The "Plural-Polity Hypothesis" Patterns of Migration and Settlement: Primitives, Pioneers and Peasants Pirates and Princes Prostitutes, Pariahs, Presidents and Proletariats Pontianak and the Political Ecology of Human Possibility

Inextricably entangled with the problem of such acculturation and the incorporation of diversity, is the problem of "ethnos" as a central organizational principle of Southeast Asian civilization. Ethnicity as the study of ethnic identity and ethnogenesis as the study of ethnic origins, are intrinsic and basic dimensions of Southeast Asian studies in general. "ethnic diversity is so fundamental in Southeast Asia that it is one of the great laboratories for the study of ethnicity." (D. E. Brown, 1976:99) It was in general reference to Southeast Asia, and in specific relation to the pervasiveness of the Overseas Chinese there, that had led J. S. Furnival to formulate his now classic theory of "radical pluralism"--the social integration of people of many cultures in a common market place and under the aegis of a common political structure.

The principle of ethnos lies at the base of Southeast Asian cultural identity. Social organization based upon such a principle of ethnos, is characteristically of a plural and culturally heterogeneous society. Indeed, the ethnic concept of "pluralism" was coined by .J. S. Furnival in reference to Southeast Asia.

D. E. Brown (Principles of Social Structure, 1976) notes seven conditions necessary for the maintenance of radically plural societies that are typical of Southeast Asian settings: 1. Continuity of stable economic and ecological conditions (ibid., pp. 82); 2. Relative isolation of the radically plural society from other similar sized but differently structured societies (ibid., p. 85-6); Demographic ratios between ruling and rule should be maintained or change in favor of the ruling elite (ibid., p. 86); Social identities and boundaries are maintained by generalizing differences across all spheres--religious, familial, educational, occupational, economic, etc.--thus restricting inter-group acculturation and mobility (ibid., p 87); Symbiotic relations offering primary compensations for the subordinate minority and religious or ideological orientations offering deferred compensations are encouraged (ibid., p. 88); The corporate exclusiveness, superior organization, solidarity and cohesion of the ruling group should be systematically promoted (ibid., p. 88); Authority should be made sacred and legitimated by an inclusive cult offering compensation in another life or advocating withdrawal from worldly affairs. (ibid., p. 90).

The basic model of corporate social structure based upon the principle of ethnos implied by this formal paradigm is held to characterize the developmental dynamics of typically Southeast Asian civilization; from its first prehistoric inception perhaps as long ago as several thousands of years until today. It is a model in which numerous, relatively homogenous, local groups came into increasing contact with one another, and with extra-regional peoples, and in the resulting processes of intercultural contact and transmission, there developed increasing levels of heterogeneity and socio-structural complexity.

This model is held to be critically linked to the development of the economic exploitation of the entire region, and to the emergence of an increasingly complex interregional system based upon commerce and hinterland exploitation, in which local peoples were to become increasingly integrated and more culturally sophisticated and cosmopolitan. "To examine the role of economic exchange in this region, we must be aware of the ways in which international commerce has penetrated Southeast Asia, and come in contact with local societies and economies. My contention is that the process by which this occurred generally intensified through the centuries, that as time went by more and more parts of the region made contact with foreign trade. While there certainly were fluctuations in this development, we must consider that those societies which at onetime had taken part in this trade remained aware of it and interested in it. From this point we may begin to ask about the impact of this commercial involvement on the internal situation...." (J. K. Whitmore, "The Opening of Southeast Asia: Trading Patterns Through the Centuries," in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia, edited by Karl L. Hutterer 1977:134)

Civilization is thus also held to be a developmental process of interregional integration, represented by increasing levels of complexity of socio-political organization, increasing economic integration and exploitation, and the increasing influence of religious ideas and orientations upon the social organization. The political-economic basis of Southeast Asian civilization is discussed in its structural relation to the phenomena of plural-polity role relations between different kinds of peoples. The political-economy of a region during a particular period cannot be simply understood in formal terms, but has a substantive bases rooted in the culture and the ecological-economic underpinnings of a region.

Identity in Southeast Asia; has always been of a shifting focus, dependent upon one's geographical distance from alternative centers of influence and power. The chameleon quality of Southeast Asia Identity is even apparent in the hyphenation of "South-East" which the name implies. The Chameleoness of identity is of course rooted in an orientation that emphasized the importance of context, both social and natural, in the definition of the self.

This posed a fundamental relationship between time and space, and the forms of constraint imposed upon the temporal-spatial organization of experience. Inconsistency becomes a relative measure in the eye of the beholder. The play between the forces of good and evil that are enacted upon the stage of wayang kulit are the play of forces which tear at and continually threaten to sunder the self.

The hypothesis is held that Southeast Asian identity was spatially ordered in a way that contrasts with the "temporal" organization of western historical recounting of biographical experience and historical events. We are left with the question of the role of cultural constraint and the extent and manner in which context must be taken into our account in our formulas for historical patterning.

Status became a matter of negotiation and manipulation of one's own place, a positioning, in relation to others, for strategic advantage. It also entailed constant competition and conflict, coalitions and cross-cutting commitments, as well as centering oneself in positions of greater legitimacy and power. As everywhere, power in Southeast Asia, unevenly distributed, created legitimacy, and legitimacy reinforced relations and positions of power.

If we were not the first civilization to actually invent the corporate principles of capitalism, we may also not have been the first peoples to invent the practices of political-economy. Power and wealth have always been the unholiest of unions. It is the kind of violent force that creates coercive power which states cooptate and also creates the prerequisite and sufficient conditions for the accumulation of wealth that we call today capital and that is more generally referred to as profit. Combining the two in terms of political economy, we can talk about human exploitation of labor and resources for the sake of private gain.

An alternative substantivist model of political economy, or political-ecology, is proffered in within a regional context of multiple modes of production within different patchworks of adaptation, which beget different patterns of social relation and stratification at different levels of articulation and transaction. Each role had its place, and different roles had their different "places" within a larger context in which the payoffs of conflicts always had to be measured against the costs of cooperation.

Southeast Asia has been described as an ethnic mosaic, a cauldron and a laboratory of ethnicity. It has been a region where different groups have coexisted and transacted time immemorial. Identity rooted in ethnic distinction and diversity demanded that people incorporate themselves into groups in the pursuit and protection of their common interests, in competition with some groups, and in complement with others.

The "plural-polity" hypothesis holds that circumscription in terms of social-environmental relations, were systemic mechanisms in the rise and development of regional integration and of early state civilizations. Stratification occurred as asymmetrical interrelations of dominance-dependency were established between different groups of people, and, by extension, between the different niches that they occupied. State structures and the stratification upon which they are based are expectable outcomes of the critical self-organization and interaction of diverse inter-local areas and peoples. This development has depended upon the incorporation of broad resource basis, and organizational mechanisms that permitted the articulation of resources.

While most materialist models of state development are built from the ground up, the plural-polity hypothesis turns Marx "inside out" and focuses upon the self-other defining reference behavior of different kinds and groups of people who are tied to and defined in terms of their main ecological modes of adaptation, as these are articulated within an extra-local social-geographical context. The origin of change of a people, say from a latifundian slave class into a feudal land-bound serfdom or from a hunter-gather or slash and burn primitive to a sedentary-farming peasant, is rooted not so much in the primary modes of production upon which they are held to be based, as they are in the shifting patterns of domestic and extra-domestic social relations/reproduction that arises from asymmetrical relations of dominance/dependence between people. Dominance and dependency are political relations that control change and the differential access and distribution of resources. They are inherently conflicting and social in nature. These relations are inherently unstable and shifting in character, unless they are firmly rooted to culturally defined patterns of ecological adaptation.

The internal contradictions that are the source of dialectical transformations in social integration are those asymmetries of power which are rooted within systemic social-environmental inconsistencies ecological adaptation. The development of the birdman cult on Easter Island and the subsequent decline of Polynesia civilization upon the island was rooted in the imbalances and eventual failure of the cultural system to work out a more stable, long term relation with its island world.

It is in reference to the "plural-polity" relations in Southeast Asian political ecology that we can consider several sets of factors which underlie Southeast Asian regional integration: 1) the patterns of movement and settlement of different kinds of people; 2) the periodic rise and fall of Mandala city-state kingdoms during the proto-historic phase with concentrically diffused spheres of authority and legitimacy, and within which the roles and status-identity of different kinds of people's could be reciprocally defined; the cultural-ecological and economic bases of group-identity and organization of different peoples in Southeast Asia.

We may refer to enduring, long-term structures of continuity which are rooted in the geographical contexts of Southeast Asia, which have preconditioned and underlay the political economic relations between different peoples of the region, and the resulting patterns of social integration of the region.

"Wherever they settled, there was Vietnam, because Vietnam, as a totality and continuity of human existence, was the Vietnamese Village...(Joseph Buttinger, 1958: pp. 172-3)

The "Great Divide" may have been as much a culture geographical relationship between high and low in Southeast Asia as much as it has been a culture historical distinction between "primitive and civilized."

Throughout Southeast Asia the distinction between the dwellers in the highlands and the lowlands; remains one of the most basic distinctions. This kind of cultural distinction may have been present even in the remotest of prehistoric times, and may in part account for the confusing complexity of the ethno-linguistic map of Southeast Asia. The highlands have been conservative and isolated. The lowlands have been a source of contact and convergence of different civilizations. Highland-lowland distinctions may have maintained themselves in much earlier times--with isolated pockets of highland groups which today seem anomalous in a cultural surroundings may have been present before the lowland groups, and may have witnessed the successive replacement of several lowland groups.

Different groups were pushed and pulled in different directions. Two separate routes of movement would also have been open--highlanders following the mountain valleys and crests, lowlanders following the flow of rivers and coastlines. The flow of culture would have tended from one direction to another along each route, except when unusual historical circumstances would have dictated a crossing over from one to the other. The more widespread traffic would have been lowland. Cultures crossing between mountain chains would be less likely than a common origin of a lowland culture diverging into the highlands and becoming subsequently isolated. We historically privilege more complex social patterns as being more advanced developments, rather than a merely alternative forms of adaptation.

Ways of life in the mountains were separate from, and in many ways complementary to, ways of life in the valleys and lowlands. The ball and chain configuration of the Southeast Asian landscape permitted each group to have its own mountaintop or lowland delta or plain or river or island. Dense tropical rainforest interiors prohibited the across the grain movements of peoples which may have disrupted the formation of this stable pattern. Pioneers proceeded from the direction of greatest population pressure, princes proceeded along the lines of least resistance. Within Southeast Asia, power has always flowed along the lines of least resistance.

The patterns of movement that are associated with the lowland rice-cultivating peasant are very different from the patterns that the swidden horticulturalist of the highlands will adopt, although both fit into a "wave of advance model" in which change is linked to demographic transitions based upon subsistence strategies, while the flow of culture by the transference of an elite, a prince and his court, may be rather dramatic and sudden, as suggested in an "elite-dominance" model in which at least the incoming group must be fairly highly organized. (Colin Renfrew Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, 1987: pg. 131-2.)

There is also evidence in Southeast Asian demography suggesting the "system collapse model" in which the demise of a small state organization, either due to internal pressures or external forces, may lead to a migration and dispersal of once concentrated people.

If we studied the ethno-linguistic map of Southeast Asia (for instance, see the superbly detailed map accompanying the book Ethnic Groups of Mainlands Southeast Asia by Frank Lebar, Gerald Hickey and John Musgrave, New Haven: HRAF Press, 1964) we could probably find evidence of patterning that would fit some variant of all three models. In fact, none of the models are mutually exclusive, and all can be fit within a fourth model of imperialism and possibly a fifth one of colonial enslavement.

