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2 THE PRODUCTION OF MARGINAL PEOPLES AND LANDSCAPES Resource Access on the Periphery In Yunnan the barbarians who have yet to be incorporated are many. FIRST GOVERNOR OF YUNNAN (1253 CE), “Biography of Sayyid ‘Ajall,” Yuanshi, juan 125, quoted in J. Armijo-Hussein, Sayyid ‘Ajall Shams Al-Din The king’s rule is a “variable sphere of influence that diminishes as royal power radiates from a center.” S. J. TAMBIAH, World Conqueror and World Renouncer IN BOTH PREMODERN CHINA AND SIAM,1 THE MODES OF CENTRAL RULE over rural areas were configured around the collection of grain. In each case, the government extracted taxes in grain from lowland farmers who were included in mainstream society. Aside from the common concentration on grain, however, the two modes diªered considerably. In China, the o‹cial history of Yunnan indicates that as early as the thirteenth century rulers exerted control over territory as well as people, with o‹cials organizing territory into prefectures, counties, and plots of land and requiring farmers to pay taxes in grain based on landholdings (Yuanshi, juan 125, quoted in Armijo-Hussein 1996:167). In Siam, for many centuries rule was arranged through a hierarchy of patronage relations, with the king at the top. The king allocated serfs and slaves to nobles, who managed the labor of serfs to produce grain, against which head taxes were collected and sent to the central court. Rule in Siam sought to control labor rather than land (Feeny 1989:285; Vandergeest and Peluso 1995:392). Looking outward from the court, scholars and o‹cials in China and Siam also identified those peoples on the periphery, in the distant forested mountains, in relation to state rule. The location of the periphery in each case is centuries old. In China, such definitions created a taxonomy of “barbarians ,” especially in the southwest, categorized according to their degree of amenability to imperial rule. In the central view, the civilizing influence of the emperor was to bring these peoples as well as their territory into the fold. In Siam, by contrast, mountain people were generally regarded as “wild” people beyond the reach of the king’s moral influence. In relation to the king’s rule, however, these wild people also constituted potential captives to be brought back to lowland society as slaves. The role of wild people was ambivalent, both outside of society and within it as the lowest rank. In both China and Siam, these modes of rule and the central definitions of marginal peoples and landscapes were transformed in the twentieth century by state-making eªorts to “modernize” rural production, although under very diªerent ideologies and political-economic systems. Central to these transformations in rural areas were the imposition of citizenship, new forms of state-sanctioned property rights, and intensified state claims on rural resources. In relation to peoples on the margins, policies in China over the past fifty years have included so-called minority nationalities in the polity and have linked upland minorities to their mountain (and forested) land through production of grain for the state. In Thailand, meanwhile , policies over a similar period have claimed forests as state assets and national treasures, separating minorities from the forests by identifying “hill tribes” as fundamentally “not Thai” and undeserving of Thailand’s land and resources. How did these disparate outcomes come about? Historical antecedents as well as twentieth-century moments of solidifying state definitions and purposes produced diªerences in definition and practice. This resulted in distinctly diªerent conditions in these two countries, with greatly diªering outcomes for Akha and their forests. HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTS OF PEOPLES AND LANDSCAPES Barbarians in Southwest China The area that is now Yunnan Province in China is mentioned in o‹cial documents as early as the first century CE as a place where numerous primitive peoples lived. Court records recount that various groups agreed to pay RESOURCE ACCESS ON THE PERIPHERY 43 tribute to the Chinese court, sending salt, rhinoceros, elephants, textiles, and jewelry, in return for gifts of silk from the Emperor of Heaven (Bielenstein, Wang Mang, the restoration of the Han dynasty, and later Han, in The Cambridge history of China, volume 1, the Chin and Han empires [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978], cited in Armijo-Hussein 1996:107). The exchange of gifts implied a connection, probably interpreted at court as an indication of the primitives’ recognition of the superiority of Chinese culture . The...

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