The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

There can surely have been few other books in Asian Studies and certainly not in South East Asian Studies in recent years that have been as widely anticipated as James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009). The Art of Not Being Governed does not come out of a clear blue sky but represents an extension and adaptation of many ideas with which Scott has worked over the years. Many people first gained some familiarity with the theory underlying this new work through the seminars and keynote lectures Scott gave at intervals over an extended period at elite centres of learning worldwide, often under the rubric ‘Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills’. Although Scott is a political scientist and anthropologist, readers of Reviews in History may well be familiar with one or all of his now classic works The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcript of Subordinate Groups (1990) and Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998). Blending the anthropological with the meta-vision of the political scientist has been a distinctive element of Scott’s style and of the interpretative frameworks he likes to build, with the micro-details of particular spaces and times being used to feed into grand schemes of explanation. In this respect, his latest work does not disappoint, although he states that with The Art of Not Being Governed he finds himself now also becoming something of an historian.Where previously Scott’s concern was to show the commonalities between peasant societies worldwide, The Art of Not Being Governed extends this interconnection to swidden agriculture. In this new book, settled, lowland peasant societies and mobile swidden agriculturalists are to be considered part of the same cyclical econoscape of interaction, with ‘the state’ as the defining impetus for the development of both ‘systems’. In discussing the details of settled and swidden agriculture Scott can also lay claim to authority derived from his work as Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale, and a life-long interest in the development of new understandings of marginal and ‘illegible’ spaces of economic and political life, particularly in non-urban environments. One of the skills demonstrated in this present book is the bringing together in a focused way of a disparate range of technical information about crops, about transportation and so on, and then relating these to an environmental context in a way that is simply unavailable, and largely unimaginable, anywhere else. These early chapters are lively, provocative and informative. Setting aside the issue of whether or not one agrees with the conclusions, Scott raises the bar in this book for thinking about the highland-lowland binary, which has been so entrenched in the literature on Southeast Asian history. His work ultimately reinforces the binary, rather than challenges it, but what it does achieve is the ‘paradigm shifting’ effect that is acknowledged on the book jacket: now the book has been published, it will be impossible to discuss the uplands of Southeast Asia in the same way again, and some who had never discussed them before will be discussing them for the first time. Many of us who have been working in this field for many years can feel some sense of satisfaction that our rather eclectic range of interests and obscure points of reference are gaining institutional authentication. So, in some ways and for some of us, this shift in focus could be a very good thing, and for academia in general it is good that such books can still be written and that they can provoke a wide debate, especially where that debate centres upon understandings of the relatively unloved subjects of classical, early modern and pre-colonial non-European societies, allowing these subjects to take centre-stage in discussions on global history.Yet Scott has also long been a controversial figure who is undoubtedly guilty of the sin of over-generalization. Clearly he is not shying away from controversy with this book, and it too is over-generalized. So, beyond the clear contribution that this work makes to revivifying a moribund debate, or developing a new one, there are some limitations as to how we might conceive of this work as ‘A History’. One might wish to see it as a history in the experimentalist vein, in which all historical writing is recognised as being fundamentally fictive, but there is nothing in Scott’s work to suggest he might be engaging with any particular theoretical strand of historical writing. The grandeur of the longue durée or the differentiated temporal spheres of Braudel should not be compared with Scott’s vision; nor should the work of Ladurie, who sought also to explain mountain-scape histories. These historians fundamentally worked in innovative ways with conventional historical sources and these sources did a huge amount of the intellectual work in locating these environments within a grand schema. Scott’s work is built up almost entirely from secondary sources, almost entirely in English. The influences he cites are not historical at all but figures from anthropology and political science such as Pierre Clastres, who developed a theory of stateless societies and resistance to states that, like Scott, involves an underplaying of economics in favour of millenarian prophets, and an anarcho-primitivist perspective on the removal of the political constraints of ‘civilisation’.Most telling, however, is the debt of gratitude he declares for the work of Edmund Leach, most especially his Political Systems of Highland Burma (1), of which Scott states in his preface that ‘There are few books that are “so good to think with.”‘ It seems clear throughout The Art of Not Being Governed that this, too, is what Scott is aspiring to. However, Leach was an anthropologist who was ‘frequently bored by the facts’ and unashamed in his statement that Chapter VIII of Political Systems, titled ‘The Evidence from Kachin History’, was at best ‘in some ways a complete waste of time’ and could be omitted by the reader. Scott’s liberal referencing of Political Systems of Highland Burma places Leach’s often contentious interpretations of data to the fore as a critical point of support for his own arguments, especially Leach’s interpretation of the term gumlao as an example par excellence of strategies of state resistance. Yet, even Leach himself acknowledged that he had essentialized terms such as this and that they had a historical modality with evolutions of meaning in different contexts over time. Gumlao was not part of a binary of oppositional choices; even where there might for a time be no ‘chief’ as a result of violent overthrow, a functioning kinship system was always maintained through which socio-economic relations and socio-ritual hierarchies were configured, and such characteristics limit the internal traction and relevance of terms such as ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘anarchism’ as applied from outside models. The term gumlao that Leach identified in his reading of 19th-century sources was a product of the extremely volatile situation in regions to the north of the kingdom of Burma, produced by the extension of British power to the west and south and the Taiping and Panthay rebellions to the east; it reflected attempts by all groups caught up in this chaotic time to position themselves favourably in relation to multiple ‘states’ in a complex understanding of regional geo-politics, as much as it was to resist them. Leach’s relational dynamic between ‘the Kachin’ and ‘the Shan’, which Scott also references extensively, was likewise focused towards a narrow interaction of particular, essentialized communities and not towards the complex multi-valent relationships of ‘Kachin’ (and ‘Shan’) communities across a range of dialect and culture groups, with multiple nodes of social, cultural, economic and political orientation spreading lattice-like across what is today northeast India, Tibet, Burma, Yunnan and northern Thailand. This kind of binary obviously becomes critical if one concentrates attention on places where the Kachin-Shan dynamic exists, just as the state-anti-state binary becomes critical if concentrating on the points at which the state cannot assert its rights to hegemony; it is less powerful as an explanatory tool when looking at the modes of interaction between Kachin sub-groups not determined by their relation with ‘Shan’, or when trying to understand the internal dynamics of supposedly ‘non-state’ societies with each other. With Leach, there was undoubtedly a shaping of evidence to fit a theory, and in creating a book with which to think, evidence and theory may be uncomfortable bedfellows.Certain concepts that have long been associated with Scott, such as ‘arts of resistance’ and ‘non-state space’, continue to do a lot of the operational work in this new book. These terms, and the ideas underpinning them, have often been the subject of criticism and non-state space is in particular a phrase that is used widely but rarely receives proper critical definition. Early on in the text, while one may be drawn into the argument by admiration of Scott’s intellectual fluidity and verve, terms like ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ seem to be bounced around across this historical and geographical (global) landscape in a rather disconcerting fashion for an historian. Scott utilises the term non-state space a priori in this current work: non-state spaces exist and therefore we have to explain (now historically) how they came into being. The orientation is, however, from the state outwards rather than taking the spaces that historically have straddled, interconnected, ignored, influenced, utilised and resisted the various states with which they are in contact on their own terms, and as a starting point. Neither state nor non-state are historically unchanging concepts, nor might they be considered environmentally produced oppositional norms, particularly in relation to flows of economic interaction locally, regionally and globally. The nature of ‘the State’ in classical, early modern and colonial contexts varied massively, as do the historical meanings and relevance of the term in China, in Yunnan, in Tibet, in the Princely States in Northeast India and in the state of India, in what was to become Laos and Thailand, in Vietnam, in Islamic polities; but none of this political, economic, societal or cultural variety is brought to the fore by Scott. The State remains a largely undefined term in this book. Although clearly the early polities and classical states of Southeast Asia are very different to colonial states, we are told that the only historical period we should discount from the model he proposes is the period after the Second World War because of the intensification of the process of state enclosure. But why, then, discount this from the frame of reference? The dangers in this approach can already be seen as I have recently read an abstract from one academic working on border issues relating to Burma where they state that they are relieved that through Scott’s work that the imperative to give time depth to understanding the rationale of state action against minority ethnic nationalities has been removed; the state can be seen always to act in the same way.Thank you !!!

This extremely informative book opened my eyes to the true nature of so-called "barbarians" and civilization. The cover design is god-awful but the content is excellent. For those who like to consider ideas that challenge mainstream history and theories around it. The book focuses on Asian geographical areas, but the concepts apply to the history of civilization building the world over.

... and the recipient was happy. Maybe later I will read it myself. An ebook would be a nice thing.

James Scott is well-known among cultural anthropologists for this and other works which challenge some long-held assumptions and axioms about traditional social structures in pre-developed regions of the world. This book, however, is also very important for general readers of history and culture and a nonacademic audience.I leaned decades ago the general belief that minority and subordinate cultural groups surrounding or adjacent to dominant groups quite likely were driven to less-desirable and remote habitations in competition for land and resources. Scott illustrates convincingly that, in many cases, the dominant groups wanted those subordinate peoples close by to exploit them for labor, crops, taxes, and military recruitment, but that those groups commonly migrated away to avoid those same costs. In doing so, they purposely backtracked in what we would normally think of as normal cultural and technological evolution to more primitive standards, such as by going from settled farming and animal husbandry to swidden agriculture and foraging and hunting. In some cases, they even gave up literacy as less useful and less sustainable in their new lifestyles. While the dominant culture and its governors might have promised some stability and even military protection from bandits and raiders, the minority populations might have thought that, in balance, it was not a good deal.Ground-breaking and fascinating. Scott's book is based on his long researches in Southeast Asia, but his conclusions are applicable all over the world.

Es un libro excelente, el autor demuestra de forma increíble como los pueblos sin estado no son necesariamente más atrasados, ya que en muchos casos ven que el estado es algo que no quieren y deciden huir de el, por lo que son pueblos "contra" estado. Además resulta interesantísimo para el lector occidental ya que habla de la historia de Asia (desconocida para mucha gente) y desde el punto de vista de los " bárbaros", no de los reyes. Aunque sea una lástima que esté en inglés es de lenguaje fácil y nada complejo. Con tener un poco de idea y google para algunas palabras se entiende genial. Absolutamente recomendable.