VI. Zomia: A Topography of Positionality

It is worth quoting the closing passages of Tacitus’s Germania in full:

Here Suebia ends. I do not know whether to class the tribes of the Peucini, Venedi, and Fenni with the Germans or with the Sarmatians. The Peucini, however, who are sometimes called Bastarnae [around present-day Slovakia or western Ukraine], are like Germans in their language, manner of life, and mode of settlement and habitation. Squalor is universal among them and their nobles are indolent. Mixed marriages are giving them something of the repulsive appearance of the Sarmatians. The Venedi [around present-day Belarus] have adopted many Sarmatian habits; for their plundering forays take them over all the wooded and mountainous highlands that lie between the Peucini and the Fenni. Nevertheless, they are on the whole to be classed as Germans; for they have settled homes, carry shields, and are fond of traveling—and traveling fast—on foot, differing in all these respects from the Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback. The Fenni [around present-day Lithuania] are astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor. They have no proper weapons, no horses, no homes. They eat wild herbs, dress in skins, and sleep on the ground. Their only hope of getting better fare lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with bone. The women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men; they accompany them everywhere and insist on taking their share in bringing down the game. The only way they have of protecting their infants against wild beasts or bad weather is to hide them under a makeshift covering of interlaced branches. Such is the shelter to which the young folk come back and in which the old must lie. Yet they count their lot happier than that of others who groan over field-labor, sweat over house-building, or hazard their own and other men’s fortunes in the hope of profit and the fear of loss. Unafraid of anything that man or god can do to them, they have reached a state that few human beings can attain: for these men are so well content that they do not even need to pray for anything. What comes after them is the stuff of fables—Hellusii and Oxiones with the face and features of men, the bodies and limbs of animals. On such unverifiable stories I shall express no opinion. [82]

As the Roman historian’s gaze moves farther and farther from the boundaries of the empire, passing through diminishing rings of state influence, patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalist values, and scientific certainty progressively disappear.

Environmental determinist explanations for state formation tend to focus on original states. Because original states had the cards stacked against them more than subsequent states, with state formation being so actively resisted, we can accept that the first states arose within a narrow range of ecological niches—those that presented the fewest disadvantages—without assuming that the geography determined the state.

The inadequacy of the determinist lens becomes even more evident when one examines secondary state formation. A map alone—coded to indicate rainfall, soil type, elevation, and other data—could not allow us to predict with high accuracy which parts of northern Africa, Europe, and western Asia would be stateless, and to what degree, in the first millennium of the current era. Geographic conditions in the Baltic countries, the plains to the northeast of the Carpathians, or the Maghreb were no more hostile to state formation than they were in the Iberian Peninsula, England, or the original Russian territories. From the Cherusci to the Fenni, peoples across Europe responded to the pressures and influences exerted by the Roman Empire and subsequent states, and positioned themselves accordingly.

This is not to say that a state’s influence diminishes smoothly with distance and that anarchy therefore is a reactive function of remoteness from existing states. Fiercely anarchic societies have existed and thrived directly next to or even in the midst of the claimed borders of powerful states. Speaking of Zomia, the highland area that extends across Southeast Asia, James C. Scott writes:

After a demographic collapse following a famine, epidemic, or war [broadly speaking, state effects]—if one were lucky enough to have survived—swiddening [the practice of shifting and diversified agriculture generally associated with stateless peoples in the region] might become the norm, right there on the padi plain. State-resistant space was therefore not a place on the map but a position vis-à-vis power; it could be created by successful acts of defiance, by shifts in farming techniques, or by unanticipated acts of god. The same spot could oscillate between being heavily ruled or being relatively independent, depending on the reach of the padi state and the resistance of its would-be subjects. [83]

Additionally, “the choice between padi planting [necessary for state formation but not inevitably associated with it] and swiddening is more likely to be a political choice than a mere comparative calculation of calories per unit of labor.” [84] Elsewhere, for example discussing Chin attempts to resist and avoid British domination, Scott drives home the point that the political choice of resistance, and the very construction of a society’s fabric, often trumped economic considerations.

A stateless society in Zomia could practice padi [rice] planting as easily as swiddening, but the closer an anarchic society is to a state, the more it requires a wide range of defensive advantages—prominent among them, geography and subsistence techniques—in order to survive. Thus, as state power grows in history, the more it appears that inaccessible geography or supposedly primitive modes of production determine anarchic social organization, though in reality they are only enabling features often sought out by stateless societies as a reflection of their decision to resist state power.

