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Zomia is an area in the highlands of SE asia roughly the size of Europe and spread out over eight separate nations where close to a hundred million people (made up of ethnic minorities) have been living beyond the reach of various regimes and state actors for generations. It is also the subject of anthropologist James C. Scott's controversial book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia where he suggested that Zomia's inhabitants purposely adopted various techniques to avoid assimilation into surrounding nation-states and low-land societies, preferring to remain in completely independent communities. Though some still get visits from the tax collector or army patrol.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/
Some of the techniques allegedly used in Zomia include creating leaderless communities, swidden agricultural practices and development of sophisticated oral traditions to encumber government record keepers.
There's the suggestion that some in the west are indulging in romanticism regarding Zomia. And I'm not suggesting that it is any sort of ideal to be emulated. (It's also said to be in gradual decline due to the encroachments of modernity). But it makes for an interesting case study and based on the way it is described, Zomia does seems like an example of what anthropologist David Graeber referred in one of his writings as a "strategy of exodus", where freedom is obtained not through confrontation but a sort of strategic avoidance. In this case on a seemingly massive scale.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Battle-Over-Zomia/128845/
Some of the techniques allegedly used in Zomia include creating leaderless communities, swidden agricultural practices and development of sophisticated oral traditions to encumber government record keepers.
There's the suggestion that some in the west are indulging in romanticism regarding Zomia. And I'm not suggesting that it is any sort of ideal to be emulated. (It's also said to be in gradual decline due to the encroachments of modernity). But it makes for an interesting case study and based on the way it is described, Zomia does seems like an example of what anthropologist David Graeber referred in one of his writings as a "strategy of exodus", where freedom is obtained not through confrontation but a sort of strategic avoidance. In this case on a seemingly massive scale.
