (470).
1. See New York Times, July 23, 2004, and the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 340, 368, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/index.html.
2. Jean Michaud, ed., Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif (Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 11. Michaud goes on to note that hill peoples have occasionally launched state-making projects of their own.
3. Guerrilla resistance in the zone of direct state expansion is seldom successful over the longer term unless the guerrillas have powerful state allies. French military backing, for example, allowed many Native American groups to resist the expansion of English colonists for a time.
4. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Regions of Refuge, Society of Applied Anthropology Monograph Series, no. 12 (Washington, D.C., 1979), 23, 25. When mountainous terrain held valuable resources, like the silver deposits of Potosí, they were seized.
5. Ibid., 39.
6. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Adjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South America Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–502, quotation from 448. See also the recent attempt to summarize our demographic understanding of the Conquest that bears directly on such migration and social structure in Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005). Although the demographic facts are the subject of heated debate, it seems evident that the population of the New World was far larger than previously assumed. It was anything but an empty continent and just may have been “fully occupied.” It is important to note in this context that if the epidemic-driven demographic collapse was anything like as dramatic as now seems to be the case, foraging and swiddening would have become far more advantageous as an agro-ecological strategy, promising a higher return per unit of labor than fixed-field agriculture, now that so much land was unoccupied. Jared Diamond makes an analogous claim that the Australian “aboriginal” population was originally located more densely in the most productive regions of the country (for example, the Darlington River system of the Southeast) and was driven into drier areas that the Europeans didn’t want. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997), 310.
7. Schwartz and Salomon, “New Peoples,” 452.
8. Ibid., 452. For more detailed accounts of Andean flight from Spanish forced settlement, see Ann M. Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570–1720 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), and John Howland Rowe, “The Incas under Spanish Colonial Institutions,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (1957): 155–99.
9. Mann, 1491, 225.
10. Schwartz and Salomon, “New Peoples,” 460.
11. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1, 14. Here too, epidemics played a key role, along with the warfare of competitive state-building in displacing people.
12. See the remarkable study by Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems, and Annemarie Cottaar, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-historical Approach, Centre for the History of Migrants, University of Amsterdam (London: Macmillan, 1998).
13. Ibid., 63. Such hunted groups, not surprisingly, often banded together to raid settlements in this zone as more refugees poured in. Local authorities responded by hunting and killing gypsies and other vagrants. The authors document a similar pressure on Gypsies (Bohemians) in France, where they were rounded up for the galleys.
14. There are interesting parallels between this “outlaw” corridor and what has been described as the “Wa corridor,” or the heartland between the upper reaches of the Mekong and the Salween/Nu, which has the further advantage of being deeply fissured. Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, 51.
15. I rely entirely here on Robert W. Hefner’s fine account in The Political Economy of Mountain Java: An Interpretive History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For a detailed cultural analysis, see his earlier Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
16. Hefner, Political Economy, 9.
17. Quoted ibid., 182; ngoko refers to “low” Javanese, in which the elaborate, power-coded terms of address are dispensed with.
18. Unlike Zomia, Tengger dissent is not ethnically coded. Had Tengger been even more isolated, and for a longer time, Hefner notes, the difference might well have been “ethnicized.” Instead, the people of the Tengger highlands think of themselves as Javanese: they dress as Javanese (though deliberately without ostentation); they speak Javanese (but avoid using its rank-laden terms of address in the village). They think of themselves as wong gunung (mountain) Javanese and therefore a very distinct subset of Javanese. Hefner suggests (personal communication, February 2008) that other more recently incorporated autonomous peoples in insular Southeast Asia still retain a strong sense of being a distinct, often more egalitarian, society, without this distinctiveness necessarily taking on strong ethnic characteristics. See in this connection Sven Cederroth, The Spell of the Ancestors and the Power of Mekkah: A Sasak Community on Lombok (Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1981), and Martin Rössler, Striving for Modesty: Fundamentals of Religion and Social Organization of the Makassarese Patuntung (Dordrecht: Floris, 1990).
19. Felix M. Keesing, The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 4. This and the next paragraph rely heavily on Keesing’s argument.
20. William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, rev. ed. (Quezon City: New Day, 1974), 75, argues along the same lines: “Such reducciones naturally required the relocation of scattered tribes and semi-sedentary agriculturalists into settled communities where they could … be reached by clergy, tribute collections, and road foremen.”
21. Keesing, Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon, 2, 304. This view accords in its broad outlines with the historical account of Scott in Discovery of the Igorots, 69–70.
22. Keesing qualifies his argument by allowing that there were other reasons to head for the hills: the search for gold, the desire to collect and trade hill products, escape from lowland feuds and wars, and epidemics. He is clear, however, that the overwhelming reason for flight was the colonial labor system of the Spanish. This view in endorsed in Scott, Discovery of the Igorots, who would extend it beyond Northern Luzon to the Philippines as a whole; see 69–70.
23. Keesing, Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon, 3.
24. The culminating event for the Yao/Mien was their defeat at the battle of Great Vine Gorge in Guizhou in 1465. The victors sent eight hundred captives to Beijing to be beheaded there. It was not long after, in 1512, that the scholar-soldier Wang Yangming proposed to revive the Yuan policy of “using barbarians to rule barbarians,” a policy of indirect rule that became known as the tusi system.
25. C. Pat Giersch, “A Motley Throng: Social Change on Southwest China’s Early Modern Frontier, 1700–1880,” Journal of Asian Studies 60 (2001): 67–94, quotation from 74.
26. Richard von Glahn argues persuasively that acephalous groups are less likely to revolt than more centralized “tribes,” such as the Dai or Yi, who can mobilize large-scale resistance. This does not imply, however, that they are more likely to be absorbed, only that they are more likely to scatter and flee rather than holding their ground. In fact, the more centralized and hierarchical the social structure of a group, the closer it is to lowland norms and the easier it may be for it to assimilate en masse. The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times, Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 213. See also Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 88, who notes that “emigration” is often the only means of escape from corvée and domination.
27. Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics, 186. I believe it is more plausible, contrary to Wiens’s assumption, to believe that many contemporary hill peoples were long ago valley dwellers who became hill farmers as a consequence of adaptation. It is also worth pointing out that for much of the time the Han-Chinese were pressing to the south and southwest, they were, in turn, being pressed from the north by Mongolian armies.
28. Ibid., 69.
29. Ibid., 81–88, 90. This is in marked contrast to Wiens’s usual placid, evenhanded tone throughout his survey.
30. Ibid., 317.
31. Those who elect to stay will often be absorbed into the arriving hill society in the same fashion as the Han absorbed the groups whom they enveloped.
32. C. Backus, The Nan-chao Kingdom and Tang China’s Southwestern Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The “Tainess” of Nan Chao has, since the publication of Backus’s book, been heavily contested. Jean Michaud, personal communication, April 2008.
33. G. E. Harvey, cited in David Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 90.
34. It also happened, occasionally, that militarily expansive padi states in the hills drove other hill peoples into the lower valleys. From the thirteenth century on, the Ahom, a Tai group, drove the people of the rival Dimasa kingdom into the valleys, where they eventually merged into the Bengali majority. The Ahom themselves later conquered the lowlands of the Brahmaputra Valley and acculturated to the Hindu-Assamese. See Philippe Ramirez’s fine article “Politico-Ritual Variation on the Assamese Fringes: Do Social Systems Exist?” in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach, ed. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3, Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 91–107.
35. Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, 5 vols. (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893). The epigraph of this section is from Reverend Father Sangermano, A Description of the Burmese Empire, trans. William Tandy (Rome: John Murray, 1883), 81, emphasis added.
36. This is amply confirmed in seventeenth-century decrees warning fighting men on the march not to “kill birds and beasts to eat,” “loot and plunder,” or “molest girls and married young women.” Royal Orders of Burma, A.D. 1598–1885, part 1, A.D. 1598–1648, ed. Than Tun (Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), 1: 87.
37. Robert E. Elson, “International Commerce, the State, and Society: Economic and Social Change,” chapter 3 of The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164.
38. One of the first historians to identify this practice as a widespread form of political protest was Michael Adas. See his pathbreaking analysis in “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Pre-colonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 217–47.
39. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 241.
40. J. G. Scott [Shway Yoe], The Burman: His Life and Notions (1882; New York: Norton, 1963), 243.
41. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 483.
42. The most comparable historical setting of which I have seen a description is that of a zone of refuge in the Great Lakes region in nineteenth-century North America so perceptively and painstakingly described by Richard White in The Middle Ground.
43. Paul Wheatley, The Golden Kheronese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961), xxiv.
44. But not out of reach of other forms of power such as warring factions, bandits, and slave-raiders taking advantage of the vacuum to sweep up an exposed population.
45. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 508. The epigraph of this section is from The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma, trans. Pe Maung Tin and G. H. Luce, issued by the Text Publication Fund of the Burma Research Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, London: Humphrey Milford, 1923), 177.
46. Or, to put it another way, the condition of being and remaining taxable was a central qualifying feature of Burmese, Thai, or Chinese ethnicity. Only, I believe, in this context does the Mien/Yao treasuring of purportedly imperial scrolls from the emperor granting them perpetual immunity from the tax and corvée burdens of Han subjects and the right to move as they wish in the hills, make sense. A large part of Mien/Yao ethnicity is, precisely, non-subjecthood. See, for example, the fine study by Hjorleifur Jonsson, Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Jean Michaud speculates that the Mien/Yao may long ago have been pushed westward, out of Hunan, by the coastal Han. Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Latham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 264.
47. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996, 274.
48. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 298. See also his “Sedentarization and Selective Preservation among the Montagnards in the Vietnamese Central Highlands,” in Michaud, Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, 138–39.
49. An example of this shift is given by Yin Shao-ting in his description of De’ang swiddeners in Yunnan. People and Forests: Yunnan Swidden Agriculture in Human-Ecological Perspective, trans. Magnus Fiskesjö (Kunming: Yunnan Educational Publishing, 2001), 68.
50. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 14 and chapter 3. The first epigraph in this section is quoted by Hazel J. Lang, Fear and Sanctuary: Burmese Refugees in Thailand, Studies in Southeast Asia no. 32 (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2002), 79. Compare this to the Bugis text from Sulawesi: “We are like birds sitting on a tree. When the tree falls we leave it and go in search of a large tree where we can settle.” Quoted in Leonard Andaya, “Interactions with the Outside World and Adaptation in Southeast Asia Society, 1500–1800,” Tarling, Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1: 417. The second epigraph is from Scott [Shway Yoe], The Burman, 533.
51. Anthony Reid, “Economic and Social Change, 1400–1800, in Tarling, Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1: 460–507, esp. 462.
52. Charles Keeton III, King Thibaw and the Ecological Rape of Burma: The Political and Commercial Struggle between British India and French Indo-China in Burma, 1878–1886 (Delhi: Mahar Book Service, 1974), 3.
53. Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1600–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 99, and Martin van Crevald, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), cited in Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 81. See also John A. Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder: Westview, 1993).
54. Lynn, Feeding Mars, 21.
55. William J. Koenig, The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819: Politics, Administration, and Social Organization in the Early Kon-baung Period, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asian Studies, no. 34 (Ann Arbor, 1990), 34.
56. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 231, part 1, 281.
57. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginnings to 1923,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979, 78, 130 et seq.
58. Pierre du Jarric, Histoire des choses plus memorables advenues tant ez Indes Orientales queautres païs de la descouverte des Portugois, en l’etablissement et progrez de la foy crestienne et catholique (Bordeaux, 1608–14), 1: 620–21, cited in Reid, “Economic and Social Change,” 462.
59. “Glass Palace Chronicle: Excerpts Translated on Burmese Invasions of Siam,” compiled and annotated by Nai Thein, Journal of the Siam Society 8 (1911): 1–119, quotation from 43.
60. Scott [Shway Yoe], The Burman, 494. Mutiny was more dangerous and therefore less common than desertion, although it did occur. See Koenig, Burmese Polity, 19, for a brief account of a mutiny by Mon troops in the Burmese army in the 1772 campaign against the Thais. It is, in my view, a fine thing to see an army that has decided it has had enough and wants no further part of the war and drifts away. The Confederacy in the War between the States was undone largely by desertion. One of the most inspiring things I have ever seen was a large papiermâché statue of a running figure, a “Monument to the Deserters of Both World Wars” (Denkmal an den Unbekannten Deserteurs der Beiden Weltkriegen) assembled by German anarchists shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and taken, via flatbed truck, to the cities of the former German Democratic Republic. It was chased from city to city by the local authorities until it came to rest, briefly, in Bonn.
61. Most recruits in such armies were press-ganged in the first place and would have seized any opportunity to desert. Jeremy Black reports a desertion rate of 42 percent from the Saxon infantry during 1717–28. European Warfare, 219.
62. This is especially true when the troops are already far from home. Thucydides’ account of the disintegration of the Athenian-led forces in Sicily is instructive. “With the enemy now on equal terms with us, our slaves are beginning to desert. As for the foreigners in our service, those who were conscripted are going back to their cities as quickly as they can; those who were initially delighted with the idea of high pay and thought they were going to make some money rather than do any fighting … are either slipping away as deserters or making off in one way or another—which is not difficult, considering the size of Sicily.” The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1972), 485, emphasis added.
63. Khin Mar Swe, “Ganan: Their History and Culture,” M.A. thesis, University of Mandalay, 1999.
64. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 205–7.
65. Charles F. Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 44.
66. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Empiricist Method and Intensional Analysis in Burmese Historiography: William Koenig’s The Burmese Polity, 1752–1819, a Review Article,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6 (1991): 77–120, esp. 86.
67. Renard, “Kariang,” 44.
68. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), 130.
69. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 282–86.
70. Ibid., 49.
71. As a late-nineteenth-century visitor to the Shan states observed, “From what we have learnt, there is little doubt that the sparsity of the hill tribes in the hills neighboring Zimmé [Chiang Mai] has been chiefly caused by their having been, in olden time, systematically hunted like wild cattle to supply the slave market.” Archibald Ross Colquhoun, Amongst the Shans (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), 257.
72. In western India, hill raids on the plains were so extensive that by the early nineteenth century only 1,836 of the 3,492 former villages were populated, and the sites of 97 villages could not even be remembered. Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130. I have encountered no inventory of loot in the Burmese materials, but perhaps this inventory of booty from western Indian hill raids on the plains is suggestive: 77 bullocks, 106 cows, 55 calves, 11 female buffaloes, 54 brass and copper pots, 50 pieces of clothing, 9 blankets, 19 iron ploughs, 65 axes, ornaments, and grain. Ibid., 132.
73. For an important examination of slaving across the Sunda Shelf, see Eric Tagliacozzo, “Ambiguous Commodities, Unstable Frontiers: The Case of Burma, Siam, and Imperial Britain, 1800–1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 354–77.
74. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 315.
75. The Wa were well known for their ridgetop fortifications built to deter raiders for “heads” and slaves. Fiskesjö, “Fate of Sacrifice,” 329. There was a maritime version of this manpower capture and trade in insular Southeast Asia. A number of peoples, most notably Malays, Illanu, Bugis, and Bajau, scoured seaward settlements throughout the archipelago, capturing slaves to incorporate into their own society or selling them on. As a result, vulnerable maritime communities evaded capture by retreating inland and up the watershed or took to their boats to become sea nomads. The orang laut (sea people), who live largely on their boats and specialize in collecting (sea foraging), are the maritime equivalent of the small hill groups that retreated to the ridgelines. In fact, the Jakun (a forest-dwelling people linguistically related to the “sea nomads”) are suspected of having come from the same stock—some fleeing to the hills, others taking to their boats. See in this connection the illuminating book by David E. Sopher, The Sea Nomads: A Study Based on the Literature of the Maritime Boat People of Southeast Asia, Memoirs of the National Museum, no. 5 (1965), Government of Singapore; and Charles O. Frake, “The Genesis of Kinds of People in the Sulu Archipelago,” in Language and Cultural Description: Essays by Charles O. Frake (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 311–32.
76. Andrew Hardy, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 29.
77. Salemink, Ethnography of North Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, 37.
78. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 102.
79. See Christian Culas and Jean Michaud, “A Contribution to the Study of Hmong (Miao) Migration and History,” in Hmong/Miao in Asia, ed. N. Tapp, J. Michaud, C. Culas, and G. Y. Lee (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2004), 61–96; and Jean Michaud, “From Southwest China to Upper Indochina: An Overview of Hmong (Miao) Migrations,” Asia-Pacific Viewpoint, 38 (1997): 119–30. In fact, the most comprehensive source for the nineteenth-century and twentieth-century migrations from southwest China into mainland Southeast Asia (especially Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand) is Jean Michaud’s edited volume Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, especially the chapters by Christian Culas and Michaud.
80. See the fine analysis of “small border powers” in Janet Sturgeon, Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
81. Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice,” 370.
