The Ungovernable.

A Return To Barbarian Logic!

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders, administration and representatives in recent years, has been radical and ever more frequent.” (Paul Kingsnorth, Unherd). The author should have included the entire governed expanse of the world, a global sentiment as the “loss of faith”. Yet, that is a matter of extending the story forward — combining the ungovernable with the loss of faith.

The last 5000 years of civilization — varying enclosures of land and sea, as an outcome of violent expansion (as well as collapse) of many empires, kingdoms and states is well recorded in history. Yet globally speaking, the people who managed to evade such enclosures or everlasting dominion, can be understood as the “non-state peoples” — the tribal, the indigenous, the foragers and scavengers, the raiders and the non-sedentary, were labelled as “barbarians” and “savage” — a counterpart of the “civilized” and what James C. Scott refers to as the “dark twin” of civilization, both in “reality and semiotically”. Like a tenacious combo, the Civilized and the Barbarian were “born together as twins”. A relationship that has survived to this date, most often framed within a devious logic, impositions and myths lasting thousands of years, as the ‘superiority’ of the civilized versus ‘inferiority’ of the uncivilized.

A great disservice, as baseless demonization, when modern educated people label their enemies as “barbarians” or modern acts of genocide, holocaust, war and invasion as “barbaric”. Ingrained within us all, is an unfounded fear and cultural loathing of uncivilized people — based on mythology, religion, past imaginaries and present norms of “othering”.

The civilized conjures up it’s diametrically opposite partner, as the uncivilized. Worse, despite abundant historical and archeological evidence to the contrary, the peoples who have identified themselves as belonging to the ostensibly more “evolved” member, of each pair. It is the “Civilized” who have taken their identity as “essential, permanent, and superior”. Within such a binary, there is very little difference of outlook, between the ancient Chinese or Europeans or Indians, between the Ottomans or the Spanish or the British. A form of othering that has survived, right down to our age of nations and their so called sovereignty. Owen Lattimore has articulated this “dark twin” conundrum most clearly. “By introducing the “Barbarian” into history and historical context, creates not only problems of legitimacy of the so called “civilized” but also the entire basis of enclosure, dominion, sovereignty, existing law, regulations like taxation and property, even nationality and identity” (Owen Lattimore).

Modernity can also be understood as a system of “enclosure” — fueled and sustained by the destruction of self-sufficient “life-ways” following their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and orchestrated by policies, corporations and the entire apparatus of domination. What then can we learn from the Barbarians and the stateless people of the world? What lessons of freedom and evading direct confrontation? Let us ask the Barbarians? Let us follow their ecologically viable trajectory? Life at the peripheries of much troubled and violent civilizations. The “history of peoples without history” is a history of their struggle against the state.

Defined as “Zomia” by James C. Scott, is a vast region that “virtually maps all the lands at altitudes above roughly 300 meters, all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China — Yun’nan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Sichuan” (The Art Of Not Being Governed). The region can be taken as an expanse of about 2.4 million square kilometers, containing about 100 million peoples, often slotted as “minorities” who in reality represent a “truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety” according James C. Scott and earlier historians like Owen Lattimore, Eugene Burnouf and Fernand Braudel. Zomia is not defined by enclosure but the zones of contact and of refuge, when seen and understood as evolving topographies. Diverse environments that include not just the pastoral and non-sedentary, but also hunter gatherers, nomads with domesticated animals, slash-and-burn farmers, traveling traders, weavers, potters, masons, blacksmiths, medicine men, etc.

Dozens of intersecting or sometimes entirely isolated bands, spread allover “Zomia” speak more than 10 languages and several related dialects. Among them are the Akha, H’mong, Karen, Lahu, Mien and Wa peoples. A “nomadic periphery” and “adjacent states” are the two coinciding spheres that these groups have navigated for well over 2000 years. Their autonomy has a direct relationship with survival, regardless of imposed national borders, internment camps and hundreds of attempts (violent and non-violent) to civilize them over centuries. James C. Scott encapsulates such a geographic expanse as “shatter zones or zones of refuge”.

