The third to last chapter of “The Art of Not Being Governed” is “Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case”. One of the ideas is that there are no real “tribes”, but they are a handy abstraction for those “seeing like a state” (in the words of his previous book) and are made manifest by state action which molds people into the identities defined for them. He views such identity as more fluid and opportunistically adopted by the upland southeast asian peoples who are his primary object of study in this book. I’m quite ignorant about that area and am willing to concede to his greater knowledge. But the old orthodoxy has taken deep enough root in my mind that I can’t jump to applying his theory elsewhere. A footnote references the Bushmen/San of the Kalahari, citing “Land Filled With Flies” to the effect that san-Khoi designates a caste which includes dispossessed Tswana and other non-San speakers (Scott acknowledges this interpretation is controversial and references a review to that effect). My impression had been that genetic data really does support the theory he claims is mythical: that they are the remains of one of the “oldest” human populations (except both sides of any branching event are equally old). An example of people for whom genetic data does not support the story we had previously been telling ourselves are the Basques.
There are some other populations conventionally considered to be made up of assorted refugees from landless laboring like Russia’s cossacks and Florida’s (part African) Seminoles, but in the same paragraph includes the Gypsies. I had never heard such a claim given for them before, and James Scott provides no cite. Genetic evidence shows them to be distinct from European populations, and while they don’t have that much south asian ancestry remaining that is understandable given the long time they have lived elsewhere and doesn’t indicate a very high rate of European influx per generation. Ashkenazi Jews are another population settled in Europe they are often compared to, and like the Gypsies they may have intermarried to a significant degree in during their settler generations, but then became the predominately endogamous ethnic group Scott suggests is mythical. But I’m getting distracted from the Gypsies. Near the beginning of the book he also compared Gypsies to Cossacks (widely acknowledged to be communities created by runaway serfs). He actually does make a citation, to “Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups”, but no details are given about the text. I’ll quote the sentences on them from that paragraph:
“The history of the [Gypsies] in late-seventeenth century Europe provides a further striking example. Along with other stigmatized itinerant peoples, they were subject to two forms of penal labor: galley slavery in the Mediterranean basin and, in the northeast, forced conscription as soldiers or military porters in Prussia-Brandenburg. As a result they accumulated in a narrow band of territory that came to be known as the “outlaw corridor,” the one location between the catchment areas of these twin, mortal dangers.”
The other populations he discusses fled from conquest to hills or other inaccessible geography and were considered distinct peoples from the peasantry they originated from. Gypsies make a lousy comparison since they are migrants into Europe and as Yuri Slezkine notes depended for their food on host populations they lived among (yet socially separate from). I’d never heard of the “outlaw corridor” and Wikipedia was no help (maybe Thaddeus Russell would know something). There were of course more indigenous populations subject to both forms of conscription, but I’ve never heard of them fleeing to become gypsies. They gypsies are famously subject to persecution throughout history, but nowhere does Scott mention how their sometimes prideful avocation of petty crime relates to that history, which is not quite the stigma applied to the “hill peoples” discussed elsewhere in his book. I would also suggest that their history of persecution is also fairly distinguishable from that of hill peoples. Scott admirably does not shy away from mentioning many “hill people’s” proclivity toward such state-like activities as slave raiding, but this again highlights how different Slezkine’s “Mercurians” are from the “warrior castes” that tend to come from hills.
Enough about gypsies. In one surprising bit Scott cites Benedict Anderson on “the creation by the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia, virtually from thin air, of a “Chinese” ethnic group”. Is there genetic data on the overseas “Chinese” in Indonesia? My guess is going to be that they really are of Chinese descent.
Entitled to an Opinion 
February 24, 2011 at 1:43 pm
Victor Lieberman, in Strange Parallels, offers a very different history of SE Asia. His review of Seeing Like a State, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7807296, can be somewhat scathing.
In particular, he argues that 1) There were not huge, documented refugee flows into highland areas in large portions of SE Asia, 2) Reactive strategies against lowland impositions cannot explain highland behavior, especially since a broadly similar culture is found in other parts of SE highlands that did not have that antagonistic history.
Lieberman does acknowledge that ethnic categories can be fluid. But there’s a difference between porous boundaries between well-defined groups (a widespread, perhaps universal, characteristic) and the fundamental arbitrariness of those groups themselves.
Finally, to the extent that highland ethnic distinctions were weak; it seems that came from the fragmented physical environment, a weak state, lack of literacy, etc. Papua New Guinea, for instance, is a highly fragmented society. So the results are certainly not generalizable.
February 24, 2011 at 9:24 pm
Big thanks. That’s an excellent review. A much better replacement for the earlier critic of Scott I’d found.
February 24, 2011 at 9:25 pm
[…] Thorfinn points me to a much better critique from Victor Lieberman, this time of “The Art of Not Being […]
February 26, 2011 at 3:14 pm
Excellent post, can’t add anything, but..
a word of caution on Cossacks. They remain an understudied phenomenon in the West. The works on Cossacks tend to be English language summations of Russian works, many of which were politically motivated. This has changed, in recent times, see Thomas Barrett, Shane O’Roarke, and Brian Boeck. I’m not even touching the Ukrainian Cossack phenomenon, which is another issue, but…
Important to remember that it was Lenin who declared that the Cossacks were not a distinct people, more of a class made up of runaway serfs, ignoring the fact that Cossacks might be autochthonous to southern Russian and eastern Ukraine, a mixture of Slav, Iranian, Caucasus and Turkic elements. Cherkess, after all, was an early term for Cossack.
This was part of the Bolshevik policy of the destruction, physical and social, of Cossacks. Nobody denies the runaway serf element, but it’s kind of like saying the Seminoles were black and ignoring the overwhelming Native American element. In fact, Seminole would be a better analogy to Cossack than Gypsy.
Lenin’s statement remained academic Gospel for decades. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that Soviet ethnographers began to openly state that 1) Cossacks were very distinct from Russians in cultural ways 2) Cossack groups (voisko, i.e. host) were distinct from one another with their own ethnogenetic histories. Not to blame the Soviets entirely for Cossack historical repression. The Tsarist state stressed the runaway/frontiersman aspect of Cossack identity because it suited their purposes. Cossacks made for excellent gendarmes. So they gave the Cossacks privileges, turned them into a special estate (sosloviye), kissed up big time, and paid the leaders off.
In time Cossacks came to see themselves as Great Russian and now the neo-Cossack phenomenon has become an expression of Russian religiously tinged nationalism. But even as late as the 19th-century, if Tolstoy is correct, and he was an eyewitness, Cossacks were a distinct people from Great Russians. Other eyewitnesses also delineated Cossacks from Great Russians and from each other
I’m no expert but I can say it seems that some Cossacks were fiat Cossacks, not all of whom were Russian or Christian, and some Cossacks were cultural Cossacks, not all of whom were Russian or Christian, or even if they spoke Russian were not recognizably Russian to Russians from Russia proper.
February 27, 2011 at 11:27 am
A while back there was a discussion here on whether cossacks constituted an ethnicity. The consensus among commenters is that they weren’t really, which is why I was surprised later to hear Scott claim they were officially designated as an ethnic group.
It seems to me the most important trait defining ethnic groups is language. Do cossacks speak a different language than “Great Russian”?
For some reason I can’t find my semi-recent UR comment on Evsey Domar’s theory on serfdom. I’ll stick a link to it here so I can easily find it later.
February 27, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I have to begin again with my disclaimer about Ukrainian Cossacks, I don’t know much about them, and while many Ukrainian Cossacks went east and “became” Russian Cossacks, in a way that is still cloudy, those in the Ukraine have a distinct historical trajectory and a centrality to Ukrainian nationalism that isn’t the case for Russian Cossacks.
I’d also add that early Cossack history and origins is little documented and debated. I say this because it goes to the question of whether they were originally distinct and became Russianized or if they are Russian breakaways.
A short answer on whether Cossacks constitute a distinct ethnicity is it depends on when and where. This was a social phenomenon stretching from the Ukraine to the Pacific involving multiple communities, so, as you can imagine, it was complex. I mention the point again because it seems to me that scholars don’t stress enough, Cossacks were made by government fiat and they also were organic communities. And yes some were runaways.
On language, I have to disagree. I’d say language is an important part of ethnicity, but there are examples of distinct peoples speaking intelligible dialects, and lingua francas always confuse the issue. I think that self-recognition, supported by easily verifiable and significant differences in material culture and social structure are also important parts of ethnicity. But here again, there were profound differences amongst Cossacks.
To answer the question, most Cossacks spoke various dialects of Russian and Ukrainian, particularly Southern Russian.
I’d say the older Cossack communities like the Don Cossacks came pretty close to being a distinct ethnicity. Indeed, if the Civil War had gone slightly different they might have successfully become a nationality, although one constantly battling disenfranchised non-Cossack Russian and Ukrainians in their midst.
But even in an old, organic Cossack Community like the Don there were internal divisions.
I think a major problem is that we are returning to this issue after decades of official Soviet Marxist academic dogma following almost one hundred years of Tsarist politically motivated historical revisionism.
I think a quote by General Aleksandr Rigel’man sums it up. Rigel’man was a German-Russian officer who spent time in the region, speaking with actual Cossacks! He is important as a disinterested, third party primary source. He says that the history of Cossacks is paltry, but they may have been more a result of Caucasus peoples and others than of Russians and that they never considered themselves Muscovites. I think this is important because, technically speaking, Ukrainians and Belorussians are also “Rus” in the old sense of the word, i.e. East Slavic and Orthodox. In the old days Ukrainians and Belorussians called themselves “rusyn.” This “Rus” issue is still a point of contention between hegemonic Russians (“we’re all one people”) and Ukrainian nationalists (“we’re Rus’ heirs, you guys are Russified Finns and Tatars!”)
In a much cited section, Rigel’man quotes an anonymous Cossack, saying that this represented a common attitude,
“I am not a Muskol’ (Muscovite) rather Russian, and this through custom and the Orthodox faith, not through birth.”
Suitably ambiguous, was the guy alluding to Tatar or Cherkess ancestry? Or was he claiming to be a Russian, i.e. an East Slav, but not a Muscovite, i.e. a Great Russian.