82. Charles Crosthwaite gives an example of such fusion between rebellion and princely pretenders shortly after the British conquest of upper Burma. A Shan ruler, confirmed by the British as sovereign in his district, seized several adjacent districts and was dismissed. He was then joined by “the two sons of the Hmethaya Prince, one of King Mindon’s numerous progeny.… Their cause was taken up by a noble guerilla leader Shwe Yan, who raised their standard in the Ava District.… The elder [son] Saw Naing, escaped to Hsen-wi, and, failing to get help there, retired to the mountains and very difficult country on the border of Tawnpeng and Mong-mit.” Charles Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 270.
83. See E. Michael Mendelson, “The Uses of Religious Skepticism in Burma,” Diogenes 41 (1963): 94–116, and Victor B. Lieberman, “Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350–c. 1830,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993): 513.
84. There is an interesting parallel here between the rich valley abbeys of French Catholicism and the poor clergy of the bocage at the time of the French Revolution. The former, for its avarice and failure to aid the indigent with tithes, was the object of popular wrath (arson and plunder), whereas the poor, marginal clergy of the bocage were popular and eventually crucial participants in the counterrevolutionary uprising in the Vendée. See Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).
85. The literature is vast. See, for example, Stanley Tambiah, Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-Century Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). Forest sects and hermitages were “an extension of the early Buddhist practice of ‘going forth’… distancing oneself from society in order to achieve a strict disciplining of the mind and body demanded by the eightfold path.” Reynaldo Ileto, “Religion and Anti-colonial Movements,” in Tarling, Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2: 199. See also the valuable and more recent study of contemporary, charismatic forest monks in Burma by Guillaume Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance: La quête de la sainteté dans la Birmanie contemporaine (Geneva: Editions Olizane, 2005).
86. E. Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership, ed. John P. Ferguson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 233. For a more contemporary and exceptionally illuminating analysis of “sainthood,” forest monks, and their entourages, see Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance.
87. Mendelson, Sangha and State in Burma, 233. See also Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Empiricist Method and Intensional Analysis,” 90, who writes of monks and chapters falling from favor and taking refuge in “the remote towns and villages.”
88. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 30.
89. That is to say, on the east bank of the Salween River rather than the west bank. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 320.
90. Bertil Lindner, Land of Jade: A Journey through Insurgent Burma (Edinburgh: Kiscadale and White Lotus, 1990), 279. For a comparable account a century earlier of Shan Buddhist heterodoxy, see Archibald Ross Colquhoun, Amongst the Shans (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), p. 103.
91. Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 168, et seq.
92. Robert LeRoy Canfield, Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu—Kush, Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, no. 50 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973), quotation from 13. I am greatly indebted to the insights and fine-grained ethnographic detail provided by this monograph, brought to my attention by Thomas Barfield.
93. Such diseases, as they killed off the less resistant, became endemic to such populations. When they encountered immunologically naïve populations (initially far healthier) in the New World, the mortality rates were devastating. Another great urban scourge should be noted: fire. Premodern cities—made from combustible materials, and their light and cooking fuel provided by open flame—burned regularly, and the historical record is full of references to devastating fires in Southeast Asian cities. See, for example, Anthony Reid, Southeast Asiain the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 91; Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 1, on Amarapura; Koenig, Burmese Polity, 34–35, on fires in Amarapura and Rangoon. The epigraph from this section is from Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997), 195, and the first paragraph draws on Diamond’s arguments about epidemic diseases.
94. Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 2: 291–98. Reid here aggregates the effects of drought and subsequent famine with disease. The connection between drought and famine are obvious enough, but epidemics often come unaccompanied by famine.
95. David Henley, Fertility, Food, and Fever: Population, Economy, and Environment in North and Central Sulawesi, 1600–1930 (Leiden: Kitlv, 2005), chapter 7 and p. 286.
96. Scott, Discovery of the Igorots, 90. Scott does not tell us how frequently the fleeing Igorots brought the epidemics with them or how often they arrived at the passes to find them already blocked.
97. Michael Aung-Thwin, in his otherwise fine study of irrigation in Burma’s heartland during the Pagan period, emphasizes this advantage to the exclusion of the vulnerabilities of crowding and monocropping. Irrigation in the Heartland of Burma: Foundations of the Pre-colonial Burmese State, occasional paper no. 15 (DeKalb: Council of Southeast Asian Studies of Northern Illinois University, 1990), 54.
98. Nai Thein, “Glass Palace Chronicle,” 53.
99. Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43.
100. Koenig, Burmese Polity, 43.
101. Keeton, King Thibaw and the Ecological Rape of Burma.
102. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 163, 174, 318–19.
103. Broadly understood, the concentration of population in the state core—also known as “government”—is a major cause of famine, fire, and epidemics, not to mention war. All of them, then, are in part state effects. The royal decrees specifying a series of steps that all inhabitants of the capital must take to be prepared to prevent fires and to extinguish them when they did occur are evidence of this concern. See Than Tun, Royal Orders of Burma, 3: xiv, 49–50.
104. Imagine, for example, a New Orleans that every twenty or thirty years experienced a crisis evacuation on the order of the one occasioned by Hurricane Katrina. In such circumstances, an array of crisis routines would be deeply embedded in the popular memory.
105. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 369, 394, 312.
106. Aung-Thwin, Irrigation in the Heartland of Burma, 34.
107. This is the pattern described in some detail for Chinese villages by G. William Skinner in “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 270–81.
108. Once again, the hills are meant literally but also metaphorically as a state-resistant space.
109. Nai Thein, “Glass Palace Chronicle,” 17. The epigraph for this section is quoted in Scott, Discovery of the Igorots, 141.
110. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 148.
111. Hardy, Red Hills, 134.
112. G. E. Mitton [Lady Scott], Scott of the Shan Hills: Orders and Impressions (London: John Murray, 1930), 182. Scott goes out of his way to play up the Wa’s head-hunting proclivities.
113. Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed, 1991), 349.
114. Sociolinguists will recognize this as analogous to the way in which isolated migrants, especially those isolated from their point of origin, may preserve antique dialects long after they have been lost in the culture from which they originally departed. Quebec French, Boer Dutch, and Appalachian English are cases in point.
115. Crosthwaite, Pacification of Burma, 116.
116. Smith, Burma, 231.
117. In March 2006 I attempted with a friend to make a trip by motorcycle into the southern reaches of the Pegu Yoma, east of Tharawaddy town. Within less than two hours, the track became so sandy that is was impassible for our motorcycle. We continued on foot. We met a few bullock carts loaded with firewood and charcoal from the hills. After half a day’s walk we came to a settlement of eight or nine rough houses, many of whose trees seemed from a distance to be festooned with white gauze. We quickly realized that the white gauze effect was made by mosquito nets. All the villagers were sleeping in the trees after marauding elephants from the hills had broken into their small granaries and eaten all their young banana saplings. Elephants, no less than rebels, found the location advantageous for raiding.
118. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 133.
119. Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants, 190.
120. Shih Nai-an, trans. J. H. Jackson (Cambridge: C&T, 1976), originally published in Shanghai.
121. Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 99. Arash Khazeni, in an excellent thesis on nineteenth-century Qajar, Iran, notes that a defeated Bakhitari military leader fled with his family to these marshes near the Shatt-al-Arab. “Opening the Land: Tribes, States, and Ethnicity in Qajar Iran, 1800–1911,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005.
122. Consider, for example, the huge Pripet Marshes (covering one hundred thousand square kilometers of Poland, Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine), which the Nazis had grandiose plans for draining, or the Pontine Marshes near Rome, finally drained by Mussolini. It is no mere coincidence, I think, that much the same civilizational discourse was applied to stateless swamp dwellers as to stateless hill peoples. They were seen as a primitive, even degenerate, population who could be redeemed only by radically changing their environment or by removing them altogether.
123. See, for example, Robert Rimini, “The Second Seminole War,” chapter 16 of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 272–76. In an interesting parallel to the supposition that some groups in the Malayan peninsula evaded the Malay state and slavery by heading to the hills while others took to their boats, some of the fleeing Cherokee went to the swamps while a small group “hid away in the uppermost reaches of the mountains” of North Carolina.
124. Bland Simpson, The Great Dismal: A Carolinians Swamp Memoir (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 69–73.
125. Mariana Upmeyer, “Swamped: Refuge and Subsistence on the Margin of the Solid Earth,” term paper for graduate seminar, The Comparative Study of Agrarian Societies, Yale University, 2000.
126. Stan B-H Tan, “Dust beneath the Mist: State and Frontier Formation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the 1955–61 Period,” Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 2006, 191.
