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particular, disease-determined niches within the larger mountainscape
then being opened to cultivation. In Kaihua prefecture forming part of
Yunnan’s southeastern border with Vietnam,“Miao moved to dwell in
the cliffs and bamboo stands...scattered along the malarial border
area.”^39 This is evidence from beyond the southwestern core of Yunnan
of the larger disease environment’s structuralizing effects on provincial
migration and agricultural development patterns. Differential resistance
let Miao cultivators break ground, possibly Han-style, in places where
Han farmers themselves could not.
These Miao had a choice between Han-style and indigenous swidden-
ing, with critical implications for Yunnan’s basic ecological and political
structure. Han-style swiddening would have caused rapid deforestation
that would eliminate arable land on the mountainside within a few years
and erode more downstream later. Farmers would have to move on,
pursuing an ultimately rootless existence that prevented any territorial
consolidation. Indigenous-style swiddening, in contrast, protected tree
cover to preserve soil for long-term residence around which imperial
indigenist chieftainships could form.
Swiddening was a critical dimension of indigenous ethnic identity for
adaptation to regional ecological conditions. The dynamics of the
“region”in this instance extend well beyond Yunnan and other subsec-
tions controlled at various times by various states. This dense cluster of
highlands of lands and peoples at altitudes above three hundred meters or
so stretches across Southeast Asia to northeastern India. James C. Scott
has recently explored this transnational territory of“Zomia,”also known
to geographers as the Southeast Asian Mainland Massif. He has found it a
haven of“self-governing”hill peoples whose every expression from kin-
ship to cultivation manifests opposition to state control in general and
“the precocious Han-Chinese state”in particular. Scott conceives of this
opposition as a series of deliberate political“adaptations designed to
evade both state capture and state formation”as a response of“nonstate
peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening.”
He even accords upland crops a role in indigenous resistance, arguing that
roots and tubers are especially“appropriation-proof”against centralizing
state tax collectors. They can, for example, be left in the ground for up to
two years after ripening. Would-be confiscators are thus denied the easy
access afforded them by conventional granaries full of already processed
revenue in kind. Cultivators in Burma in the 1980 s and in Ireland in the
early nineteenth century liked potatoes partly because they were not cost-
effective for the state to root out.^40
The Nature of Imperial Indigenism in Southwestern Yunnan 183
