1. 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), 387.
2. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 48.
3. Census of India, 1931, vol. 11, Burma, part 1, Report (Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1933), 173, 196.
4. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 46.
5. Census of India, 1931, vol. 11, part 1, 174, and J. H. Green, “A Note on Indigenous Races in Burma,” appendix C, ibid., 245–47, quotation from 245. Green goes on to suggest body measurements and cultural inventories that, he believes, would help establish “stages of cultural evolution.”
6. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 49. See also 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, 176–83, for a similar argument.
7. For this paragraph, I have drawn from 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), 92–116; Nicholas Tapp, The Hmong of China: Context, Agency, and the Imaginary (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and Jean Michaud, ed., Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000). One episode of the exchange of population in the hills—a Yao village in which a majority of the adult males had been adopted from other ethnic groups—is cited by Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 169.
8. Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed, 1991), 143. Smith also points to padi-planting, monolingual Burmese-speaking, self-identified Karen fighting with the Karen National Union (KNU) and presumably willing to die on behalf of this identity (35).
9. Charles F. Keyes, ed., Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1979), 6, 4.
10. François Robinne, “Transethnic Social Space of Clans and Lineages: A Discussion of Leach’s Concept of Common Ritual Language,” 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 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2008), 283–97. This raises the question of the limits of absorption. As long as those being absorbed at any one time are only a small proportion of the “receiving” society, one imagines a fairly smooth process. In the case of a large pulse of migrants coming en masse in the wake of a war or famine, one imagines that the group might well maintain its distinctiveness. This appears to be the case for the Intha living on Inlay Lake in the Shan states, who, legend has it, were military deserters who came together in large numbers from the south.
11. Sanjib Baruah, “Confronting Constructionism: Ending India’s Naga War,” Journal of Peace Research 40 (2003): 321–38, quotation from 324, quoting Julian Jacobs et al., The Nagas: The Hill People of Northeast India: Society, Culture, and the Colonial Encounter (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), 23.
12. Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural, and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 21.
13. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 244. J. G. Scott, when negotiating the border with Chinese officials at the turn of the century, was trying to untangle the tribes. “Rode out with General Liu to fix the line across the plain. No line could be found which would divide Kachin and Shan cultivation. The different fields were as completely mixed up as the blocks on a child’s puzzle letter toy box.” G. E. Mitton [Lady Scott], Scott of the Shan Hills: Orders and Impressions (London: John Murray, 1936), 262.
14. Michael Moerman, “Ethnic Identity in a Complex Civilization: Who Are the Lue,” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1215–30, quotations from 1219, 1223.
15. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1996, 44, subsequently published as Mien Relations: Mountain People and State Control in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
16. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 64.
17. Here, the Tai muang, or statelet, with its inevitable padi core, must be distinguished from the many so-called upland or “tribal” Tai, who may well be Buddhist but who are hill peoples largely outside state structures.
18. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 32.
19. Georges Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, from Sad’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), 41.
20. For the best survey and analysis see Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983).
21. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 221–22.
22. Condominas, From Lawa to Mon, 69–72.
23. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 478. Many of these marriages also represented alliances that helped protect the ruler against his princely rivals.
24. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, chapter 7, 213–26. But see also, for a similar Lisu-to-Shan transformation, E. Paul Durrenberger, “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, Northern Illinois University, occasional paper no. 14 (1989), 63–120; and for a more formal analysis grounded in political economy, see Jonathan Friedman, “Tribes, States, and Transformations,” in Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology, ed. Maurice Bloch (New York: Wiley, 1975), 161–200.
25. See, for example, David Marlowe, “In the Mosaic: The Cognitive and Structural Aspects of Karen-Other Relationships,” in Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, 165–214, and Peter Kunstadter, “Ethnic Groups, Categories, and Identities: Karen in Northern Thailand,” ibid., 119–63.
26. Kunstadter, “Ethnic Groups, Categories, and Identities,” 162.
27. Katherine Palmer Kaup, Creating the Zhuang: Ethnic Politics in China (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 45.
28. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 39.
29. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 218.
30. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 40–41.
31. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 274.
32. See, along these lines, 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.
33. See Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and his “Reinterpreting Burmese History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987): 162–94; and his “Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350–1830,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993): 475–572.
34. 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), 52. Wolters specifically excludes Vietnam from this generalization.
35. 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.
36. Jonsson, Mien Relations, 158–59. See also his “Yao Minority Identity and the Location of Difference in South China Borderlands,” Ethnos 65 (2000): 56–82.
37. Ronald Duane Renard, “Kariang: History of Karen-Tai Relations from the Beginning to 1933,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai’i, 1979, 18, makes this case for the Karen and Thai in Ratburi province, Thailand.
38. What is missing here is the issue of whether the performance is accepted by powerful others. Many Germans of Jewish ancestry in the 1930s were entirely assimilated into secular German culture and experienced themselves as Germans only to find, fatally, that Nazi “race science” classifications prevailed.
39. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing] “Ethnic Categories in Burma and the Theory of Social Systems,” in Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, ed. Peter Kunstadter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 75–92, quoted in Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, 172.
40. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 287.
