Stateless
Peoples and Anarchism :
Indigenous Peoples and the Invasiveness of Nation-States
James
Scott’s thesis “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist history of Upland
Southeast Asia” takes us through a convincing yet complex phenomenon of the
invasiveness of empires, kingdoms and subsequently the nation-state as these
entities seek to legitimize their control and presence against the will of
stateless people, indigenous communities as well as those that live in
mountainous or forested regions.
His
book has received international recognition and staged at various platforms at
conferences. His thesis about the repelling nature of the state against what
has been term as “Zomia.” He referenced the works of different scholars in
various field of studies including social anthropologies, ethnographers, etc. Some
of the explicit questions that Scott seems to be answering in his thesis
include how the nation-state continuously seek to use the ordinary people for
its own gain through the process of standardization, legitimatization,
citizenship, taxation, etc. These are paramount issues that Scott addresses in his
thesis.
In
the text and preceding chapters of his book “The Art of Not Being Governed,”
Scott takes us through his analytical framework, which is specifically directed
towards the relationships between various ethnic groups dwelling in hilly and
mountainous regions of the so-called “Zomia.” Geographically, Zomia is known to
be areas situated in rigid mountainous regions of Southeastern Asia. Specifically,
this area includes countries such as Cambodia, Burma, India, Laos, China,
Vietnam, Thailand and parts of Malaysia. His interest of the dense and forested
mountainous region of Southeastern Asia is partly due to the fact that this
region is one of the existing regions on earth that still has primitive and
native groups that have not being subsequently incorporated into the fabrics
and legal frameworks of the nation-state vis-à-vis ‘modernity’ and ‘globalization.’
Comparatively, this is similar to the Amazonian region as well as indigenous
groups in the highlands and lowlands of Papua, Indonesia known as the Memberamo
of the mountainous and forested hills and other part of Indonesia that are
commonly being marginalized. Some of these indigenous include the Memberamo of
western and eastern New Guinea, and the indigenous communities of Lombok.
The
peoples of the highlands of the Zomia have live for about two thousand years
out of the reach of the nation-state. The conventional perception of people
living in highlands is that they are fragments of the pre-state era and as such
they are characterized by primitive form of living. In contrast to this view,
those who migrate into the lowlands systematically become part of the
nation-state system are view as civilized and also regarded literate.
This
is likely the case of most international humanitarian organization as well as
development agencies that penetrate these cultures in the name of their
so-called ‘development apparatus.’ Their view is to exploit these indigenous
communities with their westernized ideological perception of what is right and
what is wrong. It should be explicitly noted that even though Scott’s thesis is
directed to Zomia, most governments, national and transnational development
agencies are guilty of this dilemma; that is, they tend to believe that
indigenous people are helpless, primitive and they are better equip and
educated in assisting them address their problems and this would eventually
lead to modernity, which in turn would eradicate their disease; that is, their “primitiveness.”
Scott
also argues against the perception that natives are primitive leftovers of
modernized societies or as some authors coined as the residues of the pre-state
era of progress. He argues that those indigenous people living outside the
nation-state so deliberately decide as such knowing their rights and
attachments to nature. He also added that the predatory nature of the state;
that is, its progressiveness to gain for its own led to such decisions by those
who so choses to live in the highlands away from the detrimental
progressiveness and invasiveness of the nation-state and its developmental apparatus.
Scott’s
thesis can also be linked to situation in Liberia after the arrival of free
slaves from the Americas in the 1820s. Those free slaves haven been educated
and trained by their slave masters considered themselves “better off” or so to
say “more civilized” when they were settled in what was called the “Green Coast”
amongst the indigenous peoples whom they consider primitive, salvages and
severely illiterate. With their new environment and their learned skills and
knowledge, they subjugated, suppressed and marginalized the indigenous people
of Liberia into slavery and the imposition of their ideologies and thoughts
during the formation of what is now known as “Liberia,” which got its name from
the so-called ‘Liberty.’ The natives were alienated, isolated and their land
were taken from them and formalized by the governmentality of the new system
and held them in atrocious conditions for over 100 years. Local chiefs and
their clans had to leave their existing territories, because the new
governments had to be seated and as such never wanted their support. It took
almost a century before situations gradually changed with a counter social movement
led by the natives.
Scott’s
thesis on “The Art of Not Being Governed” can also be paralleled to his earlier
book “Seeing Like a State” where he argued that the failures of the
nation-state has led to dysfunctional systems in the development discourse
(Scott 1999).
Work
Cited
Scott, James C.
2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
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