108 Part II: Outsiders
oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription,
taxes, corvee labor, epidemics, and warfare.... Virtually everything about
these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more contro-
versially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic position-
ings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. Their physical dispersion in
rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship struc-
ture, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenar-
ian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent
states from springing up among them. The particular state that most of them
have been evading has been the precocious Han-Chinese state. (2009:ix–x)
This view, and most of the studies on which it is based, requires seeing
Asia (and especially Southeast Asia) in a nonstate prism and without the grid
of a modern map pressed over the territory. Some researchers have given the
name Zomia to that vast and rugged territory of highlands, mountains, ravines,
and jungles that stretch across seven nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thai-
land, Burma, China, and India), a territory created by the Great Collision of
India and Eurasia (see chapter 1). Zomia excludes the lowlands amenable to
wet-rice cultivation where “padi states” have been founded. These padi states,
“little nodes of hierarchy and power,” as Scott calls them, have small court cen-
ters with inordinate demands for laboring folk to work the padi fields in order
to support the small elite and their ceremonial cultures. Wars were fought lessHmong village nestled in remote hillside in Thailand.