41. For persuasive accounts of the adaptive quality of plural identities in the Malay world, see, for example, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Jane Drakard, A Malay Frontier: Unity and Duality in a Sumatran Kingdom, Studies on Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Victor T. King, “The Question of Identity: Names, Societies, and Ethnic Groups in Interior Kalimantan and Brunei Darussalam,” Sojourn 16 (2001): 1–36.
42. For the most convincing broadside against the term tribe in this context, see Morton H. Fried’s little classic The Notion of Tribe (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1975).
43. Thomas S. Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 100 BC-AD 400 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 103.
44. Diamond, “Defining the Miao,” 100–102.
45. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850-1990 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 21–29.
46. Tania Murray Li, ed., Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power, and Production (Singapore: Harwood, 1999), 10.
47. For studies of this process in the Middle East, see Richard Tapper, Frontier History of Iran: The Political and Social History of Shahsevan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Eugene Regan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
48. Quoted in Fried, Notion of Tribe, 59.
49. This perspective is most lucidly elaborated in Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference (1969; Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland, 1998), 9–38, and shared by Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma; 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; and Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, although Keyes wishes (4) to emphasize the degree to which, once established, such groups acquire a more distinctive culture, structurally opposed to other groups.
50. 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 McKenzie Pinter and Don Karl Rowney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 130–61, quotation from 133.
51. See Leo Tolstoy’s fine novella The Cossacks, in The Cossacks and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 163–334. Here Tolstoy writes in particular about the Tarek River Cossacks, called the Greben Cossacks, who settled among the Chechens.
52. Cossacks also provided military forces to the Ottomans; see Avigador Levy, “The Contribution of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Ottoman Military Reform: Documents and Notes,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 6 (1982): 372–413.
53. See Richard Price, Introduction to part 4, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 292–97.
54. Fredrik Barth, “Ecological Relationships of Ethnic Groups in Swat, North Pakistan,” American Anthropologist 58 (1956): 1079–89, and Michael T. Hannan, “The Ethnic Boundaries in Modern States,” in National Development and the World System: Educational, Economical, and Political Change, 1950–1970, ed. John W. Meyer and Michael T. Hannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 253–75, quotation from 260.
55. Manfred von Richtofen, Letters [to the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce], 2nd ed. (Shanghai, 1903; Peking reprint, 1914), 119–20, quoted in Owen Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 469–91, quotation from 473n2.
56. Lattimore, “Frontier in History,” 473n2.
57. The distinction between “Kayah” and “Karenni” (Red Karen) is an artifact of political relabeling, rather like the distinction between Myanmar and Burma for the name of the country as a whole. Since the previous term Karenni was associated with rebellion against the regime in Rangoon, the term Kayah—actually the name for the preponderant subdivision of the Karenni—was chosen instead because it did not carry these associations. Thus today the state is officially called Kayah State, though it might more accurately be called Karenni State. I use the term Karenni for shorthand. F. K. Lehman (Chit Hlaing), on whose fine analysis I rely here, uses the term Kayah in “Burma.”
58. Ibid., 35.
59. F. K. L. Chit Hlaing [F. K. Lehman], “Some Remarks on Ethnicity Theory and Southeast Asia, with Special Reference to the Kayah and Kachin,” in Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma, ed. Michael Gravers (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007), 112.
60. For accounts of ethnicization having largely to do with control over trade privileges or land, see 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; and, on the piratical Tausug in the Sulu Archipelago, 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), 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. For an astute analysis of the invention of indigeneity in the late twentieth century, see Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
61. One of the most striking cases of this process concerns the Bushman of the Kalahari—also known as the san-Khoi—so often depicted as a peripheral, wild, Stone Age remnant from the dawn of human history. Though the historical facts are still in some dispute, it now appears that this understanding is radically mistaken. In Edwin Wilmsen’s reconstruction, the Bushmen of the Kalahari are essentially a dispossessed class of mixed origin that has over time been relegated to serflike labor and foraging in bands in the arid sandveld. Comprising pastoralists, many of them Tswana, ruined by cattle raids, livestock epidemics, and war, escaped slaves, and military deserters (many of these in turn Europeans), they joined a small San-speaking population of foragers who had once prospered on sales of ivory, ostrich feathers, and hides. See Wilmsen’s classic Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For some of the controversy surrounding this interpretation, see Jacqueline S. Solway’s review of Wilmsen’s book in American Ethnologist 18 (1991): 816–17.
The importance of the subsistence niche to the determination of ethnicity is revelatory. Speakers of non-San languages who have no livestock and who forage (or work as servants) are understood to be San-Bushmen. On the contrary, San speakers who have livestock and are well off are understood to be of Tswana ethnicity. As the two groups are, to use Wilmsen’s term, “interdigitated,” it is common for bilingual San speakers to routinely “pass” as Tswana. The San-Bushmen are, then, essentially a stigmatized class—or caste—relegated to the least desirable subsistence niche of foraging, and their identity has become synonymous with that niche. In relational terms it would be just as accurate to say that the keystone of Tswana ethnic self-making was the stigmatization of the San-Bushmen. The net effect of treating in homogeneous and stigmatizing terms what is in fact a diverse population is to have “aboriginalized” them. Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies, 85, 108, 133.
