It is not often these days one finds scholars of Southeast Asia with exceptional breadth and depth, prescience, and commitment who stick to their creed until the end. In the pantheon of such rare scholars, Benedict O’Gorman Anderson, who died in 2015, would have led the way. James C. Scott, who died on July 19 at his home in Connecticut aged 87, would be right beside him in a distinctly different fashion.
Anderson is best known for his book “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism”. It exposed the paradox and power of nationalism, how, as a concept, it is unique and common, ancient and new, and vague and powerful at the same time.
Long associated with Cornell University, with many disciples and students in Thailand and elsewhere, Anderson essentially came up with insights on Southeast Asia that were widely accepted as a global theoretical framework.
A longtime teacher and researcher based at Yale University, Jim Scott was from a different mould. He was a self-proclaimed anarchist and a tireless anthropologist. Trained as a political scientist, he deeply disliked the notion and existence of the state. His criticism of the state was the flipside of his championing of farmers and the grassroots. Unlike his Cornell contemporary, Scott was more a political activist than a public intellectual.
His rise to fame was in the mid-1970s when he came up with the influential volume “The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia”.
It took issue with how development and the market penetrated rural societies. Scott argued that agrarian societies were inherently good because of their organic cooperation, solidarity, reciprocity, and communitarianism. At the time, this was an anti-capitalist outlook far enough to the left to be associated with communism.
By the late 1980s, when I came to it en route to postgraduate studies, the pro-peasant book was squarely rebutted by Samuel L. Popkin’s “The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam”, which I found much more credible and convincing at the time. Capitalism and development spread to rural areas because calculating farmers wanted to open up for their own benefit. Like everybody else, rural farmers were utility maximizers who invariably made cost-benefit decisions. Morality was nice, but rationality rules. Or so I thought at the time.
When I arrived for more schooling in Washington in 1990, a classmate who had just come from Yale said he took a great Southeast Asia class from Scott who was reportedly living on a farm by then. Neoliberalism was in its heyday and Scott just didn’t get it. So it seemed.
Subsequently, his name and work kept showing up on my radar. An internet search would show that titles under Scott’s penmanship included “Weapons of the Weak” and “Seeing Like A State”. In his books, the “state” was always the bad guy. The downtrodden and subjugated farmers were always the victims who needed championing. But the book that changed my outlook on him was “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia”. I thought he had hit the bull’s eye on Burma, now more commonly called Myanmar.
Borrowing the concept of “Zomia” from a Dutch colleague, Scott persuasively showed how highland people tended to refuse authority from lowland centers. The mountainous and hilly highlanders were ensconced anywhere above 300 metres. This study explained the highlands in mainland Southeast Asia covering Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and four provinces of southern China. Mountain peoples are hard to govern because they can use terrain and height to preserve and sustain their autonomy.
Burma/Myanmar stood out because it was just reopening after five decades of military dictatorship on top of centuries of internal conflicts. Geography has always been Myanmar’s destiny and chief constraint. Lowland authorities from the various kingdoms and ruling dynasties to military dictatorships over the centuries always had to put down rebellions and uprisings from ethnic highlanders.
The situation today is no different, as ethnic armies are winning on battlefields and gaining territory at the expense of the military junta since it seized power in February 2021. The big change is that the lowland Bamar people also have turned against their military overlords. For the first time, the Burmese people have taken up arms against their rulers who consequently cannot put up enough of a fight to keep ethnic minorities in the highlands at bay. Myanmar’s fraught future will have to strike a new balance and a new power-sharing framework in consideration of relations between ethnic highlanders and the Burmese on the central plains.
In 2010, while on the Bernard Schwartz Book Award committee, I had the pleasure of picking Scott’s “Art of Not Being Governed” as the winner. It was, in fact, an easy consensus. In March 2010, the Institute of Security and International Studies launched the book in Bangkok. It became required reading for those who wanted to understand what then seemed like a new Myanmar.
It was the Myanmar connection that set up my personal meeting with Scott. He was passionate in his political and academic activism, getting rid of Myanmar’s new military dictatorship. He helped raise money to fund Myanmar activists and dissidents who had to flee the country after the coup. He was so passionate and committed that he set up a new publication series called “The Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship”.
He was always encouraging to younger scholars and to pro-democracy causes. It’s safe to say that he despised the state the most when it was a military dictatorship. Our last correspondence was in February 2023. His predictable parting words, applicable not just for Myanmar but Thailand and elsewhere as well, were thus: “I hope we meet soon at a time of celebration with the military(ies!) out of power.”
A professor and senior fellow of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science, Thitinan Pongsudhirak earned a PhD from the London School of Economics with a top dissertation prize in 2002.
This article first appeared in The Bangkok Post.
