Scott’s expertise is the history of the people living in the hills of Southeast Asia. This people have been in contact with the largest state-building project in history (China) for thousands of years. They have arranged their societies to be anti-legible: to make it as hard as possible for the state or any large institution to establish itself.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with James C. Scott’s ideas. If you are unfamiliar with them, see my review of Seeing Like A State.
The key idea in Scott’s work is legibility. Organically grown human societies are enormously complex. There are many local variations, grown from the preferences of many individuals. Although this makes sense to the people who live in the society, it does not to outsiders. Large institutions, especially the state (meaning government – not the US meaning), cannot function in this environment. In order to do anything, they first have to make society legible to a central administrator. So they bulldoze the organically grown society. Many aspects of our lives were created by the state forcibly replacing the organic society with something more amenable to the state – cities planned on a grid, monoculture agriculture, unambiguous property rights, standardized measurement systems, national languages with dictionaries & grammar rules, and even unique unchanging names. But, in order for the state to thrive, the individuals also have to thrive. When administrators push to “rationalize” society too much or too quickly, the results are catastrophic.
Originally Written: August 2020.
Confidence Level: Not my ideas.
The Art of Not Being Governed is Scott’s discussion of the area of the world where he has the most expertise: peoples living above 300m (about 1000ft) in mainland Southeast Asia, southern China, and northeastern India.
Two features of the hills of Southeast Asia are immediately obvious:
- It has extremely difficult terrain: steep mountains and dense forest.
- It has incredible cultural and linguistic diversity. Even a map like this one underestimates the complexity because many villages (and people) are multilingual.
The history of the region is typically told from the perspective of the civilized valley states, which have wet rice agriculture (padi/paddy), hierarchical social structure, a literate elite, and orthodox religion. The uncivilized hill people, who have transient agriculture (swidden/slash-and-burn) or foraging, sometimes egalitarian social structure, no writing, and heretical charismatic religion, are seen as a relic of a more primitive time that is slowly fading away as the people learn the benefits of civilization.
This perspective is wrong. The hill peoples are not primitives who aren’t yet civilized. Most of the peoples in the hills previously lived in the valleys and moved to the hills fleeing state violence. They have been in cultural and economic contact with the valleys for thousands of years. If these peoples aren’t civilized, it’s because they actively chose not to be, not because they never learned.
The hills of Southeast Asia should instead be thought of as a shatter zone. The incredible linguistic diversity is the result of wave after wave of peoples fleeing state violence. They mostly came from what is now southern China, but also from the padi states of Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma. During good times, some people would be drawn from the hills to join the valley people (physically, linguistically, culturally, even ethnically). But that state can be incredibly violent: high taxes, corvée labor, epidemics (from concentrated population), slave raiding, civil war, large armies that live off the land, etc. During most of Southeast Asia’s history, more people choose to move to the hills than to move to the valleys. States would often collapse when poor governance led to most of the population running away. Even the states that did survive waged frequent wars with the intent to capture slaves to work the wet rice fields (until they ran away).
Other shatter zones exist. They tend to be mountains, dense forests, or swamps at the margins of major states which have incredible cultural diversity.
The central mountains of India, Afghanistan, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Balkans are all clear examples. Switzerland and the Low Countries might be shatter zones, although most people in Western Europe fleeing the state have moved to colonies for the last 500 years. How many of the native societies in the Americas were original vs. post-epidemic shatter zones is widely debated. The Seminole in the Everglades and the runaway slave colony in the Great Dismal Swamp are more recent American examples. I don’t know enough about African history to give examples there.
Nomadic societies, whether on horseback or in boats, share many features with shatter zones. They incorporate a wide variety of people fleeing states, but tend to form larger, shifting confederations instead of many small, diverse communities.
Although these societies may look primitive for the perspective of civilized people, they postdate states. Steppe nomads require domesticated horses and swiddening in hardwood forests requires iron axes, both of which were developed after the first states.
Several aspects of the cultures of the hills of Southeast Asia are particularly illustrative: farming practices, political/social structures, ethnicity, writing, and religion.