62. Ibid., 275, 324, the latter quotation citing John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
63. I am grateful to Shanshan Du for her careful exposition of the evolution of the tusi system as it evolved, creating hereditary chiefdoms with territorially defined kingdoms to match throughout much of southwest China, especially in poor, inaccessible areas at high altitudes. The system was largely abandoned in favor of direct administration (gai tui gui liu, replacing tusi by mobile officials), with household registration and taxes starting in the mid-eighteenth century, under the Ming. Personal communication, August 2008.
64. Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (London: Cohen and West, 1963).
65. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 167–69.
66. 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; and Benjamin and Chou, Tribal Communities in the Malay World. See Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, 284, on the Jarai prohibition on the use of the plow.
67. For example, if one were inventing a set of taboos for a group to discourage mixing and commensuality, one could scarcely do better than the traditional high-caste ideas about pollution in India or the stricter versions of orthodox Jewish kosher dietary laws.
68. The epigraph of this section is from Fried, Notion of Tribe, 77.
69. Charles F. Keyes, “A People Between: The Pwo Karen of Western Thailand,” in Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation and Identity, 63–80, and Renard, “Kariang,” passim. It is important to recall, in this context, that it has been at least as common over time, and much more so in the past half-century, for the Karen to become Mon, Burman, Thai, Shan, and so on.
70. Leo Alting von Geusau, “Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System,” chapter 6 in Turton, Civility and Savagery, 122–58, esp. 133–34, 147–50. I believe that von Geusau himself married into the Akha and was incorporated in the manner he describes. See also E. Paul Durrenberger’s account of Yao/Mien household competition to attach outsiders to achieve economic and social success: “The Economy of Sufficiency,” in Highlanders of Thailand, ed. John McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87–100, esp. 92–93.
71. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 127–30. The social transaction, if it may be called that, redistributes food and goods—material equality—among the community, while concentrating status inequalities.
Officially, the youngest son succeeds to his father’s chiefly title (ultimogeniture). Any other son, however, can become chief by successfully founding a new community, by purchasing the ritual rights from the youngest son, or by conquest—providing always that he can successfully make the claim stick. Ibid., 157.
72. Ibid., 164, 166, 167. See also Robinne, “Transethnic Social Space of Clans and Lineages.”
73. The logic of feasting and oscillation between democratic (gumlao) and autocratic (gumsa) forms among hill peoples has been worked out brilliantly by A. Thomas Kirsch in “Feasting and Social Oscillation, a Working Paper on Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia,” data paper no. 92 (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, 1973.).
74. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 17. Lehman also points out that in China and India, from which valley-state ideological forms are derived, “there was a regular ideology of usurpation that required the usurper and his descendants eventually to establish a real and an imaginary genealogy linking them either to a royal ancestor or a god” (17). A similar point is made by Clifford Geertz with respect to Bali. Although there was a rigid principle of direct descent, “genealogies … continually were manipulated in order to rationalize current power realities.” Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 31.
75. Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, ed. Stephen Halkovic, vol. 144 (Bloomington: Research Institute of Inner Asian Studies, Indiana University, 1983), 33.
76. To cite one final example, Robert Harms has shown in his study of the Nunu in the Congo that the “organic unity of the lineage model and the personal manipulations of the bigman ethos” were, structurally, in contradiction. In practice the contradictions were resolved by fabricating genealogies to make it appear as if the big man had been the rightful heir, even when his position was based on personal wealth and political maneuvering instead of on genealogical reckoning. Games against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 21.
77. Kirsch, “Feasting and Social Oscillation,” 35.
78. Renard, “Kariang,” chapter 2, esp. 3–32. Adaptability has in many cases meant absorption into valley societies. It is probably a safe assumption to claim that a majority of the “Karen” have, over the past millennium or so, assimilated to valley societies—a process considerably accelerated over the past half-century.
79. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 238. Benjamin, in the Malayic context, makes a point of showing that groups have moved in and out of tribality over time. Tribal Communities in the Malay World, 31–34. For a recent analysis of a quasi-settled group (the Chewong) moving “back” into “tribality,” see Signe Howell, “‘We People Belong in the Forest’: Chewong Recreations of Uniqueness and Separateness,” ibid. 254–72.
80. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 254, 272.
81. Jonsson, Mien Relations, 19–34.
82. For a detailed analysis of this dynamic in the South Asian context, see Sumit Guha’s fine Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
83. The cease-fire arrangements that the current military dictatorship in Burma has concluded with many hill rebels can be read in much the same way: a grant of armed autonomy and economic opportunities in return for an end to active hostilities.
In the Malay world it is virtually a historical truism that upstream populations were so vital to Malay coastal states that it was important to manage those relations well. See, in this connection, inter alia, 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). More broadly, on the symbiosis between hill/steppe peoples and adjacent lowland centers, see David A. Chapell, “Ethnogenesis and Frontiers,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 267–75.