Highland population densities are much lower than lowland population densities (130 per square mile compared to densities as high as 500 per square mile). The premium in the highlands that practiced a swidden pattern of slash and burn hoe-cultivation without draft animals is for new fertile land. The premium in the lowlands is for cleared, arable and cultivable land. There is thus a tendency in a shifting cultivation pattern adapted to the highlands towards marginalization or movement towards the periphery, and this marginalizing tendency will be "pushed" from behind by the increasing densities and population pressures of previously used land in which different methods of cultivation must be adopted to maintain satisfactory productive yields. Movement in and among the highlands region is governed by the "law of the Mountains"--"land that is not under settlement is everybody's land, and, there being more people behind than in front of him, he is prepared to keep moving onwards." (William Robert Geddes Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of Thailand, 1976: p. 28.) Mountain people are not foot loose. Though they may be "indomitable pioneers" they are not nomads or "driven to travel by an innate compulsion. Our observation suggests that every Miao, if asked, would say that he prefers to be settled. The people who do follow behind may have a lower range of expectations because they are usually farming land which has already been occupied. Therefore those in the vanguard tend to stay there because they have the greater incentive. Opportunity, too, is greater at the frontier. Those behind may have to adapt to longer periods of settlement, and modify their farming practices accordingly, because of lack of opportunities to better themselves." (Geddes, pg. 28-0)

Evidence suggests that the Miao Mountain people on the move long before they began cultivating opium. Opium has long been opportunistic cash-crop that fit in well with their cultural incentives that maximized opportunity and freedom of movement.

Movement of both mountain and lowland groups will tend in similar directions--towards the frontier--and in every case the lowland groups will tend to drive out and displace those groups of the lowlands who are practicing a shifting pattern of cultivation.

It is suggest that the wave model in which pioneers are replaced by peasants in the opening and settlement of new frontiers, roles in which even primitive hunter-gatherers may become specialized primary foragers such as the Punan peoples of Borneo. Punan is a broad, loosely applied generic label to peoples specialized in a primary foraging adaptation at the peripheries of civilization and who have long been enmeshed in a larger regional or global network, recapitulates to some extent the pattern of state development and regional integration/stratification in Southeast Asia. The Punan are Austronesian speakers who were at one time rice cultivating farmers who subsequently returned to "commercial hunting-gathering" that is "an adaptation in which the collection of natural commodities for trade forms a major, if not primary motivating for hunting and gathering. (Hoffman, pg. 147)

Jean Kennedy provides a model for the regional development of Southeast Asia based on growing interdependencies between different specialized groups, leading to a diversification of the spectrum of Southeast Asian society. "Systems of exchange, in maintaining links between old and new forms, not only foster innovation by decreasing the risks of specialization or nonconformity; they also, by their areal extension and persistence, are the bridge that leads to growth rather than to simple substitution of the new for the old. The increase in diversity and differentiation of productive modes is conducive not only to further economic specialization, but also to the development of intra- and inter-group controls and to the rise of central-place exchange. In such developments, perhaps, lies the origin of the ethnic mosaic of modern Southeast Asia." (Jean Kennedy, Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia edited by Karl Hutterer, 1977: pg. 35-6)

There are historical precedents for some of these processes in Southeast Asia. From the period of Chinese domination in North Vietnam from the first century BC, until the 14th Century AD, the expansion of the Vietnamese nation consisted of a slow and steady "march to the south" that was accompanied and punctuated by a series of wars with its Southern Champan and Khmer neighbors, a settlement pattern by pioneering peasants and frontier armies that was not too different from the American westward march.

Part of this process was surely a gradual process of fissioning and dispersal by small peasant villages into outlying hamlets that become strung out along roads and water courses. This fissioning process has been fairly well described. (For Instance, see Joseph Buttinger, Keith Taylor, and Gerald Hickey.) They must also be fit within a larger patterning of north to southward migration that was stimulated in Northern China and in part explains the construction of the Great Wall. A continuous trickle of soldier/peasant/ex-officials/refugees from the Han period, and periodic waves fleeing famine, poverty and persecution made their way South, putting pressure upon and ultimately displacing those who come before them.

The Vietnamese advance southward replicated the Chinese model by the frontier establishment of pioneering farmer/soldier settlements of exiled persons of the state who could earn their own land and freedom while defending and domesticating the frontier against hostile barbarians. These settlements eventually became hamlets and villages that added to the hearth count and the tax revenues of the state.

This process must be seen as multi-layered in its patterns of movement. Undoubtedly the resistance and ultimate demise of the Champan state braked, channeled and finally created a vacuum for this process. The Chams themselves were ultimately part of a group of sea-invaders whose numbers could not have been too large, and yet whose cultural presence has left an indelible mark upon the local region. A similar pattern of movement can be detected in the spread of the Thai speaking peoples down into the Chao Praya plains, and the intrusion of Sino-Burman speaking peoples in the Northeast region of the Southeast Asian mainland.

All of these movements into the lowland plains and deltas have an historical time-frame. Court records document the rise and fall of royal potentates, some of whom fled to safety. Most of the time, when these movements were not the result of conflict and conquest, it can be assumed that a certain modicum of acculturation, assimilation and amalgamation between groups was always occurring. It is certain that the patterns of these movements have played an important part in dictating the resulting distributions of peoples in Southeast Asia today.

If we want to look at some of the dynamics of this set of processes, the history of Vietnam provides a good example. First Chinese colonization of Vietnam apparently mostly affected the ruling elite, though evidence suggests intermarriage between Chinese men and local wives from a very early time, and the undoubted influence which indigenous Vietnamese women had upon their husbands and their offspring.

