Life on the Edge
Denizens of the periphery find ways to escape the predatory state.
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GoogleThe Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, Yale University Press, 442 pages, $35
In the dominant narrative of civilization’s march, cultured people are ruled by centralized law-giving institutions (city-states, kingdoms, empires, and now nation-states), usually centered in relatively flat lowlands and sustained by grain agriculture. By contrast, according to this view, people who live in the mountains, in swamps, or in “remote” jungles are rude, primitive, and backward, relying on nomadism, slash-and-burn agriculture, and hunting and gathering. They live not in cities or nations but in bands, clans, and tribes. The way they live is the way everyone used to live before some of us became civilized; they are windows onto our past, living museums of prehistoric life.
How lucky we are not to be backward. How fortunate we are to be ruled by wise kings and far-sighted legislators, by shepherds who protect us from barbarian wolves. Surely, as Oliver Wendell Holmes instructed us, “Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.” Those who evade taxes are evading civilization and all that it entails.
Now along comes James C. Scott to show how absurd that narrative is. In his dazzling, enlightening, and enjoyable new book, The Art of Not Being Governed, the Yale anthropologist and political scientist boldly challenges the age-old story of “rude barbarians mesmerized by the peace and prosperity made possible by the king’s peace and justice.”
To begin with, people who live in relatively “ungovernable” peripheries do not really live like people before states existed. They live alongside state-governed populations, in constant contact with their cousins who live under state control. The inhabitants of such peripheries, Scott shows, are overwhelmingly refugees or descendants of refugees from states’ predatory behavior: slavery, war, and taxation. Their ways of life have made it more difficult for states to control them.
Their agricultural products are not harvested all at once, so it is harder to tax them. Their kinship systems decentralize power through networks of families. Their residence on difficult terrain, such as hills and swamps, makes them less accessible to slave raiders, tax collectors, or press gangs (or draft boards, “revenuers,” or drug agents). Their ways of life are adaptations to living near, and attempting to escape from, predation and violence. Those adaptations have made them harder to rule.
Once you understand Scott’s point, you can’t see such people the same way again. They are not a museum of ancient life. They are a display of what people will go through to escape being enslaved, robbed, and pressed into war. Their agriculture, social structures, religions, and other features, Scott writes, are “better seen on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation. They are, in other words, political adaptations of nonstate peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening.”
As Scott notes at the outset, the “standard civilizational narrative” leaves out “two capital facts. First…it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages. When these burdens became overwhelming, subjects moved with alacrity to the periphery or to another state.”
Political and military history, with its palace coups, religious conflict and persecution, wars, looting, rapine, and subjugation, produced not only victors but vanquished, some of whom escaped into regions inaccessible to their pursuers. Each successive wave of refugees carried new languages, religions, and other cultural accoutrements with them. Thus, “Much of the periphery of states became a zone of refuge or ‘shatter zone,’ where the human shards of state formation and rivalry accumulated willy nilly, creating regions of bewildering ethnic and linguistic complexity. State expansion and collapse often had a ratchet effect as well, with fleeing subjects driving other peoples ahead of them seeking safety and new territory.” Even the tribal systems of such peoples are, to a significant extent, the creations of the states they are fleeing, who foster them as means of “institutional linkage and control.”
Scott focuses his attention on the region of upland Southeast Asia he calls “Zomia” (from a term for “highlander” in the Tibeto-Burman languages). “Much of the Southeast Asian massif is, in effect, a shatter zone,” he writes. Similar “shatter zones” can be found in the mountains of the Caucasus (the ethnic, linguistic, and religious complexity of the region is staggering, with at least 13 languages spoken in Georgia alone), in the Balkans, in highland West Africa, in highland South America, in the Mekong Delta, in the Don River Basin, and elsewhere—even in Appalachia and the Great Dismal Swamp along the Virginia/North Carolina border.
For millennia, rulers have attempted to eliminate such zones of refuge, sometimes through relatively benign methods, such as road building in highland areas, and sometimes with brutal methods, such as forced relocation, “ethnic cleansing,” or habitat destruction. An example of the latter would be Saddam Hussein’s destruction of the Tigris-Euphrates marshlands, an effort to bring the Marsh Arabs under control following their unsuccessful 1991 uprisings against him.
Scott illustrates the case in great detail, drawing on his remarkable knowledge of Southeast Asia. The early public choice theorist Amilcare Puviani asked what tax collection systems would minimize taxpayer resistance to taxation, a question that led him to the study of “fiscal illusion.” Scott focuses our attention on the geography of predation, asking what conditions “would be most favorable to the state and its ruler” and “what arrangements are most likely to guarantee the ruler a substantial and reliable surplus of manpower and grain at least cost.”
From the perspective of the rulers, but perhaps not of the ruled, wet rice cultivation seems ideal. It requires large concentrations of manpower (i.e., taxpayers and soldiers) and produces a crop that is relatively easy to appropriate and that can be stored to support armies in the field in ways that yams, vegetables, and other foodstuffs cannot. Scott finds a close relationship between states and agriculture, one that helps explain the rise and fall of the region’s various kingdoms, empires, and other state formations.
In addition to discussing the appropriation of agricultural surpluses to sustain the ruling houses and their wars, Scott focuses attention on the appropriation of population itself, noting that “most powerful kingdoms constantly sought to replenish and enlarge their manpower base by forcibly resettling war captives by the tens of thousands and by buying and/or kidnapping slaves.” Successful rulers were preoccupied with keeping subjugated people under the state’s thumb; as Scott notes, the Great Wall of China was built not merely to keep barbarian raiders out but to keep Chinese peasants in.