84. The last “lowland” ally of the Karen was, of course, the British colonial regime in whose army they—as well as the Kachin and Chin—were vastly overrepresented. They depicted themselves as an “orphaned” people, and their abandonment by the British only added to the legend. For more on Karen alliances to valley kingdoms, see Keyes, Ethnic Adaptation, chapter 3, 63–80; Mikael Gravers, “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion among the Buddhist Karen in Burma and Thailand,” Moussons 4 (2001): 3–31; and E. Walter Coward Jr., “Tai Politics and the Uplands,” draft paper (March 2001).
85. Baruah, “Confronting Constructionism.” Maritime kingdoms in the Malay world had watery barbarian allies. Melaka had its orang laut, the Bugis had the Bajau, and so on.
86. As noted earlier, Leach asserts that Shan culture and state-making is uniform and stable from place to place. If, however, each Shan statelet was largely created by the ingathering of adjacent hill peoples, then each Shan statelet should be somewhat different depending upon the particular hill populations it absorbed, just as each Malay state was said to bear the marks of the stateless upstream people it had incorporated.
87. The difference, of course, is that the Han series is a formula for being absorbed by an existing state, while the Shan formula is, or can be, a formula for creating a state.
88. For citations, see Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 197, and his bibliography, 313–18. The first and third epigraphs for this section are from Thomas Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations: The Inner Asian Perspective,” in Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation, 153–82, quotations from 163 and 164, respectively; the second is from Karl Gustav Izikowitz, Lamet: Hill Peasants in French Indochina (Gothenburg: Ethnografiska Museet, 1951), 113.
89. For the Karen see, for example, Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 35–36, and Smith, Burma, 31, 432n7; for the Wa, see Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 493–519; for the Lahu, see Anthony R. Walker, Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of the Lahu People (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 2003), 72; and for the Karenni, see again Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 37–41.
90. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 363.
91. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma, 199, excerpted from a 1929 handbook, “Advice to Junior Officers.”
92. Scott, Gazetteer of Upper Burma, vol. 1, part 1, 370. Scott’s prose is judicious. Such communities were permitted in tracts where they had been recognized and where it was felt that the imposition of a duwa would occasion new resistance. Furthermore, gumlao communities outside the administrative boundary but still within British Burma were left undisturbed—essentially left to their own devices. See also Vanina Bouté, “Political Hierarchical Processes among Some Highlanders of Laos,” in Robinne and Sadan, Social Dynamics in the Highlands, 187–208, who notes that the Lao court and, subsequently, the French colonizers always preferred more hierarchical societies to egalitarian ones, as the former both were closer in form to their own state structures and provided them with a ready-made structure of control.
93. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Burma,” 1: 38. This paragraph is drawn entirely from Lehman’s astute analysis.
94. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 116–20; Durrenberger, “Lisu Ritual, Economics, and Ideology”; and E. Paul Durrenberger, “Lisu: Political Form, Ideology, and Economic Action,” in McKinnon and Bhruksasri, Highlanders of Thailand, 215–26.
95. The classic analysis is Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
96. Durrenberger, “Lisu,” 218. Related to this are the traditions for ferocity, savagery, and in particular headhunting, which are, it seems, actually promoted by certain stateless peoples to discourage state incursions into their territory. See, in this connection, Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1 (1999): 139–68, esp. 146, and Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 155.
97. The literature from the Malay world is extensive, but perhaps the best-worked-out analysis of the contrast and oscillation between hierarchical state forms and acephalous egalitarian forms, both at the ideological level and at the level of social praxis, is Jane Drakard’s Malay Frontier.
98. Robert Montagne, Les Berbères et le Makhazen au Sud du Maroc (Paris: F. Alcan, 1930), cited in Ernest Gellner, Saints of the Atlas (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 26.
99. Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 47.
100. 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.
101. Von Geusau, “Akha Internal History,” 153.
102. Physical mobility is facilitated for many swiddening groups by the assiduous maintenance of a widely dispersed network of kinsmen and friends. The Hmong (Njua) of northern Thailand, for example, have marriage alliances that span great distances, facilitating migration to new areas of fertile lands and political safety. Their history of swiddening also gives them a shadow society of ex-swiddening neighbors that may be activated as the need arises. William Robert Geddes compares these social networks to “invisible telephone lines linking the household to areas near and far, and along any one of them may come a message of hope stimulating movement.” Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao [Hmong Njua] of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 233.
103. Philippe Ramírez, writing of the Korbi people of Assam, notes that various political choices were freighted with consequences for ethnic identity. “Group identity—ascribed identity, at least—is determined not by certain cultural features but by allegiance to a political authority or a political order.… In this case, cultural heterogeneity does not prevent coherence of the group in terms of identity or social relationship.” “Politico-Ritual Variations on the Assamese Fringes: Do Social Systems Exist?” in Robinne and Sadan, Social Dynamics in the Highlands, 91–107, quotations from 103–4.
104. Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 529.
105. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 132.
106. The linguist Robert Blust believes that all Austronesian hunter-gatherers in the Malay world were once sedentary agriculturalists who knew rice cultivation techniques and who subsequently became nomadic by choice. Cited in 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, citation from 133. See also Sopher, Sea Nomads, 363–66.
107. Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape,” 124, 185–86.
Epigraphs are from, respectively, Guillaume Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance: La quête de la sainteté dans la Birmanie contemporaine (Geneva: Editions Olizane, 2005), 274 (my translation); and John Dunn, Setting the People Free (London: Atlantic, 2006), 188.
