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Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and
Southeast Asia’s Premodern States
Miriam T. Stark
Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are
familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a
veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth-
and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined commu-
nities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the
moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done
in Southeast Asia. The region’s archaeological record is
equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins dis-
rupt models of human origins, the world’s largest Buddhist
monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land
mass in central Java, and the world’s largest premodern
city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that
remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised
that Scott’s Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest
states draws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to
study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This
essay concentrates on how Scott believes early
Mesopotamian states became legible.
Scott’s engaging book will please the educated non-
archaeological public and rile archaeologists who dislike
treatments of our field by those outside it. Certainly some
of Scott’s key points are conventional wisdom in our
field, like the reciprocal nature of plant and animal domes-
tication (e.g. Rindos 1984) and the short lifespans of ancient
states (e.g. Baines & Yoffee 1998; Yoffee & Cowgill 1988).
And few working archaeologists are environmental deter-
minists vis-à-vis collapse: most agree that human agency
shaped a world of climatic ‘predictable unpredictability’
(Miller 2011). Yet much of Scott’s model is generalizable
to premodern Southeast Asian states. One contribution
from his work concerns literacy as a ‘technology of com-
munication’ (p. 148; see also Scott 1999; 2010). Southeast
Asian states emerged soon after the embrace of
Sanskrit-derived writing systems. The role of tax versus
tribute is currently under discussion, and libraries that
Chinese annals describe have not been found, perhaps
because they held records written on bamboo. Remaining
stone inscriptions, however, fit Scott’s model: writing
made Southeast Asian states legible and elites into kings.
A second contribution lies in Scott’s vision of ancient
states as brittle structures that were prone to shatter. He is
at least as interested in continuities in rural agrarian life
through time as he is in particular ‘collapse’ events (a
term he dismisses as ‘histrionic’, p. 201) of the small elite
and urban sector of the population. Elites formed delicate
superstructures that rested precariously atop foundations
of ‘smaller and more stable components’ (pp. 187, 253),
CAJ 29:4, 709–711 © 2019 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774319000416
Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and Southeast Asia’s Premodern States
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