Farming
In Southeast Asia, the factor limiting food production was labor, not land. This has only started to change in the last few decades. This explains why it was so easy to run to the hills and why collecting (often forced) labor was so important to states.
Individuals care about efficiency per hour worked. States care about efficiency per land area.
Efficiency per land doesn’t matter for the people who live among the fields. It matters for people who try to tax food and gather it to the capital. Before the introduction of railroads and motorized vehicles, moving food overland was prohibitively difficult. Armies had to march immediately after the harvest or they wouldn’t be able to provide for themselves.
Wet rice is the perfect crop for the state. Not only is it extremely high density, it also is extremely legible. The rice is all planted and harvested at the same time, so it is easy to assess and later collect the appropriate taxes for each padi. Although wet rice is easiest to grow in flat, wet valleys, with enough labor, the hillsides can be carved into terraces and filled with stream water. Wet rice is almost always found in states or among peoples who aspire to form states.
Subsistence in the hills is much more varied. Some people practice fixed field agriculture. Some people practice transient swidden agriculture. Some people are foragers in the forest. People switch between these practices, or use a combination of them.
Many of the crops grown are from the New World – especially potatoes, maize, and cassava. These not only do better at higher altitudes than most Old World crops, they are also much less legible than rice. Root crops, in particular, can be left in the ground instead of harvesting them all at once and placing them in a storehouse. This makes it much harder to collect taxes – or for raiders to steal your food. Crops that require little care can even be abandoned if you have to go hide in the forest, and still have food when you get back.
What crops are planted and what farming or foraging practices are used allow people to determine how legible their food source is. If the nearby states are attractive, they might switch to more settled agriculture, or even move into the padi core. If the nearby states are dangerous, they might abandon all farming except for a few hidden fields of potatoes and cassava and get most of their food from foraging.
Regardless of their agricultural choice, hill people remained connected to the valleys through direct or indirect trade. The hill people needed iron tools from the valley forges. Much of the wealth of the valley states came from international trade in luxury goods that could only be found in the hills.
Political Structure
States are inherently hierarchical. There is a central authority which monopolizes force to impose its will. This is especially true in the Indian tradition of Theravada Buddhism, with an ideal universal ruler in the center of the wheel, and in the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, with its emphasis on proper action in hierarchical relationships. Liberal democratic government was unknown.
States prefer to interact with other hierarchical organizations. If a tribe has a single chief, then it is clear who the state should negotiate with. If there is no hierarchy, then there’s no one with the authority to sign a treaty detailing their relationship to the state. Egalitarian social structures not only prevent the emergence of a state within your own society, they also make it more difficult for neighboring states to exert their influence.
States, both traditional and colonial, actively encouraged the peoples surrounding them to organize into tribes with an unambiguous chief. Some peoples did, becoming miniature kingdoms in the hills. Each one would be allied with one of the neighboring valley states. Without the economic concentration of padi agriculture, political concentration is difficult to maintain without outside support. Others actively resisted this and maintained traditions of killing anyone who aspired to become chief.
In the absence of a political hierarchy, social status was often determined by competitive feasting. Whenever someone had an excess of food (from a successful hunt, a bountiful harvest, new trade goods, etc), they would invite everyone in the village to a feast. A grand feast would be remembered, and increase your social standing in the group. These feasts had the effect of exchanging unequal material wealth for social status. A sure sign of increasing hierarchy is when someone tries to restrict the right to hold feasts to only some members of the group.
Much like their agricultural practices, hill peoples could choose their social organization based on how much state influence they wanted.
Ethnicity
One of the goals of colonial governments in Southeast Asia was to take a census of the hill peoples and categorize them based on their ethnicity. This proved to be completely impossible.
Ethnic groups are supposed to be (mostly) genetically and culturally distinct groups. Even if the peoples do not stay as distinct as they ought to be, when there is cultural variation, you’d think that you could find some way to categorize them.
There are various ways to distinguish between ethnicities, for example by dress or food or language. Even if you do choose how to divide up the different styles of dress, these lines do not follow the divisions in food, or language.
But this is not the biggest problem for the census taker. Most people in the hills are multilingual. And not only can they speak multiple languages, they know how to function in multiple different cultures.
The individual people have command of multiple cultural repertoires that they can use in different contexts. These contexts might be for a short time scale, like who I’m talking to or what sort of event is happening, or they can be for a long time scale, like whether I’m going to spend the next few years swiddening in the mountains or farming rice in a valley state.
This completely undermines what we typically mean by ethnicity. Ethnicity is something you are born into. It is not something that you can change whenever you feel like it.
Although these behaviors make sense to the people doing them, they are extremely confusing to the census taker. How do you categorize someone with this cultural flexibility? The resulting surveys are comical: small villages which contain almost as many ethnic groups living side-by-side and interacting daily as they have households; entire societies that vanish and later reappear without any loss of life; and, of course, the people who purposely make life more difficult for the census takers, because they realize that the goal is to make it possible for the state to exert its power over you.
Writing
This chapter of Scott’s book is more speculative, and relies on local legends and personal speculation more than lived experience. But his ideas are interesting, even if they are not true in a particular situation.
The valley states see the hill peoples as pre-literate. They have not yet learned to write. The legends of the hill peoples typically describe themselves as post-literate. They used to know how to write, but lost it due to treachery, trickery, or neglect, typically involving a dramatic story with supernatural elements.
Writing, and history in general, were also ways to control how legible your society is. Even in the most civilized pre-modern states, literacy was exclusive to the elite. Writing helped to create and maintain a hierarchy.
Writing also institutionalizes society in another way. A written text provides a long-lasting source of authority to check claims against. You cannot reinvent your history if there is a text to check it against. Whoever controls the text has epistemological influence over society. Losing the texts, whether because they were eaten by pigs, or because a trickster stole them, or because a neighboring king took them and executed every literate person in the tribe, makes the society more egalitarian.
Even in the absence of writing, some hill peoples maintained extensive oral traditions. These could be long and detailed: the story of a murder that sounds like a police investigation or genealogies going back 10 generations. This provided an alternate form of maintaining history.
Other peoples kept no history at all. They kept no stories of great deeds (unless it involved murdering an aspiring chief). They refused to remember genealogies back beyond the people they knew personally. They even would not think of themselves as a people – the names we use to refer to them are entirely given by outsiders.
Illiteracy is one of the main things that the valley states use to stigmatize the hill peoples. Many of the hill peoples agree and see it as a source of shame. It can also be seen as another source of illegibility. People without history are as flexible as possible. They can change subsistence practices, alliances, and even their ethnicity more easily than people who are constrained by an existing text.
Religion
The padi states tend to practice an orthodox version of one of the major world religions. Which religion varies between states: Confucianism in Vietnam, Hinduism and then Theravada Buddhism in most of the region, Islam in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Catholicism in the Philippines. Regardless of which religion is practiced, it is always an orthodox version. The religion is a hierarchical institution with written commandments and an exclusive class of priests/scholars. A foreign source for the religion also helps to invoke the legitimacy found in better established states.
The religions of the hills tend to be different from the neighboring padi states. Animism and Buddhism are common in the hills throughout the region, along with Hinduism in the hills of Indonesia and Islam in the southern Philippines. Christianity has also become a hill religion.
The religions in the hills are never orthodox. They blend multiple religious traditions and local folklore. There is rarely any established hierarchy. Buddhist monks in the hills tend to be self-appointed hermits, rather than members of a monastic order.
Hill religions also have strong messianic / prophetic tendencies. Belief in a future messiah is common among peoples who have been marginalized, oppressed, and driven from place to place. Prophets, who gain followers by their personal charisma, provide a way to organize people who were notoriously opposed to institutions. These prophets might trigger revolutions (appealing to both hill people and the poor in the valleys), lead groups to settle new territory, promote new customs, and establish new legends that would be incorporated in all later religions. Following a new prophet allows for the immediate creation of a new culture and society in response to the immediate circumstances.