States, then, usually arose in geographical settings where the massive, irrigated cultivation of the local cereal (rice, wheat, maize, etc.) was feasible, though they were often parasites to innovation rather than the original architects of irrigation, city-building, and agriculture. Once they had latched onto a subject population they certainly encouraged these activities and modulated them to encourage centralization. Presumably, societies that evolved to become anti-state rather than merely stateless, learned to reject such activities and develop others that would give them symbolic and technical advantages in their fight against state authority.

Many states collapsed due to problems of their own creation, such as famine, epidemics, and warfare. [85] But they usually came back, and over time, demonstrated their dominance within a narrow ecological niche. Peoples determined to be stateless therefore developed, with time, an identification with opposite subsistence practices, such as foraging, hunting, swiddening, and pastoralism, and with opposite ecological niches, such as mountains, deserts, forests, and swamps.

To counteract this migration, both physical and philosophical, away from the realms of its domination, the early state had to develop organizational and ideological tools to retain its subjects. As Scott amply demonstrates, the states of Southeast Asia have historically been obsessed with captivating their own populations. He quotes dozens of adages and stratagems from all the states of the region, all similar to the following, taken from a “Chinese manual on governance” from over a thousand years ago: “If the multitudes scatter and cannot be retained, the city-state will become a mound of ruins.” [86]

The Catholic Church, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, tried to accomplish the same objectives as the mandala states of Southeast Asia. Many early Catholic saints were civilizers and cultivators whose miracles are related to acts of settlement, deforestation, clearing, draining, and planting, taming the wilderness that had once again come to cover Europe in the freedom of the Dark Ages. [87] In the Iberian Peninsula, many pioneering villages corresponded to the sagrera model, in which a newly constructed church would automatically gain ownership over the lands within a certain distance from its walls. The peasants worked the church lands, and also carried out subsistence activities in the unclaimed forests and fields beyond the sagrera. The model was, fundamentally, a religious protection racket. By living within the sagrera (and working its fields), the peasants protected themselves from acts of raiding or usurpation by nobles (commoners were not, contrary to current misconceptions, powerless before nobles, but smaller groups of peasants might have a harder time getting their commune officially recognized by royal authority, which based much of its early power on its function of arbiter between the nobility and the commoners). Especially in more mountainous and rural regions throughout the early Middle Ages, a principal difference distinguishing Christian from pagan peasants was whether they submitted to the protection racket and agreed to live in the Church’s shadow, or whether they tried to maintain autonomous communities. Their religious practices—consistently syncretic and often crossing the line into blasphemy, heresy, and polytheism—were far from sufficient to qualify them as believers.

On the organizational plane, warfare was one of the first and most common measures deployed to achieve and maintain the labor-power states needed for their existence. This involved “forcibly resettling war captives by the tens of thousands and by buying and/or kidnapping slaves.” But as captives ran off, states had to develop complementary methods. Subsistence activities and living outside of sanctioned villages were prohibited, and state planners developed legal and economic mechanisms, with the aim of forcing their subjects to choose between grain cultivation and starvation. Tattooing or even branding of subjects became common in certain places. The destruction of wild places was another obvious tactic, if we accept the pathological mentality of states and their agents. “Cut the forests, transform the forests into fields, for then only will you become a true king,” as a ruler in ancient Mali was instructed. [88] Forests were cleared, herds were exterminated, marshes were drained. In more recent times, states have been able to add the wholesale destruction of mountains to their repertoire (first with megadam projects and then with mountaintop removal mining).

Contrary to the mythology of social peace, which would have us believe that state evasion is a thing of the past, this war on the world, this wholesale destruction of places that favor ungovernability, is a preoccupation that has stayed with states up until the present day. Scott notes that the marshes on the lower Euphrates and the Pontian marshes near Rome, each of them locations that have long harbored rebels, outlaws, and state evaders right in the midst of two of the cradles of civilization, were drained in the twentieth century by Saddam Hussein and Benito Mussolini, respectively; he also mentions the Great Dismal Swamp, one of the most important foci of indigenous, African, and fugitive European resistance to colonization on North America’s eastern seaboard. [89] And to this we can add the destruction of another anarchic zone, the Appalachian Mountains, particularly the attempt to carry out mountaintop removal mining on Blair Mountain, the site of a short war between an interracial group of coal miners and the US government, in 1922.

