Zomia

This chapter addresses the mobility and migrations of the Lisu, an ethnicity in Southeast Asia who may or may not constitute a single social group with a single set of "origins".  It traces back the movements that scattered Lisu households and villages over a broad area from Yunnan in the east to India in the west, from northern Myanmar to Thailand and Laos.  Lisu migrations occupy the fringes of other stories, those of the British and Chinese empires, of colonization, Christianity and Communism.  In light of their history, the chapter reconsiders Scott and van Schendel's idea of "Zomia" as a paradigm of cultural history.

Townsend Middleton's The Demands of Recognition is an invitation to think through the everyday dilemmas of ethnic minorities as well as the state anthropologists who certify them as 'scheduled tribes' in contemporary India. Through an extended case study of Nepali-speaking groups that are collectively known as 'Gorkhas', Middleton shows how late liberal governmentality and what he calls the 'ethno-contemporary' make and remake each other. As the postcolonial state has devised affirmative action policies to redress the historical disadvantages of socially marginalized groups, a new kind of 'ethnopolitics' has emerged to claim the loaves and fishes offered by the state. In turn, this new ethnopolitics has compelled the state to rethink its classificatory schemas and mechanisms in order to decide which groups ought to be considered as 'tribes', and hence, merit affirmative action. In most cases, the primary aim of ethnopolitics in contemporary India is to enter official lists or 'schedules' that record castes and tribes as well as other groups deemed to be 'backward' enough to warrant affirmative action. The situation with the Gorkhas was no different after their demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland went unmet a generation ago. By undertaking a fine-grained ethnographic exploration of the Gorkhas' ethnopolitics and the travails of their interlocutors within the postcolonial ethnographic state, Middleton challenges us to interrogate our received notions of ethnicity and about the place of anthropology in our world.

La Zomia est une zone collinéenne et montagneuse de 2,5 millions de kilomètres carrés, aux confins de plusieurs États-nations d’Asie du Sud-Est. Elle abriterait environ 100
millions de personnes. Les premiers embryons d’État ne sont apparus en Asie du Sud-Est qu’au Ier siècle avant notre ère, et depuis lors d’innombrables populations n’ont cessé de résister à leur extension, et de se mettre hors de leur portée dans la Zomia. L’anthropologue américain James C. Scott éclaire leurs tentatives de se soustraire à l’assujettissement par différentes pratiques « statofuges ».

Most ethnic conflicts in Northeast India are fallout of colonial era policies and contesting versions of indigeneity, but their lesser researched impact on the human realm of survivors hold important hints for the future. The paper as a contextual background theoretically explores the role of indigeneity and territory in producing political violence in Bodoland in Assam and reproduces narratives of resilience of a community of Adivasis who had been displaced in the regional militant led violence. The paper has tried to show how resilience is a complex quality that entail attributes like, among others, refusal to surrender, putting faith in prayers, holding onto identity cards with original address, ways of coexistence with the conflicting community through church based dialogues or anti-alcohol campaigns. These narratives of resilience point towards hopeful possibilities in the Northeast, a space popularly viewed through the optics of chaotic violence, when conflict is also characterised by survivors as external and a disruption of life worlds.

Ce long écrit (530 pages) se propose de défendre une thèse « à la fois simple, osée, et polémique » pour reprendre les mots de l’auteur : l’idée que les peuples des hauteurs de la Zomia, loin d’être des communautés archaïques, ont sciemment fait le choix de fuir les villages en contre-bas « afin de se soustraire aux différentes formes d’oppression que renfermaient les projets de construction étatique à l’œuvre dans les vallées ». James C. Scott présente ainsi les différentes composantes de ses communautés des hauteurs, dans une approche comparative avec celles des vallées, tout au long de l’ouvrage.

The main purpose of this work is to provide a cartographic representation of the process of Islamization of the vast area of “Kafir” cultures and Indo-European languages here styled “Peristan”. This area once extended from present-day Nuristan to the borders of Kashmir over a surface of some 80.000 square km. The Kalasha of lower Chitral are now the last surviving heirs of this area. Only recently scientific research has produced new elements to reconstruct the history of this process, which had so far remained obscure. After a brief analysis of the different forms of perception of ethnic and religious identities in the area, the paper deals with the relationship between the process of Islamization and that of subjection to the authority of states from ca. 1500 CE to this day. Then the sources on which the cartography is based are discussed. The result is a somewhat unexpected image of what was once “Kafiristan”, perhaps the most remote and tenacious barbaricum of the Asian continent, and one of the largest.

