80 Part II: Outsiders
Chapter 4 turns to others who, in danger of being captured by growing
states, sought only to keep their distance. They are on the fringes of state cen-
ters that are always in need of labor and looking for areas into which their own
peasant populations might expand. Turning from the nomadic and warlike
Central Asian peoples, we look at the mountainous regions between India and
China and the Southeast Asian states, where free peoples have taken to the
highlands to survive by swidden cultivation and cross-mountain trade. Some
scholars have called this region “Zomia” where, according to James C. Scott in
The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009),
hill peoples have
been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—
slavery, conscription, taxes, corvee labor, epidemics, and warfare....
Virtually everything about these peoples’ livelihoods, social organization,
ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can
be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length.
(p. ix)
We examine this argument and then come to focus on one such group, the
Hmong, who inhabit the highlands of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and southern
China, where they are known as Miao.REFERENCES CITED
Gladney, Dru C. 1994. Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/
Minority Identities. Journal of Asian Studies 53(1): 92–123.
Goldstein, Melvyn C. 1997. The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai
Lama. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.