The great stability and conservatism of the peasant in his nucleated, inbound and impenetrable village, is held to have always outlived the vicissitudes of court intrigues and the instability of dynastic succession. Vietnamese national and cultural sentiment was rooted in the peasant, who survived, from the time of Chinese imperial domination, until even in the most recent era, the violent political forces which have always threatened to destroy them. "Cultural values and social behavioral patterns are shared because the inhabitants have a common tradition, which in this case is the Vietnamese tradition as it exists in Southern Vietnam. It does not necessarily follow that members of village society have strong social bonds or a sense of social solidarity. These qualities are found within the village but cannot be attributed to the village." (Hickey, 1964: pg. 278)

"The single form of Vietnamese settlement duplicated the closed circle of the nation. Hidden from sight behind their high hedges of bamboo, the villages stood like nuclei within their surrounding circle of rice fields." (Fitzgerald, 1972: pg. 11) Indeed, a lesson hard learned by blundering Americans was that it was the very self-sufficiency of the villages that "gave Vietnam hidden powers of resistance." It has also been ethnographically documented that the average peasant, though conservative, is supremely practical and will accept and adapt any innovation if its usefulness can be proven.

Behind the peasant and his village we see the operation of kinship and the political economic role of the family unit--one whose lineage size went from nine ascending generations in the north to five in the central regions to only three in the south. But the family was a corporate productive unit--the minimal community. And the village was a tight aggregation of families, and the village replaced the clan or lineage organization as the principle unit of organization. "One of the dreads of poverty is that the family may disintegrate as members quit the villages to seek livelihood elsewhere. For the villager, it is extremely important that the family remain together: in addition to the comfort of having kinfolk around, immortality lies in an undying lineage." (Hickey, 1964) In Vietnam, to be exiled from the Village was a fate worse than imprisonment or even death.

Chinese commandaries were at first interested in the villages only for the purposes of hearth-counts, taxation, corvee and conscription and pacification. For the most part, they left the local culture of the Village intact. With independence after the 9 Century A. D., national and court life of the King and subsequent emperors came to intrude more upon the daily lives of the peasant. Yet the Vietnamese Village has always remained a semi-autonomous unit, and the source of much potential conflict--"The laws of the Emperor yield to the custom of the villages."

Annual festivals were held at the village ceremonial center, or Dinh, commemorating the official consecration and founding of the village by the Emperor. Before national government, dinhs referred to local gods of the earth. "In assuming temporal power, the emperors of Vietnam took on the responsibility to perform the rites of the agriculture for all the Vietnamese villages and replaced the local spirits with the spirits of national heroes and geni. Under their reign the dinh contained the imperial character that incorporated the village into the empire, making an elision between the ideas of 'land,' 'emperor' and 'Vietnamese'" (Fitzgerald, 1972: pg. 14) The dinh was "a symbolic bond between the villages and the emperor." (Hickey, 1964: pg. 6)

The common factor in the stability of lineages was the possession of common land, or huang hoa, as well as the symbolic-ceremonial mechanisms that reinforced lineage solidarity. This links the stability of family units to the possession of property--the peasant should contribute not only to the interests of his/her own offspring, but to the common welfare of the "main stem" of the family. These institutional mechanism reinforced the human relationship to the land at the same time that they reinforced human social solidarity. Hence, we have a triadic interrelationship between the individual's own interests, land and property ownership, and the common interests of the group. The basis for potential conflict was rooted in the structure of village society, familial organization and individual peasant-villagers in possession and usufruct privileges to land, and is critical to understanding the process of southward expansion called "Vietnamization." "...Within the villages as within the nation the amount of arable land was absolutely inelastic. The population of the village remained stable, and so to accumulate wealth meant to deprive the rest of the community of land, to fatten while one's neighbor starved..." The earth took precedence in the definition of society, "for, as the source of life, it was the basis for the social contract between members of the family and members of the village..." (ibid.: pg. 13) Perhaps this explains why graft and corruption at higher levels became so rife--for it meant becoming divorced, physically, socially and psychologically, from the primary symbolic structure of one's psycho-cultural identity.

But village solidarity was never complete or immune from the competition and intrigue of neighbors. "Land breeds no land" and will property was a legitimate source of wealth, poverty meant the disinheritance of property to someone else. "...But strictly speaking, the distinction is not between richness and poverty, but between privilege and non-privilege. (Stover, 1974: pg. 80-1) States could come and go, but the Vietnamese nation, rooted in the village, would remain.

In this regard, it is worthwhile to consider several other important aspects of the general process. The colonial and dynastic history of Vietnam reveals the struggles of a rising state centralization against the divisive tendencies of a feudal social structure. Periods of good and honest administration were followed by the corrupt exploitation of degenerate offspring, setting the stage for feudal divisions and rebellion, and subsequent replacement by a new dynasty. The degree of corruption preceding rebellions is documented in the tax records.

Also important is the degree to which the state or alternatively a feudal authority intrudes upon the productive relationship between the peasant and the land. Promulgation of state laws encouraging parible inheritance, even sexual equality in the matter, constituted an attempt by the state to prevent and break up large land-holdings which represented a source of resistance to state revenue and power.

In a strictly feudal economy, the relationship between the serf or peasant and the central authority of the state is one that is characterized by social distance and regal-ritual symbolism. Otherwise the direct linkages between the royalty and the land are tenuous and easily broken. It is a central economy characterized by the redistribution of levied foods for the maintenance of the court. The move towards a state society entails the bureaucratic and administrative incorporation of the peasant into the orbit of the state. The emphasis is upon the management of markets and greater administrative efficiency in extenuating the linkages between the state and the productivity of the peasant. The peasant cultivating a basic staple remains the primary source of food and economic basis of the state, whose power to extract and requisition this wealth directly from the peasant is the source of centralized authority and power.

An important motivating factor in territorial expansion of Vietnam was the chronic problem of local over population that the cultural ecology of wet-rice cultivation led to. The harvesting and planting of rice are brief but labor intensive seasons that are critical to the success of the crop. They require a reserve labor force that is not needed during the rest of the growing season. Wet rice regions support some of the highest population densities in the world, next to some urban areas, and such densities are in part due to the agricultural involution which wet-rice cultivation supplies--renewable or even increased fertility of the same plot over time, and relatively high yields per unit area of land.