This chapter invites readers to Nagaland (Northeast India) to reflect on the
impulse that compelled thousands of Nagas to participate in a horrific public lynching of a perceived illegal immigrant. The inflow of ‘ethnic strangers’ is seen as challenging the Nagas’ ethno-territorial sovereignty and reinvigorates local obsessions with notions of autochthony – an emotive affirmation of Naga origins, roots, soil, genes, semen, and blood as the prime criteria of rights, entitlements, and belonging. This chapter presents immigration panic and ethnic violence as cultural and bodily friction blocking such flows. The implication? A body politic gripped by a volatile, potentially violent split between those considered autochthonous and those deemed outsiders.

Blo bzang snyan grags (Lcags mo tshe ring, translator). 2015.  The Origin of Gnyan Thog Village and the History of Its Chieftains IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor, 242-250, 301-332.


ABSTRACT
This text, translated from Tibetan, details the migration of Mongol soldiers from the southern banks of the Yellow River to their descendants' current residence in Gnyan thog Village (Gnyan thog Township, Reb gong County, Rma lho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province) and also gives details of the hereditary succession of their leaders.

KEYWORDS
Gnyan thog, history, Mongol, Monguor, Reb gong

Perhaps nowhere in India is contemporary politics and visions of 'the political' as diverse, animated, uncontainable, and poorly understood as in Northeast India. Vernacular Politics in Northeast India offers penetrating accounts into what guides and animates Northeast India's spirited political sphere, including the categories and values through which its peoples conceive of their 'political' lives. Fourteen essays and an Afterword by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and geographers think their way afresh into the region's political life and sense. Collectively they show how different communities, instead of adjusting themselves to modern democratic ideals, adjust democracy to themselves, how ethnicity has become a politically pregnant expression of local identities, and how indigeneity assume a life of its own as it is taken on, articulated, reworked, and fought over by peoples.

YESTERDAY'S TRIBE Reviewed: Kelsang Norbu; MY TWO FATHERS Reviewed: Sangs rgyas bkra shis; SMUG PA and CHU MIG DGU SGRI Reviewed: Konchok Gelek; KLU 'BUM MI RGOD Reviewed: Pad+ma rig 'dzin; PHYUR BA Reviewed: 'Brug mo skyid; TIBET'S BELOVED CHILD; Reviewed: Rinchenkhar; THE RISE OF GÖNPO NAMGYEL; Reviewed: Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa; IMAG(IN)ING THE NAGAS Reviewed: Mark Bender; THE DAWN OF TIBET Reviewed: Ivette M. Vargas-O'Bryan and Chelsea McGill; BRIGHT BLUE HIGHLAND BARLEY Reviewed: Limusishiden; A CACTUS OF TEARS and THE TUYUHUN KINGDOM Reviewed: Wu Jing; A CHANGE IN WORLDS Reviewed: Bill Bleisch; TIBETAN LITERARY GENRES Reviewed: Tricia Kehoe; LANGUAGE IN AN AMDO TIBETAN VILLAGE Reviewed: Zoe Tribur; EARLY CARPETS AND TAPESTRIES Reviewed: Juha Komppa; FOUNDING AN EMPIRE 1790-1840 Reviewed: Hilary Howes; CHINESE MUSLIMS Reviewed: Bianca Horlemann; THARLO and THE SACRED ARROW Reviewed: Khashem Gyal; RIVER Reviewed: Phun tshogs dbang rgyal; and AMNYE MACHEN MOUNTAIN CIRCUMAMBULATION Reviewed: Bill Bleisch.

Gerald Roche and CK Stuart. 2015. Introduction: Mapping the Monguor IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor, 5-15, 301-332.

The thirteen contributions in this collection shed new light on the people, officially referred to in China as the Tu, but in the West more commonly known as the Monguor, who numbered 289,565 in 2010 (Poston and Xiong 2014:118), and who lived mostly in Qinghai and Gansu provinces. While considered in China to be a unitary minzu, or nationality, with a single history, language, and culture, and also assumed to be as much by Western scholars, a growing body of research is suggestive of the diversity within this group (Janhunen 2006). One indication of this diversity has been the proliferation of names used to describe localized populations of the Tu, including Karilang, Mongghul, Huzhu Mongghul, Huzhu Tu, Tianzhu Tu, Mangghuer, Gansu Mangghuer, Reb gong Tu, Dordo, Wutun Tu, Baoan Tu, Shaowa Tu, Mongolic Tu, Naringhuor Mongghuor, Datong Tu, and Halchighul Mongghul. Linguistic research has also revealed diversity among the Monguor, showing that their first languages may include Qinghai Chinese (Datong Tu) and other 'Creolized' Sinitic varieties (Wutun), as well as Mongolic (Mongghul, Mangghuer, Reb gong Tu) and Bodic varieties (Shaowa Tu) (Janhunen et al. 2007).

