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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

Southeast Asian Early Maritime Silk Road Trading Polities' Hinterland and the Sea Nomads of the Isthmus of Kra

Résumé

When, how and why does cultural differentiation take place? Which environmental, social, demographic and economic factors are at play? These questions are perhaps even more pertinent when dealing with mobile or semi-sedentary and forager or semi-agriculturalist groups living on the margins of centralised polities. Anthropologists and archaeologists have long abandoned the evolutionist postulate that the social organisation of foragers (hunter-gatherers) represented a stage preceding state societies. On the contrary, they now often argue that foragers or nomadic groups form part of regional states’ political economies and that there are no states without those highly adaptive groups that academics often label ‘peripheral’, ‘marginal’ or ‘minorities’ (Possehl 2002; Ivanoff 2015). Forager or nomadic lifeways are viewed as complementary adaptations to those of complex societies. Groups were rarely truly isolated and their interdependent relationships mostly developed with different socially and economically-organised groups, in particular with traders (Morrison 2002) and/or with agriculturalists (Junker 2002; Junker and Smith 2017). In South and Southeast Asia, these symbiotic relationships would represent an adaptive strategy, allowing groups to thrive in a politically and economically changing world and in a diversified ecological environment (Morrison and Junker 2002). The environmental diversity that characterises Southeast Asia, as well as its physically fragmented nature in the case of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), are important ecological constraints put on food production. These are interpreted as important factors that contributed to social diversity and interactions between different economically specialised groups, lowland rice farmers, upland swidden-farmers and forest foragers. There, as well as in southern India (Kerala in particular), the forest foragers’ role in collecting goods for trading states is an external factor often put forward to explain this adaptation (Dunn 1975; Headland et al. 1989). In Southeast Asia, the pressures lowland regional states exerted over neighbouring groups, such as ‘corvées’ (forced or required labour), war, slave raids and plunder, are often cited to explain groups’ voluntary marginalisation. Scott’s anarchist model pushed this logic further: the states’ repelling action was a core agent for various farming groups’ sociogenesis in the refuge zone of ‘Zomia’, a large mountainous zone spanning from northern South and Southeast Asia (Scott 2009). Several anthropologists have found this heuristic value of Scott’s libertarian framework useful to rethink ethnicity, relationships between nomadic and sedentary groups as well as those between states and minorities....
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Dates et versions

hal-03499996 , version 1 (02-12-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03499996 , version 1

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Bérénice Bellina, Aude Favereau, Laure Dussubieux. Southeast Asian Early Maritime Silk Road Trading Polities' Hinterland and the Sea Nomads of the Isthmus of Kra. Bérénice Bellina; Roger Blench; Jean-Christophe Galipaud. Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia. From the Past to the Present, National University of Singapore Press, pp.102-141, 2021, 978-981-3251-25-0. ⟨hal-03499996⟩
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