Notes on James C Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed -- Scott's multiplicity

Notes on James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).

Scott describes a multiplicity with topographical / transport-technological, political-economic, political-organizational, administrative, and violence elements. A multiplicity is a set of interacting processes in which thresholds in the relations of processes produce qualitative changes in the behavior of the system.

For Scott, “state” and “non-state” processes are in “dialectical” or “mutually constituting” relations. The “state” processes (enclosure, enslavement, taxing …) here are orienting limits, with classic, colonial, and post-colonial states with varying capacities to approach the limits and maintain / reproduce those gains. The “non-state” processes (flight, nomadicism, raiding …) also admit of degrees, with well-administered states in times of economic growth sometimes attracting non-state peoples to settle down. States and non-states exchange (at different rates at different times) people, customs, and goods across the “membrane” that frontiers provide, all mediated by smugglers, traders, brokers, peddlers, and so on.

However, the whole analysis is governed by the “last enclosure” thesis whereby post-WW2 “distance-destroying technologies” (roads / cars / ATVs; planes / helicopters / drones; electronic communications) are severely encroaching upon ability to live a self-governing or non-state life. However, again (something Scott underplays), climate change could quite possibly throw a spanner in the works and allow more leeway for non-state living.

I. Topographical / transport-technological (“friction of terrain”)

1. State spaces: valleys and rivers / oceans
   1. military enforcement
   2. administrative “visibility”
   3. economic integration limited by cost per unit weight across distance:
      1. much easier by water
      2. by land, human / animal power constrained by its need for fuel, which it also had to carry with it
2. Non-state spaces:
   1. hills / mountains (in this book)
   2. but generalizable to any zone where state reach is hampered: jungles, deserts, marshes, and so on.

II. Political economy (production)

1. state
   1. coerced by state: sedentary river valley rice agriculture is legible, taxable / appropriateable, and the population is conscriptable into army or into corvée labor
      1. slavery
         1. capture of hill people by raiding
         2. debt bondage
      2. share-cropping
      3. corvée labor for infrastructure and / or monuments
   2. however,
      1. Scott rejects Wittfogel: states did not build irrigation, but took over historical, slow, accretions of it
      2. similarly, you can have terraced rice cultivation in hills and wet-rice w/o states or states w/o wet rice (64-65)
   3. tolerated / encouraged by state
      1. independent urban artisanal production
      2. temple / palace luxury goods (also by trade / gift)
      3. products for trade with hill peoples
         1. fish and other foods unavailable in the hills
         2. manufactured goods (e.g., metal tools and weapons)
2. non-state production
   1. food production / consumption
      1. swidden agriculture / horticulture
      2. nomadic steppe pastoralism
      3. nomadic foraging
   2. trade with states (sale, barter, debt payment, tribute [106])
      1. by land (high density / high value
         1. plants: medicinals / spices (opium, pepper)
         2. animals: birds, feathers, honey
         3. minerals: jewels 
      2. by water (can be bulkier)
         1. timber
         2. cattle
         3. animal products (e.g., furs)
         4. hill agriculture (yams, rice, etc)
      3. slaves

III. Political organization

1. state
   1. concentrated manpower (64)
      1. for agriculture
      2. for military
         1. to squeeze peasants
         2. to hold geographically important positions to collect tolls on trade
         3. but concentration allows famines / epidemics
   2. central command authority with radiating subordinates
   3. military specialization / conscription
   4. taxes
      1. land rents based on “visible” agricultural productivity
      2. tolls / taxes commercial transactions
   5. corvée labor

2. non-state “shatter zones”
   1. egalitarian / acephalic bands
   2. chiefdoms
   3. temporary alliances

IV. Ethnic / kinship / linguistic structures

1. state systems:
   1. need ease of incorporation in order to concentrate populations, even if we see use of ethnicity for stratification
   2. once incorporated, we see tendency to uniformity, fixity, religious orthodoxy (155)
2. non-state peoples: multiple / flexible kinship (“ethnogenesis”)
   1. ethnicity: varying declared identities depending who was asking
      1. p 254: “identities are plural … and systematically structured by relations of power and prestige … a bandwidth of traits or identities that could be deployed or performed as the situation required…. Ethnic identity … would be the repertoire of possible performances and the contexts in which they are exhibited”
      2. nonetheless with states providing constraints
   2. tribes:
      1. often state creations for administration
      2. can become a self-identity for political purposes
   3. kinship:
      1. ease of incorporation of immigrants, captives, in-marrying
      2. ease of creating fictitious lineages to legitimate new aristos
   4. languages: hill peoples tend to multi-lingualism

V. Regimes of violence

1. state
   1. primary violence of statification warfare:
      1. territorial incorporation
      2. population enslavement and resettlement
   2. secondary violence:
      1. tax terrorization
      2. enforcement of conscription and corvée labor
2. non-state
   1. anti-state fighting (state avoiding)
   2. internal state-preventing violence (exile, "capital punishment")
   3. predation on state economies
      1. trade routes
      2. raids:
         1. stealing from produce of valley agricultural slaves
         2. slave-raiding (population is targeted commodity)