From Padi States to Commercial States: Reflections on Identity and the Social Construction Space in the Borderlands of Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar

Staying or Moving: Government Compliance in Post-Zomian Laos

“…The required control over the uplands, however, was not in place earlier in the twentieth century (Scott 2009: 10). This makes the Rmeet today 'internal Zomians' , to borrow a term from Frédéric Bourdier et al (2015): people who live out their somewhat strained relationship with the state as part of their citizenship but who still define themselves by cultural, local and geographic differences (see Sprenger 2017a). In particular, aspects of livelihood that have been constrained and illegalised by the government, including swiddening, hunting and some forms of labour migration, are highly contested.…”

Southeast Asian early Maritime Silk Road trading polities’ hinterland and the sea-nomads of the Isthmus of Kra

“…In South and Southeast Asia, interdependent relationships mostly developed with different socially and economically-organised groups, in particular with traders (Dunn, F. 1975;Headland et al 1989;Morrison 2002) and/or with lowland agriculturalists (Junker 2002;Junker and Smith 2017) as an adaptive strategy to deal with the fragmented and diverse environment and to thrive in a politically and economically changing world (Morrison and Junker, 2002). The pressures lowland regional states exerted over neighbouring groups, such as "corvées" (forced or required labour), war, slave raids and plunder, are also often cited to explain groups' voluntary marginalisation and sociogenesis, such as for the various farming groups' in mountainous regions (Scott 2009) or for the sea nomads of Thailand (Moklen) and Myanmar (Moken) Bourdier et al, 2015;. In the Malay World Benjamin suggests that minorities resulted from a choice to avoid an imposed hierarchical organisation and its apparatus combined to an internal process of dissimilation between the different socio-economically organised groups (2002: 9).…”