February 28, 2011 at 7:39 pm
The cossacks are often referred to as a military caste rather than an ethnicity.Might we expect a military caste to feature “self-recognition, supported by easily verifiable and significant differences in material culture and social structure”?
I don’t mean to impugn him, but what makes Rigel’man a neutral source that I should trust his writings over others saying different things?
When I was at university I had some classes with Russians. I believe the ones I knew were ethnically Jewish and had spent time in Israel, but one of them had a very strong sense of being Russian and belittled the Russian-ness of another because that one was from Moscow! Real Russians are provincials, big-city dwellers are chopped liver.
March 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
You’ll have to forgive my argumentativeness. When it comes to history I tend to be a particularist, while recognizing that we do need terminology, categories, and theory, albeit imperfect.
“The cossacks are often referred to as a military caste rather than an ethnicity.Might we expect a military caste to feature “self-recognition, supported by easily verifiable and significant differences in material culture and social structure”?”
Good question. I’ll only say, with certainty, Cossacks were a legally codified estate from the 18th century to 1917. I wouldn’t disagree with characterizing some Cossacks as a caste. When and where once again are key questions.
The problem with terms like caste or ethnic group is that we have to keep redefining and reworking them to suit specific cases.
Sometimes a caste cannot be distinguished by material culture or social structures.
What cultural differences would there be between a free holder or semi-free colonus in Carolingian France?
Even when castes are formed from disparate ancestries, acculturation results in shared culture and worldview. For example, many people commented on the shared material culture of poor whites and blacks in the US South.
Could we distinguish, only on the basis of archaeological evidence, the home of a middle or lower class creole from that of a mestizo in the Spanish colonies?
From my reading of South Asian ethnographies, it appears that different castes are usually distinguished by relative wealth rather than anything else. One would think religion might play a role and for locals it might result in subtle, but easily recognizable differences.
Regarding Rigel’man, good point. I was taking my cue from his general tone, he presents the arguments, and says that nobody is sure there simply isn’t that much evidence.
On your friend, I’m not surprised. Many people will say that if you’ve only been to Moscow or St. Pete you haven’t seen Russia. It’s the classic metropole vs. provinces authenticity argument.
There is regionalism at work, and some could say, with some justification, that the Muscovite-Cossack tension observers saw on the frontier was the Narcissism of small differences at work. I’d only say it depends on which Cossacks and where. I don’t mean to sound cute with the when and where, but I don’t want to subject anyone to lengthy comments.
From my own experiences, I’m like every other foreign observer, European Russia basically looks the same wherever you go and the cultural conformity is astounding. Compared to Western Europe it appears very monolithic, almost American in its size and homogeneity.
March 2, 2011 at 9:33 pm
I wouldn’t be surprised that Russia is as internally self-similar as America rather than Europe. Most of its inhabitants are ethnic Russians, whereas Europe is split into a number of different languages which all have a long history there.
March 1, 2011 at 1:02 am
[…] clearly disagrees with James Scott: “[F]rom the 1960s anthropologists have become less confident than they used to be with the […]
July 9, 2011 at 11:12 pm
[…] And of course in his later book, “The Art of Not Being Governed”, he claimed that tribes are fluid things constructed by states. Scott doesn’t treat colonial governments as being that different from pre-colonial or […]
December 29, 2012 at 10:11 pm
[…] want to be a farmer). As in James Scott’s account of highland southeast asia (which I don’t entirely buy) was there much cultural defection of the peasantry to the greener pastures outside […]
February 7, 2013 at 1:58 pm
Overseas Chinese:
I don’t think that Scott (or Anderson, who we could look up) is saying that the Dutch took an arbitrary group of Indonesians and declared them to be Chinese. One interpretation is that they took a mildly endogamous group and made it sharply endogamous. Another, more literal interpretation, is that the Chinese did not see themselves as even a vaguely defined group. But there were Chinese immigrants that could be induced to form an endogamous group. I suppose these might make different genetic predictions. If the new identity consisted only of fresh immigrants, it would be pure Chinese, while if it were based on an existing Chinese community, it would start with admixture. But I’d expect it to be impossible today to determine the composition 400 years ago, that there would be too much inflow both the locals and of new immigrants.
It is often said that overseas Chinese proudly trace their ancestry back 400 years to China. Why 400, not 500? Did the Manchu allow emigration that the Ming denied? Or is the significance that the Dutch showed up 400 years ago and made them proud of the distinction?
Here is the full paragraph:
February 8, 2013 at 12:05 am
I am going to guess that genetic data would not indicate there was panmixia.
February 8, 2013 at 11:32 am
Is that guess in contrast to someone else’s guess? Do you think Scott is predicting that there is no genetic difference today between the Javanese and the Chinese in Indonesia? Do you really think I think that of him? Didn’t I just say I don’t?
February 8, 2013 at 6:28 pm
I don’t know what anyone else would guess, that is my guess.
March 30, 2022 at 5:38 am
[…] Thorfinn points me to a much better critique from Victor Lieberman, this time of “The Art of Not Being […]