Gary Knight

Zomia

A ongoing project by Gary Knight with Philip Blenkinsop, Daniel Schwartz, Denis Gray and Bertil Lintner that we are currently funding.

There are 80 to 100 million people living in the mountains and hills of Asia - a broad swathe of land that flows from the high Tibetan Plateau to the lowlands of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, many of whom have lived life according to their customs and traditions relatively unchallenged by the rest of the world for thousands of years. They self identify as Hmong, PaO, Naga and other tribes or clans and not as Vietnamese, Burmese or Indian. As roads are constructed, the environment they inhabit is destroyed by climate change and lowland peoples encroach on their land, these highlanders are now living in closer proximity to their neighbours and are in danger of being completely assimilated into the general culture, losing their languages, heritage, self-identity and expressive artefacts. The next generation will likely see much of the highland culture transform beyond recognition and their rich legacy become a matter of history.

This project does not seek to pass judgment on whether this evolution is right or wrong, good or bad. That is for these communities to determine for themselves. We aim to document the rupture to these unique cultures using the written word, photography, film, mapping and oral histories to record the daily life of the last ungoverned people on earth.

The Zomia Project is rooted in what we refer to as anthrophotography but it includes the telling of visual, written and oral stories, the gathering of data for anthropological research; the collection of oral histories and stories, and the curation and public display of documentary materials. It crosses the boundaries of documentary journalism, community action, anthropology, linguistics and archive. We seek to document, with photography, film, the written word, oral histories, GIS mapping, spacial analytics and architectural drawing the state of the cultures of the hill tribes of South East Asian Massif.

The project will visit Tibet, China, India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. We will work with local organisations to help build their capacity to document their own histories and narratives, and support those already working to create alphabets so their narratives and histories do not die when their languages become extinct.

We do not seek to portray these peoples as exotic endangered species or produce a ‘Field Guide to the Hill Tribes of Asia’. That has been done many times before and we see no value in representing these communities as exotica once more. Our outcomes will be published in the media and made available through academic and cultural institutions to local communities, the public and scholars.

Photographs by Gary Knight & Philip Blenkinsop

Introduction

On a recent journey to Nagaland in the highlands of north east India, in a village called Longwa I watched a group of young girls in skinny jeans take photographs of themselves on their smart phones while they watched - and flirted with - a group of young boys playing football. The boys were dressed in Real Madrid football kits and competing for honours on the village green. Behind them their fathers, with elaborate facial tattoos that honoured victory in fierce mortal battle with neighbouring villages and wearing traditional tribal headdresses, fashioned a new house out of bamboo and teak with machetes. All the while older women in traditional clothes crouched around a fire cooking a wild boar that had been killed earlier in the day by a musket. The house was adorned with the skulls of hundreds of dead animals, and in the community long house further down the hill were over a hundred human skulls, trophies of battles past. From the Tibetan plateau to the tropical rainforest of the central highlands in Vietnam, in an area anthropologists call Zomia, live a hundred million diverse people in 2.5 million square kilometres of land, members of communities who are the last significant numbers of people on earth who live beyond the clutches of the nation state. They speak multiple languages, have no written history and have different beliefs. They don’t self identify as being Indian, Chinese, Burmese, Laos, Thai, Khmer or Vietnamese. These are the hill tribes of the South East Asian Massif and their languages and culture are changing rapidly.!

Through history these people have been regarded as savages or preliterate peoples who are the aboriginal 1 descendants of more highly evolved plain dwellers. In a recent book2 Yale Professor James C Scott argues that on the contrary these tribes are highly evolved communities who live beyond the tyranny of taxation, colonisation, conscription and disease and that the mountains allow for sanctuary and self determination beyond the control of invaders and nation states, keeping the outside world at arms length.

Shortly after World War II, when technological advances provided nation states the means to occupy and subjugate the highlands for the first time in history, politics intervened. Decades of war in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, and war between newly independent India and newly communist China delayed the inevitable shattering of over two millennia of indigenous life

That time has now come and the homogenisation of these cultures is happening as I write.

Now decades of conflict in Myanmar has ended, trade between China, India, ASEAN and the West has started to migrate through the mountain borders of Myanmar and its neighbours - home to the highlanders, and the effects on the indigenous people who occupy this land is already staring to be felt dramatically. States are eager for tax revenue and to consolidate sovereignty, corporations are hungry for new markets and are encroaching on this last significant market vacuum at a rapid pace, (trade between the USA and Burma has increased by 1400% in 3 years) Christian churches, eager for new converts, are in on the game, converting animists and spiritualists with the promise of everlasting life and salvation from pain and disease. 

There are precedents all over Asia. No sooner was the war in Vietnam over than the Vietnamese government set about a process of Vietnamization in the Central Highlands, eradicating indigenous belief and language. In Tibet the Peoples Liberation Army smashed resistance and paved the way for colonization by lowland Han Chinese and in Bangladesh the Chittagong Hill Tracts were turned into a militarized zone when highlanders resisted the resettlement of lowland Bengalis. 

On a recent visit to Ziro, a small thriving town in Arunachal Pradesh, I was told by local village leaders that they are trying to construct an alphabet using the roman alphabet. Most hill tribes do not have alphabets and their histories and narratives are oral. Most of the countries that host hill tribe communities prevent the teaching of their languages in schools and the consequence is that the languages are dying and along with them much of their cultural identities, save for symbolic gestures, such as clothes worn on special occasions. Peoples without their own histories are no longer identifiable as being unique or different, they become a part of the homogenous whole. 

My guide to Longwa Village was a young man called Nameih Konyak who had been born there 22 years ago. His father was one of the men with the tattooed faces building the new house. Nameih was raised to live a life like his father, practicing slash and burn agriculture, hunting for wild animals with a musket and providing for his family by growing root vegetables. In 2005 the Indian Government built a road to Longwa, a strategic village that straddles the border with Burma. Nameih saw opportunity down that road and went to the nearest town 40 kms away. He found himself an education, married and plans never to return to his previous way of life. The football teams the skinny jean clad girls were watching were all young men like Nameih, men who had left the village, now returning only to play football at the weekends. The village is changing, the young people are leaving—traditions are lost.

Today, in communities all over the region, a way of life similar to that of the current highlanders’ ancestors is rapidly evolving to one imported from the plains and cultures thousands of miles away. The chance to document these unique and important cultures is receding fast. 

1 Man Shu, Book of the Southern Barbarians

2 The Art Of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press.

3 United States Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5460.html