For more than 2 millennia, at the peripheries of many empires (ancient and medieval) as well as nation-states (of the modern era), the stateless have evolved, pursuing a diverse range of sustainable activities. Remarkable examples of survival and sustenance. Ecological and social patterns within ‘Nomadism’ that we find at higher altitudes, around deep jungles, seemingly arid harsh deserts and while navigating riverways and myriad tributaries. A recent follow up study* (2018) reveals the “nomad ability” to evade and resist civilization — “stateless nature of various communities… about 45% of such non-sedentary, non-enclosure people, nomadic in terms of subsistence, do not exist for a given state, in terms of birth records, address, passports or legal ID.” (Bérénice Bellina, National University Of Singapore). Further down the coastal regions south Asia, we find the nomadic Sea Peoples or “Sea Gypsies” (Sama Bajau). Their nomadic sea-faring cousins, numbering roughly 1.4 million are the ‘Moken’ (Burmese-Thai Mergui Archipelago), the ‘Orang Laut’ (southeastern Sumatra, Riau Islands of Indonesia and peripheries of Singapore) and the ‘Tanka’ (Southern China).

Globally speaking, all identities without exception, have been primarily social constructions, and for that very reason the above groups do not identify themselves as Chinese or Vietnamese or Indonesian or of any fixed nation-state in the region. To recount Barbarian victory in medieval China, both the Yuan and Manchu/Qing Dynasties were defeated by outlying Mongol tribes (Red Turban Rebellions) and simultaneously bashed by natural disasters (mass flooding). The invading “Barbarians” backed by thousands of Buddhists, in turn would claim the center as “the new elite of the sedentary state, living at the capital and operating the state apparatus” (Against The Grain, James C. Scott). As the Chinese proverb has it, “You can conquer a kingdom on horseback, but to rule it, you have to dismount.”

Zomia is probably the “largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states”. In spite of several attempts to invade, capture and convert these nomadic groups, by Chiang Kai-shek (1930s), followed by Mao / People's Liberation Army (1950-1965) and later by Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and Laos — the rebellious spirit or the “fugitive status” of all such people remains. However the resilience is fledgling over time. “A recent field study shows over 122,000 undocumented people crossed unmanned borders, between South China, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bangladesh and North Eastern India.” (South China Morning Post, 2020). Yet, according to James C. Scott “…their days are numbered. Not so very long ago however, such self-governing peoples were the great majority of humankind”.

Today, we might identify them as “our living ancestors” or the proverbial “Barbarian” or the “Savage Highlander”. What human beings of the region were, before they discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism, Hinduism, dynasties and incoming civilization. Scott insists on the higher autonomy of non-sedentary people of the past as “….hill peoples (Zomia) are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects”. Yet the “fugitive” is not specific to South Asia, but can be found scattered around the entire world, whereby things like slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare would become synonymous of civilization making.

Is sufficiently clear whichever way we might be oriented, in terms of escape or reform, that the people of Zomia are more autonomous and self-sufficient, than those who were subjects of some empire, or citizens of new nations, serving whatever political economy. Conceptually or as lived experience, evading the state and it’s grid-like emancipation of everything is encapsulated by historian and philosopher, Arnold J. Toynbee as “More directly, civilized life is symbolized by material abundance and complexity as much as the loss of social consciousness, the ability to escape disasters and every new crisis of modernity.” (Civilization On Trial).

In history, nomads/nomadism have always been regarded as a by-product of the cultural evolution of sedentary farmers and “a permanent threat”. And that is a fundamental error or say the “civilized bias aimed at all outsiders, foreigners, non-natives, an outstanding fear of the non enclosure…” (Fernand Braudel). Take the case of the Roman empire and it’s relationship with the “Barbarians”. Braudel’s analysis of European civilization as a long process extending centuries, emphasizes on the topography of continents and not so much on the popular buildings and “core imaginaries” of the past. Braudel insists that “the invasive projects undertaken by organized armies, was entirely dependent on the ability to find natural passage, build new roads, bridges and carry water / food supplies over long distances… actual conquest of barbarian lands and outlying regions was a never ending project that stretched right down to modern era”.

Braudel’s observation busted an inherent misunderstanding or false assessment of empires, framed within popular history. About the given empire’s outreach on maps and words versus their actual dominion and ability to integrate and sustain power (material reality). For any empire, be it Greek, Roman, Spanish or Portuguese, or even later — in order to extend dominion, the construction of roads and marine transport was fundamental, which enabled garrisons, further administration, cultivation, taxation, ports, towns etc. Things that framed the center’s relationship with the peripheries, is key to understand the equity of any empire as well as the autonomy of the “Barbarians”. Why did the almighty Julius Caesar believe “I rather be the first man in a barbarian village than the second man in Rome”? We may never know. The uncharted hinterlands and highlands outside core peripheries, remained autonomous in their ability to adapt, whereby small bands invented ever new ways to evade the ill-prospects, of capture, slavery, forced labor, sedentary economics, written language and the final inclusion into the empire.

Decades ahead of the Roman Empire’s apex (115 - 120CE), geographically diverse, outlying communities and non-sedentary groups had already been identified as “extra societatem or outside civilized society” (Pliny the Elder, 70CE). This included every tribe or junta that came in contact with the expansion of the empire. New inquisitions followed standardization viz-a-viz institutionalization — of territories, land tenure, customary laws, appointed chiefs, garrisons, even later as schools and paperwork, coalescing into a “Roman identity”. Yet the empire failed to actually convert so many “Barbarians” especially those who remained at the peripheries, however primitive, pagan, illiterate, warring or unruly. The “colonized” and the “converted barbarians” in turn would attempt the conquest of the very state or empire, or worse become a new ruling class by itself.

Pliny’s so called “primitives” and “adults who behave like children” would eventually cause widespread disruption — raiding, invading, sacking and weakening the might of the Roman empire over centuries. Most notable amongst the dozens of so called “Barbarians” were the Picts, Caledonians, and Saxons (in Britain), the Germanic tribes of Frisii, Saxons, Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians, Marcomanni, Quadi, Lugii, Vandals, Juthungi, Gepids and Goths. The Dacian tribes of the Carpi and the Sarmatian tribes of Iazyges, Roxolani and Alans (later Catalans) as well as Bastarnae, Scythians, Borani and Heruli along the Rhine-Danube rivers and the Black Sea. The following epoch, lasting almost 1000 years, known as the Middle Ages is witness to the mushrooming of hundreds of small autonomous juntas, spread over the continent — an entanglement of “barbarian and the civilized, the primitives and the enlightened, the free and the bound, the religious and the heretics, the people without history and the people with history”.

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In Praise of Barbarians (Mike Davis) “Essays against Empire” examines contemporary socio-political dynamics, drawing parallels to ancient Rome's “encounters and experiences” with Barbarians, right down to 20th and 21st century political and military strategies (American) deployed in Nicaragua (1912 and 1932), Vietnam (1970s) and Afghanistan (2001). Davis draws several parallels between ancient and modern colonization of land, as well as modern state warfare within “unnavigable shanty-towns and slums spread across the world, where the barbarian can hide or evade the state along with the dispossessed and unemployed”. Spatial dimensions of “organized conquest and settler colonies” and their corresponding mechanisms of achieving dominion, have gone through tremendous change over the last 2000 years, yet the “patterns of resistance” reveal remarkable resemblance, with the ancient ways and means of the “Barbarian Logic”. Both the civilized and the uncivilized are situated at two ends of the same political spectrum, and like the antagonistic relationships between religion, imperial power, democracy and the state, entangled in unprecedented ways, across societies, topographies and nations. Deviating deeper, please read “Land Is Life” (Patrick Wolfe)

Organized religions that proliferated far and wide, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, attacked and demonized those who could not be captured or converted. Chastised, excluded or abandoned, by the written word or by fables, we find thousands of verses, many divine verdicts upon the “Barbarians” in many languages. Yet “Barbarians” had also evolved, to manifest their own supernatural gods and deities. Goddess Kali as an example — the deity and her lore was appropriated into medieval Hindu mythology and religious practices, yet the origins of Kali go a long way back to the dawn of humanity. A demon-slaying “Barbarian” Goddess, worshiped by the Neolithic “Adivasis” of Bengal. Kali statues found within nomad settlements dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE.