1. See, especially, Christian Culas, Le messianisme Hmong aux XIXème et XXème siècles (Paris: Editions MSH, 2005). The Hmong, strictly speaking, are the largest of four linguistic subgroups of the Miao, and by far the most numerous in mainland Southeast Asian states.
2. 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), 66–91, and Nicholas Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990), 151.
3. The Yao/Mien have no happier a history. They were defeated by Han troops and auxiliaries at Great Vine Gorge in Guangxi in 1465. It took 160,000 troops to defeat them; 7,300 Yao were decapitated and 1,200 taken prisoner. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 226.
4. Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics, 90.
5. Robert D. Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854–1873 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 90; Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics, 90.
6. Hmong had moved earlier into northern Siam and rebelled in 1796 and 1817 against Thai slaving raids and administrative controls: the so-called “red-iron policy.” See Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 300 et seq. As late as 1967, the rumor that a new Hmong king had been born set off a large-scale migration by refugees in Laos to walk to the king’s court. Nicholas Tapp, “Ritual Relations and Identity: Hmong and Others,” in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, England: Curzon, 2000), 84–103.
7. Quoted in Mikael Gravers, “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion among the Buddhist Karen in Burma and Thailand,” Moussons 4 (2001): 3–31, quotation from 13.
8. Jonathan Falla, True Love and Bartholomew: Rebels on the Burmese Border (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 375.
9. I am indebted for much of this analysis to the perceptive work of Mikael Gravers, for example, “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion”; “Conversion and Identity: Religion and the Formation of Karen Ethnic Identity in Burma,” in Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Burma, ed. Mikael Gravers (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007), 227–58; and “When Will the Karen King Arrive? Karen Royal Imaginary in Thailand and Burma,” manuscript, 28 pp., 2008.
10. Quoted in Gravers, “When Will the Karen King Arrive?” 7.
11. This account is drawn from Gravers’s “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion”; “When Will the Karen King Arrive?”; Theodore Stern, “Ariya and the Golden Book: A Millenarian Buddhist Sect among the Karen,” Journal of Asian Studies 27 (1968): 297–328; and the “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.
12. The meaning of the term Gwe, as Gravers explains, is the subject of much discussion. References to “Gwe Mon” and “Gwe Shan” at the time suggest that it is not an ethnic term. Gravers believes that it may refer to Gwae Gabaung, a mountain famous as a refuge after the fall of Pegu. Other mín laún adopted the prefix Gwe as well.
13. Mon, Shan, and Burmese followed his banner, as well as Kayah and PaO (Taungthu), these last two also Karennic-speaking groups. One commentary suggests that Tha Hla was either the son, by a concubine, of the Burman king, Pagan Mín, or the son of Pagan Mín’s uncle, who had revolted and fled. If so, it would have been a fairly typical move for a pretender or rebel prince to seek backing at the periphery in order to seize power. Nai Thein, “Glass Palace Chronicle,” 8: 98.
14. This and the next two paragraphs are based on Gravers’s “Cosmology, Prophets, and Rebellion,” 10–12.
15. Stern, “Ariya and the Golden Book.”
16. It is indicative of the importance of millenarian themes in Karen politics that Martin Smith’s detailed and comprehensive history of insurgency in Burma after World War II contains but a single appendix: “Millenarianism,” devoted almost entirely to the Karen. Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed, 1991), 426–28.
17. This account of Lahu millenarianism is based almost exclusively on Anthony R. Walker’s extraordinarily rich, insightful, and learned book Merit and the Millennium: Routine and Crisis in the Ritual Lives of Lahu People (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 2003). This landmark volume and Walker’s translation of a Lahu creation epic, Mvuh Hpa Mi Hpa: Creating Heaven, Creating Earth (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1995), deserve to be far more widely known than they are currently.
18. Quoted in Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 80, plate 17.
19. Ibid., 78.
20. The male part of the dual Gui-sha was responsible for the sky and the female part for the earth. As the male was lazier than the female, there was too much earth and not enough sky. Gui-sha rectified this by squeezing the earth so that it protruded more into the sky to balance the proportions. The result was a wrinkled earth with mountains and valleys.
21. Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 505.
22. These clashes were almost certainly related to the Cold War machinations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its missionary collaborator William Young, grandson of the revered first Baptist missionary to the Lahu. See Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: C.I. A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, rev. ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003), 342–45, 372–74.
23. Both uprisings are described in Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 524–33, quotation from 524. Also useful are Walker’s account of a Lahu prophet contemporary with his own fieldwork in the 1970s and a study of the same prophet by Sorot Sisisai, a Thai scholar.
24. S. C. Peoples and Howard Campbell, “The Lahu: Paper Prepared for the Joint Commission of Baptists and Presbyterians to Consider the Mission Problems in the Kengtung Field” (Chiang Mai: American Presbyterian Mission, typescript, Chiang Mai Payab Archives, 1907), quoted in Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 587.
