Central to the model of premodern Southeast Asian padi-states that Jared Scott writes about in The Art of Not Being Governed is his notion of a porous boundary between state space and non-state space.
State space consists of all those places where unmoving rice paddies are worked and taxed, people are subject to corvée labor and military conscription, and somewhere a king is ruling from his palace. It is typically marked by the presence of a salvation religion - usually Theravada Buddhism or Islam.
Non-state space is basically everywhere else - usually (but not always) marked by swiddening agriculture, animist religion, less hierarchical social structures, and a vast plurality of languages and ethnic identities which people pass between fairly freely.
Scott argues that for much of history, peripheral peoples had the choice of which to inhabit, and might as easily leave an unsuccessful state and go swiddening as they would join a successful state. The kingdoms of SE Asia were always fighting to hold people in against the draw of life outside the obligations and hierarchies that states imposed.
It's too bad that Scott evidently never read Melford Spiro's Buddhism and Society. Spiro's ethnography of Theravada Buddhism in Burma provides an interesting lens on Scott's leaking states. Spiro writes:
The Buddhist emphasis on redemption from suffering permits the monastery, in addition to its other functions, to serve as an institutionalized solution to the problems of all kinds of men including those who, from a secular perspective, are (or would become) misfits, neurotics, and failures.Written in the 60s, his ethnography has many touches of idealism and psychoanalysis, which one should simply spit out like a cherry pits. It's the idea of the monastery as a kind of release valve for social pressures that I find particularly compelling. Instead of retreating to the mountains, where one would exist entirely beyond the reach of the state and where one's labor could never be compelled, the appeal of monkhood allows one to remain within the regimentation of state space and continue fulfilling prosocial functions within it even as one rejects the "worldly" tedium and toil of life as a paddy farmer.
Recall also that in Theravada Buddhism, monkhood is not necessarily forever. All young Burmese men are briefly ordained as a rite of passage in their early teens, and throughout adult life men may leave the monastery and return to it. One would not expect the same from the people who leave to swidden in the hills.
Additionally, those who flee the state into the hills of Zomia to swidden would likely flee as families, not as individuals. Only men have the option of joining the monastic orders, though. Monkhood is described by Spiro as a thoroughly individualistic pursuit. He writes of monks as being paranoid and jealous of their peers, suspecting them of falsehood and constantly claiming their own attainment.
Ultimately, I'm not sure where this synthesis leaves me. Am I smarter now, because I noticed a connection between two books and wrote about it (poorly) on a blog no one reads? Difficult to say. The issue will make me neurotic. Maybe I should join a monastery.