Compounding this problem is the need for essential amino acids and balanced proteins which a dependency upon a staple carbohydrate produces. The Vietnamese countryside was characterized by a disease of protein-calorie, nitrogen-protein deficiency; referred to as Boiffoisure d'Annam that seems to have been endemic and which seems to have resulted in a diet based upon strategies of diversification and opportunistic consumption--a wide ranging consumption of almost any protein source available, including carrion, worms, rats, and entrails and the characteristic lack of hoarding. A main part of the Vietnamese diet is nouc mam or fish sauce that is high in concentrated proteins.

A country confronted with periodic bouts of overpopulation and malnutrition, almost once every generation, has only two means open to it. In the tradition bound feudal economy of Vietnam only the former one of which was seen as a viable alternative. This is either the opening of new frontiers or imperialistic expansion and colonization of foreign territories, and the seeking out of new economic sectors in a field of "supply and service industries operated by merchants." Stover talks about these possibilities (The Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization: Peasant and Elites in the Last of the Great Agrarian States, 1974) and it is interesting to compare the more tradition bound Vietnamese peasant, and the later Vietnamese refugee in the United States, with very similar or alternative patterns by Chinese immigrants in the Nanyang or Overseas.

The Le rulers of the fifteenth century instituted a policy of systematic territorial expansion against the Champan Empire in the south. A series of wars led to the virtual eradication of the Champs of the lowlands by 1471. During the following decades "masses of landless peasants" settled during the following decades southward, penetrating the Mekong delta region which was indefensible by the then declining Cambodian empire. "The Vietnamese reached Saigon shortly before 1700 and annexed the rest of the South during the following sixty years." (Buttinger, 1958: p.47).

We may look to yet another factor involved in this process, also characteristic of both the Vietnamese and the Chinese, and that is the "oral" pattern of socialization which distinguishes the indulgences and subsequent corruption of the children of the wealthy and the privations and frequent rising of the children of the poor. Wealthy parents unconsciously consider their children's leisure and gratification as indicative of their own prestige and prosperity. The mechanism underlying "father-son" identification among the Chinese (and by inference, the Vietnamese) is similar to the mechanism of romantic identification between husband and wife. Children may be raised in very strict, paternalistic and authoritarian regimes, but be "free from restraint with regard to food."

The children of the poor must tighten their belts not because of the disciplinary compunctions of their parents, but because of adverse circumstances--they are liable to grow up under food restrictions "regardless of parental intentions." "....parents do not merely refrain from imposing restrictions on their children's feeding habits. Those who have no cause to worry about food take great pleasure in seeing their young ones eat freely. The same is true regarding the spending of money. (Hsu, 1967: pg. 278).

We can compare, as Francis Hsu does, two alternative and clearly contraposed "status personality configurations" that are the result of these factors. Poor children grow up hard working, while the children of the rich grow up "to firmly believe that whatever they desire in life will be forthcoming to them simply for the asking or the taking." (Hsu, 1967: pg. 279) The differences between these personalities are that while "the former status group tends to be submissive, careful, rational, frugal, realistic, industrious, and sincere. The personality configuration of the latter group tends to be vain, unsympathetic, licentious, impulsive, unrealistic, extravagant, carefree, insincere and to lack economic and common sense." (ibid.: pg. 280)

Combining these three sets of factors, it is useful to consider this problem in light of Melville Herskovits theory of cultural dynamics that posits that socialization and enculturative conditioning in early childhood and the integration of society and cultural sanctioning, will lead paradoxically both to adaptive reconditioning and relearning and to conservativism in adulthood, and that cultural focus upon certain aspects of culture to the exclusion of others will lead to greater elaboration of those aspects, and subsequently, to 'drift.'" (Melville J. Herskovits Cultural Anthropology, 1955).

It seems as if cultural forces are focused upon the dynamic relationships between people, groups, land and resources of the land, in terms of controlling, channeling or facilitating the mobility and mobilization of such resources. Such control is mandatory if a society is to achieve adaptive integration. Such mobilization may take many different patterns. We can refer to upward and downward social mobility, to migration and geographic mobility, and to mass mobilization or social movements.

Piracy, and the attribution of piracy, has always been endemic and widespread in Southeast Asian Historiography as a political ploy and strategy. Pirates have continued to operate up until contemporaneous times, afforded haven and hiding among the many small islands and outlets of the seas. Fishermen and traders in one season may become opportunistic pirates in the next.

Piracy has always added flavor and violence to the daily rhythms of Southeast Asia. We must inquire into what piracy has represented to the region, and how it has influenced the character of Southeast Asian Civilization.

Southeast Asia has had a long and romantic tradition of piracy. The possibilities for adventure and predation have always been there. The mentality of primitive economics construes raiding as merely a para-politically expedient extension of trading--why haggle over prices when one can simply take by force what one wants. Some economists have argued that the need for finance and protection on the high sees was one of the main spurs towards government and capitalistic enterprise.

Clearly, the early European trading partners who got together investors to finance long distance trading missions in Further India numbered among the earliest, and perhaps most unscrupulous capitalists western society has produced. For piracy was more than a human possibility of the variegated Southeast Asian landscape. It was a major off-season pursuit of peripheral fishermen and traders who regularly plied the pliant, warm seas of the region.

Protection from pirates, and from interior raiders and brigands who always lurked just beyond the margins of the concourses of civilization, has been perhaps a major impetus behind early state aggregation and formation. Early Mandala civilizations surely served, besides a symbolic and possible mercantile function, a police function to protect the interests of the elite, if not the peasants or tribes of peoples who came under the umbrella of their control.

There was a perennial need to secure the lucrative linkages of trade and communication with the outside world. The same forces that could police the hinterlands could also be counted on to enforce tributary relations and to subdue other tribes and peoples. The arc of control by one potentate over other petty potentates, was the symbolic measure of the greatness of a people and a political economic measure of their prosperity and security of their resource base. In other words, petty pirates were not the only one's to practice piracy in Southeast Asia, and, despite the romanticism, they have been the only one's without the legal charter or moral mandate to reinforce their institutional prerogatives.

We must recognize that "piracy" was as much an ascriptive label applied especially by the British as a matter of policy in their pacification and colonization of Malaya and Borneo. Piracy was applied to all groups who showed resistance to British colonial procedures and who sought by brute force to gain profit from victims.

This form of piracy was not too much different from the imperialistic policies of the Europeans themselves, whether we talk about the cut-throat and exploitative policies of merchant-mariners or the policies of British administrators and their military henchmen. Such piracy policy later became transformed into a policy of paramountcy. "...This was the theory that the strongest had a legal duty to keep its weaker neighbors in sufficient order to permit trade. ...The roots really lay in a concept of world order that exalted rights of property, of goods in transit or in warehouses, to be free from interference. Since rival claims to sovereign, law-making authority might interfere with rights of property, the 'paramount' power assumed the right, even the 'duty' to oversea questions of dynamic succession." (Alfred Rubin, Piracy, Paramountcy and Protectorates 1974: p. 54)

British policy became transformed into a matter of "protectionism" in which "the mark of a protected state or people...is that it cannot maintain political intercourse with foreign powers except through or by permission of the protecting state." (ibid.: pg. 66) It is not too difficult to see the implicit "White man's burden" and racial superiority behind this kind of policy.

But the prototypical form of piracy has probably had its place in Southeast Asia long before the Europeans took over. It consisted for the most part of sea-going groups, sometimes numbering in the thousands and in the hundreds of craft, who traveled and marauded ships, coastal settlements, and even raids far inland up rivers. This was a cultural adaptation, and fishing and trading were undoubtedly a part of the complex. Families lived on boats, headed by a male elder and several sons or in-laws. Such fleets could hide among the many islets and bays, or escape inland among the many inlets and deltaic tributaries with which they were familiar. Groups that were displaced from their settlements may become "wandering pirates"--sort of sea gypsies.

The principle item of trade of such pirates were slaves, many of whom were inducted into the profession of piracy, and most of whom would be resold in another place on the slave market. They might capture slaves on one shore, and sell them on the opposite shore, or take them in the north and sell them in the south.

Princes kept harems of slaves, concubines--some of whom were recorded to have escaped from a Malay prince to seek safety among the Chinese of Singapore after having been tortured. Chinese themselves have long been pirates on the Nanyang--capturing slaves from the coasts of Fukien province, attacking a Spanish settlement at Manila in 1570 under the leadership of Limahon (Charles Robequain Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo and the Philippines: A Geographical, Economic and Political description of Malaya, the East Indies and the Philippines.London: Longman, Green and Co., Ltd., 1958) and even plundering ships in Singapore harbor in the 19th century. Malay pirates were more numerous. They attacked as far as the Gulf of Tonkin in the 8th Century, using poison arrows, throwing darts and slings.

Piracy was no small part of the prosperity of the Indianized states of Southeast Asia, relying as much on control of commerce as upon the exploitation of a sedentary agricultural substratum. We must consider piracy to have been an acceptable form of "primitive economics" in which relations of trading could easily alternate into raiding.

In considering the Mandala states, we must look at the limitations of power yielded by princes who were as much "big men" of prowess as they were "chiefs" whose authority was legitimated by religion. In this we can see certain characteristic patterns that have been identified by Wolters as widely represented features of many parts of early Southeast Asia. Comparative isolation of groups with strong local attachments, cognatic kinship, an indifference towards lineage descent, "and a preoccupation with the present that came from the need to identify in one's own generation those with abnormal spiritual qualities...(1982: pg. 4-9).

These characteristics combined to promote a "big Man" orientation upon "men of prowess" bringing with it the "possibility of mobilizing extended kinship ties within and outside the settlement or network of settlements." This orientation promoted characteristic regional attitudes towards common expectations for achievement in public life, a means of gaining prestige. "...Public life would also be the stage for open competition for pre-eminence. Leaders and followers alike needed to validate their status by continuous achievement, and achievement often involved adventures into neighboring settlement areas..." Leaders regularly bestowed gifts and titles on those of merit. Many Southeast Asian languages came to reflect the differences between the aristocratic and the common people in marked dialectical forms. "Finally, and very important in the extension of communications between networks of settlements, leaders in neighboring areas would recognize the higher spiritual status of a man of outstanding prowess and seek to regularize their relations with him by means of alliances that acknowledged the inequality of the parties. In this way more distant areas would be brought into a closer relationship with one another." (Wolters, 1982: pgs. 4-9)

These overarching themata of proto-historical Southeast Asian civilization resulted in a map of concentrically radiating, overlapping "Mandalas" or "circles of kings" whose power would wax and wan like so many ripples upon a pond. Power, spiritually sanctioned, radiated in concentric rings of influence and prestige. The prehistoric map of Southeast Asia evolved from a complicated network of many small settlements into a patchwork of overlapping "spheres of power." Boundaries existed only in the name and influence of the ruler and in the sense of security of the subjects, as "each ruler was acclaimed in his own country as one who had unique claim to "universal" sovereignty. "...In each of these Mandalas, one king, identified with divine and "universal" authority, claimed personal hegemony over the other rulers in his mandala who were in theory his obedient allies and vassals..." (Wolters, 1982: pgs. 16-17)

Mandalas were inherently unstable--expanding and contracting in influence in "concertina-like fashion." Chronic warfare or acculturative influence failed to define a stable structural center, while many princes competed for the title of ultimate sovereignty. "The mandala perimeters continued to replicate court situations at the center. Centers of spiritual authority and political power shifted endlessly." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 17).