Christian missionaries found particular success in the hills. Scott discusses several possible reasons why. Christianity is a messianic tradition. Looking forward to the Second Coming of Christ resonates with previous traditions of a future ideal king. The most successful missionaries in the hills were typically Baptists, who promote local autonomy over institutional authority. Not only is this consistent with the illegibility of the hills, it also makes it easier for individual churches to incorporate earlier traditions. Christianity allows the hill people an alternative route to modernity, escaping the stigma from the valleys, without becoming subject to the padi states. In particular, missionaries would bring or create alphabets, bringing literacy to a people (not just an elite) who had previously lost their letters.
This got me thinking about the relationship between various religions and how widespread literacy is. In particular, Abrahamic religions tend to promote mass literacy. The Torah commands the Levites to read the entire law to the people every 7 years [Deut 31:9-13] and encourages at least a little interaction with text among all the people [Deut 6:6-9]. This has developed into the frequent practice of Torah reading (in Hebrew), which continues in modern Judaism. Having the people read the scriptures continues to be a theme in the New Testament – which encourages mass literacy [Luke 24:35, Romans 15:4, repeatedly in the letters to Timothy]. Medieval Catholic use of the Latin, instead of vernacular, Bible is a deviation from this pattern which has been corrected. The Book of Mormon is even more explicit: a prophet tells poor people who have been kicked out of their congregation to search the scriptures themselves [Alma 33:2]. In Islam, Mohammad’s first revelation involves Gabriel berating him for not knowing how to read [Quran 96].
I don’t know enough about the history of other religions to be able to look at their relationship to mass literacy. I would suspect that at least some of them traditionally encourage literacy for the elites, like the Hindu brahmin or the Confucian scholars or the Roman augurs, and discourage literacy for everyone else. This would fit with the trend Scott describes of institutional religions being used to protect the status of the elites relative to the commoners. To be clear, I don’t know about these particular examples. If anyone is familiar enough with pre-modern non-Abrahamic religious practices to comment on this, I would love to hear it.
If my suspicion were true, then we would expect pre-modern societies with Abrahamic religions to have significantly higher literacy rates than other pre-modern societies. Scott unknowingly provides evidence for this claim by saying that the places with the highest literacy in pre-colonial Southeast Asia were Indonesia and the southern Philippines, which were the areas where Islam was established. It would be interesting if mass literacy, one of the hallmarks of modernity, actual dates back to the Torah.
Two other quotes from this chapter, in particular, stood out to me:
It was the good fortune of the Baptist missionaries to have brought the Bible to a people who had long believed in messiahs. It was their mistake to imagine that the Baptist messiah was the last messiah the Karens, in their impatience, would be needing.
[p. 286]
The frequency of Lahu prophetic movements allows us to identify something of a ‘career trajectory’, even for an activity so decidedly unroutine as becoming a god-man.
[p. 291]
Southeast Asia is rugged terrain next to the oldest and largest state building project: China. As the Han Chinese expanded southwards from the North China Plain, wave after wave of ethnic groups, failed rebels, and oppressed farmers fled from the padi state to the hills, despite the efforts of the state to contain them. Smaller, closer padi states, like Vietnam, Thailand, and Burma, also contributed. These refugees created a human landscape of remarkable linguistic and cultural diversity. It has only been recently that modern transportation and communication technology has allowed the state to extend its influence into these regions, and that is still very limited in some areas.
While most aspects of life in the padi state are designed (by the state) to be as legible as possible to a central administrator, life high in the hills tends to be as illegible as possible, with a continuum of options in between. People can choose between the wet rice of the padi state, dry fixed field agriculture, transient swiddening agriculture, and foraging in the forest. People can choose hierarchical, inherited social structures or more egalitarian systems where social status is based on competitive feasting. People can choose from or mix multiple world religions and local traditions. All of these choices can be made either as a group or individually. Most individuals are multilingual and can function equally well in multiple cultures. They can easily choose which hill society they want to live in, or whether to move to a valley state, changing their ethnicity at will.
The societies of the hills are not primitive. They were created by intentional choices of people who were familiar with and rejected the state.