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The volume contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas.

A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this book fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

This essay traces the early beginnings of the Indo-Naga conflict, which erupts in the 1950s and continues into the present-day. It focuses on the period roughly between the Battle of Kohima in 1944, which ends Japanese expansionism in the east, and the enactment of Nagaland state in 1963 as an envisaged (but failed) political compromise to the demand by the Naga National Council (NNC) for complete Naga sovereignty. This essay uses hitherto scantily used tour and personal diaries, government reports, private correspondence, memoires, and recorded memories to interrogate the master-narrative of the Naga struggle that reconstructs a relatively straight and uncomplicated historical trajectory that sees the genuine awakening and NNC-led political mobilization of an upland community situated off the beaten track of both Indian civilization and colonial domination, and of Nagas’ collective resolve to take up arms to fight for a place on the table of nation-states. Alternatively, if the story is told from the vantage of the Indian state, the dominant narrative apportions blame to a ‘misguided’ Naga elite that seeks to undermine the territorial and national integrity of the Indian state. These prevailing views, attractive for their absence of complexity, however, ignore the anguished debates, interpersonal and intertribal differences, contingent histories and events, dissenting voices, political assassinations, and sharp divisions within the rank-and-file of the NNC, and whose inner dynamics and sentiments could as well have produced outcomes other than war.

Zomia, in the sense exulted by James C. Scott (2009) as an abode of purposeful political anarchy and anti-stateism, is not an emic conceptualization, not a particular place or an incantation of a collective identity referred to or professed by particular populations of humans. As a spatial and social reality, or as a word-concept, Zomia, then appears an exercise in scholarly magical realism (evidence is ‘thin’, ‘limited’, and ‘ambiguous’, as Victor Lieberman (2010: 339) puts it more discreetly). It is a form of geographical and historical imagination that nevertheless has begun to ‘escape’ the narrow corridors of the academy and into public discourse where it now lives a life of its own. It is an original imagination no doubt – an optic that stimulates fresh scholarship – but one simultaneously cannot escape that Zomia-disciples are letting their imagination run away with them.

Dan Smyer Yü, Su Faxiang and Li Yunxia, eds. 2018 Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader II: Zomia, Frontiers and Borderlands. Beijing, Academy Press.

This is the second Chinese translation volume of the Trans-Himalayan Studies Reader Series from Academy Press. Dan Smyer Yü is the chief editor of this ongoing translation and publishing project intended to introduce critical literature of Himalayan studies in the West to the Chinese language world. It particularly caters to graduate students and scholars based in China, who are having growing interest in Himalayan studies as a unique transregional studies. This volume hosts the works of high impact scholars such as Jean Michaud, Willem van Schendel, Sara Shneiderman, Gunnel Cederlöf, Sarah Turner, Geoffrey Samuel, and Georgina Drew. The conceptual gravity of this volume is on Zomia from the perspectives of James Scott, Willem van Schendel, Jean Michaud, and Sara Shneiderman, who are currently the leading luminaries in deciphering the theoretical and transregional significances of Zomia as a concept and as a differently perceived world region in terms of geography, geology, ecology, ethnolinguistics, and inter-state power dynamics. It is intend as a contribution to building an informed, international arena of scholarly debates in contemporary China. The volume is the outcome of the united understanding and appreciation of intellectual diversity from the co-editors, translators, and the original authors.

The historiography of the nineteenth century Panjab privileges the core constituency of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 'empire', whereby the margins are represented only as conquered territories. This article shifts the perspective by highlighting the context of 'Zomian' margins in the making of an 'empire'. Based on coeval travellers' accounts, news from Lahore Durbar and British Indian governmental sources, the focus is on the impact of economic and political contingencies on the policies of Sikh Sardars, the Maharaja of Lahore and, ultimately, the British Indian government in the Western Himalayan region. We shall, however, limit ourselves to economic interaction between the hegemonic empire and Kangra hill states to bring out the dynamics of dominance and subversion. The underlying assumption of dominance and eventual integration into the 'empire' was rather economic: in services, materials and money. It was, however, not a relationship of political dominance only. While the subjugation of hill states alienated revenue to the 'empire', it also opened new markets to the hill products and services that had cultural and economic implications. The new markets were welcomed; the alienation of revenue was not. The alliance, therefore, had an uneasy aspect, nuanced by a subtle protest, that of the weak against the strong: an indirect, meek and symbolic resistance. Consequently, when the strength of 'empire' dwindled, such protests acquired accentuated dimensions. The process of such protests is vital in understanding the decline of Lahore 'empire', barely a decade after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

What characterizes the Naga kin universe? What was lost and gained as Nagas transitioned from a stateless to a state society? What happens to a society when long entrenched in political conflict, violence, and brutality? What is the place of Naga traditions and customs in the contemporary historical moment? What are the political paths and possibilities that fork off into the future? With Nagapolis: A Community Portrait, Jelle J.P. Wouters addresses these and related questions through a varied range of topical essays, from feasting to factionalism, customs to cuisine, prophecy to politics, and colonialism to capitalism. Delving deep in history, politics, culture, and social mores, Nagapolis traces and places Naga society, relating changes, continuities, and changing continuities, to ultimately ask, just what is the Naga community all about?

This introductory chapter lays out a roadmap of the book regarding
its overarching themes, conceptual concerns, and individual chapter
highlights. It attempts to initiate a trans-Himalayan study aimed at an
ethnoculturally and ecologically coherent but geopolitically demarcated
world region. Based on the borderland perspectives of the contributors,
it deems the trans-Himalayan region a space of multiple state margins
between which connectivity and disconnectivity concurrently take place.
Concerning the diversity of trans-Himalayan livelihood, territoriality,
and modernity, the chapter emphasizes the criticalness of ecological
forces, which, along with human-induced global-local forces of change,
reshape the multidimensional borderland engagements between different
ethnic communities and nation-states in the greater Himalayan region,
including the highlands of Southeast Asia and Southwest China.

Keywords: Trans-Himalayas, Zomia, livelihood, horizontal connectivity,
multistate margins

Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control examines the Kashmir dispute from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and within the theoretical frame of border studies. It draws on the experiences of those living in these territories such as divided families, traders, cultural and social activists. Kashmir is a borderland, that is, a context for spatial transformations, where the resulting interactions can be read as a process of ‘becoming’ rather than of ‘being’. The analysis of this borderland shows how the conflict is manifested in territory, in specific locations with a geopolitical meaning, evidencing the discrepancy between ‘representation’ and the ‘living’. The author puts forward the concept of belonging as a useful category for investigating more inclusive political spaces.

This essay argues that imperial Vietnamese officials produced legible subjects through the genre of imperial ethnography in the decades before French colonial rule in northern Vietnam. Focusing on one official working in the Northwest, it connects Vietnamese imperial ethnography both to the rationalising administrative reforms of the early nineteenth century and to the scholarly discussion about modern empires and ethnography.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the French colonial administration adopted various strategies and tactics to 'pacify' and control the culturally heterogeneous regions dividing the lowland realms of the Lao and Vietnamese courts, while upland powerbrokers aimed to forge strategic alliances with the new colonial power. This article takes the concept of mimesis as a means to explore the interplay of alterity and identity. With reference to the work of Michael Taussig, along with other theories of imitation, I will discuss processes of mutual appropriation and differentiation within the precarious relationship between colonizers and colonized. Mimesis here provides an alternative reading of upland Southeast Asian history beyond the binaries of dominance and resistance prevalent in James C. Scott's recent work on the anarchist history of zomia.

On 15 August 1950, just as India was celebrating its third independence anniversary, an earthquake of 8.6 magnitude struck the remote north-eastern state of Assam and its surrounding borderlands. Rivers came out of their bed and landslides blocked Himalayan valleys, destroying towns, villages, roads, fields, and tea gardens in their wake. Beyond the disaster’s shattering impact on the physical geography of the region, this paper explores how it participated in another reconfiguration — that of Assam’s place within India’s political geography and national imaginary. The Indian public had hitherto known very little about India’s remote ‘north-east frontier’; the cataclysm and subsequent relief measures served to carve out a space for it on Indian mental maps. Simultaneously, by forcing a large-scale encounter between Indian authorities and the people of the scarcely controlled eastern Himalayas, post-earthquake relief and rehabilitation led to unprecedented state expansion in this newly strategic borderland. Yet in the same breath, the aftermath of the disaster fuelled stereotypes about Assam and its hinterland that would eventually further their marginality within India and undermine their continued unity. The crystallisation of Assam’s image as a place irreducibly subject to the whims of nature, and more importantly incapable of taking care of itself (and hence, of its highland dependencies), would poison centre-state relations for decades to come. Imperfect and contradictory, the re-ordering of this border space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India’s national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it.

