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What's (written) history for?: On James C. Scott's Zomia , especially Chapter 6½
Author(s) -
MICHAUD JEAN
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12322
Subject(s) - orality , egalitarianism , argument (complex analysis) , reading (process) , literacy , history , sociology , literature , flexibility (engineering) , state (computer science) , oral tradition , aesthetics , anthropology , classics , philosophy , law , art , linguistics , political science , politics , pedagogy , biochemistry , chemistry , statistics , mathematics , algorithm , computer science
What could still trigger a worthwhile anthropological debate now that eight years have passed since the publication of James C. Scott's The art of not being governed in 2009? In this article, the author proposes a reading involving perhaps the most controversial chapter of Scott's book: Chapter 6½ – ‘Orality, writing, and texts’. Scott means to say that the absence of literacy in a society could result from a preference rather than a deficiency. He describes a project that refuses state formation, putting to use the advantages of flexibility and adaptation that an oral tradition has over a written tradition. Drawing on the case of the Hmong, the author proposes that Scott's argument might have been made more solid had he relied less on a geographical and historically rooted definition of Zomia, and more on a discussion of cultural elements such as egalitarianism and orality.