Paper short abstract:

Studying the state where it is an outsider reveals similarities to other powerful agencies like ghost and gods. How did the nation state break the bounds that Zomian communities successfully placed on all sources of sovereignty—divine or terrestrial? Can the chains that once bound it be reforged?

Paper long abstract:

In the Blang Mountains along the China-Myanmar border, the nation state is a recent arrival. It was only in the 1950s that the People’s Republic began attempting to transform these Zomian uplands from exterior to interior. This paper will investigate what we can learn about the state from people who “retain some degree of autonomy” (Graeber 2004, 65) from the “strange intimacy between the state and the people” (Aretxaga 2003, 403). My Blang friends and interlocutors have a long history of keeping various powerful others at bay. Ghosts that enter the village, causing trouble, are given food and riches, and dispatched out of the village. The local mountain god cannot be dispatched, so the village routinely invites him to enter a tree in a grove away from the village to receive gifts in exchange for land and prosperity. Until 1953, the local Tai king claimed a role much akin to a god. As owner of the land, he demanded tribute and corvée labour. In reality, the kingdom acted more like a ghost in the mountains, occasionally sending officials who under the threat of violence were given food and gifts and dispatched back into the valleys. The nation state is a different kind of god. It provides prosperity and care, at the threat of violence, but it does not want gifts in return. It wants to possess people, to make them citizens and it accepts no other gods—all relations must go through the state. Can the nation state be exorcised?