Cultural diversity and regional variation led to a consistent pattern of localization or stylization of exogenous acculturative forms in endogenous meanings. Foreign symbols were adapted to local contexts and needs. "Foreign materials had to be localized in different ways "before they could fit into various local complexes of religious, social and political systems and belong to new cultural "wholes." Only when this had happened would the fragments make sense in their new ambience, the same ambiences which allowed the rulers and their subjects to believe that their centres were unique." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 52).

The Southeast Asian cross-roads created a shared "outward" and open orientation toward a "single ocean." "The trading connections linked the opposite ends of maritime Asia resemble links in a chain which would join together again even if one link were temporarily broken..." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 39) The single ocean was "a vast zone of neutral water" that all states sought to mutually protect and exploit to maintain the freedom of the seas. It is not surprising then that one of the most important functions of Southeast Asian states was the control of piracy that flourished only upon the peripheries and interstices of Southeast Asian civilization. "The single ocean is a significant fact of Southeast Asian historical geography...." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 40.)

We must consider briefly the political ecology of the symbol as this has become representative of Southeast Asian civilization. The type of proto-historic state characteristic of Southeast Asia can be classified as a regal-ritual city-state in which central power and wealth was relatively limited and the monopoly of power tended to be decentralized across a feudal region of subsidiary areas and regents, kinsmen of the ruler, royal appointees with local power bases, or "autonomous self-made magnates" Distances become an important function in the amount of autonomy of local rule and power may be reduplicated in kind or form at many levels throughout the state. The rural/urban dichotomy is not a qualitative difference but more quantitative in terms of "simply more wealthy, prestigious and powerful." The political-religious roles of the urban residents provides a model of emulation by the countryside and is the only means of solidarity in an otherwise weakly cohesive society. Leaders may come and go, but there must always be a contender. Corporate Ideological links survive ties of actual power to be redefined in contexts of new people but the same tradition. The chief inhabitants of the city are the members or associates, artisans, bureaucrats, retainer so the prince and his court. The court consists of family and kin, officials, advisors, servants, concubines and "others whose presence is solely a reflection of the ruler and his court." (Fox, 1977)

Such centers are parasitic consumers--economically dependent upon exploitation and taxation of the surrounding areas. A sumptuous court life provides a model, a style of life, embodied by a ceremonial complex reinforcing the status hierarchy. "The life-style is defined by the calendrical round of state rituals, kingly ceremonies, coronations, funerals, preparations for war, royal feasts, and divine sacrifices, rather than by individualism and secularism...."(ibid.: pg. 54)

Symbolically, the function of the center is that of paramountcy over the surrounding area. Centralization depends heavily upon a shared ideology and emulation of the ruler's prestige. There exists ideological continuity between center and periphery and definition of symbolic forms and elements in the center will "influence the nature of settlement throughout the society" and will be approximated more-or-less throughout. Design motifs, patterns of behavior, speech and symbols will be duplicated and become the basis of status determination at every level of the society. "Emulation of the attributes of the capital cities can continue down to the simplest village and homestead. In ancient Siam, for example, the village headman was lord of the village in a manner similar to the King who was lord of the state."

It follows that the most important function of the regal-ritual center and the court is to preserve, protect and reinforce its symbolic and ideological legitimacy. These states are referred to as "theater states" or "segmentary states" rather than merely feudal or tribal. Segmentary states widely disperse power throughout various sub-units of organization. They rely heavily upon lineage or kin-based or even pseudo-familial paternalism for assuring solidarity. They are theatre states because they highlight the symbolic function of legitimization by the ruler and his household, a function replicated through the levels of society, in lieu of real political cohesiveness. "...Even if, in South-East Asia, the old dynasty is deposed, the new ruler who sits in the regal-ritual capital quickly becomes a hitherto unknown reincarnation of the divine. The symbolic aspects of rule thus continue even though the actual leadership of the state society changes. In state societies where centralized power is limited, the ideology of kinship or the divine nature of rule stabilizes the framework of political organization even if its personnel undergoes frequent changes through revolt and usurpation..."(Fox, 1977: pg. 21-22)

It is in this context that we can infer an historical phase in the development of the "administrative mercantile" city-state in Southeast Asia, one that largely accompanied the extension of trading empires and the need for the protection and regulation of such commercial activity. In this we can consider the affect of the intrusion of a global market oriented political economy which tended to everywhere upset the earlier, domestic based division of labor upon which society was founded. The tendency was to emphasize the basic difference between the countryside and the urban center. In the third world, at least, it has resulted in the growth of "primate cities" characterized by huge slums of displaced proletarians.

It is in regard to these subsequent phases of the regional integration of Southeast Asian civilization that we can make reference to the rise into preeminence of four categories of people whose status-role identity were defined by the new relations established. These four types of people are prostitutes, pariahs, proletariats and presidents.

Prostitution. The status of women in Southeast Asia has everywhere been noted to be relatively high and equal to that of men, at least in traditional definitions. They are active agents and traders in many local markets, virtually monopolizing some sectors of commerce. One common consequence of political-economic intrusion has been the de emphasis and denigration of the domestic mode of production and hence the relegation of the role of women and their participation in the market economy to a second class position. This is perhaps best represented in Southeast Asia by the rise of the widespread profession of "GI/tourist prostitution" that has accompanied the poverty of underdevelopment. This form of prostitution was greatest in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Though .prostitution has had a long history, and though all of these categories have had some precedence time immemorial in Southeast Asia, we must consider the economic place that this particular "profession" has had in a modern setting as a kind of marginal "service" economy and a form of "sexploitation" that has accompanied the lack of sexual repression and alienation upon which developmental organization and socialization has in part depended, and political economic asymmetries that result in such forms of exploitation.

Pariahs. Secondly, the role of pariahs in Southeast Asia is also been, in the colonial and post-colonial eras, a vital one in the political economic organization and mobilization of the entire region. In this Chinese merchant middlemen, the "Asian Jewry" have figured prominently. They are necessary and efficient intermediaries in the long-distance networks that have established the regional integration. Their position as resident aliens is inherently ambiguous and ambivalent in society--often charged with exclusive, usurious and exploitative practices resulting from their superior social organization and money-handling skills, they have also been some of the main agents in the innovation, pioneering and development of Southeast Asia.

The British not only used them as a coolie labor force and a merchant-middleman sector, but also as bureaucratic officials who interceded from them in the daily business of colonial administration. Pariah groups thus frequently serve the function in complex societies as one of intermediary between potentially hostile and asymmetric social groups, and thus as the convenient "scapegoats" for conflict and targeted aggression by both the elite and the masses.

Brian Foster writes of such an important intermediary role, in which the breakdown of "minority trading mechanisms provide large-scale, inter-group conflict which, in extreme cases, can take the form of genocide. Persecution of minorities who are active in commerce has been known for centuries." Such pariah groups are in an inherently, structurally insecure position. They are symbolic targets for both the machinations of the elite who wish to focus blame upon some convenient out-group, and for the hatred, feelings of failure and insecurity of the masses that is born in the frustration of their own failings, false promises and exploitation. They come to embody, culturally and structurally, the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the integration of the region.

Political economic asymmetries can become the source of "exchange-generated conflict" characterized by a mode of "negative solidarity" and by the focal point of strategic relations/transactions negotiated in the market place.

In complex societies, trading specialists emerge who, along with political authorities and property owners, become major foci of conflicting relations, by which compensating effects of other cross-cutting conflicts may be diffused and their relative forces diffused. (B. L. Foster, 1978:pp.10)

There occurs special distancing mechanisms to regulate such conflict--jural mechanisms or ritual proscription regulating and limiting the range of interaction, displacement of conflict upon a third pariah party, and by spatial/social distancing between the parties of the negotiation who come together only in the marketplace. Conflicting relations become focused on these trading out-groups, diminishing other possible conflict and further insulating different communal groups from maintaining potentially conflicting relations between one another. It also "helps relieve the trader from the expectations of fair dealing and generosity that the peasants have among themselves. This change of expectations, as does the market place, constitutes a mechanism for displacement of the exchange-generated conflict by focusing some of the tension on inter-ethnic group relations rather than on the parties to an individual transaction. Such displacement helps explain the remarkable hostility often encountered by minority trading groups. It also helps explain why traders who are the object of such hostility are not readily replaced by traders from the majority group: the latter are destroyed by the conflict inherent in their commercial activities or by the uneconomic behavior required of them if they are to avoid conflict." (Foster, 1978:pp. 14)

Proletarians. Proletarians can best and most simply be described as landless peasants who are destined to become the slum-dwelling poor of Southeast Asia's primate cities. They are, most important, a readily exploitable and cheap source of labor, and resources. Witness the market in some countries for the selling of donor organs. They have high rates of crime, substance abuse, birth, infant mortality, malnutrition, and debt, and low rates of longevity, employment, literacy, education and opportunity. They can be a volatile source of instability and fodder for cannons and machine guns. They are the most despised people on earth, and no one wants to be a part of them--they are the untouchable symbols of the failings of our system.

Presidents are, I maintain, another distinctive feature of the modern political economic order. They too are important national and cultural symbols--they too are inherently ambivalent and insecure. They are rational symbols of the rational, administrative order of the secular state too concerned with balancing budgets and taxes to be concerned with moral-religious precepts. They are thus supremely middle class, suburban symbols whose only religion is the false consciousness of a New Nationalism. They stand for democracy, republicanism, equality, as well as for corruption, violence and stratification. Their administrations come and go faster than the nations they control. They say a lot and accomplish little. Independent or puppets, they are all enmeshed inescapably in a web of political economic entanglements.

Pontianak is a Malay story about a beautiful woman who comes out at night at lonely places. Usually she will say she is in trouble so men, and sometimes women will help her. Once she has them in her clutches she changes suddenly into an ugly monstrous woman and kills her victims by sucking their blood, if they do not die by fright. But if one manages to hammer a nail into the nape of her neck, then she will forever remain a beautiful woman, and never become a Pontianak any more.

One time, a young man managed to put a nail into the back of her neck, and they married and had a beautiful daughter. Many years passed and the daughter grew up. One day the daughter was combing her mother's hair, and said "Mother, there is something in the back of your neck". Her mother told her to pull it out, and as soon as she pulled it out, that night following she transformed back into a Pontianak. She did not hurt her husband or her daughter, but ran off into the forest and was never seen again.

The political economy of a people cannot be merely described in terms of "modes of production" and social relations of production. The style of life a people pursue, and the values and interests with which they pursue it, is critically rooted in and constrained by a wider social context in which the values, interests and styles of life of others must be taken into account in formulas and strategies for success. In other words, the political economy by which a broad group or nation of peoples achieve social integration is accomplished by cultural means. The adaptability of Chinese immigrant society in Southeast Asia owes its success as much to the organizational ethos and practical strategies open to a group because of its shared cultural values and orientations, as it does to any notions of "innate" Chinese cunning or business acumen. As sojourning merchant middlemen with extraordinary skills in merciless handling money and in business organization, the Chinese have been able to out compete practically any group they have come into relation with. In a similar vein we can speak of the cultural political economy of the Miao speaking peoples who have a considerable interest in the production of poppies in the highlands of Northern Southeast Asia. The world it seems, must always be short of opium, and the Hmong must understand this very well.

Identity in the world becomes established as a function of our role-relations and place occupied within the world. Within each identity there is possibility for alternation and symbolic subjectivization of meaning that relates the biography of personal experience to the larger streams of social and political history. There is an inherent political-ecological relativity about such identity and of human possibility. We are what we are in relation to others who are what they are in relationship to ourselves. This relationship is dynamic and is always defined in a context that has a sense of space and time, of a geographical history about it. We are actors cast upon a stage not of our own choosing, and however long or short our entrances or exits, we may have many parts to play.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction