Reddit Reddit reviews The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

We found 24 Reddit comments about The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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24 Reddit comments about The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series):

u/multinillionaire · 28 pointsr/AskAnthropology

James S Scott speculates that this is actually very common. His main case study is Southeast Asia, where there is a lot of evidence of people fleeing heavily agricultural civilizations for a horticultural life in the highlands both as a result of conflict and simply because the life of the latter is freer and (at least in many ways) richer as compared to the heavily-taxed life of an agricultural serf in a stratified society. Of course, horticulture might not be rice paddy cultivation but it's still agriculture. Nonetheless, he finds signs that this is a worldwide dynamic that shows up where ever you have a geographic or temporal transition between densely settled agriculture and a lower-density space that makes "less civilized" lifeways possible. One space he keeps coming back to is the Eastern/Midwestern US of the 1500s and 1600s, when the post Columbian contact plagues and their associated population collapses gave the survivors plenty of elbow room to make this transition.

u/5432nun · 20 pointsr/MapPorn

>Was being a "stateless" person just as simple as not paying your taxes, and hiding when the taxman rode through once a year?

It's more complex than that. There are many strategies which stateless people have adopted over time in order to avoid state rule.

One is to engage in subsistence methods which are difficult to appropriate to state needs. If a community relies on a diverse array of foods which come into season all at different times or - even worse from the state's POV - can be left underground for a few years and dug up and eaten as needed, the taxman will need to do a hell of a lot more to extract taxes than roll through once a year. It would require a tremendous effort to make sense of and quantify all of the labor that is going on, much less extract a portion of it.

This is why early states typically promote mono-cultures. Mono-cultures transform the product of a community’s labor into a form which comes into season all at the same time in vast fields. This makes it easy to quantify and appropriate to state use in the form of taxes. An added benefit is that individuals who are stationary, as when rendered dependent upon monolithic agricultural projects, are generally easier to govern. Such states typically rely on slavery in order to get started. The Great Wall was built to keep individuals from fleeing state servitude just as much as to keep "barbarians" out.

There's a fascinating book called The Art of Not Being Governed which describes this and a number of other state evading techniques which communities have adopted in the past. Although written mostly about Southeast Asia, it provides an amazing model for understanding stateless (and state) societies in general. You can also watch a short video of the author, James Scott, going over many of the ideas in his book here.

u/Susanoo-no-Mikoto · 14 pointsr/SubredditDrama

Yes, and indeed certain anthropologists theorize that real-world hill tribes do in fact deliberately live in terrain that is difficult or useless for lowland states to access in order to escape serfdom, slavery, military conscription, corvee labor, etc.

u/Avant_guardian1 · 14 pointsr/todayilearned

Potatoes are more finicky than rice, wheat, and corn?
The only reason those crops are so popular is because they are more easily taxed and they travel well to feed armies. Root vegetables have a long history of being "rebellious" crops. Harder to tax, harder to burn or destroy if the peasants get uppity, and can be stored by simply leaving them in the ground. Not to mention much more nutritious.

Read The Art of not Being Governed James C Scott

u/[deleted] · 5 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

Here are a few to consider.

  1. Zomia, a region in Asia. See this book :

    https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175/

  2. Medieval Ireland:

    https://mises.org/library/property-rights-celtic-irish-law-0

  3. Pre-monarchic ancient Israel (at least as represented in the Bible).

    The first two I know little about. The third one I'm pretty familiar with. From time to time I see others examples mentioned.
u/fieryseraph · 5 pointsr/Libertarian

>Show me an example of a system like this working. I dare you.

https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics/dp/1107629705

https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social/dp/0199365164

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175

There is also a whole ton of economic literature out there about groups who resolve disputes using game theory, or long term contracts, things like that, instead of relying on a central governing body with a strong threat of violence.

u/neekburm · 4 pointsr/TrueReddit

Obviously golden rice isn't purely humanitarian, but pretty close. It's 20 years old, so any patents have expired. There's PR benefits to GMOs, but considering that the vast majority of research into GMO harm has found none (Though I do see secondary effects of GMO's causing harm, such as roundup exposure causing maladies because GMO corn and soy allow roundup to be sprayed). In any case, golden rice isn't roundup resistant; it has vitamin A not otherwise present in the diets of the poor in SE Asia. SE Asian governments like rice production, it stores well and is therefore easy to tax (See generally The Art of Not Being Governed.)

The humanitarian effort line was referring to the difference between your suggestions, which I find admirable and would gladly vote for given the opportunity, and the Marshall Plan which you compared your suggestions to. I wasn't really interested in a tu quoque-off. The Marshall plan happened because of the Cold War. Maybe there's a way to phrase your reforms in a way that advances the National Interest in a way similar to a modern-day Marshall plan.

We have a crop that can be grown and the seed saved and reused by peasant farmers with nutritional deficiencies with little change to their lifestyle. The only thing keeping it from them is a massive campaign that relies on dubious to nonexistent evidence of GMO harm. Your best argument against it without reliance on that evidence (which I note you made no reference to, and I thank you for that), is that it would impair a Marshall Plan-type campaign to eliminate poverty in SE Asia. I find this argument underwhelming. Why not both? First the easy one, yellow rice, then the hard one, eliminating poverty in SE Asia?

u/cmhamill · 3 pointsr/AskAnthropology

This is probably the best for getting an anthropological view on it: http://amzn.com/0300169175

You may want to look into the history of the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil War.

u/THP88 · 3 pointsr/Anarcho_Capitalism

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia by James Scott

This book is a fascinating examination of state-resisting societies in the Zomia region of Southeast Asia.

u/mildmanneredarmy · 3 pointsr/AskAnthropology

Probably the most obvious person to look at is David Graeber as he's probably the best known self-identified anarchist anthropologist. Aside from him, however, you may also be interested in the work of James C. Scott - specifically his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

That being aid, I don't remember if Graeber or Scott actually lay out plans for what an anarchist society would look like.

It's also worth noting, I think, that's there's a big difference between a stateless society and an anarchist one, if by the latter we mean one explicitly organized according to anarchist ideas. A lot of anarchists nowadays point to the EZLN as a model for a contemporary stateless society, which is quite understandable. However I don't believe the EZLN actually considers itself to be anarchist, though I think they're sympathetic.

u/The_Old_Gentleman · 3 pointsr/CapitalismVSocialism

>Yeah but there's also the rest of the paragraph, anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them.

That is not true. If anarchists believed in a democratically controlled monopoly of force, they would be "Democrats", not "anarchists". Hell, in much of the world today we do have a monopoly of force which is technically "democratically controlled" by the generally accepted definition of "democracy", so by this conception of what anarchists think we might as well say we already have anarchy which is obviously a ludicrous conclusion. Anarchists do often use the language of "direct democracy" (erroneously, in my view) because this concept is often associated to people having control over their own lives and getting together to discuss stuff that is important to them, but any way anarchists do still oppose any sort of "democracy" ("direct" or otherwise) as a system of government insofar as it is a system of government and are more likely to write general critiques of democracy^[1] than to try and make the monopoly on force "democratic".

Social order does not require a monopoly on force, the establishment of fixed rules or the existence of particular parties with the political authority to enforce them. We know this because we actually know of societies that have existed with out any political authority or social hierarchy (Graeber^[2] for example cites the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...) and the Yale professor of anthropology James C. Scott even wrote a book^[3] about stateless peoples from the region of Zomia who have - for millenia - consciously resisted integration into State based civilization because they actually prefer anarchy (largely because life in the neighbouring State societies was characterized by "slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare").

The real question for most anarchists today is how can these same basic social forces that are at play in those anarchic societies scale and adapt to an post-industrial, large scale society. The general idea is to make those social forces take the form of inter-locking networks of self-managed associations (with no monopoly on force or central bureaucracy), oriented around the social ownership of the means of production and a organized gift or mutualistic economy. There have been all sorts of experiments with particular anarchist principles and practices (experiments in worker's self-management, experiments in gift economies such as Linux, real communities like Freetown Christiania, etc) and even mass revolutions which saw these experiments applied in a larger context (Paris Commune, Shinmin, Catalonia, etc), and while so far no lasting anarchist mass society has come into being (mostly due to the quick repression that follows and the lack of international support to defend itself from it) this does not mean anarchy cannot work.

Our fellow anarchist /u/humanispherian has for a long time openly criticized^[4] (and i agree with him) the curious phenomenon of anarchists who are "much more comfortable with the language of governmentalism and authority than they are with the concept of anarchy" and this curious phenomenon is certainly very prevalent on the Reddit anarchist milieu, but i don't think i have ever seen anyone go as far as state that "anarchists agree that monopolies on force will exist, we just want to democratically control them."

u/SevenStrokeSamurai · 2 pointsr/pbsideachannel

Oh hay! I was actually just reading something that was mentioning this intersection of politics and language. I was reading "The Art of Not Being Governed" in a section describing the process of how people or groups would deliberately avoid or remove themselves from the power of the state by a process he calls "dissimilation" (as opposed to assimilation). "State Space" for Scott isn't just that area under political state control, which could be rather small. It would project itself beyond the boundaries under direct control through cultural influence: religious ideas that would emphasize a divine king, social structures that emphasized hierarchical organization, and critically common languages that would allow people to easily communicate, trade, negotiate, or command if enslaved. So various peoples, both expats from the state and outsider peoples who resisted domination, would not just "run to the hills" to put physical distance between themselves and the state but also emphasize, embrace, or in some cases wholly construct separate cultural identities to "dissimilate" themselves from the culture of the state peoples. This would go as far as for a non-state people whose language would be linguistically similar to a state people language to claim ignorance, as though they're not speaking the same language, similar to how African and Indian slaves in the Americas would resist their colonial masters by claiming not to understand instruction.

