Chapter 4 Tribal People 109for territory than for laborers; captives were little more than slaves working for
the padi state. There was little incentive for free people to voluntarily join these
centers, since labor demands were intense, and surpluses were seized as taxes
and tribute. Most of what passed for “protection” by the state’s power was no
less than the demands of the state itself, or else the greed of a neighboring mini-
state after the same thing: territory and cultivators. So Zomia—the distant hilly
territories that padi states could not well capture or control—became areas of
refuge, “shatter regions,” where free people kept as much distance as possible
from the nearest expansionary state.
This is not the story that states tell themselves. Rather, states—from the
Han Chinese to the Thai, the Burmese, the Vietnamese, the Cambodian, the
Khmer—see themselves as civilizations, great centers of culture and civil orga-
nization, vastly superior in every way to the barbarians on the periphery. Their
confidence in their superiority became the rationale for seeking to civilize infe-
rior peoples in the hills, a “civilizing mission” that masked the constant need to
keep a vast laboring force at work, cultivating grain and sending tax and tribute
to support the projects of the center. There was constant loss of labor from
desertion, high death rates from disease and warfare in concentrated popula-
tions, and labor needs for monumental projects such as building the Great Wall
of China or building monumental palaces and temples in the soggy plains of
Cambodia. “The pagoda is finished; the state is ruined” runs a Burmese prov-
erb. The benefits of civilization did not appeal to the peoples of Zomia.
Nowadays in the modern nation-state, these groups are viewed as a prob-
lem in various ways by the states that have at last captured them. Tribal peoples
may be viewed as impediments to full national integration because they retain
nonnormative customs, languages, and adaptations. Their citizenship may be
in doubt if they maintain strong connections with similar communities across
state borders, or if their swidden-style cultivation or pastoral nomadism
requires them to move their villages frequently. They may be viewed as insuffi-
ciently civilized (or even as “wild” or as “living fossils”), requiring expensive
remedial action on the part of the majority society. Every modern state has
devised policies to deal with these “tribals” or “minorities,” and the targeted
groups have themselves responded in various ways to the kinds of attention,
definitions, and policies set by central governments.
Identification of such groups, even in the gross way required to create the
chart at the beginning of this chapter, is filled with difficulties. The chart itself is
organized by nation-state, many of which are of recent creation. “Minorities”
are not necessarily “tribal” people. The Chinese are a minority in Malaysia,
Indonesia, and Thailand, yet they are by no means tribal, nor are the Indians in
Singapore and Malaysia, or the Vietnamese in Cambodia. On the other hand,
what is a “tribe”? A century of anthropological research has not resulted in sat-
isfactory concepts, far less consensus, for identifying a “tribe.” Tribes tend to be
defined by what they are not: they are not states. “A tribe is an animal without
a central regulative system,” wrote Marshall Sahlins (1968) in a famous