Zambia is a new name, which includes all places above 300 meters above sea level from the highlands in central Vietnam to northeastern India. Covering five countries in Southeast Asia (Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar) and four provinces in China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and part of Sichuan).

The concept of "Zambia" put forward in this book is a highlight of this book, which is why I have to write it in front. Nowadays, academic circles are more inclined to study problems from the perspective of globalization. Indeed, especially ethnic issues and frontier issues, we should look at a problem from a more comprehensive perspective and stand at a higher height. Today, with the upsurge of globalization, the world can be regarded as a whole or divided into several regions. At present, due to the differences in culture, religious belief, language and geographical location, the world is divided into 13 regions, namely, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, East and West Europe, North Asia, North America, Latin America and Oceania. Therefore, many scholars' research is often limited to 13 continent, and they cannot jump out of their own barriers and conduct innovative research. However, the author's definition and small-scale research on this new field is very worthy of our study. Moreover, from this concept, we can also ignite our hope of discovering the "New World".

Second, the content brief introduction

This book is a famous American anthropologist James Scott's research on the "mountain" regional space through a large number of Burmese documents and field surveys. The title of this book is The Art of Escaping from Rule. The word "art" seems to be a compliment, but in fact it is a comprehensive discussion on the lifestyle of people in the highlands of Southeast Asia. The author emphasizes anthropological investigation, ethnography and the study of minority languages, which are basic skills worthy of learning by modern and contemporary ethnologists. The content of this book covers all aspects of Zambia, and such details and in-depth theoretical achievements are all derived from the academic spirit of the author in asking questions. In the first chapter, the author first restores Zambia and expounds three basic concepts of this book: mountains, valleys and countries. The second chapter analyzes the state's control over its people as a ruling tool in detail, and explains why these people want to escape. In the second chapter, the author also presents us with his object of investigation, and makes a comparative demonstration between the modern society he visited and the difficult and occluded mountainous areas. In his view, in mountainous areas with difficult conditions, the journey that can be called a country is much slower than that of modern society. An in-depth investigation was made on the traffic conditions in the hard mountainous areas. Very detailed. The author also gives a historical description of the formation and resistance of ethnic minorities in southwest China: in Yunnan-Guizhou and northern highlands of Guangxi, mountainous terrain constitutes an obstacle to the expansion rights and colonization of the Central Plains dynasty, and distance resistance plays an important role in stopping its movement. At the same time, the Miao and Mongolian nationalities in China are cited. After several authors' accurate analysis of mountain agriculture, the religious culture, dictation, writing and text of the research object are explained in detail in Chapter 6 to Chapter 8. And it makes an in-depth case study of ethnic group theory.

Third, research theory.

Scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research on anarchism and formed a theoretical school. Mcpherson, a political scientist in 1967, said in his book Political Obligations: "Why should I obey the government is an absurd question, and he demonstrated this view. Political skepticism that negatively criticizes the concept of government legitimacy and political obligation itself. For the source of anarchism, most people think it is a derivative of liberalism. But this book mainly studies the anarchism of most people, not the "anarchism" of people living on the edge of Southeast Asia highlands.

? What does "marginal people" mean? Different times, different backgrounds and different people have different meanings. In modern China, the famous anthropologist Wu Wenzao once defined the "marginal people" in China at that time-marginal people in cultural anthropology or sociology are: between pure mainlanders and pure frontier people, they can live a marginal cultural life through two languages, such as nationalized frontier people of all ethnic groups and mainlanders who are localized in their respective provinces. It can be seen that these marginal people can find that they belong to a certain kind of people after tracing the history of their ancestors, and in the course of historical development, they have formed a new kind of people through integration. Back to the "marginal people" in this book, I made a comparison with them. In the highlands of Southeast Asia, marginal people live in the mountains because they want to avoid taxes, that is, the rule of the country. Their main mode of production is the backward agricultural form in the central region, mainly planting crops suitable for mountainous areas. Today, the marginal people in the northwest frontier are mainly nomadic people in the north, taking the Kazak people in Yili, Xinjiang as an example. The cultural transformation of Kazak nomads in modern Xinjiang mainly went through three stages: the first stage was the Republic of China, which was the embryonic stage of its cultural transformation, and there was a small amount of agricultural social and cultural transformation in this stage. The second stage was 1949 in the 1970s, which was the primary stage of its transformation and realized the transformation of a few herders. The third stage is a great change in history. In the 1980s, due to the implementation of the household contract responsibility system of land and grassland, herders gradually settled down. Kazakhs changed from nomadism to settlement. Judging from their constant changes, tax evasion is not their nomadic motivation, and nomadism is a lifestyle that has been passed down from generation to generation and changed with the development of society. Latimer is concerned about the influence of mobility on nomadic economy and the relationship between nomadic economy and modernity. He pointed out: "Nomadic economy declares relatively advanced enterprises, unless they are made by conquerors, and nomadic economy itself is limited to the interests of liquidity." Therefore, if the problem of people from the northern fringe of China escaping from the rule runs through this book, there are many problems worthy of in-depth study. To take a step back, the ethnic minorities in northwest China can be included in the category of marginalized people in the world definition. In the definition of China ethnologist Wu Wenzao, the people on the northwest edge should be people who are active between the northwest minorities and the Han nationality, who are proficient in two languages and can adapt to the customs of both sides. Therefore, this book is not a universal framework and format and cannot be applied to everything.

? On the other hand, the word "escape" is used many times in this book. An interesting phenomenon is that these people are not escaping from natural disasters, but from the government to find a new foothold. The author calls it a "refuge outside the center", and James Scott explains this proposition to readers with a simple example: "When the expansion of the kingdom in many parts of the world forces people to choose between being absorbed and resisting, similar cases, large and small, will occur. When the threatened population forms its own country, the boycott will take the form of military confrontation. If defeated, they often have only two choices, either to be absorbed or to escape, and in the process of escape, small battles or robberies often occur at the end of the escape. " This is somewhat similar to the expansion of Mongolian fighters in the history of China, which is generally centered on siege, so the mountains in the Central Plains are the refuge of its central residents. When we visited the ancient meridian road last semester, the teacher of the Silk Road Research Institute of Northwest University taught us that when the Mongolian army invaded Chang 'an, all the rich and powerful officials in Chang 'an hid in the Qinling Mountains and made a living by sharing wild fruits in the mountains. It can be seen that fleeing is not only the behavior of marginal people, but also the political refuge when the dynasty changes and the king is defeated. This kind of crowd is also deeply interpreted in China's literary works. At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, the hero 108, headed by Song Jiang, became sworn in Liangshan for escaping from various pursuits by the central authorities, and was later recruited. It can be seen from the uprisings in various dynasties and regions that although the results of these uprisings are different, the reasons are similar. Max Gerakl's point of view is put forward in the book. We can distinguish two different conflicts: centripetal conflict and centrifugal conflict: when they compete for the position of group leader within themselves, their conflicts are centripetal. When a straight line breaks away or withdraws to establish another group, the conflict comes to the center. From today's perspective, it is normal for human beings to look for more resources in the second district with low population density. However, the so-called right to speak in civilization makes these historical acts "marginalized" and "barbaric".

This book also describes the Zambian lifestyle-mobile agriculture. Mobile agriculture is the most common agricultural practice in mountainous areas of Southeast Asia. Those engaged in mobile agriculture are rarely understood as having chosen this practice voluntarily, let alone making political choices. For example, those Thais living in Mang, when we are thinking about the political nature of their lifestyle, we are already questioning this lifestyle.