This editorial develops two themes. First, it discusses how historical and anthropological approaches can relate to each other, in the field of the highland margins of Asia and beyond. Second, it explores how we might further our understandings of the uplands of Asia by applying different terms such as ‘Haute-Asie’, the ‘Southeast Asian Massif’, the ‘Hindu Kush–Himalayan region’, the ‘Himalayan Massif’, and in particular ‘Zomia’, a neologism gaining popularity with the publication of James C. Scott’s latest book, The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia.1 Through a discussion of the notion of Zomia, I will reconsider certain ‘truths’ regarding highland Asian studies. In the process, I seek to contribute to disembedding minority studies from the national straitjackets that have been imposed by academic research bounded by the historical, ideological, and political limits of the nation-state.

For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.

Historically autonomous and fiercely egalitarian, yet far from isolated and extensively implicated in regional, and global, economies of trade and exchange, the Wa people on the Burma–China frontier stand out in the history of marginal peoples refusing to be marginalized. This article addresses the place of mining in the political history of the Wa area – a key part of what has recently been called the Zomia region, but one which differs from many other cases because of its activist statelessness. The history of the Wa areas is outlined and discussed with reference to larger debates over agency, autonomy, and state formation, with particular attention to mining resources and their relation to Wa politics before the mid twentieth century.

In this article I examine the relevance of utilizing a ‘Zomia-like’ approach to interpreting upland livelihoods in the China–Vietnam borderlands, rather than the more commonly employed nation-state lens. I explore the challenges and opportunities presented by the international borderline between the provinces of Yúnnán, southwest China, and Lào Cai, northern Vietnam, for local populations, namely ethnic minorities Kinh (lowland Vietnamese) and Han Chinese. Investigating the creation and solidification of this borderline and border space, I undertake a historical and contemporary analysis of cross-border trade networks. This focuses on two time periods in which global–local linkages have been especially important in directly shaping border negotiations: the French colonial period and the contemporary economic reform era. Present-day border narratives collected in both countries during ethnographic fieldwork with local traders managing important highland commodities shed light on the means by which the borderline and borderland spaces are continuing to shape both prospects and constraints.

This article examines the applicability of the Zomia concept for social scientific studies of the Himalayan region, with a focus on the Central Himalayas. While for both empirical and political reasons the term Zomia itself may not be entirely appropriate to the Himalayan Massif, the analytical imperatives that underlie James C. Scott’s usage of it – particularly the emphasis on the ethnic, national, and religious fluidity of highland communities, and their intentionality and agency vis-à-vis the states with which they engage – can be of great utility to those working in the Himalayan region. Through a historical review of the area tradition of ‘Himalayan studies’, as well as an ethnographic sketch of the cross-border Thangmi community of Nepal, India, and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, I argue that the potential power of the Zomia concept hinges on its ability to provide an additional framework for analysis (and perhaps political struggle), that adds value to, rather than replaces, ‘traditional’ nation-state rubrics.

Against the simplistic thesis that hill peoples are marginal and unruly groups by choice, in conflict with state power, this article shows that, in the context of mainland Southeast Asia, hill peoples develop relationships with lowland state societies that are more complex and ambiguous than usually portrayed. Ethnographic and historical evidence reveals that they compromise and cooperate with the lowland state more often than they oppose it. Although hill peoples are commonly conceived as ‘barbarians’ of the periphery, and ill-treated or instrumentalized accordingly, in some circumstances they played a central role in the defence and the reshaping of pre-modern and modern Southeast Asian states. Moreover, their political and religious acculturation by lowland societies sometimes proves to have been instrumental in the perpetuation of a specific identity under the guise of surface assimilation. This article not only highlights the dynamics of past and present interactions between lowland and upland societies but also questions the future of the latter, in the context of an increasing engulfment by nation-states and, conversely, of new perspectives offered by globalization. The analysis thus demonstrates that hill peoples often take advantage of new forms of partnership resulting from globalization to renegotiate their image and status more favourably, and to counter the pressure exerted by the dominant society. Finally, they appear to be neither Zomian – that is, uncompromising rebels to ‘stateness’ in James C. Scott’s formulation – nor zombies, unable to adapt.