An unfashionable mess on the margins : clans, polities and ethnicities in North-East India. (original) (raw)

When I discovered the texts by Van Schendel and Scott about Zomia, I was both reassured and annoyed. Like others no doubt, I considered this region as a whole, without actually being able to name it other than as "the mountains of South-East Asia". I was therefore reassured that my intuition was shared by others, but upset that others had talked about it first. For me, Zomia is a multiplicity of distinctive anthropological situations but which at "certain levels" shows some consistency, without us being able to say either where these levels are or what this consistency looks like. In short, up to now we've all had our suspicions but hardly any certainties. Scott's book has at last made available a series of theories that can be discussed to further the overall understanding of this part of Asia itself. Here I will not consider his central theory, the one concerning "anarchy" -which I have reservations about -but what I'm going to talk about refers back to this for several reasons. I'm interested in one aspect of the anthropological complexity of this region, one that concerns superimpositions and therefore differences between cultures and ethnic groups. On this subject, the question of scale, which is the topic of this panel, is essential. To caricature, there are two options. We can adopt a relativist stance and spend our lives trying to describe all individual cases, without ever getting to the bottom of them all. We may instead choose to ignore the idiosyncrasies, to take a step back in order to identify the features common to all Zomia societies. But then there is the risk of only emphasizing what is universal and of abstracting so much that any statement will be contradicted when confronted with ethnographic data.