Southeast Asian Massif

The indigenous population encompassed within these limits numbers approximately 100 million, not counting migrants from surrounding lowland majority groups who came to settle in the highlands over the last few centuries.

[4] While the notion of Zomia underscores a historical and political understanding of that high region, the Southeast Asian Massif is more appropriately labelled a place or a social space.

[6] To further qualify the particularities of the massif, a series of core factors can be incorporated: history, languages, religion, customary social structures, economies, and political relationships with lowland states.

In religious terms, several groups are Animist, others are Buddhist, some are Christian, a good number share Taoist and Confucian values, the Hui are Muslim, the Kuki-Chin-speaking Bnei Menashe are Jewish, while most societies sport a complex syncretism.

[10] Zomia is a geographical term coined in 2002 by historian Willem van Schendel of the University of Amsterdam[11][12] to refer to the huge mass of mainland Southeast Asia that has historically been beyond the control of governments based in the population centers of the lowlands.

[13] It largely overlaps with the geographical extent of the Southeast Asian Massif, although the exact boundaries of Zomia differ among scholars:[14] all would include the highlands of north Indochina (north Vietnam and all Laos), Thailand, the Shan Hills of northern Myanmar, and the mountains of Southwest China; some extend the region as far west as Tibet, Northeast India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

These areas share a common elevated, rugged terrain, and have been the home of ethnic minorities that have preserved their local cultures by residing far from state control and influence.

From his preface: [Hill tribes] seen from the valley kingdoms as "our living ancestors", "what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism, and civilization [are on the contrary] 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.Scott goes on to add that Zomia is the biggest remaining area of earth whose inhabitants have not been completely absorbed by nation-states, although that time is coming to an end.

In regards to the word "national," Michaud claims that the peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif are in fact transnational, as many groups span over several countries.

While the bulk of Scott's argument rests on the efforts of lowland states to dominate the highlands, Lieberman shows the importance of maritime commerce as an equally contributing factor.

Lieberman, however, argues that the highland peoples of Borneo/Kalimantan had virtually the same cultural characteristics as the Zomians, such as the proliferation of local languages and swidden cultivation, which were all developed without a lowland predatory state.