Why the State Is the Enemy of the People Who Move Around: Hill Valley Relations in Southeast Asia

Scott explores themes of state-craft, sedentarization, etc. as part of a critique of state-making and development. In particular, he analyzes the paradoxes of attempts by states to create a fiscally and administratively legible property regime and population despite the economic and ecological imperatives of physical mobility. He elaborates the Southeast Asian variant of this historical argument. One of the great cleavages permeating Southeast Asian history and politics is the tension between hill and valley peoples, between downstream and upstream in insular Southeast Asia. Roughly, this corresponds to the social division between comparatively dense populations in valleys and 'downstream' who are often organized hierarchically into states, on the one hand, and more peripheral, dispersed, and mobile peoples who live in more egalitarian settings, on the other. These divisions are not merely of historical interest; they animate a good deal of the intra-state tension in contemporary Southeast Asia which has been understood in ethnic or religious terms.