Social conflict can also turn once civilized territory into a liberated space of resistance, self-organization, and illegibility. At the end of the American Civil War, state power in the South had collapsed, and through Reconstruction, the northern bureaucracy and northern capitalists worked with the southern planting aristocracy to put the former slaves back to work, either as wage laborers or as enslaved chain gang prisoners. The overwhelming preference of the newly liberated Africans, however, was to engage in illegible, non-monetary subsistence activities like gardening, hunting, and fishing, to feed themselves as communities rather than laboring for the production of cash crops like rice and cotton. The State changed or broke its own laws to dispossess Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites of the newly expropriated plantations, drained the marshes and cut down the pine barrens that often served as refuge for liberated communities, and instituted a reign of terror through the indistinguishable forces of the police and white vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce racial separation and to teach the citizenry that freedom was only granted to those who worked, and “work” meant working for a rich person and never for one’s own self-sufficiency; whether the labor contract was negotiated with whips and chains or with salaries and evictions proved to be a mere detail. In places like the Ogeechee Neck, where former slaves evicted the planter aristocracy and their overseers and communalized the land, the military had to come in to crush the rebellion. [90]

Urban zones of evasion have opened up in the cities of many modern states, with subcultures, ethnic minorities, or large and heterogeneous groups taking advantage of capitalist decadence to transform entire neighborhoods into areas where census-taking, tax- and rent-collecting, policing, the centralized control of popular culture, and the enforcement of labor discipline all become difficult or impossible. Police campaigns of criminalization and gentrification—which is instigated by state planners more often than is commonly recognized—are the main, and usually complementary, methods for demolishing resistant, autonomous, illegible neighborhoods and constructing pacified, striated, legible residential and commercial zones in their place. San Francisco’s Mission District, Harlem and the Lower Eastside in New York, Kreuzberg in Berlin, Raval and Gràcia in Barcelona, and the Cabanyal in València, are all good examples of state evasion and the reimposition of state control.

A long-standing task of municipal police and bureaucracies has been the prohibition of street vending, the direct sale of their wares or produce by small-scale artisans, who liberate themselves of the costly, dependency-creating burdens of taxation, regulation, and rent. The primary purpose of such state mechanisms is neither quality control nor consumer protection, but the protection of shop owners and large producers, and the prohibition of self-sufficiency. Even poorer urban denizens might liberate themselves from the money economy and thus the slavery of wage labor through squatting and dumpster-diving, both of which are increasingly prohibited through legal and architectural means. The latter might include the demolition or semi-legal renting of vacant units, as commonly occurs in Spain and the Netherlands, respectively; and as far as dumpstering is concerned through the use of trash compactors or underground waste storage. Dumpstering, today, is the malnourished final heir of a once proud tradition of rural commoning that included gleaning in the fields after harvest or gathering brushwood in the forests enclosed by lords and landowners, a practice that came to be harshly punished by the UK’s Black Act and other laws in the eighteenth century. [91]

From the beginning, architecture has been a principal means of exerting control, organizing the population so that it is more comprehensible to state surveillance and more susceptible to state administration, and structuring certain forms of blackmail and coercion into the fabric of social life. I give an anarchist history tour where I currently live in Barcelona, and over several years of compiling radical histories and chronicling the development of social control, I have come across an important pattern. [92] A striking feature of all state interventions in urban architecture is the remarkable convergence between the strategic interest of exerting military control over the population, the sociocultural interest of breaking up autonomous lower-class neighborhoods, and the commercial interest of spurring legible economic growth, sometimes to the point that they become indistinguishable. I would argue that this dynamic reflects the essence of the social war and can be found even in the earliest state interventions, although the element of this trinity that is often posited as the foundation or fundamental cause, the profit motive, can in fact be considered extraneous in the short term. It is icing on the cake, a way for state planners to communicate shared interests with the economic elite, and in the long run, necessary for the state to fuel its processes of power accumulation and social control, but it is by no means the sine qua non of civilization. On the contrary, countless states have bankrupted themselves in pursuit of the social war, and not every state that has gone bankrupt has disappeared. Nor have all states held back from destroying the productive processes they feed off of, when it was a question of asserting social control.

This authoritarian convergence can also include non-state actors applying progressive values they believe will make the world a more equitable place, such as progressive environmental activists who help modern states to wipe out state-resistant practices like swiddening agriculture, which they hypocritically and myopically blame for larger environmental problems. [93]

A common example of architectural control is the near universal location (under non-modern states) of granaries within the city walls, where they will be under the control of the civilization’s more privileged castes. Considering the city walls themselves, which frequently exhibit a structure of two or more tiers, we can intuit a few things about non-modern states’ treatment of the middle classes, the artisans and merchants. They were privileged, sheltered, culturally separated from the peasants, but were also kept close, under the control of the rulers, and thus generally or partially prohibited from an independent or illegible economic activity.