25. Karl Marx, Introduction to Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843). It is impossible to read the Communist Manifesto without being struck by how much it owes, normatively and structurally, to Christian eschatological thinking: a debased world of oppression and sin, a deepening crisis, a final clash between good and evil, the triumph of good, the perfect society, and the end of history. In this context, the appeal of socialism to the Western working class must have rested, in some part, on how neatly it tracked the millenarian narrative of Christianity they were already familiar with.
26. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay in Its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 169.
27. For an analysis that teases out the major strands of Buddhist practice in Thailand, see A. Thomas Kirsch, “Complexity in the Thai Religious System: An Interpretation,” Journal of Asian Studies 36 (1972): 241–66.
28. Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance, 276.
29. There are clearly “millenarian situations” in which an unprecedented set of circumstances renders untenable the ordinary past understandings about conduct, status, security, and how a worthy life should be lived. Richard White describes such a situation for Native Americans. Writing of Tenswatawa, a famous Algonquin prophet, he claims that “the Algonquin and white villages of the backcountry teemed with visionaries and God seemed to scatter revelations across the land with abandon.” The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 503. One location even called itself “Prophetstown” (513).
30. Franklin Roosevelt’s first campaign for the presidency in 1932 could usefully be studied in this fashion. He began as a conservative Democrat, and yet as he gauged the tremendous hopes the unemployed working classes placed in him and adjusted his “stump” speech accordingly from whistle-stop to whistle-stop, his speech (not to mention FDR himself) was increasingly infused with the promises of secular salvation his hearers reposed in him. For a similar understanding of Martin Luther King Jr.’s preaching following the same stochastic process, even within the same sermon, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
31. Such distinctions were reinforced in precolonial Burma and Siam by sumptuary laws governing the kinds of clothes, houses, and entourages people of a certain status could have.
32. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 101. In the elided section of the quotation, Weber implies that other classes—for example, artisans, the lower middle classes, lower clergy—may be in even greater need of immediate salvation, a theme to which he later returns.
33. I have discussed this theme at much greater length in “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition,” Theory and Society 4 (1977): 1–38 and 211–46, and in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For a detailed historical account of Carnival spilling over into revolt, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans, trans. Mary Feney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).
34. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 139, 80, 81. Weber actually uses the term “agrarian communism,” which seems inappropriate here inasmuch as the sects he invoked, though they insisted on popular local control over land distribution, were defending a peasant smallholding tradition.
35. This helps explain why, say, the reigns of the absolutist French kings, determined to rule provincial France systematically and impose a homogeneous civil order, were the occasions for widespread revolts, many with millenarian overtones. See Boris Porchnev, Les soulèvements populaires en France au XVIIème siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1972).
36. For ethnographic details of an actual wonder-working monk and the kind of entourage he attracted, see E. Michael Mendelson, “Observations on a Tour in the Region of Mount Popa,” France-Asie 179 (1963): 786–807, and his “A Messianic Buddhist Association in Upper Burma,” Bulletin, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 24 (1961): 560–80. For a more general description of popular religious syncretism, see Melford Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).
37. Here I rely heavily upon a recent study of eight renowned forest monks by Guillaume Rozenberg, Renoncement et puissance.
38. When asked to what monastic order he belonged, the famous contemporary forest monk Hsayadaw Thamanya, of PaO ethnicity, is reported to have replied, “I don’t belong to any branch (gaing), I belong to the ‘gone-to-the-forest’ branch.” Ibid., 35.
39. I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religions: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1989), 91.
40. Quoted in J. G. Scott [Shway Yoe], The Burman: His Life and Notions (1882; New York: Norton, 1963.), 118.
41. Barbara Wilson Andaya, “Religious Development in Southeast Asia, 1500–1800,” chapter 9 in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. 1, From Early Times to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 565.
42. Mendelson, “Messianic Buddhist Association.”
43. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism, 139.
44. Mendelson believes that many of the nats actually represent murdered royal relatives. Since the king was himself so often a usurper of the throne, making the dead relative (who anyway was powerful for dying a “green” or premature death) into a nat cult was a way of appeasing its spirit and persuading it, by a kind of symbolic jujitsu, to protect the king himself. Saya San, in the same spirit, during his revolt in 1930 invoked the spirit of an Englishman his forces had just slain to protect his following. “Observations,” 786.
45. Ibid., 785.
46. E. Michael Mendelson, Sangha and the State in Burma: A Study of Monastic Sectarianism and Leadership, ed. John P. Ferguson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 207.
47. For a fine account of an important lay meditation movement, see Ingrid Jordt, Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).
48. For the sorts of revolutionary moves that are available within a social order (that is to say, without any external knowledge of other possibilities), see my Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 77–82.
49. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 1: 328.
50. Gravers, “When Will the Karen King Arrive?” 2.
51. Tapp, “Ritual Relations and Identity,” 91.
52. George M. Foster, “What Is Folk Culture?” American Anthropologist 55 (1953): 159–73, quotation from 104.
53. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2003), 73–74.
54. Tapp, “Ritual Relations and Identity.”
55. The exception in Europe was the free city-state, a model not available in Southeast Asia, unless the Malay trading port be seen as a partial equivalent.
56. See the interesting argument along these lines in Paul Stange, “Religious Change in Contemporary Southeast Asia,” in Tarling, Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 2, The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 529–84. An interesting parallel is the adoption by Berbers of Sufism in contrast to Arab Sunni orthodoxy. They acknowledge, as it were, participation in the overarching Islamic culture, with its emphasis on brotherhood and equality, while dissenting from the Arab state and its hierarchy. See Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
57. Edmund Leach, The Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 112–13.
58. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 132. For maritime Southeast Asia, J. D. Legge notes that M. C. Ricklefs and C. C. Berg interpret the centralist cosmology of Javanese power as functioning as a counterweight to the practical diffusion of power. “The Writing of Southeast Asian History,” chapter 1 in Tarling, Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 1–50, esp. 33.
59. Charles Tilly has noted that the geography of Switzerland resulted in a Protestant Reformation that was contentious and fractured between Zwingli (Basel) and Calvin (Geneva) as well as against Catholic holdouts. Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169.
60. 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 34.
61. Hermann 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. Surely this should come as no surprise to Europeans for whom the Roman Empire and Holy Roman Empire lived on as ideas in political claims and jurisprudence long after the eternal city had become a ruin amid feuding warlords. Alexander Woodside, “The Centre and the Borderlands in Chinese Political Thinking,” in The Chinese State and Its Borders, ed. Diana Lary (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 11–28, esp. 13. Much the same could be said about the Ottoman Empire. See Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 13, 82.
62. 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, quotation from 486. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán also characterized such shatter zones as privileged locations of nativistic and messianic religions. Regions of Refuge, Society of Applied Anthropology Monograph Series, 12 (Washington, D.C., 1979), 49. See also, along these lines, Barkey, Empire of Difference, 42, on the Ottoman case, as well as Richard White, Middle Ground; Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia (New York: Schocken, 1968); Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 1969); and Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Norton, 1996).
63. Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, 57.
64. Bloch, French Rural History, 169.
65. Weber, Sociology of Religion, 126.
66. Erik Mueggler, “A Valley House: Remembering a Yi Headmanship,” in Perspectives in the Yi of Southwest China, ed. Steven Harrell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 144–69, esp. 158–61.
67. Peter Worsley’s The Trumpet Shall Sound and Kenelm Burridge’s New Heaven, New Earth, for all their sympathy for cargo-cult participants and understanding of the material conditions that set off such rebellions, fall into this trap. Such Southeast Asianists as Mikael Gravers, Anthony R. Walker, and Nicholas Tapp largely avoid it.
68. Tapp, “Ritual Relations and Identity,” 94.
69. This is often how a new, charismatic “big man” in the hills gets his start.
70. As students of cults and conversion have emphasized, the more demanding and radical the cult, the greater the importance of a public severing of ties with the old order; that is to say, a burning of bridges so that one cannot return is a mark of complete commitment to the new order.
71. F. K. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Who Are the Karen, and If So, Why? Karen Ethno-history and a Formal Theory of Ethnicity,” in Ethnic Adaptation and Identity: The Karen on the Thai Frontier with Burma, ed. Charles F. Keyes (Philadelphia: ISHII, 1979), 215–53, quotations from 240, 248.
72. Gravers, “Cosmology, Prophets and Rebellion,” 24.
73. Lehman [Chit Hlaing], “Who Are the Karen?” 224.
74. Anthony R. Walker, “The Lahu People: An Introduction,” in Highlanders of Thailand, ed. John McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983), 227–37, quotation from 231.
75. Fredrik Barth, in his introduction to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (1969; Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland, 1998), which emphasizes human agency in the social organization of boundaries, writes that one of the strategies open to elites in nonindustrial nations is to “choose to emphasize ethnic identity, using it to develop new positions and patterns, to organize activities in these sectors formerly not found in their societies or inadequately developed, for the new purpose.… The third strategy generates many of the interesting movements that can be observed today, from nativism to new states” (33). Squinted at long enough, I think Barth is making more or less the same argument we are proposing here. Hugh Brody suggests that societies in which shamanism is widely practiced is, because of the indistinct line between dreaming and consciousness, between good and bad, and between playful and serious, a society that is uniquely flexible. The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2000), 245.
76. Jenks, Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou, 6.
77. This account is taken from Salemink, Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, chapter 4, 100–129, and Geoffrey Gunn, Rebellion in Laos: Peasant and Politics in a Colonial Backwater (Boulder: Westview, 1990).
78. On the Ong Kommodam uprising see Gunn, Rebellion in Laos.
79. See Christian C. Lentz, “What Revolution? Calling for a King in Dien Bien Phu,” paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, April 3–6, 2008, Atlanta. Lentz’s much awaited thesis will treat these themes at greater length.
80. As William Robert Geddes notes for the Hmong group he studied, “It is partly for this reason the persons who often do become the most important in large communities are the shamans, the basis of whose authority is religious and therefore not confined to a particular social group.” Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao [Hmong Njua] of Thailand (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 256. The importance of figures who are above reproach may be related to the common phenomenon of the stranger-king in Southeast Asia, explored in David Henley’s “Conflict, Justice, and the Stranger-King: Indigenous Roots of Colonial Rule in Indonesia and Elsewhere,” Modern Asian Studies 38 (2004): 85–144.