127. Smith, Burma, 262.
128. Sopher, Sea Nomads, 42–43.
129. For a good account of piracy, see James Warren, Sulu Zone, 1768–1868: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery, and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State (Kent Ridge: Singapore University Press, 1981), and Nicholas Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World: A Study of British Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1963). For a broader study of maritime contraband, smuggling, and the sea as a state-resistant zone, see Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
130. Owen Lattimore, Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 35.
131. Magnus Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-Building in the 20th Century,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5 (2006), 15–44, quotations from 38.
132. In his study of the “Miao Rebellion,” Robert D. Jenks concluded that Han representation was numerically greater than minority representation. It was in the interest of the authorities never to admit this because, while it was to be expected that barbarians would rebel no matter how well ruled, the only explanation for Han rebellion was misrule—a condition for which the provincial authorities would be held responsible. Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 4. For a perceptive account of Han participation in a “Miao” revolt in the late eighteenth century, see Daniel McMahon, “Identity and Conflict in a Chinese Borderland: Yan Ruyi and Recruitment of the Gelao during the 1795–97 Miao Revolt,” Late Imperial China 23 (2002): 53–86.
133. Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 34. For a more elaborate description, see Geoffrey Benjamin, “The Malay World as a Regional Array,” paper presented to the International Workshop on Scholarship in Malay Studies, Looking Back, Striding Forward, Leiden, August 26–28, 2004.
134. Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 173–77.
135. Michaud, Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples, 41.
136. Shanshan Du, Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwest China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 115.
137. Charles F. Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 30–62. This crude gloss can hardly do justice to the complexities of the Karen diaspora as explained by Keyes. The Karenni (Red Karen)/Kayah are perhaps a major exception inasmuch as they have made a stab at state formation themselves, taking on the features of Shan statecraft and earning a reputation as much feared slave-raiders.
138. A more complex and accurate historical account would have to show the oscillation between approach and avoidance, depending on political and economic conditions. Nonstate peoples may, under favorable circumstances, seek closer lowland affiliations, and by the same token state populations may under unfavorable circumstances seek to leave the valley state. The choices we have outlined earlier should not be seen as necessarily “once and for all” choices.
Throughout maritime Southeast Asia there are numerous societies that are virtually defined by their avoidance of the lowland state. The Senoi and Semang, among the scattered orang asli population of Malaysia, have structured their subsistence practices in order to avoid becoming peasants. In Sulawesi the Wana fled to the deep interior to avoid forced settlement under the Dutch. The Penan of Sarawak, beloved by antilogging environmentalists, have a history of foraging designed to keep themselves outside the lowland state while trading profitably with it. Many such groups have a reputation of fleeing from most contact with lowlanders, perhaps the result of long experience with slaving expeditions. And, as the Ming Dynasty’s volume Description of the Hundred Barbarians reports of the Wa: “Their nature is soft and weak and they fear government.” See, in order, Robert Knox Denton, Kirk Endicott, Alberto Gomes, and M. B. Hooker, Malaysia and the Original People: A Case Study of the Impact of Development on Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Survival Studies in Ethnicity and Change (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997); Jane Monnic Atkinson, The Art and Politics of Wana Shamanship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Peter Brosius, “Prior Transcripts, Divergent Paths: Resistance and Acquiescence to Logging in Sarawak East Malaysia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997): 468–510; and Yin, People and Forests, 65.
139. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 134.
140. Ibid., 135.
1. The material for this section cornes from the detailed reporting of the Karen Human Rights Group (hereinafter KHRG) in “Peace Villages and Hiding Villages: Roads, Relocations, and the Campaign for Control of Toungoo District,” October 15, 2000, KHRG report 2000–05.
2. Ibid., 24. Military portering is especially dreaded. It has been common for porters to be worked to exhaustion on maneuvers and then executed so that they cannot return home, to be forced to walk ahead of Burmese troops through suspected minefields, and, occasionally, to be forced to wear uniforms and precede the troops in order to draw insurgent fire. Porters are seized wherever people concentrate: relocation sites, villages, markets, video parlors, bus stations, ferry crossings, and so on.
3. KHRG, “Free Fire Zones in Southern Tenasserim,” August 20, 1997, KHRG report 97–09, 7.
4. Not surprisingly, the sanitation and water supply conditions in relocation zones are often such as to pose a major health threat as well. In this respect, they mimic the epidemiological hazards of state cores more generally.
5. KHRG, “Free Fire Zones,” 7, 10.
6. The question of whether pure foraging in tropical rainforests is a viable subsistence strategy was explored by a variety of experts in Human Ecology 19 (1991), an issue entirely devoted to the matter. On balance the answer appears to be yes.
7. KHRG, “Abuses and Relocations in the Pa’an District,” August 1, 1997, KHRG report 97–08, 8. These villagers were also hoping that they might be able to return to their fields to plant a new crop.
8. For early colonial accounts of hiding villages that are “usually cunningly concealed and are as difficult to find as the ovis Ammon,” see Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States, compiled from official papers by J. George Scott, assisted by J. P. Hardiman, vol. 1, part 2 (Rangoon: Government Printing Office, 1893), 195, 416. The pacification campaign of the British in the Kachin hills in the early twentieth century bore a family resemblance to contemporary Burmese military rule in minority areas. British troops burned hostile villages, destroying all their grain supplies and crops, exacted tribute and forced labor, and insisted on a formal act of submission and the confiscation of weapons. Ibid., vol. 1, part 1, 336.
9. “Glass Palace Chronicle: Excerpts Translated on Burmese Invasions of Siam,” compiled and annotated by Nai Thein, Journal of the Siam Society 5 (1908): 1–82 and 8 (1911): 1-119, quotation from 5: 74–75. The account is of Anawhrata’s seventeenth-century expedition against Linzin (Vientiane).
10. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 23.
11. Robert D. Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 11, 21,131.
12. See, for example, Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities and the Malay World: Historical, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), especially chapter 2, “On Being Tribal in the Malay World,” 7–76.
13. Ibid. Benjamin’s position on “tribality” in general, a position that increasingly finds favor among anthropologists and historians, is that states, in effect, create tribes. He writes, “On this view, all historically and ethnologically reported tribal societies are secondary formations, characterized by the positive steps they have taken to hold themselves apart from incorporation into the state apparatus (or its more remote tentacles), while often attempting to suppress the knowledge that their way of life has been shaped by the presence of the state, or whatever represents its complexifying effects.” Ibid., 9. See also Leonard Y. Andaya, “Orang Asli and Malayu in the History of the Malay Peninsula,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 75 (2002): 23–48.
14. For a fine general treatment of patterns of nomadism, see Thomas J. Barfield, The Nomadic Alternative (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993).
15. William Irons, “Nomadism as a Political Adaptation: The Case of the Yomut Turkmen,” American Ethnologist I (1974): 635–58, quotation from 647.
16. A. Terry Rambo, “Why Are the Semang? Ecology and Ethnogenesis of Aboriginal Groups in Peninsular Malaysia,” in Ethnic Diversity and the Control of Natural Resources in Southeast Asia, ed., A. T. Rambo, K. Gillogly, and K. Hutterer (Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asia, 1988), 19–58, quotation from 25. For an analogous treatment of the Punan/Penan of Sarawak, see Carl L. Hoffman, “Punan Foragers in the Trading Networks of Southeast Asia,” in Past and Present in Hunter-Gatherer Studies, ed. Carmel Shrire (Orlando: Academic Press, 1984), 123–49.
17. The Man Shu (Book of the Southern Barbarians), trans. Gordon H. Luce, ed. G. P. Oey, data paper no. 44, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, December 1961, 35.
18. David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 186. The archeological evidence is clear. “John Coatesworth writes, ’Bioarcheologists have linked the agricultural transition to a significant decline in nutrition and to increase in disease, overwork and violence in areas where skeletal remains make it possible to compare human welfare before and after the change.’ Why would one prefer a lifeway based on the painful cultivation, collection and preparation of a small variety of grass seeds, when it was so much easier to gather plants or animals that were more varied, larger, and easier to prepare” (223). This analysis lends further support to Ester Boserup’s thesis, in The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972), that sedentary grain agriculture was a painful adaptation to crowding and land shortage. This evidence is also in keeping with Marshall Sahlins’s description of foraging society as “the original affluent society.” Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock, 1974), 1.
19. William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon, rev. ed. (Quezon City: New Day, 1974), 90.
20. Graeme Barker, “Footsteps and Marks: Transitions to Farming in the Rainforests of Island Southeast Asia,” paper prepared for the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, September 26, 2008, 3. The epigraph for this section is quoted in Arash Khazeni, “Opening the Land: Tribes, States, and Ethnicity in Qajar Iran, 1800–1911,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2005, 377. Although the poem ends with dreams of state conquest typical of militarized pastoral-nomads (in this case the Bakhtiari of Iran), it is the association of fixed cultivation with oppression to which I wish to call attention here. I am grateful for Khazeni’s research assistance and for the many insights of his thesis.
21. Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1987). Originally published as La société contre l’état (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974).
22. The evidence now suggests that the New World was far more densely populated before the Conquest than previously imagined. We now know, in large part through archeological evidence, that agriculture was practiced in most areas where it was technically feasible and that the population of the New World may actually have been more numerous than that of Western Europe. For a broad review of the evidence, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005).
23. A. R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Longbow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia (New York: Natural History, 1950).
24. For a reconstruction of the Siriono history, based in part on a closer study of a closely related group, see Allyn Mclean Stearman, “The Yukui Connection: Another Look at Siriono Deculturauon” American Anthropologist 83 (1984): 630–50.
25. Clastres, “Elements of Amerindian Demography,” in Society against the State, 79–99. The movement from settled agriculture to hunting and foraging could be documented as well in North America, where a similar demographic collapse made foraging territory more abundant, and European metal tools, firearms, and horses made it less laborious. See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), passim.
26. A fine general survey is Richard Price’s edited collection Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
27. Yin Shao-ting, People and Forests: Yunnan Swidden Agriculture in Human-Ecological Perspective, trans. Magnus Fiskesjö (Kunming: Yunnan Education Publishing House, 2001), 351.
28. Richard A. O’Connor, “A Regional Explanation of the Tai Müang as a City-State,” in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-States, ed. Magnus Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2000), 431–47, quotations from 434. O’Connor also cites Georges Condominas’s From Lawa to Mon, from Saa’ to Thai: Historical and Anthropological Aspects of Southeast Asian Social Spaces, trans. Stephanie Anderson et al., an Occasional Paper of Anthropology in Association with the Thai-Yunnan Project, Research School of Pacific Studies (Canberra: Australian National University, 1990), 60, and E. P. Durrenberger and N. Tannenbaum, Analytical Perspectives on Shan Agriculture and Village Economics (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Monographs, 1990), 4–5, in support of his position.
29. Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2006), 180.
30. See, for example, Herold J. Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics: A Discussion of the Southward Penetration of China’s Culture, Peoples, and Political Control in Relation to the Non-Han-Chinese Peoples of South China in the Perspective of Historical and Cultural Geography (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1954), 215, and Jan Breman, “The VOC’s Intrusion into the Hinterland: Mataram,” unpublished paper. To the political and tax advantages of shifting cultivation, one must add the relative flexibility of swiddeners to take advantage of new opportunities for trade and exchange. Bernard Sellato, in the Bornean context, claims in effect that swiddening is both safer and more adaptable. It offers a more reliable and diversified diet as well as fitting easily into “commercial collecting” of profitable forest products. In all, Sellato believes, “the flexibility of the system, finally, allows for a more efficient response to the opportunities presented by the modern world (short-term wage-labor, for instance) while rice farmers are chained to their work in the fields.” Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest: The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down, trans. Stephanie Morgan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 186.
31. The most convincing, fine-grained demonstration of this fact is to be found in the work of the great Chinese agronomist Yin Shao-ting, now available to English readers in People and Forests; see especially 351–52.
32. Jan Wisseman Christie, “Water from the Ancestors: Irrigation in Early Java and Bali,” in The Gift of Water: Water Management, Cosmology, and the State in Southeast Asia, ed. Jonathan Rigg (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992), 7–25. See also J. Steven Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, 2007).
33. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 236–37.
34. The celebrated Dogon of Benin fit this pattern. They fled to the hills and there, on rocky soil, constructed permanent field agriculture by carrying up soil basket by basket. It was hardly efficient, but it meant the difference between freedom and capture. Once they were safe from attack, however, they spread out and returned to shifting cultivation.
35. Michaud, Historical Dictionary, 100.
36. In fact, swiddening is, from this perspective, a more locationally stable mode of subsistence than grain growing when the danger of raiding is high. Grain growers, once their crops and granaries have been confiscated or destroyed, must move away to find food. Swiddeners, by contrast, are likely to have enough root crops still in the ground, as well as different aboveground crops maturing, that they can more readily move back and manage to subsist after the immediate physical danger has passed.
37. The converse is not necessarily the case. As noted much earlier, irrigated rice has been cultivated both in state and nonstate contexts.
38. Michael Dove, “On the Agro-Ecological Mythology of the Javanese and the Political Economy of Indonesia,” Indonesia, 39 (1985): 11–36, quotation from 14.
39. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in the South China Borderlands,” Ethnos 65 (2000): 56–82, quotation from 67. In his thesis, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Cornell University, 1996, Jonsson phrases the matter in a slightly more cultural vein: “I propose that up-landness was premised on the state’s takeover of the lowland domain.… Uplanders who explicitly stand outside states, and do not share the worldview of state populations, act on the ecological division of the lowlands and the forests in a way that reproduces it, and this is the background I propose for upland adaptations to farming in the forest, not an unmediated nature, but an environment that has been prefigured by the state” (195).
40. Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990), 20, quoting from F. M. Savina, Histoire des Miao (Hong Kong: Imprimerie de la Société des Missions-Etrangères de Paris, 1930), 216.
41. A close description of the range of subsistence activities in such a complex requires a brilliant and meticulous ethnography. The first such example for Southeast Asia is Harold Conklin’s celebrated study Hanunoo Agriculture: A Report on an Integral System of Shifting Cultivation in the Philippines (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1957). It’s hard to know how to apportion equitably the awe this report inspires between the knowledge and skill of the Hanunoo on the one hand and the observational powers of their ethnographer on the other.
42. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 416. Scott does observe that hill people are of note when they do pay taxes or “grow produce the Shan is too lazy to grow himself,” but then writes: “Payment is only enforced with difficulty in the face of passive resistance and there is always the risk of the people leaving en masse” (416).
43. Thus it is that there is always grain—usually a single grain such as wheat, maize, rice, or rye—at the center of any “civilization’s” diet: its emblematic staple. For the Romans, the striking thing about the barbarians was the relative absence of grain in their diet—as opposed to meat and dairy products. Thomas Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 100 BC–AD 400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 129.
44. An alternative, but one which requires high levels of state power, is to reduce complexity by forcing a village to plant on specific fields a state-mandated crop, which the officials can then confiscate. This was the essence of the “cultivation system” the Dutch imposed in colonial Java.
45. Mya Than and Nobuyoshi Nishizawa, “Agricultural Policy Reforms and Agricultural Development,” in Myanmar Dilemmas and Options: The Challenge of Economic Transition in the 1990s, ed. Mya Than and Joseph L. H. Tan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies), 89–116, quotation from 102. See also the striking account of a village leader during the Great Leap Forward in China who advised his fellow villagers to plant turnips because, unlike grains, they were not taxed or confiscated. The village thereby managed to avoid the starvation that affected neighboring villages. Peter J. Seybolt, Throwing the Emperor from His Horse: Portrait of a Village Leader in China, 1923–1995 (Boulder: Westview, 1996), 57.
46. Grain-growing peasants, menaced repeatedly by raiders and armies in search of provisions, are practiced at burying their grain in small lots; the advantage of root crops is that they are already buried in small lots! William McNeill, “Frederick the Great and the Propagation of Potatoes” in I Wish I’d Been There: Twenty Historians Revisit Key Moments in History, ed. Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K. Rabb (London: Pan Macmillan, 2007). 176–89.
47. Geoffrey Benjamin notes that the orang asli of Malaysia prefer crops that require relatively little in the way of labor (millets, tubers, sago, coconut, and banana), as this facilitates their mobility. See his “Consciousness and Polity in Southeast Asia: The Long View,” in Local and Global: Social Transformation in Southeast Asia, Essays in Honour of Professor Syed Hussein Alatas, ed. Riaz Hassan (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 261–89.
48. One of the tactical errors of the Communist forces in the jungle during the Emergency in Malaya was to have cleared and planted rice padis which could easily be spotted from the air. I am grateful to Michael Dove for this point.
49. For the New World this debate is summarized in Mann’s 1491. For Southeast Asia, see Sellato, Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest, 119 et seq. For a more skeptical view, see Michael R. Dove, “The Transition from Stone to Steel in the Prehistoric Swidden Agricultural Technology of the Kantu’ of Kalimantan, Indonesia,” in Foraging and Farming, ed. David Harris and Gordon C. Hillman (London: Allen and Unwin, 1989), 667–77.
50. Hoffman, “Punan Foragers.”
51. Ibid., 34, 143.
52. See Michael Adas, “Imperialist Rhetoric and Modern Historiography: The Case of Lower Burma Before the Conquest,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 3 (1972): 172–92, and Ronald Duane Renard, “The Role of the Karens in Thai Society during the Early Bangkok Period, 1782–1873,” Contributions to Asian Studies 15 (1980): 15–28.
53. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, 63.
54. Sellato, Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest, 174–80.
55. John D. Leary, Violence and the Dream People: The Orang Asli in the Malayan Emergency, 1848–1960, Monographs in International Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, no. 95 (Athens, Ohio: Center for International Studies, 1995), 63.
56. See David Sweet, “Native Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia: The ‘Abominable Muras,’ in War and Peace,” Radical History Review 53 (1992): 49–80. The Muras were masters of twenty-five hundred square kilometers of labyrinthine waterways that shifted with the annual flooding. They were a magnet for runaways from the Portuguese forced labor system, and, in fact, the term Mura was less an ethnic identity that a portmanteau term for “outlaws.” In the dry season they planted short-term crops on flood-retreat land, as well as maize and manioc.
57. For the bulk of the discussion on roots and tubers and on maize, I am much indebted to Peter Boomgaard’s remarkable historical surveys. See, in particular, “In the Shadow of Rice: Roots and Tubers in Indonesian History, 1500–1950,” Agricultural History 77 (2003): 582–610, and “Maize and Tobacco in Upland Indonesia, 1600–1940,” in Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production, ed. Tania Murray Li (Singapore: Harwood, 1999), 45–78.
58. Sago occupies a nether space, as do many plants, between a fully domesticated crop and a naturally occurring “wild” species. It came to the mainland apparently from eastern Indonesia and spread in areas suitable to its propagation, where it is both encouraged and tended. It surpasses even cassava in terms of caloric yield per unit of labor.
59. Boomgaard, “In the Shadow of Rice,” 590.
60. Scott, Discovery of the Igorots, 45.
61. I am grateful to Alexander Lee for having assembled the widely scattered data to make these comparisons possible.
62. I rely throughout this section on Peter Boomgaard’s foundational work “Maize and Tobacco.”
63. Ibid., 64.
64. Boomgaard, “Maize and Tobacco,” 65.
65. Robert W. Hefner, The Political Economy of Mountain Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 57. If Hefner’s claim has more general applicability and if it also true that steel implements transformed swiddening, then modern swiddening cannot be used to generalize about earlier swiddening practices without a great many qualifications.
66. Maize and potatoes also made it possible for dominant ethnic groups to move out of the valleys and colonize the hills. Thus in Southwest China, Han populations adopting maize and potato cultivation spread farther up the slopes, with Han administrators not far behind. The effect was to impel many non-Han populations even farther into the hills and higher into the watershed. See, in this connection, Norma Diamond, “Defining the Miao: Ming, Qing, and Contemporary Views,” in Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontier, ed. Steven Harrell (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 92–119, quotation from 95, and Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1 (1999): 139–68, esp. 142.
67. In this section, again, Boomgaard, “In the Shadow of Rice,” is my valuable guide.
68. Mann reports meeting a Brazilian woman from Santarém who claimed that when an asphalt street, laid some years before, was torn up, there was a crop of manioc beneath it. 1491, 298.
69. James Hagen (personal communication, February 2008) alerts me to the fact that in the Maluku context, at least, wild pigs are not picky about the tubers they root out and eat and than any differences are probably marginal.
70. Marc Edelman, “A Central American Genocide: Rubber, Slavery, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Guatusos-Malekus,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 356–90, quotation from 365. For a post–U.S. Civil War account of the development and subsequent curtailment of a free-peasant economy of emancipated slaves that depended on common property, see Steven Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South,” Radical History Review 26 (1982): 37–64.
71. This argument is brilliantly elaborated by Richard O’Connor in, “Rice, Rule, and the Tai State,” in State Power and Culture in Thailand, ed. E. Paul Durrenberger, Southeast Asia Monograph no. 44 (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asian Council, 1996), 68–99.
72. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma: Kayah Society as a Function of the Shan-Burma-Karen Context,” in Contemporary Change in Traditional Society, ed. Julian Steward (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 1: 1–104, quotation from 59. It is worth noting that Lehman sees the political environment in which the Kayah position themselves as a kind of solar system in which Burman, Shan, and Karen societies each exercise both attracting and repelling influences.
73. Ira Lapidus, “Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History,” in Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, ed. Philip S. Khoury and Joseph Kostiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48–73, quotation from 52.
74. Prominent exceptions would include the Hmong, the Karen, and the Kachin: the last two militarized and Christianized under British rule. The single most striking instance is the great “Miao (Hmong) Rebellion” in Guizhou, Southwest China, from 1854 to 1973. Retreat is, of course, often accompanied by defensive military measures.
75. Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), 41–49; Malcolm Yapp, Tribes and States in the Khyber, 1838–1842 (Oxford; Clarendon, 1980), quoted in Richard Tapper, “Anthropologists, Historians, and Tribespeople on the Tribe and State Formation in the Middle East,” in Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation, 48–73, quotation from 66–67.
76. See Karen Barkey’s fine study, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155–67. The difficulties the Ottomans had with the Dervish orders were, she suggests, analogous to the troubles the tsarist authorities had with the Old Believers and Uniates.
77. Lois Beck, “Tribes and the State in 19th- and 20th-Century Iran,” in Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation, 185–222, quotations from 191, 192.
78. Owen Lattimore, “On the Wickedness of Being Nomads,” Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 415–26, quotation from 415.
79. White, Middle Ground, writes, “What is clear is that socially and politically, this was a village world.… The units called tribes and nations and confederacies were only loose leagues of villages.… Nothing resembling a state existed in the pays d’en haut (16).
80. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, “New Peoples and New Kinds of People: Adaptation, Adjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South American Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era),” in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, ed. Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 443–502, esp. 460.
81. Irons, “Nomadism as a Political Adaptation,” and Michael Khodarkovsky, When Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
82. Marshall Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 45–46, quoted ibid., 64.
83. For a persuasive illustration of intensification and deintensification of agriculture in the precolonial Andes as a political option, see Clark Erickson, “Archeological Approaches to Ancient Agrarian Landscapes: Prehistoric Raised-Field Agriculture in the Andes and the Intensification of Agricultural Systems,” paper presented to the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, February 14, 1997.
84. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 171.
85. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 246.
86. Charles Crosthwaite, The Pacification of Burma (London: Edward Arnold, 1912), 236, 287.
87. A. Thomas Kirsch, “Feasting and Society Oscillation, a Working Paper on Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia,” data paper no. 92 (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 1973.), 32.
88. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 171. In most cases, a political choice to mark oneself off from state subjects or lowland societies involves a cultural agenda as well. In this connection, see Geoffrey Benjamin’s description of Semang and Senoi egalitarianism as an “abreaction” to Malay identity, prompting “dis-assimilation” from its cultural markers. Benjamin and Chou, Tribal Communities in the Malay World, 24, 36.
89. Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, 217.
90. Alain Dessaint, “Lisu World View,” Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography, no. 2 (1998): 27–50, quotation from 29, and Alain Dessaint, “Anarchy without Chaos: Judicial Process in an Atomistic Society, the Lisu of Northern Thailand,” Contributions to Southeast Asian Ethnography, no. 12, special issue Leadership, Justice, and Politics at the Grassroots, ed. Anthony R. Walker (Columbus, Ohio: Anthony R. Walker, 2004), 15–34.
91. Jacques Dournes, “Sous couvert des maîtres,” Archive Européen de Sociologie 14 (1973): 185–209.
92. Jonathan Friedman, “Dynamics and Transformation of a Tribal System: The Kachin Example,” L’Homme 15 (1975): 63–98; Jonathan Friedman, System, Structure, and Contradiction: The Evolution of Asiatic Social Formations (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altimira, 1979); David Nugent, “Closed Systems and Contradiction: The Kachin in and out of History,” Man 17 (1982): 508–27.
93. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, eds., Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering the Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach, Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3, Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2007). For a searching critique of Leach’s misunderstanding of the terms gumsa and gumlao see especially the contributions by La Raw Maran, “On the Continuing Relevance of E. R. Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma to Kachin Studies,” 31–66, and F. K. L. Chit Hlaing [F. K. Lehman], Introduction, “Notes on Edmund Leach’s Analysis of Kachin Society and Its Further Applications,” xxi–lii.