Having a large supply of manpower was “the only means by which wealth could be securely held.” To keep subjects from escaping, various states established means of tattooing, branding, and otherwise designating the human population as chattel. In Freedom and Domination, his great libertarian work of sociology, Alexander Rüstow notes that some early rulers, typically nomadic pastoralists who had conquered farmers, insisted that their subjects approach them on all fours, with tufts of grass in their mouths, to underscore their chattel status.
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Go back to Somalia libertards!
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"There once was a man from Nantucket with a dick so..." you know the rest but you Tony would change it to "small he couldn't suck it".
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This sounds like a fascinating book. Thanks for publishing this review.
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Whose leg do you have to hump to get a book reviewed around here?
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Mine.
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Bummer. You don't have any legs. How 'bout I hump the leg of the chick in the metal bikini?
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It was this history of freedom that attracted me to live in that area for four years. Indeed, my wife is actually of Nyaw heritage herself. Unfortunately, the hill tribes are now falling under ideological conquest by Baptist missionaries.
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what's their tax rate?
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I can only speak for those who live on the Thai side of the border, but it's exactly zero percent.
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Damned Baptists and their regulatory regimes.
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Baptists? 10%, of course.
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Shorter James C. Scott: Shut the fuck up, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
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Jersey FTW!
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" For example, he shows a new way to understand the dispersal of ethnic groups: horizontally. Merely looking down on a two-dimensional ethnographic map shows what appear to be random scatterings, but by looking at the topography horizontally..."
Vertically?
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I'm sure the book is fascinating if you're into that sort of thing, but what is the point of putting it in Reason...should we all move to upland Southeast Asia and become farmers? Is Tom Palmer going to?
What with no taxes and no government, is their standard of living higher than ours? Is their per-capita GNP off the charts? Is it filled with John Galts?
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It makes perfect sense for Reason to feature this book review. Did you read the article in its entirety? Their is a definitive emphasis placed on the importance of this work as a catalyst for thought. We have real world examples that may inspire different models of wealth creation and human interaction.
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Right...what I am asking is, IS this a model of wealth creation?
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Ummm...ever hear of a little thing called the "Golden Triangle"? Just what is it that you think this farmers are farming?
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Interesting.
The commentary on the geography of predation is almost identical to John Keegan's take in The History of Warfare about the preconditions for the emergence of war as a human activity. In a nutshell, population density and transportable economic surplus.
Of course, these are also the preconditions for civilization.
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Interesting.
The commentary on the geography of predation is almost identical to John Keegan's take in The History of Warfare about the preconditions for the emergence of war as a human activity. In a nutshell, population density and transportable economic surplus.
Of course, these are also the preconditions for civilization.
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Interesting point! We might compare it to the preconditions for parasitism. You need a living organism for parasites to thrive, but it doesn't follow that the parasites are the cost of the organism's existence.
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for "cost" read "cause".... jetlag!
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By no means is a lack of government a good thing. To paraphrase Thomas Paince, government is a necessary evil. However, what our country is doing (Nation building) is a dead-end. It ended many civilizations before us so I don't see why it would give us a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Further more, all our defense spending does is grow the military industrial complex! But no one ever stops to think about how that could blow up in our faces! Why not ask questions, like what are the goals of such massive militarism? Why do we need to spend 9 times more than even China spends on defense, and more than the next cluster of military powers combined?
During Hurricane Katrina, I found the events that transpired to be horrifying; troops going door-to-door confiscating weapons. What would happen during a national emergency? Or if we one day decided our government needed to be overthrown? We'd be squelched by the might of our military! They have devices that can kill standing armies with the click of a button; no troops needed.
So we must put an end to military funding of this magnitude! Check out this article called, "The Military Dictatorial Complex." It presents a scary scenario, but I share the writer's fear of what could be to come:
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I don't think it's possible to emphasize enough how important this sort of analysis is. To a great extent, America was founded by those escaping tyranny by putting geographic barriers between it and themselves - oceans, mountains, rivers, and sheer long distances.
Tom: Are you also familiar with Robert Carneiro's "circumscription" theory of state-formation? If not, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carneiro's_Circumscription_Theory
One way of putting it is that the history of civilizations is largely the history of river valleys and flood plains, because they made for easy crop irrigation and transportation.
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Tim,
I am aware of it. It's one of many interesting theories. I also like the works of Alexander Ruestow, Gianfranco Poggi, Franz Oppenheimer, John Kautsky, and others. Scott's book is a very important extension of their insights, with lots of his own. It's an impressive work.
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Moved from central Phoenix up to NW Montana. It's not so bad living out here among the fringes, a lot of these mountain people are very libertarian. They certainly like making their own rules. The county I'm living in eliminated the two party strangle hold by eliminating parties in primaries, as a result we have a number of libertarian candidates competing for various offices. A good thing in my opinion.
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It sounds like a compelling book.
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"How to be Free in an Unfree World" by Harry Browne is an informative primer on how to deal with this issue.
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"They live not in
cities or nations
but in bands, clans,
and tribes.""The periphery find
ways to escape the
predatory state.""Those who evade taxes
are evading civilization
and all that it entails."Hmmmm...sounds like New
Hampshire... -
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