Life on the edge: denizens of the periphery find ways to escape the predatory state.

• Author: Palmer, Tom
• Position: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia - Book review

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, tale University Press, 442 pages, $35

IN THE DOMINANT narrative of civilization's march, cultured people are ruled by centralized law-giving institutions (city-states, kingdoms, empires, and now nation-states), usually centered in relatively flat lowlands and sustained by grain agriculture. By contrast, according to this view, people who live in the mountains, in swamps, or in "remote" jungles are rude, primitive, and backward, relying on nomadism, slash-and-burn agriculture, and hunting and gathering. They live not in cities or nations but in bands, clans, and tribes. The way they live is the way everyone used to live before some of us became civilized; they are windows onto our past, living museums of prehistoric life.

How lucky we are not to be backward. How fortunate we are to be ruled by wise kings and far-sighted legislators, by shepherds who protect us from barbarian wolves. Surely, as Oliver Wendell Holmes instructed us, "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." Those who evade taxes are evading civilization and all that it entails.

Now along comes lames C. Scott to show how absurd that narrative is. In his dazzling, enlightening, and enjoyable new book, The Art of Not Being Governed, the Yale anthropologist and political scientist boldly challenges the age-old story of "rude barbarians mesmerized by the peace and prosperity made possible by the king's peace and justice."

To begin with, people who live in relatively "ungovernable" peripheries do not really live like people before states existed. They live alongside state-governed populations, in constant contact with their cousins who live under state control. The inhabitants of such peripheries, Scott shows, are overwhelmingly refugees or descendants of refugees from states' predatory behavior: slavery, war, and taxation. Their ways of life have made it more difficult for states to control them.

Their agricultural products are not harvested all at once, so it is harder to tax them. Their kinship systems decentralize power through networks of families. Their residence on difficult terrain, such as hills and swamps, makes them less accessible to slave raiders, tax collectors, or press gangs (or draft boards, "revenuers," or drug agents). Their ways of life are adaptations to living near, and attempting to escape from, predation and violence. Those adaptations have made them harder to rule.

Once you understand Scott's point, you can't see such people the same way again. They are not a museum of ancient life. They are a display of what people will go through to escape being enslaved, robbed, and pressed into war. Their agriculture, social structures, religions, and other features, Scott writes, are "better seen on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation. They are, in other words, political adaptations of nonstate peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening."

As Scott notes at the outset, the "standard civilizational narrative" leaves out "two capital facts. First ... it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvee labor, and, for most, a condition of...