94. Maran, “Continuing Relevance,” shows that there are many gumsa arrangements, only one of which (the gumshem magma variant of gumchying gumsa) approximates the strict hierarchy verging on tyranny that Leach associated with the gumsa system tout court. He claims further that there were no “true” gumlao (gumlau) but rather more or less democratic variations on gumsa. Strictly speaking, the most egalitarian gumsa-gumlao systems are actually competitive oligarchies of feasting open to anyone who can successfully build a substantial following. Where Leach, with his structuralist orientation, apparently went wrong is in assuming that a combination of a segmentary lineage system and asymmetric marriage alliance necessarily lead to fixed rank and hierarchy. Maran shows that this is not the case, as does Chit Hlaing [Lehman] in his Introduction. Cornelia Ann Kammerer, “Spirit Cults among Akha Highlanders of Northern Thailand,” in Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, ed. Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, monograph no. 52 (New Haven: Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), 40–68, also shows that chiefly ritual monopolies and asymmetric marriage-alliance systems are compatible with a high degree of egalitarianism.
95. The more authoritarian forms of Kachin hierarchy, as Nugent and others have stressed, were not confined to the internal tensions it generated among lower-ranked lineages and noninheriting sons. The opium boom and the ensuing scramble for new opium lands, and the British efforts to curtail chiefly taxes (in lieu of raiding) on caravan trade and to eliminate slaving as a source of Kachin revenue and manpower, played perhaps a more decisive role in undermining the more hierarchical variants of Kachin social organization. See, in this connection, Vanina Bouté, “Political Hierarchical Processes among Some Highlanders of Laos,” in Robinne and Sadan, Social Dynamics in the Highlands, 187–208.
96. One reason that Leach may have systematically overestimated the authoritarian characteristics of the gumsa system is that the gumsa chief, when representing himself to the Shan, adopted the princely titles and the conduct of a Shan lord. The same gumsa chief, among his own people, might have few or no subjects and would not be countenanced as a hereditary aristocratic chief; Leach may well have mistaken the bluster for the substance. See Chit Hlaing [Lehman], Introduction.
97. Allowing for the Southeast Asian context, the ideology of the gumlao and of gumsa villages is reminiscent of the most egalitarian (Anabaptist) sects in the Reformation and in the English Civil War. There is the same insistence on ritual equality, the rejection of tribute, the refusal of servitude and the deferential terms of address that accompany it, and the idea of individual autonomy and individual rank, in this case, earned through feasting.
98. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 2, 414.
99. The most penetrating analysis of the feasting system is that of Thomas Kirsch, who, in “Feasting and Social Oscillation,” contrasts the gumlao/democratic emphasis on the ritual autonomy of feasting with the gumsa/autocratic emphasis on lineage hierarchy in feasting. For the democratizing (at least initially) impact of opium farming on feasting, see Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Rhetorics and Relations: Tai States, Forests, and Upland Groups,” in Durrenberger, State Power and Culture, 166–200.
100. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 198–207.
101. E. Paul Durrenberger, writing about the Lisu, puts the matter of more and less hierarchical forms of social organization in a more materialist, and to me more convincing, context: “In highland Southeast Asia there is an ideology of honor and wealth that can be translated into rank and prestige under certain circumstances. Where wealth and access to valuable goods are scarce, hierarchic forms will develop; where they are widespread, egalitarian forms will develop.” “Lisu Ritual: Economics and Ideology,” in Ritual, Power, and Economy: Upland-Lowland Contrasts in Mainland Southeast Asia, ed. Susan D. Russell, Monograph Series on Southeast Asia, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, occasional paper no. 14 (1989), 63–120, quotation from 114.
102. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 199, quoting “Expeditions among the Kachin Tribes of the North East Frontier of Upper Burma,” compiled by General J. J. Walker from the reports of Lieutenant Eliot, Assistant Commissioner, Proceedings R.G.S. XIV.
103. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 197–98, cites H. N. C. Stevenson, The Economics of the Central Chin Tribes (Bombay, [c. 1943]); two works by J. H. Hutton, The Agami Nagas (London, 1921) and The Sema Nagas (London, 1921); and T. P. Dewar, “Naga Tribes and Their Customs: A General Description of the Naga Tribes Inhabiting the Burma Side of the Paktoi Range,” Census 11 (1931): report, appendixes.
104. For the Karen see Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma.”
105. Quoted in Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed, 1991), 84.
106. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 234. I am skeptical of this claim once one figures in the cost of dependence in terms of tribute, corvée, and grain. In any event, Leach provides no figures that would substantiate his assertion.
107. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], The Structure of Chin Society: A Tribal People of Burma Adapted to a Non-Western Civilization, Illinois Studies in Anthropology no. 3 (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1963), 215–20.
108. I compress what I take to be the argument of Nicholas Tapp, in Sovereignty and Rebellion, especially chapter 2. See also Kenneth George, Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). George’s uplanders give coconuts to their lowland neighbors to remind them both that they were headhunters and that they have abandoned the practice.
109. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 19.
110. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 384.
111. See, for example, Vicky Banforth, Steven Lanjuow, and Graham Mortimer, Burma Ethnic Research Group, Conflict and Displacement in Karenni: The Need for Considered Responses (Chiang Mai: Nopburee, 2000), and Zusheng Wang, The Jingpo Kachin of the Yunnan Plateau, Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1992).
112. E. Paul Durrenberger, “Lisu: Political Form, Ideology, and Economic Action,” in Highlanders of Thailand, ed. John McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), 215–26, quotation from 218.
113. One is reminded of hill peoples who either propagate, or take care not to scotch, stories of their headhunting and cannibalism as a way of keeping lowland intruders at bay.
114. Anthony R. Walker, Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People (Delhi: Hindustani Publishing, 2003), 106, and Shanshan Du, Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwestern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
115. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), 122–58, quotation from 140. Meanwhile, the Akha, a midslope people, are busy enacting their cultural superiority vis-à-vis groups such as the Wa, Palaung, and Khmu.
116. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 255. Eugene Thaike [Chao Tzang Yawnghwe], The Shan of Burma: Memoirs of a Shan Exile, Local History and Memoirs Series (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1984), 82, claims that the Shan were also free to move. And of course they were, and did often move away from a Sawbwa whom they thought oppressive. Leach’s point is simply that the cost of moving was less for a swiddener.
117. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginning to 1933,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979, 78. Another nineteenth-century instance of the Karen effort to separate tributary relationships from local autonomy is reported by Charles F. Keyes. Although Karen villages were attached to the Kingdom of Chiang Mai, “the authorities were never allowed to enter the village itself but shared a ritual meal with village elders at some place outside the village.” Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 49.
118. Raymond L. Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma, 1824–1994 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 112–17.
119. Anthony R. Walker, “North Thailand as a Geo-ethnic Mosaic: An Introductory Essay,” in The Highland Heritage: Collected Essays on Upland Northern Thailand, ed. Anthony R. Walker (Singapore: Suvarnabhumi, 1992), 1–93, quotation from 50.
120. Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, 143.
121. Walker, Merit and the Millennium. Much the same could be said about the “eternally footloose” Hmong. See William Robert Geddes, Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao [Hmong Njua] of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 230.
122. Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 44. In keeping with their cultural fleetness of foot, the Lahu-Nyi seem extremely negligent about their genealogies and “cannot even recall the names of their grandfathers.” This, of course, allows them to make or discard a kinship connection with comparative ease. See Walker, “North Thailand as a Geo-ethnic Mosaic,” 58. Such shallow genealogies and small, supple, household units have been called “neoteric” and seem to characterize many (but not all) marginal, stigmatized populations. See Rebecca B. Bateman, “African and Indian: A Comparative Study of Black Carib and Black Seminole,” Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 1–24.
1. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), 122–58, quotation from 131. Nicholas Tapp has suggested the term alliterate to describe peoples who lack writing but know of writing and texts. This has surely been the condition of all Southeast Asia hill peoples for as long as anyone can imagine. Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990), 124.
2. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 131, quoting Paul Lewis, Ethnographic Notes on the Akha of Burma, 4 vols. (New Haven: HRA Flexbooks, 1969–70), 1: 35.
3. Anthony R. Walker, Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 2003), 568. The relative success enjoyed by missionaries among the Lahu, Walker claims, arose from their promise to restore what the Lahu regarded as a lamentable loss of writing and texts.
4. Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Fate of Sacrifice and the Making of Wa History,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, 105–6.
5. Jean-Marc Rastdorfer, On the Development of Kayah and Kayan National Identity: A Study and a Bibliography (Bangkok: Southeast Asian Publishing, 1994).
6. Fiskesjö, “Fate of Sacrifice,” 129.
7. Isabel Fonseca, in her work on the Gypsies (Roma/Sinti), reports a Bulgarian story of their squandering their inheritance of literacy and Christianity by writing their god-given religion on cabbage leaves, which their donkey ate. A Romanian version has it that the Gypsies built a church of stone and the Romanians one of bacon and ham. The gypsies haggled, got the Romanians to exchange churches, and then proceeded to eat their church. Aside from the other rich interpretive possibilities here (transsubstantiation!), this story accomplishes the neat trick of simultaneously conveying greed, improvidence, illiteracy, irreligion, trading, and craftsmanship! Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (New York: Knopf, 1995), 88–89.
