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He cut down every tree he saw, he shot every animal he saw, he made war on all the people. He made guns to shoot flies with, bullets to shoot fleas with. He was afraid of mountains and made mashers to flatten them, he was afraid of valleys and made fillers to fill them up, he was afraid of grass and burned it and put stones where it was. He was really afraid of water, because of the way water is. He tried to use it all up, burying springs, damming rivers, making wells. But if you drink, you piss. Water will come back down. As the desert grows so does the sea. So Little Man poisoned the sea. The fish all died.

— Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

Zomia is the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states. Its days are numbered. hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.

Virtually everything about these people ... can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length ... to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.

the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness ... is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history.

This account implicitly brings together the histories of all those peoples extruded by coercive state-making and unfree labor systems: Gypsies, Cossacks, polyglot tribes made up of refugees from Spanish reducciones in the New World and the Philippines, fugitive slave communities, the Marsh Arabs, San-Bushmen, and so on.

Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a “secondary adaptation,” a kind of “self-barbarianization” adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion.

Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive” ... practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated.

Since 1945, and in some cases before then, the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies—railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology—so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states, so diminished the friction of terrain, that ... the sovereign nation-state is now busy projecting its power to its outermost territorial borders and mopping up zones of weak or no sovereignty.

“dead white men” ... . were the pioneers of the trail along which I plod here; I wouldn’t even have found it without them. Pierre Clastres’ ... daring interpretation of state-evading and state-preventing native peoples in post-Conquest South America in La société contre l’état.... Ernest Gellner’s analysis of Berber-Arab relations helped me grasp that where sovereignty and taxes stopped, there precisely, “ethnicity” and “tribes” began, and that barbarian was another word states used to describe any self-governing, nonsubject people.

The numerous orang laut (sea nomads, sea gypsies) in insular Southeast Asia are clearly a seagoing, archipelago-hopping variant of swiddeners dwelling in mountain fastnesses. Like many hill people they also have a martial tradition and have moved easily between piracy (seaborne raiding), slave-raiding, and serving as the naval guard and strike force of several Malay kingdoms. Poised strategically at the edge of major shipping lanes, able to strike and disappear quickly, they conjure up a whole watery Zomia.... As Ben Anderson noted while urging me in this direction, “The sea is bigger, emptier than the mountains and the forest. Look at all those pirates still easily fending off the G-7, Singapore, etc., with aplomb.” to pursue [this theme]: ... Eric Tagliacozzo.

edited by Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), is packed with original history, theory, and ethnography.

— The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott

In all those houses the backward-head people lived. They had electrical wires in their ears, and were deaf. They smoked tobacco day and night, and were continually making war. He tried to get away from the war by going on, but it was everywhere they lived, and they lived everywhere. He saw them hiding and killing each other. Sometimes the houses burned for miles and miles. But there were so many of those people that there was no end to them.

— Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

the corn that you can thrive on is the high-lysine corn and the beans have to be dense. It is the combination of dense beans and high-lysine corn hulled by lye that produces all the amino acids you need to make protein. This has a remarkable quality: it can be turned into something that a baby can swallow. It will keep a baby alive when the mother’s milk goes dry. Try to find that with any other vegetable-based foods. With Iroquois Indians when a mother’s milk went dry, they fed the baby a derivative of corn; it’s the stuff the corn bread is boiled in.

— Original Instructions by Melissa K. Nelson (Page 175)