Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality, and Fellowship in Southeast Asia (review)

This collection of essays offers insightful views of the origins of egalitarianism, political autonomy, and social solidarity among small-scale societies in Southeast Asia. Among Southeast Asianists and anthropologists, James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed raised an important question about the nature of social solidarity among small-scale communities.¹ In contrast to modern society, in which authority, hierarchy, and coercion maintained by a central power serve as a social glue that binds together the members of society, these small societies showed neither authority nor hierarchy. No individuals could enforce coercion over others. Nevertheless, everyone enjoyed personal autonomy without having to fear any threats or attacks from others. Instead of a chaotic world characterized by unending conflicts among individuals as predicted by Hobbes, in these societies the absence of coercive power provided what social theorists call gregarious sociality (p. 23), fellowship, or companionship (pp. 34–35). It is the social condition where interactions among community members are characterized by equality and informality, in contrast to hierarchy and order. Is this solidarity determined by external pressures as Scott claims, or is it rooted in the internal condition of these societies?

As stated by Charles Macdonald in the introduction to the volume, the book is meant as an anthropological parallel to Scott’s monograph. While Scott provides an historical account of social anarchism among the highland people of mainland Southeast Asia, Anarchic Solidarity is an ethnographic monograph of the island people. The former focuses on the “objective” utilitarian nature of social anarchism, which is to escape from state control, while the latter emphasizes the “subjective” components of social anarchism. To summarize briefly the whole argument in the volume under review, social anarchism is rooted not in the people’s struggle to escape from the state, as Scott argues, but in the values, norms, and practices inherent in their culture. This “subjective” factor includes kinship, sharing, and certain cultural norms/values. All these cultural components are fertile grounds for the development of weak ties in these societies. In contrast to a strong tie, which carries with it deep personal or social commitment, a weak tie allows its holders to leave quite easily to make another weak alliance with another person. Therefore, under the preponderance of weak interpersonal commitments, the small societies under study could ensure personal autonomy while at the same time maintaining social solidarity among their members.

Indeed, the volume is successful in presenting the significance of values, norms, and practices inherent in the culture of these communities to maintaining their gregarious sociality. Nevertheless, a few comments are worth making to assess further the volume’s theoretical contribution to social theory and to social development of small-scale societies. First of all, it has been argued that there are a variety of ways to explain the origins of social solidarity in such societies. According to Macdonald, these include historical, economic, and evolutionary approaches (p. 20). While the historical approach focuses on social and political processes that shape social interactions between different polities in a certain region, the economic (or material) approach assumes that dominance of mode of economic production is crucial in determining social formation of the society. Finally, the evolutionary approach will consider the innate predisposition of human nature in the development of a social system.

Scott’s volume is an excellent example of the historical approach. Drawing on large historical records on the interaction among different groups in mainland Southeast Asia, Scott finds enough evidence for what he calls “nonstate spaces.”² The choice of millions of minority people from various ethnic backgrounds to live in the hill area stretching from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India (approximately 2.5 million square kilometers) was made as a way to escape state control concentrated in the lowland areas. Challenging the widely circulated stereotype that hill people are primitive or barbarian due to their cultural or civilizational backwardness, Scott argues that these...