So in opposite to the Nation-State idea of a shared cultural identity creating a political system, this is a political system creating a shared cultural identity.

Also random related question: I know in America-land, when people want to emphasize the differences between each other (for political or other reasons) we will quite often first emphasize the "weird" way the other talks. Like how resistance to the Bush administration loved to make fun of Texan accent, or rural populists will exaggerate an almost posh-like accent for city-folk. Is that also true for other languages/places?

u/jufnitz · 2 pointsr/Frugal

If you think that's an interesting point, here's a book you might like.

u/remonumon · 2 pointsr/Anarchism

James C. Scott has done very good anthropological work showing how states have used the barbaric/civilized binary to stigmatize statelessness. Highly recommend reading.

u/thecrackshotcrackpot · 2 pointsr/AskAnthropology

My Top 3:

u/DrGobKynes · 2 pointsr/EnoughLibertarianSpam

That's actually not anything an-cap at all, but an anarchist history of nomadic stateless peoples in Asia through the lens of groups of people avoiding the rule of southeast Asian states. It's a pretty interesting book, although I'm not sure about the author's arguments or conclusions.

It seems libertarians/an-caps have appropriated it, though.

u/boxcutter729 · 1 pointr/Paleo

I'm drawn to the spirit of libertarians, feel like their hearts are in the right place (sans the neoreactionary bigoted elements that often infiltrate). Paleo is becoming very popular with that crowd, most resistance being from people that either haven't heard about it or people who tend towards naive scientism/technophilia and are hostile to anything outside of the mainstream when it comes to science. I've integrated paleo into my own beliefs (radical decentralist with sympathies that could be called libertarian, anarchist, pro-market, anti-capitalist, and primitivist). A few points:

I want my people to be healthy, strong, fertile, happy, and beautiful. Paleo does that. Paleo is power.

Some anthropological literature examines the reciprocal ecological relationship between states and grains. Grains are state fuel for a variety of reasons, states encourage their cultivation quite literally at gunpoint in one example. Growing root crops like cassava and sweet potatoes on the other hand, is a genuine insurrectionist act. "Escape crops", the author called them.

We see the government's subsidies of HFCS, bogus dietary recommendations, SWAT raids on farm to table dinner gatherings and food co-ops, and all the other ways government policy taints our food as some unique modern aberration, but it's what governments have always done. Control food to control people. Paleo will be appearing on a leaked flyer from some police agency or think tank listing signs of extremism any day now.

Diet is culture. Being different for the sake of being different helps minority groups maintain their cultural/ethnic/religious identity. You see it in slurs against them, e.g. cat-eaters, "beaners". You've seen it with the way your friends and family react to your diet. After eating paleo for a few years, there are fundamental differences in your metabolism, the way you smell, the very chemical composition of your flesh. It makes you the other, and that's desirable when you'd like to set yourself apart culturally.

Allowing my imagination to go further... I see a holistic force of decay, control, and permanent death as the driving impulse behind most of our technology since the beginning of the industrial revolution at least. It's glyphosate in your Fruit Loops, fluoride in your water, the endocrine-disrupting plastic incense inside its Wal-Mart temples. Maybe it's just a useful metaphor that ties a number of things I don't like together. Maybe I really believe it is a force that affects our world materially. Most importantly here, Paleo is a rite of purification that removes the taint from our minds and bodies.

u/cslp90 · 1 pointr/MapPorn

Check out The Art of Not being Governed by James C. Scott. He argues that the highlands of South-East Asia are the last places on earth that are not a part of modern nation-states. Also just a great geo-political history of SE Asia!

u/elliotron · 1 pointr/civ

The Art of Not Being Governed In case you're curious about how much deeper Firaxis could go into the "Barbarian" mechanic. The Art of Not Being Governed takes a pretty deep look at how geography and the luxuries of the high ground and the fringe make for stateless states.

u/A_Soporific · 1 pointr/changemyview

I recently read a book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South East Asia. It isn't a discussion of whether nor not there should be anarchy and doesn't involve any philosophy at all. It simply observes that governments don't find these people despite more than a millennium of documented attempts and postulates why.

Many of the physical and social reasons for the lack of capture would also apply to a hypothetical space-based scenario. Also, there no way in hell that there would be a Terran Empire in thirty years, and at best you can play a Chinese Ship against an EU one, or a US Ship against an African Union one.

u/t3nk3n · 1 pointr/Libertarian

>Property is the coercive exclusion of others from entering certain areas or touching certain objects. That's what it is.

Aside from alll those times when it isn't.

Not enough words to make all the citations: more and more and more and more and more

u/catmeow321 · 1 pointr/geopolitics

The book "Art of Not Being Governed" talks about "Zomia" upland mountains of Southeast Asia.

It's very good, one of the books that I actually finished from start to finish in a single setting.