The Art of Not Being Governed Quotes

“Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them. Quite often such identities, particularly minority identities, are at first imagined by powerful states, as the Han imagined the Miao, the British colonists imagined the Karen and the Shan, the French the Jarai. Whether invented or imposed, such identities select, more or less arbitrarily, one or another trait, however vague-religion, language, skin color, diet, means of subsistence-as the desideratum. Such categories, institutionalized in territories, land tenure, courts, customary law, appointed chiefs, schools, and paperwork, may become passionately lived identities. To the degree that the identity is stigmatized by the larger state or society, it is likely to become for many a resistant and defiant identity. Here invented identities combine with self-making of a heroic kind, in which such identifications become a badge of honor”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization.” on the contrary, I argue that 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.”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labor or onto the plantation deplored crops that allowed a free peasantry to maintain its autonomy. Hacienda owners in Central America claimed that with cassava, all a peasant needed was a shotgun and a fishhook and he would cease to work regularly for wages.”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

“Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.”
― James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia