I wonder if anyone here knows what happened in the Pyrenees?

Southeast Asia as a whole certainly shouldn’t be seen as a backwater only attractive as a refuge from China, either. There were plenty of ‘pull’ factors in addition to the ‘push’ from Chinese states, including the fertility of the land, the presence of navigable rivers, and the ease of trade connections with the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The trade by sea was immensely profitable, as was the trade through Myanmar-Yunnan (ancient Pagan and Nanzhao), and many of the native states were powerful and important in their own right. It’s not just, or even primarily, a refuge.

The linguistic situation is also a little problematic. Austroasiatic (aka ‘Mon-Khmer’) seems to be on quite firm ground, but even the name of Sino-Tibetan is contested (specifically by George van Driem, who prefers ‘Trans-Himalayan’). Tai-Kadai, or ‘Daic’, is well-established linguistically and the reason for the diffusion into southeast Asia may have been the spread of the Chinese state and people into southern China in a big way during the Song and Yuan eras. In any case, the highlands of southeast Asia proper are nothing in terms of linguistic diversity to Arunachal Pradesh, which seems to be excessively diverse. Most of its languages are classified as Sino-Tibetan, but this is apparently not the case, with many of the languages probably present before Sino-Tibetan arrived.

It seems like the mountains exert a trapping effect, preserving linguistic diversity. I feel obliged to point out that this is much the same ‘geographical determinism’ as Diamond supposedly espouses! 😛

But, enough of that meta stuff. I have in my mind an image of Han civilization expanding southward from North China, either assimilating or pushing further south the peoples in its way. The mountains around the rim of what is now China are a fracture zone, in which the highly dissected creates a wealth of niches in which survivors of original inhabitants or earlier invaders can survive in relative isolation while others spill out of the mountains and onto the plains in what is now mainland Southeast Asia.

The inspiration of this model is Europe, with barbarians pushing westward out of Central Asia, in successive waves that, in the type case of Britain, wind up with smaller, gaelic speaking populations in Cornwall, Wales and the Scottish Highlands, with descendants of Danes, Angles and Saxons and later Norman French ancestors filling what is now England. One also thinks of Italy, Germany and the Balkans before the 19th century unification of nation-states and, one particularly successful example of highland survival, the French, German, Italian and Romansh-speaking Cantons that make up Switzerland.

Care to comment from the perspective of someone who clearly knows a lot more about recent research in Southeast Asia than I do?

My disagreement with Leach’s thesis is indeed fundamental: the difference between (e.g.) Mon-Khmer languages and Tai-Kadai languages is NOT an “epiphenomenon” –and the relationships between these ethnic groups (historical or current) cannot be explained through a so-called “model” that is constructed out of false facts.

This was almost exactly what I was going to post before I had to leave for work this morning and as soon as I saw the title of the SM post I knew Eisel would be here. Good to see.

I don’t think Leach’s model is ‘wrong’, exactly. I find it reasonably convincing when it comes to looking at cycling and achievement-based societies around the world – Flannery and Marcus use Political Systems… as an example of such phenomena. It feels to me as if Leach thought up the model and then went to war in Burma rather than the other way around – it applies beautifully to plenty of other situations, after all (and I honestly wouldn’t lay much importance on the ethnic aspect of it, which Eisel objects to most; it’s more about competition, aspiration, and mutually incompatible attempts to grab power).

At the same time, Eisel has a very important point: while it may be true that many highland southeast Asian societies are multi-lingual, the different languages in the area are not relics of people fleeing into the hills from states, and they aren’t epiphenomena of state avoidance or ‘Zomian’ anarchism. Three separate language families with very different origins can be found in Leach’s work: Austroasiatic (perhaps the oldest in the region), Sino-Tibetan (likely more recent), and Tai-Kadai (introduced to what is now Thailand and Laos, and elsewhere, under a thousand years ago, with the first Tai inscription in Thailand dated to 1167 CE (Inscription K966 from Dong Mae Nang Muang, in case you’re interested)).

Shan is Tai-Kadai (the Shan endonym is tai, = Thai [effectively], and Shan is related to ‘Siam’). Burmese is Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman). Mon is Austroasiatic, as are Wa and Palaung (if I remember correctly). Austroasiatic has an Urheimat along the Mekong in mainland SE Asia c.2000 BCE (according to Paul Sidwell). The information I have available puts Sino-Tibetan on the Tibetan Plateau about 5,000 years ago, although I’m not sure if that’s the current consensus. Tai-Kadai languages are most diverse in southern China and almost certainly originated there (the Mongol conquests are often claimed as the impetus behind the expansion further into SE Asia, although it appears that Tai-speakers were present in the area for at least a century before this).

This is not the pattern you get if the linguistic diversity is an epiphenomenon of avoiding the lowland states. These are not arbitrarily and deliberately diversified versions of lowland languages, but languages with very different origins showing descent from three separate proto-languages fairly far back in the past.

Also, John – Eisel has a really cool website that you can access here, if you’re interested.

Tony

Re your despair over linguistic variations, one of my most vivid grad school memories was a short course in Hokkien taught by Nicholas Cleveland Bodman, who had written the textbooks used by the British Forces in Malaya while fighting the Communist/Chinese insurgency there. Very curious textbooks they were, indeed. Learned how to say “pistol” and “hand grenade” before I learned how to say “thank you.” But, back to the point at hand, our native informant was a Taiwanese graduate student. When Bodman asked him how far he had to travel to hear dialectical differences, he answered, “The next village.”

http://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.ca/2012/08/when-the-author-cancels-peer-review.html

How shall I get in touch? I have been browsing the various sites to which clicking on your name here leads me, but the same aging eyes that mistook “altitude” for “attitude” are not discovering any straightforward way to send you email. The search, however, has been interesting. I have just briefly scanned the Oxford Buddhist Society lecture Language Hierarchy, Buddhism and Worldly Authority in Yunnan, Laos, Etc.and found it very rich, indeed. Your remarks about law, lawyers and legal language are particularly thought-provoking.

In my reply to you, above, I was making an implicit contrast between ethnoi that are members of totally separate language-families (Mon-Khmer vs. Tai-Kadai) and ethnoi that are very much of the same language-family (Tai Neua vs. Tai Lue) and yet will themselves explain to you how stark the difference is between themselves and the others who share a category with them –i.e., a category imposed by outsiders.

The categories imposed by Leach are, however, especially absurd. In their further application by James Scott they become exponentially more absurd, as they are made to pull the cart of a supposed ideology of anarchism, that misrepresents intensely hierarchical, slave-trading societies into supposed exemplars of “anarchy”, on such flimsy grounds as the occasional quote referring to such peoples as “anarchic” (in a desultory sense) by the representatives of the British Empire who rather failed to “pacify” (i.e., conquer) the region, in the explorations that were presumed to set the stage for a (doomed) railroad to Yunnan through that part of Burma.

I can honestly say that I have read much more useful descriptions of the traditional relations between highlanders and lowlanders written by Lao officials –both because their propaganda purpose was much less perverse than Scott’s, and because they were built on real ethnography, and real historical research, conducted by fluent speakers of the languages in question.

Please take a look at my one-page article against Zomia (linked to above) and you can see also my longer “Laos in 1893” on the subject of that doomed railroad (a project that indirectly illuminates much of the British misinformation on the region, i.e., the peculiar alignment of interests –such as the opium trade and the fear of the French presence on the Mekong– that resulted in any of this information being created by these peculiar military expeditions, that have just lately been dragged from obscurity by this absurd “fad” in anarchist anthropology).

“Altitude” not “attitude”: My bust. Thank you for the correction. Re the thinness of Leach’s ethnography: I’ve heard this before. We have no disagreement there. Where we may still differ is on the relation of ethnography to theory. I worship neither and maintain what I would describe as a skeptical and generous stance toward both.

I am perfectly willing to consider the likelihood that Leach’s theory is wrong. Theories often are. But what I would like to hear more of, particularly from those with local knowledge like yourself, is precisely why it is wrong and what, if anything, has replaced it.

I would also like to hear more about the Tai Lue and Tai Neua, about whom I know nothing. Are their languages as different as Mon-Khmer and Tai-Kadai? If so, why are both referred to with names that share the initial syllable “Tai”? There must be an interesting story here.

I would certainly agree that if members of the two groups see themselves as their languages as totally distinct, this is a social fact that must be taken into account. But how long has that “fact” been around? How far back does the enmity go? Are there no members of the two groups who recognize similarities between them? In whose interest is the difference asserted? Whose ox is gored if the difference is denied? How would this difference compare with, for example, that between the Nuer and the Dinka, Israelis and Palestinians, or Protestant and Catholic Irishmen? Do intermarriage, adoption, trading partnerships or friendships cross-cut the difference in question?

Anyway, lots to talk about here.

Where I wrote *altitude,* McCreery has mis-read *attitude.*

That is a distinction with a difference.

Leach’s assertion that the altitude of the culture (in three strata, still followed by the Lao government as official categories: highland, midland, lowland) was more important than very palpable differences of language, ethnicity and religion is demonstrably false (both in contemporary ethnography, and in local history).

Leach was both misleading and misled in this regard, and he was so far off the mark in what he says about the differences between the languages of that region that (I surmise/infer) he must have had extremely good translators provided to him by the British military (he was on military assignment at the time, you know) in order to have even been able to overlook the evidence that was so starkly to the contrary of his hypothesis.

This is not some minor detail that can be run roughshod over with such statements as, “Right or wrong, what Leach describes is…”. No no, in establishing facts through the methods of ethnography, it really does matter whether these things are right or wrong. Is it right or wrong? Let’s go out into the field, talk to villagers, and then start with that –we cannot start from an abstract theory, to then force the facts to fit.

The facts as perceived and presented by the natives themselves (from the native perspective) are much, much more important than the top-down synoptic view of an outsider –especially if that outside view contradicts (and is contradicted by) real evidence.

In Northernmost Laos, the fact that the Tai Lue and the Tai Neua regard themselves as completely separate ethnoi (and have a long history of warfare against one another, enslaving one-another, etc. etc.) is a very important fact –regardless of any outside theory that would put them into the same category. If they regard their own languages as totally distinctive, too, this is an important fact, even if a linguist can indicate how much they have in common (etc. etc.) despite this cultural (and even political) perception.

My disagreement with Leach’s thesis is indeed fundamental: the difference between (e.g.) Mon-Khmer languages and Tai-Kadai languages is NOT an “epiphenomenon” –and the relationships between these ethnic groups (historical or current) cannot be explained through a so-called “model” that is constructed out of false facts.

Leach’s work remains a laughing-stock to anyone who has actually lived and worked in the peculiar region described (on the edges of Burma, Laos, and Yunnan) –but it is taken terribly seriously by Anth. undergraduate students who know nothing but abstractions, and who are taught to worship theory for the sake of theory (the more abstract the better!).

I will try to find a copy of Scott to take a second look in the context of what you write here.