8. Olivier Evrard, “Interethnic Systems and Localized Identities: The Khmu subgroups (Tmoy) in Northwest Laos,” in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering the Political Systems of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach, ed. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3, Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 127–60, quotation from 151.
9. J. G. Scott [Shway Yoe], The Burman: His Life and Notions (1882; New York: Norton, 1963.), 443–44.
10. Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, 124–72. Tapp provides references for several other hill legends of the loss of writing.
11. If some of the Tai peoples in the Yangzi Valley were, long ago, a literate state-making people, their literacy would have been in another script than the Sanskrit-derived script linked to Theravada Buddhism they mostly use today.
12. Even here, the absence of written records from the period is not conclusive evidence that all writing ceased, though it is certain that virtually all the purposes to which it had been previously put had been snuffed out for the better part of four centuries.
13. Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 441.
14. It is nonetheless common for illiterate peoples to preserve documents that seem to guarantee them their land and freedoms: for example, the famous imperial decree allowing the Mien to move freely in the hills and make their swiddens, Russian peasants’ copies of tsarist decrees believed to order the emancipation of the serfs, and the Spanish land titles the original Zapatistas brought to Mexico City to assert their claims against the haciendas.
15. Thus the Yao/Mien have their sacred written treaty with the Chinese emperor and a restricted Chinese script necessary for their preoccupation with geomancy adapted from Chinese practice. The Sui, a minority in the Chinese province of Guizhou, have a pictogram script used in divination and geomancy rituals. Jean Michaud, Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2006), 224.
16. The Portuguese in the early seventeenth century encountered high rates of literacy evenly divided between men and women in the southern Philippines, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. What is striking is not only the fact that these peoples were far more literate than the Portuguese at that time but that their literacy was not associated with courts, texts, taxation, trade records, formal schooling, legal disputes, or written histories. It seemed to be deployed exclusively in the service of the oral tradition. People would, say, write down a spell or a love poem (the same thing, essentially!) on a palm leaf in order to memorize and declaim it or else to present the actual script to the loved one as a part of courtship ritual. This is a fascinating case of a form of literacy divorced entirely, it seems, from the state-making technologies with which it has usually been associated. See Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 215–29.
17. Writing, Roy Harris argues convincingly, is not simply speech “written down” but something quite different. See his arguments in The Origin of Writing (London: Duckworth, 1986) and Rethinking Writing (London: Athlone, 2000). I am grateful to Geoffrey Benjamin for these references.
18. Even the Pict symbol stones found in northern England, never quite deciphered, have this character. They were clearly meant as assertions of permanent territorial authority. What precisely they conveyed to contemporaries is obscure, but to dispute the meaning of a symbol stone, one would have to produce a competing text, a competing symbol stone, that could be read against it.
19. James Collins and Richard Blot, Literacy and Literacies: Text, Power, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50 et seq. The most spectacular recent attempt to physically efface a history was the dynamiting by the Taliban of the two thousand–year–old Buddha statues in Bahmian, Afghanistan.
20. The convolutions required to efface an inconvenient physical record in writing or monuments is captured in the Roman tradition of damnatio memoriae, by which the Senate would destroy all written and monumental traces of a citizen or tribune who was considered a traitor or who had brought disgrace on the Republic. Of course, the damnatio memoriae was itself an official, written, and duly recorded act! The Egyptians destroyed the cartouches memorializing the pharaohs they wished to erase from the record. One is reminded of the Soviet practice of airbrushing out of photographs all those comrades who had fallen afoul of Stalin in the purges of the 1930s.
21. For the forms that much of this record keeping takes, see Frank N. Trager and William J. Koenig, with the assistance of Yi Yi, Burmese Sit-tàns, 1764–1826: Records of Rural Life and Administration, Association of Asian Studies monograph no. 36 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979).
22. Mogens Trolle Larsen, Introduction, “Literacy and Social Complexity,” in State and Society: The Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization, ed. J. Gledhill, B. Bender, and M. T. Larsen (London: Routledge, 1988), 180. The remaining 15 percent appear to be lists of signs arranged on some taxonomic principle, presumably as an aid to learning the script.
23. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 291. The relationship between writing and state formation seems to me to be one less of cause and effect than of elective affinity. As with wet-rice irrigation, one can find writing without states and, more rarely, states without writing, but the two normally go hand in hand. I thank Thongchai Winichakul for pressing me on this issue.
24. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 133.
25. For the classic account see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). A more contemporary, extreme example is the Khmer Rouge imprisonment and execution, as class enemies, of those who could read and write French. A curious variation is the suspicion of—and occasional persecution of—educated, literate Han by the two major non-Han dynasties of China: the Mongol/Yuan and the Manchu/Qing. See Patricia Buckley Ebery, The Cambridge Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 9.
26. Mandy Joanne Sadan, History and Ethnicity in Burma: Cultural Contexts of the Ethnic Category “Kachin” in the Colonial and Postcolonial State, 1824–2004 ([Bangkok], 2005), 38, quoting T. Richards, “Archive and Utopia,” Representations 37 (1992), special issue: Imperial Fantasies and Post-Colonial Histories, 104–35, quotations from 108, 111.
27. The obvious exception, when the telling of histories, legends, and genealogies is confined to a small, specialized group of people, is examined below.
28. Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 54. Havelock adds: “The audience controls the artist insofar as he still has to compose in such a way they [the audience] can not only memorize what they have heard but also echo it in everyday speech.… The language of the Greek classical theatre not only entertained its society, it supported it.… Its language is eloquent testimony to the functional purposes to which it is put, a means of providing a shared communication—a communication not casual but significant historically, ethnically, politically” (93).
29. This is why Socrates believed that writing out his teachings effectively destroyed their meaning and value, while it is just this instability, spontaneity, and improvisation of speech that made Plato so suspicious of drama and poetry.
30. Jan Vansina, Oral History as Tradition (London: James Currey, 1985), 51–52. The classic source on Serbian epics from which is derived a great deal of our knowledge about oral epic performance, including our suppositions about classical Greek epics, is Alfred Lord’s The Singer of Tales (New York: Atheneum, 1960).
31. Barbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993), 8.
32. Richard Janko notes that “unlettered Bosnian bards” were in the 1950s still singing the deeds of Suleiman the Magnificent from the 1550s, and that bards on the island of Keos remembered the great volcanic eruption of 1627 BCE on the nearby island of Santorini (which did not affect them). “Born of Rhubarb,” review of M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Times Literary Supplement, February 22, 2008, 10.
33. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 132.
34. The story was, of course, sung in the PaO tongue (a Karennic language), then translated into Burmese and then into English. It is impossible to know how much the story has drifted from its 1948 version, but it would, in principle, be possible to compare the various extant versions currently being sung in the PaO hills to ascertain regional variations.
35. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 265–66.
36. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginnings to 1923,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979.
37. For those familiar with the Malay world, the same variation can be observed in the variant tellings of the classic stories about the Malay brothers Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat, which have radically different political meanings vis-à-vis the contemporary Malay state.
38. Swiddeners have a similarly rich portfolio of swiddening neighbors they have known in the course of their long agricultural history. This too is a kind of shadow community that can, when necessary or useful, be invoked to establish new and advantageous alliances for trade or politics.
39. Vansina, Oral History as Tradition, 58. Igor Kopytoff notes that in African “societies without written records, many different groups could claim to be of the royal blood.… As the Africans put it, ‘the slaves sometimes became masters and the masters slaves.’” The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 47.
40. William Cummings, Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
41. Margaret R. Nieke, “Literacy and Power: The Introduction and Use of Writing in Early Historic Scotland,” in Gledhill, Bender, and Larsen, State and Society, 237–52, quotation from 245.
42. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996, 136. Renato Rosaldo, llongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 20, says much the same about the abbreviated oral histories of the Ilongot.
43. Vansina, Oral History as Tradition, 115. What seems debatable as a general matter with this argument is that a scattered, marginal, decentralized, egalitarian people could have, on that account, a history that amounted to an elaborate lament of defeat, victimization, treachery, and migrations, as do many hill peoples. Some modern national histories—for example, those of Ireland, Poland, Israel, and Armenia—take essentially this form.
44. See, in this context, Reinhart Kosseleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing, History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), which argues that a consciousness of history is uniquely a product of the Enlightenment.
