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The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

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Description

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose writer evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. A number of the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that toughen mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a in large part oral culture that permits them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.

In accessible language, James Scott, recognized all over the world as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey on the lookout for self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the point of view of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new point of view requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to consider area studies as a way to be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

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