Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • When Do Civilizations Climb Mountains?

    One of the most important books in modern Southeast Asian studies is James Scott‘s The Art of Not Being Governed. This book draws on the term Zomia, coined by Willem van Schendel, which describes the upland areas of mainland Southeast Asia that had never been completely incorporated into the lowland civilizations associated with the kingdoms and empires of Pagan, Funan, Champa, Sukhothai, Dai Viet, and so forth.

    In the Southeast Asian context, then, civilizations are lowland things. (In the islands things are slightly different, but the lowland/upland distinction does emerge around the Malay terms hulu [=source, interior] and hilir [= downstream] to describe riverine polities in Sumatra, see here for more.) An early draft of Scott’s book circulated under a title that was something like “Why Civilizations Don’t Climb Mountains.”

    I am fascinated, though, by the limits of generalization from the Southeast Asian experience. Nothing holds the Southeast Asian cases in more relief than the Incan and Aztec Empires, located in upland areas and no less “civilizational” than lowland empires of the Mayan and Moche. But the case that really stands out is the Merina Kingdom on Madagascar. Here we have a case of a kingdom founded by Southeast Asians—the first Malagasy people came from Borneo—but politically and socially centered in the highlands of an island with a noticeable coastal/interior divide. Like many who have worked on politics in island Southeast Asia, Madagascar ranks pretty high on my research bucket list for this very reason.

    Now, I am certainly not the first to have noticed that there are highland civilizational counterparts to the riverine civilizations of Southeast Asia and others settings like China, India, and Egypt. But I’m not familiar with any direct answer to the question in the title of this post. Do we know, when do civilizations climb mountains? Is there a big Jared Diamond-style biogeographic perspective on the conditions under which empires form in upland versus lowland areas (which could tell us why, for example, Borneo and New Guinea never developed Merina-like highland civilizations)? Something more prosaic? Or is this just a case of variation that has no single explanation? I’d love to know the answer.

  • Miss Indonesia Sports Hammer-and-Sickle T-Shirt

    …and it causes a minor scandal. Here is an article, in Indonesian. And here is the offending image.

    That’s right. Anindya Kusuma Putri, Miss Indonesia 2015, captioned her peasant-communist-chic Instagram photo as “I am so Vietnam today.” I got the image from a tweet by one @mas_prasetiyo, who suggests that the Army and Special Forces take action.*

    Now, this isn’t a giant scandal or anything. But reading the comments and tweets you can see how a segment of Indonesia’s population remains gripped by a Cold War-era mentality, one fostered under Indonesia’s New Order regime, of communism as an existential threat to the very idea of Indonesia. I have no systematic evidence to back this up, but my guess is that such sentiments are fairly widely shared. A follow-up tweet from another user mentioned in the article above says it all: Communist ideas are forbidden [= terlarang] in Indonesia.

    And in this tweet, yet another Twitterer mentioned in the article follows up by drawing on a common trope among anti-communist Indonesians, a memory of one’s family having been victimized by PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, over fifty years ago.

    What I find even more interesting, though, is the explicit analogy drawn between communism and ISIS as two common threats to the Indonesian state.

    The user mentions a widely known case of an ice cream vendor in the Jakarta exurb of Depok being detained simply for flying an ISIS flag. As if the more suggestion of ISIS and communism are enough to warrant an intervention by the state’s security apparatus.

    Such sentiments from a random Twitterer would not be so notable were it not for the fact that, indeed, particular arms of the Indonesian state security apparatus have explicitly likened the threat of ISIS to the threat of communism (here is an example from a regional military command).

    UPDATE

    Right on cue, an Indonesian Army general feels it necessary to weigh in—as a private citizen, of course—on the matter, asking Miss Indonesia to apologize.

    Note

    * To best of my knowledge, those are not the official twitter accounts of either the Army (TNI) or the Special Forces (KOPASSUS), although there’s probably an entire dissertation to be written on the GI Joe-themed KOPASSUS one.