Over the past twenty years or so, researchers have increasingly used the term Zomia to talk about ethnic and linguistic minority communities who live at the edges of state control, especially in the mountainous regions of South and Southeast Asia. The idea was first proposed by the historian Willem van Schendel as a way of drawing attention to a very large highland zone that stretches across many modern national borders, but does not fit neatly into familiar categories like “South Asia”, “Southeast Asia”, or “East Asia” (van Schendel 2002).
Van Schendel pointed out that many highland peoples have long shared cultural, linguistic, and historical connections that existed well before the creation of modern nation-states. As a result, they are often awkward to classify using present-day political maps. For example, Konyak, Tangkhul, and Thadou-speaking communities live on both sides of the India–Myanmar border. Likewise, Lisu (Yobin), Kaman (Mishmi), and Bori (Adi) communities are found in both India and Tibet/China. Asking whether such groups are “South Asian” or “Southeast Asian” misses the point, because their distributions mostly predate both the borders and the regional labels themselves. The term Zomia gives us a way to talk about this shared transnational highland world and the deep connections within it.
The concept of Zomia became much more widely known after the political scientist James C. Scott developed it further in his book The Art of Not Being Governed (Scott 2009). Scott argued that many familiar features of Asian highland societies – such as shifting cultivation, small and scattered settlements, weak political hierarchies, strong oral traditions, and high linguistic diversity – should not be seen as leftovers from a “primitive” past. Instead, he suggested that these features developed over time as ways of avoiding control by powerful lowland states. In this view, Zomia is not just a place on the map, but the historical outcome of people repeatedly moving away from expanding states and shaping their ways of life to remain difficult to govern, tax, or conscript.
This is an appealing and influential idea, and it has shaped how many people think about highland societies in Asia. However, when we look closely at the Eastern Himalaya – and especially at the history of the Mising – it becomes clear that the story is more complicated…
Today, the Mising live mainly in the lowlands of the Brahmaputra valley. Yet linguistic evidence, oral traditions, and shared cultural practices all show that they originate in the same highland cultural and linguistic world as the Adi, Galo, and other groups of the Siang and Subansiri regions (Taid 2010; Pegu et al. 2021; Post 2021). In other words, the Mising did not move up into the hills to escape states. Instead, their ancestors moved downfrom the highlands into the plains.
Most researchers agree that this movement into the Brahmaputra valley took place several centuries ago. Early Mughal- and British-period observers already described the Mising as long-established in the plains by the time they first encountered them (Cazim 1799; Wilcox 1832; Mackenzie 1884). Importantly, this movement did not lead to a sudden loss of what are often called “Zomian” ways of life, nor to a rapid reshaping of Mising society along lowland state models. What we see instead is continuity: practices shaped in the highlands were carried into new environments and adapted, rather than abandoned.
This matters because the Mising continue to share many cultural and social features with highland Tani groups that are often described as typical of Zomia. These include shifting and mixed farming practices, village-based economies, egalitarian clan-based social organisation, and rich oral traditions. The Mising language also pays close attention to landscape. Its grammar encodes uphill and downhill directions, contrasts between north/south and east/west, and especially navigation of river systems (e.g. télé vs. bélé vs. élé). These kinds of “topographical-deictic” language systems are strongly associated with mountainous environments. In the Mising case, however, they did not disappear when people settled in the plains. Instead, they were adapted to managing large and complex riverine landscapes (Post 2020).
If such cultural and linguistic features mainly arose as strategies for avoiding states, then the Mising case is difficult to explain. Their history simply does not fit Scott’s model of people fleeing state power into the hills and reshaping their societies in response.
Looking more broadly at the Mising alongside other Tani groups suggests a different way of thinking about Zomia. Many of the features often described as “Zomian” may not be clever strategies invented to escape states at all. Instead, they may be long-standing ways of living that developed well before strong states existed in this region. In the Eastern Himalaya, high levels of linguistic diversity, flexible farming systems, and relatively egalitarian social organisation likely go back thousands of years, to a time when nearby valley states had little reach or influence. When states eventually arrived – often late and unevenly – they encountered societies with their own stable systems, which did not need to be reinvented in order to maintain a degree of independence. (Post 2022).
The Mising are therefore especially important for thinking about Zomia. Their history shows that “Zomian” ways of life do not necessarily come from state evasion, do not depend on permanent highland isolation, and do not automatically disappear when people come into closer contact with states. Instead, they point to deep historical continuities in culture and identity that challenge simple explanations based only on flight and resistance. Seen from the Mising case and the broader Eastern Himalayan perspective, Zomia begins to look less like a reaction to state power and more like a region in which long-standing and successful ways of living have endured, adapted, and persisted over many centuries, right up to the present.
(Featured image courtesy of the Author)
References
Cazim, Mohammed. 1799. “A Description of Assam.” Asiatic Researches 2: 171–85.
Mackenzie, Alexander. 1884. History of the Relations of the Government with the Hill Tribes of the North-East Frontier of Bengal. Royal Asiatic Society.
Pegu, Pabitra Kr., Bidyeswar Doley, Suruj Kr. Patiri Mili, and Aswini Kr. Doley, eds. 2021. A Concise Cultural Dictionary of the Misings (Miris). Second Edition. Mising Cultural Association, Assam.
Post, Mark W. 2020. “The Distribution, Reconstruction and Varied Fates of Topographical Deixis in Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan): Implications for the Reconstruction of an Early Trans-Himalayan Environment.” Diachronica 37 (3): 146–87. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.19018.pos.
Post, Mark W. 2021. “On Reconstructing Ethno-Linguistic Prehistory: The Case of Tani.” In Crossing Boundaries: Tibetan Studies Unlimited, edited by Diana Lange, Jarmila Ptáčková, Marion Wettstein, and Mareike Wulff. Academia Nakladatelství.
Post, Mark W. 2022. “Rethinking ‘Zomia’ from an Eastern Himalayan Perspective.” In Ethnolinguistic Prehistory of the Eastern Himalaya, edited by Mark W. Post, Stephen Morey, and Toni Huber. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004518049_003.
Schendel, Willem van. 2002. “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 647–68.
Scott, James. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press.
Taid, Tabu, ed. 2010. Mising Gompir Kumsung: A Dictionary of the Mising Language, with an Introduction to Mising Phonology and Grammar. Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art & Culture.
Wilcox, R. 1832. “Memoir of a Survey of Assam and the Neighbouring Countries, Executed in 1825-6-7-8.” Asiatic Researches XVII: 314–469.
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