81. Ira Lapidus, “Tribes and State Formation in Islamic History,” in Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, 25–47, quotation from 29.
82. Thomas Barfield, “Political Legitimacy in Afghanistan,” manuscript, 53.
83. This is what is also suggested by Peter Worley in The Trumpet Shall Sound, 227. It is a conclusion I resisted, owing to its functionalist mode of reasoning, but which is nonetheless hard to reject on the evidence.
84. Richard A. O’Connor, “Sukhothai: Rule, Religion, and Elite Rivalry,” paper presented at the Forty-first Annual Conference of the Association of Asian Studies, Washington, D.C., 1989, cited in Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 151.
85. Here I use the formulation of James Hagen in his fine study of the Maneo community of Maluku, Community in the Balance: Morality and Social Change in an Indonesian Society (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006), 165.
86. Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, 95–97. Tapp reports such rebellions in the 1950s as well. Jesus was sometimes confused with Sui Yi, the premier shaman historically, who is also prophesied to return to earth one day.
87. Outside the region, of course, the indigenous peoples of the New World far outstrip this lamentable history. For the period of the Indochina War, see Alfred McCoy’s fine detailed account in chapter 7, “The Golden Triangle,” in The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, rev. ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003), 283–386.
88. See the fine book on the oral tradition of the Christian Bible among African Americans by Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
89. This account is drawn from Walker, Merit and the Millennium, 580–86.
90. Quoted ibid., 791.
91. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Norton, 1965).
92. See Courtney Jung, The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Second epigraph is from Richard A. O’Connor, “Founders’ Cults in Regional and Historical Perspective,” in Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity, ed. Nicola Tannenbaum and Cornelia Ann Kammerer, Yale Southeast Asian Monograph Series no. 52 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 269–313, quotation from 297.
1. John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (London: Atlantic, 2005), 182.
2. See, for example, Magnus Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire: Chinese Nation-Building in the 20th Century,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 5 (2006): 15–44.
3. Joyce C. White, “Incorporating Heterarchy into Theory on Socio-political Development: The Case from Southeast Asia,” in Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies, ed. Robert M. Ehrenreich, Carole L. Crumley, and Janet E. Levy, Archeological Papers of the American Archeological Association, no. 6 (1995): 103–23.
4. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Postscript, “Reconsidering the Dynamics of Ethnicity through Foucault’s Concept of ‘Spaces of Dispersion,’” in Social Dynamics in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Reconsidering Political Structures of Highland Burma by E. R. Leach, ed. François Robinne and Mandy Sadan, Handbook of Oriental Studies, section 3, Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 299–308.
5. In East and Southeast Asia, this would include the Austronesian populations of Taiwan and Hainan, as well as previous state-bearing Malayic peoples like the Cham.
6. O’Connor, “Founders’ Cults,” 298–99.
7. 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), 33.
8. The great maritime states of Southeast Asia such as Pegu/Bago, Srivijaya, and Melaka, owing to the great advantage of low friction of terrain across water, had a far greater and more vital penumbra than did the more agrarian states of Pagan, Ava, Ayutthaya, or Tongkin, though they were militarily weaker.
9. Slaves in North America made similar use of Christianity and the Bible—especially the Old Testament—to confect a message of liberation and emancipation.
10. Nor is the whole constellation a self-contained system. External shocks have, from time to time, provoked a wholesale realignment of its structure. The colonial conquest and the Japanese occupation in World War II, not to mention the subsequent wars of national liberation fought by lowland majorities and now, often, by upland minorities, are striking cases in point. These shocks completely transformed the constellation of power relations and the options available to each ethnic group in repositioning itself advantageously in the new order.
11. G. William Skinner, “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 270–81.
12. The pattern of preserving the local food supply is reminiscent of the market customs in eighteenth-century-England at times of food shortage. See E. P. Thompson’s famous article “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1950): 76–136.
13. Hjorleifur Jonsson, “Shifting Social Landscape: Mien (Yao) Upland Communities and Histories in State-Client Settings,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 249, 380–84.
14. Permanent inequalities can arise under contemporary conditions where land is scarce and modern forms of freehold property have been instituted, allowing some families to accumulate land and others to become landless tenants or laborers. Where land is plentiful and open property forms prevail, inequality, when it arises, is usually linked to the family cycle and how many able-bodied workers a family disposes.
15. Georges Condominas makes the same point in 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.
16. Once again, there is a “watery” version of this readjustment. David E. Sopher points out that many groups of orang laut/sea gypsies have become sedentary and then returned to their seafaring ways only to become sedentary once again. The widespread idea that once nomads settle, it is for good, is without foundation. 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, 363–66.
17. One could, of course, easily work this out for any imperial project. In the French case, the contrast between the ideals of the French Revolution, the rights of man, the idea of citizenship, and the civic discourse of Victor Hugo would, say, confront the realities of colonial Saigon or Algiers. As a little thought experiment, try comparing the discourse of “development” (today’s euphemism for civilization) with the unseemly NGO scramble for turf and loot in, say, Vientiane.
18. Flory, the tragic hero of George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, is a memorable depiction of someone driven to suicide by this contradiction.