The Institutionalized Zomia

In 2009, the notion of ‘Zomia’ emerged and suddenly became inescapable. How does one explain such a phenomenon that took even the author James Scott by surprise? The term suddenly appeared and has since become a topic of reference for conferences, classes, discussions, articles, panels, etc. We discovered this phenomenon while attending the 2010 Asian Borderlands Conference entitled ‘Enclosure, Interaction and Transformation’, held in Chiang Mai (Thailand), where we heard Scott talk about his book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2010). Scott was aware, and even somewhat amused, of the criticism his work had already started to garner. ‘As for the criticism that keeps coming, in journals and at conferences, I’ve got a thick skin’, says Scott (Hammond 2011). Scott then listened to our talk on, among other topics, the subject of ‘our’ maritime Zomias. Amidst all the criticism and debates, the objections raised by many researchers to the disappearance of Scott's Zomia after World War II seemed to have sparked his interest. ‘Academics are even now trying to make the case that the conditions he sets up for state-evading peoples may still apply, not only in Zomia, but also among Myanmar's Sea Gypsies and some groups in Africa. “There are people busy working on other Zomias, if you like”, says Scott’ (Hammond 2011). In fact, we decided that we would gather the works we presented at this conference, driven by Scott's interest – and by the fact that he cannot cover everything, as he told us – in a historical and contemporary study of maritime populations, namely the sea nomads.

The purpose we had in writing this book was to show how the concept seemed ‘logical’ to us and how we can interpret, reinterpret and use it, just as with any new concept. Within the span of a few years, the term has become a ‘must’ in the vocabulary of the social sciences. Yet the term did not appear out of nowhere and has not experienced such a soaring development for no reason. Furthermore, Ivanoff, in this book, rightly places the concept of Zomia within a wider framework, at the crossroads between the fields of anthropology (Condominas, Barth) and history (Winichakul, Pavin Chachavalpongpun), a discipline in which Scott, an enterprising historian, has given a new importance to anthropological studies.