But the story of expansionary states and self-governing peoples is not confined to Europe or Southeast Asia, nor the ancient / medieval worlds alone. Nor did the global “Barbarian” fade into history as a symbol of primitive rebellion. “It is echoed in the cultural and administrative process of ‘internal colonialism’ that characterizes the formation of almost every modern Western nation-state” (James C. Scott). Very clearly visible in the imperial projects of not just the ancient Chinese, Persian, Greek or Roman, but also the House Of Hapsburgs (Spain, Austria, Holland and Hungary), the Ottomans (medieval Anadolu) and the British, Russian, Japanese right down to American expansionism in the 19th and 20th century. All these empires, their corresponding dynasties and nation-states have waged continuous wars of inquisition, in order to acquire higher dominion as well as absorb every possible “uncivilized spirit and body” into myriad grids — historic segments of modernity.

The matter of subjugation, of indigenous peoples — in “white-settler” colonies such as the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Algeria and even Palestine, is a recurring conflict of autonomy and authority, that has stretched over centuries (and generations). The precise dynamics of the invader and the enslaved, as encounters, is unique to each case. The case with sedentary, town-dwelling Arabs and nomadic pastoralists (of the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa) has characterized much of Middle Eastern and Arab history. The sustained invasion, slavery and conversion of the indigenous in the so called “New World” is yet distinct, as a form of hemispheric domination. “Kill The Indian, Save The Man” and several other manifest destiny mantras that highlight the European invader’s “quest to civilize or worse eliminate the barbarians and savage Indians…” (Roxanne Ortiz Dunbar). Vast numbers of nomads based in Africa merit a special mention, in terms of their sheer ability to avoid Arab and European domination (and slavery) as well as post-colonial African states — the nomadic Somali, Dinka, Nuer, Berbers, Afar, Bedouin, Toubou, Massai, Fulani, Boran, Rendille and Samburu to name just a few. And two cheers for the “700+ ethnic groups” of India, commonly referred to as “Adivasis” who still traverse in small bands across the entire subcontinent, often without cash, without passport or ID.

The ubiquity of the encounter between self-governing and state-governed people can be understood in myriad ways, especially outside popular history and national sovereignty. As the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tamed, the hill / forest people versus the valley/cleared-land people, upstream and downstream, the Barbarian and the Civilized, the backward and the modern — “the people without history and the people with history—provides us with many possibilities for comparative triangulation. We shall take advantage of these opportunities where we can.” (The Art Of Not Being Governed).

Much like the ancient Barbarians, the nomads of today, the stateless and undocumented people tie up into one ‘socio-ecological mode’ — that is able to appear or disappear at any place and any time. One that is able to cope with rising scarcity and is also collapse ready! The “Barbarian Logic” is perhaps something embedded in our social evolution, if not our DNA, unlike the impositions of fixed identity, nationality and a given profession, most often hogtied to modern means of production and corresponding modes of survival. Simply put, the “Barbarian Logic” is Anarchy — anarchist frameworks, decisions and actions that can fight back raw power. Perhaps even overthrow acquisition of land, avoid corporate slavery, enforced exploitation, taxation and a range of negative impositions of the day.

The Ungovernable. Escaping the tentacular state and it’s means of oppression, has been a popular aim for thousands of years and is even more prescient today. Especially with the rise of ever worse forms of tyranny, wielded by the ruling class using a range of destructive laws, techniques and technologies. “The Ungovernable” is a response, however individual or based on kinship. History shows us all, that some cultures developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”. Some cultures rejected every offer and imposition of the so called civilized and the modernized. May the true “Barbarian” persist and motivate us all. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and totalitarian outreach of the state? What to do? Avoid it? Hide from it? Attack it? Ignore it? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how? Alas, I don’t know. But I do know how to become ungovernable — as a transformation, a transition to higher autonomy, whatever the consequences and yet not imagined outcomes.

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