Welcome to Zomia, the Anarchist Country You've Never Heard Of
I want to introduce you to Zomia. Zomia is the 8th largest country in the world by area, spanning over 2.5 billion square kilometers. It hosts a vibrant and diverse population of over 130 million people, comparable in size to the likes of Japan and Mexico. Zomia also boasts some of the planet’s most stunning nature and scenery, such as dense rainforests teeming with wildlife and cloud-puncturing, snow-covered mountain peaks.
Yet despite its formidable size and population, you won't be able to find Zomia on any contemporary world map. Or any historic one, for that matter. The reason why Zomia doesn't exist on any map and why you haven't heard of it is because Zomia never wanted to be known by you. In fact, the people of Zomia, at heart anarchists, spent their lives rejecting the idea of being citizens and protecting their status of statelessness. Zomia, then, is a ‘non-state’ space, representing the very opposite of what we think a state should be. Let me explain.
Zomia's history starts in 1997 when anthropologist Jean Michaud finds a new angle to approach the extremely diverse Southeast Asian region. Academics struggled up till then to find the right toolkit that could be applied to a region bursting with unique cultures and peoples. With hundreds if not thousands of different languages, dozens of different religions, an extensive range of social structures and customs, Southeast Asia is an anthropologist's wet dream, rivaled only by the rich diversity found in Papua New Guinea.
But Michaud realizes that despite its overwhelming diversity, a dividing line can be discerned between those living in the 'highlands’ and those living in low-lying, flat areas.
By looking at the various diverse human societies that populated the lands above approximately 300 meters in the southeastern portion of the Asian landmass, Michaud finds shared commonalities across a huge geographical region that extends beyond the conventional mainland Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) and includes parts of Myanmar, China, Bangladesh, India, and even Taiwan. Those commonalities include a sense of marginalization, lack of state-subordination, and a vast ecosystem. Michaud terms his geographical research tool the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’.
Despite its value for researchers in providing new ways to study this area and its manifold cultures, the term Southeast Asian Massif itself lacks a certain appeal. That's why researcher Willem van Schendel proposes in 2002 the term Zomia, derived from Zomi. Zomi is a common word in many Tibeto-Burman languages for highlander and used in several countries which form part of the Southeast Asian Massif. ‘Zomia’ thus captures both the diversity of this vast region overlapping 10 different countries and its key characteristic of high altitude peoples.
Though the Southeast Asian Massif and Zomia inspire some academics, it is not until 2009 that the debate on Zomia and its communities really takes off. The well-respected anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott argues in his The Art of Not Being Governed that the Zomians represent one of several examples of anarchic peoples worldwide that have deluded our nation-state imbued focus and perspective. Peoples who have been misrepresented as uncivilized barbarians.
Zomia is not just known for its diversity, he argues, but represents an active historical attempt from its communities to resist the influence from and attempts at their subordination by state actors.
Zomia is the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states. Its days are numbered. Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind.
The portrayal of these types of people as ‘barbaric’ by civilizations throughout the ages, most notably the Chinese and Roman empires, was in fact nothing less than an attempt to convince their citizens of the supremacy of the state and the social contract it enforces upon its dominions. The very existence of free-living people that didn't pay taxes posed a direct threat to the state's supremacy over its citizens. By raising the flag of civilization and warning against the threat of barbarism, the state heralded its own achievements and derided those who failed to develop likewise.
My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive.” On close inspection those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. […] Ethnicity and “tribe” begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end — in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese.
In the case of Zomia in particular, the low-lying valley states circumvented their failure to include the various hill peoples into their state-making process by referring to them as the ancestors that have failed or were unwilling to embrace the advantages offered by modernism and development. As Scott says:
They are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism, and civilization.”
But this view is incorrect, Scott maintains.
On the contrary, I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.
Scott's argument is a provocative one. He makes the case that the peoples populating Zomia have been, throughout the past millennia, actively eschewing the reach of the state, opting for freedom over any form of submission by the low-lying valley kingdoms. Zomia is made. It doesn't exist out of passivity, nor is it a collection of “archaic remnants”.
The Zomians made the decision to stay out of the states and civilizations surrounding them in order to remain free. They weren't left behind passively by the state-making process, nor failed to develop out of a lack of capacity. Zomia was created by those who preferred freedom over the material or cultural advantages that states and ‘civilizations’ might have had to offer. It was an anarchist refuge for those who didn't want to pay taxes, or adopt a new religion, or get rid of their own customs. They weren't just eluding the state, but actively repelled it.
The constitution of Zomia is far from a political one, however, in so far as the word ‘political’ doesn’t encompass a geographical area marked by a state of relative anarchy.
Zomia is […] knitted together as a region not by a political unity, which it utterly lacks, but by comparable patterns of diverse hill agriculture, dispersal and mobility, and rough egalitarianism, which, not incidentally, includes a relatively higher status for women than in the valleys.
In their desire for freedom, the Zomians were primarily successful by the limitations their natural surroundings placed on the state-making, nation-building process. The mountainous and rugged terrain, thick jungle, and thinly populated landscape made it difficult for states to reach the Zomians, let alone submit them to their state apparatus.
This changed, according to Scott, in the 20th century, and in particular after World War II.
Since 1945, and in some cases before then, the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies — railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology — […] changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states, [… diminishing] the friction of terrain.
While parts of Zomia are still relatively untouched by or actively fighting against state encroachment, many Zomian peoples have seen their lives changed significantly in the past decades. Under the guise of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’, contemporary terms for ‘civilizing’ and ‘enlightening’ the barbarians, the state has finally succeeded in turning the peoples on the fringes of its borders into tax-paying citizens.
Zomia, then, has more or less ceased to exist as a non-state space. But the discovery of its past existence as an anarchist stronghold provides a powerful counternarrative to our prevailing (historical) conception of civilization and states.
We commonly approach our histories from written records and the uncovering of impressive archeological sites. Civilizational myths have been spun to make us believe we're part of something bigger and better. We would be 'developing’ and ‘evolving’ along with the state's growing encroachment of public and private life. Civilization is good, representing the progress of humanity, and uncivilized people are bad. Those who lived outside of civilization have been derided for their ostracization throughout the past millennia.
Because of this Other, ‘civilized’ people were able to (mostly) accept the demands states put on them. As in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, however, the picture painted of these barbarians was mostly an artificial one. And the threat they posed was not necessarily one of violence, but an ideological one. We dehumanized the barbarians in order to humanize ourselves. Our reality of civilization couldn't exist without the creation of this fictional reality that explained why we decided to be part of this certain group of people, submitting ourselves to laws and bureaucrats.
Zomia, then, shows how the myths and juxtapositions of order vs. chaos, civilized vs. barbaric served to accept the world we have created around us. Although the ‘country’ of Zomia may be lost to us, its lesson of always seeing humanity in others remains.
