Zomi, Zomia, Nomadia - Landscape, Handicraft and Statecraft
- Part 1 -

Niraj Kumar & Chingngaihbiak *

Dai Minority in China :: Source - accesschinatravel.com

Does territory determine the mode of thinking? French philosopher Deleuze and Guattri posited for "geophilosophy" in their essay, "What is Philosophy" to describe the relationship between territory and thinking. There have been recent studies that show that the landscape does influence the thinking of the locals. Bernard Formoso conducted a study on minority community of Yi in China's Yunnan province and found how the terrace and the terraced landscape are significant symbols used in traditional handicrafts, particularly women costumes. , (A Terraced world for an Armoured Body: The symbolism of women costumes among the Yi of Yuanyang, 2006, Research in Anthropology and Aesthetics).

Pascal Bouchrey worked upon the Hanis in the Yunnan and discussed that how the "cosmological conceptualization of the local environment is grounded in a practical experience of wet rice agriculture and irrigation management. The principles on which the irrigation system is based provide a conceptual framework facilitating various analogical transfers from which each village community constructs a religious interpretation of the surrounding landscape".( Terrace Cultivation and Mental Landscapes in Southern Yunnan", in Marie Lecomte-Tilouine ed. Nature, Culture And Religion At The Crossroads of Asia,2010).

Pascal argues how the terraced cultivation and the irrigation system finds resonance in the religious belief through means of analogical transfer to build a coherent belief-system. It is not the belief system that serves as a model for the irrigation system, rather there is a reverse process. We are certain that human life is not determined merely by the molecules/genes or nature. There is an inherent propensity to organize coherence.

Without the integrative element, what to talk about organism , even proteins and cells could not have evolves, It is the coherence that organizes the biology from cellular processes to the organ integration. The lack of coherence leads to the disease like cancer where the cells continue to multiply bypassing the principle.

The question that remains valid is whether this intrinsic propensity for coherence extends to mental processes? Do human beings seek to create a coherent belief-system in which the society, ecology, geography, cosmology, all fits in neatly? And if human thinking is inherently coherent, how does one coherent belief-system pave way for another new system? What is the source of dynamic and evolving coherence?

Zomia and Nomadia

A Thousand Plateaus

It is again Deleuze and Guattri whose idea about nomads has revived keen interest among political scientists world across. For D&G, life, as immanence, is a state of pure becoming as opposed to static being. Any supposition of transcendental concept/Being stops the movement of "becoming". Thus, they plead for the end of transcendental signifiers to reassert life's movement. D&G elaborates the philosophical theme in "1227: The Treatise of Nomadology"in the master piece work, "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia"(1980)and by pitting State vs. War Machine. State is the sedentary formation and the war-Machine is the nomadic and directed against the State System. The nomad has though territory, but every point is a relay and exists only as a relay in the path o a nomad. D&G explains that "the life of the nomad is the intermezzo".

Nomadic trajectory distributes people and animals in an open space unlike the sedentary roads which regulates the communication and create a closed space for people. D&G further describes the characteristics of the nomad and the state space. "Sedentary space is striated by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by traits that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory." (p.421, A Thousand Plateau) .

Deleuze and Guattari deploy the analogy of chess against the game go to describe two different kinds of space and organizational thought. Chess is a game of State but game of go is fluid, implying perpetual movement like a nomad's movement. In chess there is a grid and the space of chess is "striated" and each piece possesses intrinsic properties and limited powers. These move according to fixes set of principles and the movement is not unexpected.

This is the Order of State within which D&G subsumes religion also as these also presuppose some transcendental signifier thereby putting a break on the perpetual movement of the Being. By contrast, D& G stress the war machine molded as in the game go.

The War machine follows a guerrilla logic and 'it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the point of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.' I would like to coin the neologic word, nomadia to explain such a Nomadic space which resists the State formation and striation.

In the book, "The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia". James C.Scott(2009) coins the term Zomia to describe the "one of the largest remaining nonstate spaces in the world". Zomia constituting the highlands spread across Southeast Asia, China, India, Bangladesh and sprawls across 2.5million square kilometers. Scott puts Zomia "as marginal in almost every respect. It lies at a great distance from the main centers of economic activity; it bestrides a contact zone between eight nation-states and several religious traditions and cosmologies."(p.14, The Art of Not Being Governed).

For the past two thousand years , this vast region has resisted the attempts of State formation.The neologism has been derived from the term, Zomi, used as common nomenclature for several communities in South and Southeast Asia. Zomi consists of two words- zo and mi. Zo is the mountain and Mi, people. So, Zomi denots the highlander people. In India and Myanamar, Zomia have come under the banner of Zogam-zo-land movement for separate permanent autonomous space spanning across many nation-states.

Scott discusses in the book that inhabitants of zomia have used numerous tactics to escape capture by state-makers, from geographical dispersal, living with an oral culture, agricultural practices that encourage mobility and oppose sedentary life which makes predation by tax –authority possible, becoming sea gypsies (orang laut) and resisting co-option into expanding state machines.

James Scott' Zomia is the War machine of the Nomadia , the ultimate social machine of resistance against the powerful process of State formation .It is interesting to find how the state authorities have faced the Zomia war Machine in this fight for territorialization. The State is constrained with the deployment of paramilitary or military forces on the Stationary duty, while the groups which resist the appropriation by the State engage in guerilla warfare. The first relies on the static manpower, the Zomia fighters on the perpetual mobility. Another similarity of Zomia and Nomadia can be traced to the perpetual movement of various ethnic groups of Zomia from time immemorial.

Their oral history is the history of dispersion, and to resist the formation of permanent Kingdom or the structures. One can see the same pattern among Nagas, Zomis, Kukis, Mizoa, Hmar, Naxi, Bei, Mosuo, the highlanders of Burma, Laos, Vietnam. Their history is mere the history of movement and war. There is no monument , no historic date, no grand text, nothing to commemorate the history. It's the ultimate D&G War Machine. But, the Zomia people are creative .

They resist the codification of life itself by others, in particular modern State-System evident from the geopolitical arch of instability spanning Zomia where the guerillas are engaged in struggle and co-option against all the neighboring. They innovate new forms of mobility and resistance in opposition to the apparatus of state capture. One can see the increased recourse to digital networking as a way to increase the mobility and as extension of the "smooth space" they intend to maintain and expand.

Zomia vs. Zomi handicraft: Smooth political space vs. striated mental Space

Ethnic costumes in SW China - image: http://www.pacross.net/Photo_galleries.htm

Paites in modern attire with traditional pattern - http://www.paite.org/nampuan

It is absolutely clear that Zomia is a non-state political space which is struggling on its last leg against appropriation by the adjoining Nation-States. As per, D&G, the State system crates striated space while the nomadic system "smooth space" without permanent signifier. Zomia is a War-Machine par excellence from this aspect as it resists the 'striation" by the State. Here comes the problematic.

If one observes the traditional textiles woven with the decorative pattern, one will be surprised to find the "striation". Across Zomia, same pattern of striation is visible in the weaving of textiles or baskets or carpets. Wheresoever the 'handicraft" is required, the "terrace" pattern is visible. Many social scientists are pleading to read the various decorative pattern as "text".

I have in my mind one such text, "Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest C hinese Minorities"( University of Hawaii Art Gallery, 2009) Angela Sheng, art historian discusses in her essay, "Reading Costumes as 'Texts' and Decoding Ethnic Visual Culture of Southwest China', how to read the myth and narratives of the community in the weaving patterns.

To be continued....