EGALITARIAN ISLANDS IN A PREDATORY SEA ∗ Thomas Gibson, University of Rochester Abstract This article argues that the egalitarianism, sharing and individual autonomy characteristic of many societies in the highlands of Southeast Asia represent a set of mutually reinforcing ethical values that developed in opposition to the debt-bondage, tribute extraction and social hierarchy found in the lowlands of the region. The development and maintenance of these values depended on access to modes of subsistence such as hunting, fishing, gathering and shifting cultivation that freed people from the need to defend productive resources that had absorbed large amounts of previous labor, and to accept subordination to political authorities. The egalitarianism found in these societies is thus a secondary reaction to the predatory ranking of their neighbors and may be usefully compared and contrasted with the primary egalitarianism found in foraging societies, with the spiritual egalitarianism found in world religions, and with the civic egalitarianism associated with the modern nation state. Introduction In a series of papers written over the last twenty years, I have been slowly putting together an argument that the whole of island Southeast Asia should be regarded as a single, loosely integrated social system composed of social groups that had developed the ability to express their political disagreements with one another in a common symbolic code (Gibson ∗ Published as “Egalitarian islands in a predatory sea.” In Thomas Gibson and Kenneth Sillander, eds, Anarchic Solidarity: Autonomy, Equality and Fellowship in Southeast Asia, 270-293. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 60, 2011.