500 meters

Many historians insist that something peculiar happens at 500 meters above sea level. In his opus on the Mediterranean region in the late medieval and early modern period, Fernand Braudel generalized that civilizations spread easily over wide swathes of level territory, “but are powerless to move vertically when faced with an obstacle of several hundred meters.” Scholars of mainland Southeast Asia have arrived at a similar conclusion. As James C. Scott has recently reminded us, two leading figures of Southeast Asian studies’ postwar founding generation, Oliver Wolters and Paul Wheatley, were acutely aware that Sanskrit—and with it the courtly culture and cosmological orientation of the Indic states they studied— was “stilled to silence at 500 meters.” In momentarily interrupting their own magisterial surveys of “civilization,” these far-flung admissions of the power of geography qua altitude to make a difference gesture towards a vast silence in the historical record, one that has kept significant—perhaps even constitutive— patterns of culture, economy, and society out of view.

No doubt, Braudel can be accused of recapitulating an ancient stereotype of the “mountain man”— that icon of rusticity, barbarism, and arrested development relative to citizens of the polis— in modern historicist guise. It is also true that detailed studies of particular Mediterranean city-states and their hinterlands prove that not all mountain dwellers existed in the state of egalitarian poverty, superstition, and lawlessness that Braudel painted with broad brush-strokes. Yet the very same studies also show that structural dynamics between distinctly oppositional yet symbiotic ecological zones did exert a vital influence upon city states and civilizing projects, while also shaping powerful and enduring self-definitions on both sides. Similarly, there is a mounting recognition amongst Southeast Asian scholars—one seeded long ago by the work of Edmund Leach— of the significance of oscillation and interplay amongst valley centers and mountainous fringes for state formation in the premodern and modern eras.

Well into the modern period, writes Scott, the majority of Southeast Asian territory was comprised of “non-state” spaces such as mountains, swamps, mangrove coasts, deserts, and river deltas, where a range of “strategic adaptations”— cultural and economic practices like ephemeral leadership, shifting cultivation and foraging subsistence patterns—coalesced into flexible social arrangements. Ethnicities and identities were fluid, often changing within the same generation: Scott observes that many “valley people” were once “hill people” and vice versa, so that “it is impossible to write a history of one that ignores the other.” Based on mobility and the embrace of marginality, such social practices enabled a significant portion of the population to elude the exercise of sovereignty and control by lowland states and religious authorities. But not for much longer: in what Scott terms the “last enclosure,” modern states of the region are forcefully imposing territorial sovereignty over the last remaining “non-state” spaces in order to control commercial flows, sedentarize inhabitants, and extract revenues and resources.

It is against this backdrop that Scott’s call for scholars to coax elusive upland social arrangements into view (whether through oral history, ethnography, or the careful combing of historical sources) acquires particular urgency. Such an approach to social history offers a means of deconstructing lowland hegemonies and civilizing projects—if only by remedying the occlusion of a key set of dynamics by which such hegemonies became constructed in the first place. If the chief obstacle— the imperceptibility of upland social arrangements in lowland-centric historical records—is forbidding, then it has also inspired bold strategies for working around archival silence. For example, Willem Van Schendel proposes a new and entirely notional “region” of study: Zomia, which conceptually unites various shards of high-altitude society dispersed across the vast Southeast Asian massif between elevations of 200 to 4000 meters above sea level, and traverses a host of present-day national boundaries across mainland Southeast Asia, South China, and South Asia. The idea of “Zomia” (which means “highlander” in several Tibeto-Burman languages) is wholeheartedly endorsed by Scott as “a new genre of area studies, in which the justification for designating the area has nothing to do with national boundaries . . but is rather based on ecological regularities and structural relationships that cross national frontiers.”

This was written on February 6