Walls have also existed on a much greater scale. Contrary to popular belief, or rather, the belief inculcated by statist education, the Great Wall of China was constructed at least as much to keep the empire’s citizens in as to keep the barbarians out.

Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans in the British Isles, served the same dual purpose. Yet we are systematically taught that the only purpose of the wall was to keep out the barbarians, who always remain on the wrong side of history. The student is trained to view them from this side of the wall. The needs of state are privileged, whereas the stateless are presented as dangerous, opaque, and ultimately evil outsiders.

Such walls are also important as symbols, and complementary to the State’s organizational efforts to capture and retain subjects is a whole array of ideological efforts that to this day shape what it means to be a state subject. Religion, history, citizenship, nationality, and identity as we know it all train us to be incapable of imagining our lives outside of state authority. All of us grow up believing that the State is an inevitable and universal evolution for humankind that improved the quality of our lives; only later are we given access to the information that conflicts with this narrative, once it already constitutes our fundamental worldview and sense of self. We grow up lacking information about contemporary or historical stateless peoples. The vast majority never surpass this ignorance. States and their leaders are fed to us as the protagonists of history, and when the stateless cannot be symbolically suppressed as primitive, savage, obsolescent, ignorant, evil, or terrorist, they are relegated to the shadowy backdrop of a stage the State clearly commands.

Anticapitalists will often insist that the purpose of public education is to prepare workers. This is balderdash, a perfect example of dogma obviating reality. The vast majority of the lesson plan, once a pupil is literate and knows the most basic math, is irrelevant to the tasks of the future worker, unless we count the abilities to follow orders, accept confinement, and complete meaningless tasks; however, those skills are required of all citizens, employed or unemployed, prole or petty-bourgeoisie. A typical worker has absolutely no need to know about ancient Egypt, William Shakespeare, or basic chemistry. No, the fundamental purpose of education is to civilize children, and a large part of this means filling their heads with the lies that are necessary to make them always view history and society from the perspective that privileges state power.

In recent literature, Hadrian’s Wall has come back to us as the Wall in George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire. An intelligent writer, Martin has incisively deconstructed the romantic aspects of state mythology. In his worldview, statecraft is a bloody, authoritarian, and cynical affair. Many of his most sympathetic characters are rebels who fight authority or tragic characters who are foolishly dedicated to the sham principles the State hypocritically espouses. Stateless people are often depicted in a positive light; the most prominent example call themselves the “Free Folk” and they refer to their statist neighbors as “kneelers.” It is curious to see, at the vanguard of the popular imaginary, which aspects of state mythology can be dismantled, and which cannot. The stateless peoples in Songs of Ice and Fire are still kept to the margins of history, and do not have any voice capable of offering an anarchic solution to society. They remain a relic.

As for the Wall, as brutally honest as is the portrayal of statecraft in these novels, mass abandonment of the State is never brought up as an option. “Going savage” is not considered as a possibility. [94] The Wall does not exist to keep the kneelers in, but only to keep out the “wildlings,” and an even greater evil: the Others. The Others are a completely unnatural monstrosity. What remains beyond the consciousness of these novels is that the origin of monsters within our collective imaginary is in the very margins of the State. Whether the source is the fables of ancient Greek travelers, the more scientific account of Tacitus, or the racialized fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, monsters may only thrive where civilization and state authority are weak. In other words, the monsters also represent stateless people (or more broadly, forms of life, since humanity as distinct from animality also blurs beyond the borders of the State). Evil, in our imaginary, owes its existence entirely to the ideological machinations of the State. (Making a similar point regarding the Early Middle Ages, Le Goff notes that peasant morality was characterized by an ambiguity between good and evil, in total contrast with the moralistic dualism of the clergy. [95] ) In other words, Martin, though his vision is admirable, has done nothing more than give us a multicultural fantasy with good savages and evil savages, but in the end the narrative is the same one that has played out—no, that we have been forced to play out, and to swallow, and to play out again, until we believe it, until we cannot question it and are no longer aware of its existence—for thousands of years. In this context, it is tragically hilarious how liberals speak of freedom of expression, as though it were a meaningful concept. At a fundamental level, all expression in our civilization is saying the same thing.

What would change if everyone grew up knowing that states built walls to keep their subjects in, that a great motor of history was the state need to coerce people into being its subjects, that all of us, in one way or another, are the descendants of slaves, and that the mechanisms of our enslavement have never disappeared, only been elaborated?