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Self-Governing People and Expansionary States
This chapter is devoted to the barbarians. From the point of view of all the
ancient states, out in their hinterlands and highlands, in their wastelands and
coastlines, out of reach of court centers and their submissive padi cultivators
live wild people they do not understand and cannot control. These uncon-
quered people have been perplexingly resistant to the civilizing process offered
(or demanded of) them by expansionary states like the Han Chinese or Hindu
princedoms or Cambodian temple-kingdoms. They choose to live in difficult
terrain, surviving by hybrid economies of hunting, gathering, swiddening, and
trade. They have no texts or writing systems, or once had and lost them; they
don’t miss them. They can pick up whole villages and disappear in days. Often
their women are hard-working cultivators, the men hunters and warriors as
needed. They value their freedom and have almost no social hierarchy; perhaps
a headman, a respected leader, but rarely anything lowland states can identify
as a “chief ” unless they themselves appoint them.
Nowadays, especially since the end of World War II and the demise of the
old colonial empires, these people have been captured by those old expansion-
ary states newly structured as nation-states. This new kind of state is no longer
a court center with a broad haphazardly controlled frontier but is a geographic
entity with boundaries on maps. Where one state ends, another begins. The ter-
minology has changed: the peripheral people are no longer barbarian, “raw,”
“savage,” or “wild”; they are now known as minorities, ethnicities, indigenous
folk. The language is kinder, yet the powers of the state are more insistent.
Who are these people? Why and how did they stay independent for so
long? What is happening to them now?
Several generations of researchers, often supported by colonial powers try-
ing to govern and “civilize” them, have puzzled over their close studies of local
populations, attempting to make sense of received assumptions about border-
land people in light of social realities they see on the ground. Are they rem-
nants of ancient peoples not yet fully modernized and civilized? Are they
visible forms of ancient social systems, “our ancestors” surviving into the pres-
ent? Or are they something more complicated than that? These studies have
been brought together in a brilliant synthesis by James C. Scott in The Art of
Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia:
I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon
communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing theChapter opener photo: Akha woman in morning.