Scholars are enchanted by the notion of this anarchistic region in Asia. But how real is it?
The region of Zomia had not been mapped for very long when people started quarreling over it. Political scientists, historians, geographers, anthropologists, and especially Southeast Asianists. Even a few anarchists weighed in.
Much of the most recent debate has been spurred by the Yale University professor of political science and anthropology James C. Scott, who describes the region in his latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
…Zomia does not appear on any official map, for it is merely metaphorical. Scott identifies it as “the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states.”
…Scott’s argument that the purpose of state-making is about control of manpower, and not just territory, is one that will resonate a long while, [Anne L. Clunan, director of the Center on Contemporary Conflict at the Naval Postgraduate School] says in an interview, noting that she is expressing her own views and not those of the U.S. government.
“It is a necessary corrective to the predominantly benign view of state-building,” she says. Scott’s book demonstrates that “the state itself can be harmful and despotic.”
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“It is a necessary corrective to the predominantly benign view of state-building,” she says. Scott’s book demonstrates that “the state itself can be harmful and despotic.”
It’s not really radical to say that the state can be harmful and despotic. That should be apparent to anyone living within the last few thousand years. Once the majority of people start believing that the state is necessarily harmful and despotic is when we know that we’ve gotten somewhere.
Sounds like an interesting book, though, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
Scott has a Marxist bent that bothers me, anyone else notice that?
Haha Clunan thinks that Scott was the first person ever to show how state building is harmful? LMAO
I chuckled, too. But it’s to be expected. The crowd of people in this article (political scientists, historians, anthropologists) are usually hardcore statists that have never heard of anything remotely like what Scott proposes. Of course they consider him wacky.
If they got a hold of other anti-state writers of different bent, like Nozick, Mises or Hayek, they’d probably think the same thing. And if they came across Spooner, Rothbard, Hoppe, or David Friedman, all of it would be rejected outright because the premise is too far out of what they consider “correct.”
Inch by inch. Little by little…
Last December, Edward Stringham authored a post about Riggenbach’s audio review of the book and also linked to his paper, “Repelling States: Evidence from Upland Southeast Asia”.
There’s a very good paper linked to in that article. If anyone ever tells you that traditional societies didn’t have individual property rights and that property cannot exist without a state, refer them to it.
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