India’s Northeastern states have presented a complex challenge to the Indian Union for over half a century, with continuous pushes for independence, autonomy and secession by a number of violent non-state actors and paramilitary groups. Few groups have achieved as prolonged and successful a challenge to the Indian Union as the National Socialist Council of Nagalim led by Isak Chisi Swu and Thuingaleng Muvaih. The research seeks to re-orient perspectives of the insurgent group through an alternative to the ‘state-insurgent’ lens much of the academia and policy has focused on. This research views the organization and its offshoot groups as a fledgling attempt at forging new borders and maintaining a push for an independent and ethnically protected Nagaland. The nation-building project the National Socialist Council fought so hard for may be on its last limbs today, but much can be learned from its decades long push for a Nagamese nation and wider support for independence in India’s northeastern periphery.

At the time that Bianca passed away, she had just completed her first term of teaching, as a Senior Teaching Fellow with the Department of History at SOAS. She had undertaken this as replacement teaching for the course entitled " The Creation of Modern Burma " which examined the intellectual, cultural, social, economic, and political formation of colonial Burma under British rule, a course that allowed Bianca to bring together her vast personal and scholarly experience with the country, adding to the normal lowland focus much new attention to the historical role of the highlands. Bianca's research agenda focused on bringing to the Chin/Zo a deeper awareness and understanding of their own history and to explain why the border between India and Burma divided this population group into different ethnic identities where were consciously presented as primordially exclusive of one another. This was both a personal and a family interest. Bianca's personal life was one of migration to many different locations. At various points in her life she lived in Burma, East Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea, giving her fluency not simply in Chin, but also in English and German. She wrote about these personal experiences with migration and about her deep personal relationship with her father, the late Dr. Vumson Suantak, and her younger sister in 2007, and how these personal experiences brought her into contact with the Chin/Zo diaspora and the challenges of their transnational existence. 1 Bianca was also the latest in a family line of scholars. She saw in her dissertation the continuity of a path chartered by her father, who had authored Zo History (1986), and who had viewed the latter as the continuity of his own father's (Dr. Son's grandfather's) work on the Chin/Zo people. Bianca explained in interviews with the press that she also inherited from her father an interest in the plight of the Chin/Zo and their contemporary situation in Burma (Myanmar) and his belief that only education would empower the Chin/Zo and lead to self-development of what he saw as the Zo region. When he passed away, Bianca followed in his political footsteps and became a Chin/Zo activist and became a member of the managing board of the Chin Forum. In the midst of these activities, she encountered the obstacles of the 1 Bianca Son, " Papi, " in Thanakha Team (ed.), Burma—Women's Voices for Hope (Bangkok: Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, 2007): pp. 37-42.

The Ksingmul people of the northern Laos-Vietnam border area have been known within local Tai social systems as Puak, a derogatory term that evokes images of forest-eating termites. Occupying the lowest rung in the Tai social hierarchy, what is known of the Ksingmul has been dominated by the idea of Tai-ization — a process of cultural loss and assimilation. But overt markers of physical culture and economic status mask the persistence of traditional beliefs, moral entanglements and alternative historical perspectives that can be accessed only through the Ksingmul language. In this article, I analyze a story called “Person and Nya Wai Become Friends”, which tells of a competition of trickery between a human and a wild spirit. In the telling of this story, the narrator marks the words of the spirit with a prefix that marks the “abnormal speech” of a non-human. He uses the marking to index the moral stance of the person and the wild spirit, as they first become friends, and the human subsequently betrays the special bond of friendship. The wild spirit Nya Wai “speaks like a human” when he is trying to gain mercy from Person when he is caught stealing from Person’s bird traps, while Person starts to “speak like a ghost” as he hatches his plot to get revenge on Nya Wai by tricking him into castrating himself. This is one of the linguistic devices used by the narrator to perform human-spirit relations in the telling of the story. Such performances are firmly located within the multiethnic landscape of the uplands, where power structures are negotiated, constructed and subverted through language use.

This essay explores the fragmentation of provincial rice fields into warring postcolonial territories in mid-twentieth-century South Asia. I focus on rice as a powerful grain that connected the shifting borders of British colonial Assam and Bengal, and later Northeast India and East Pakistan (1930–1970). I show how state repression and competing claims to rice harvests contended with shifting terrains. At important historical junctures, rice came to link cultivation and territorialization, state violence and food, and dispossession and espionage. I engage with the powerful symbolism attached to rice by colonial and post-colonial officials, border guards, and cultivators who were variously conceived of as peasants and adivasis, as they sought to settle, cultivate, demarcate, and govern new national boundaries in a radically changing landscape. This paper situates rice battles within current discussions on Asia's borderlands to show how rice established the border as a space for alterity and to expose the blurred boundaries between static peasants and mobile adivasis, and between cultivation and soldiering.