Course Description: The course syllabus uses highlands as a paradigm to explore society, space, and politics in Southeast Asia, inspired by the foundational “Zomia” studies debates. Zomia as a concept examines regions at state peripheries, originally focused on the Southeast Asian highlands, but now with a broader, global application that includes forms of perspectivism. Initially, the Zomia framework proposed alternative cartographies of upland Asia, prompting debates on state, culture, and social structures in mountain peripheries. Today, Zomia has become a robust interdisciplinary approach, challenging the limitations of traditional Area Studies. It interrogates simplistic lowland-upland binaries such as “primitive” vs. “civilized,” “state” vs. “stateless,” “center” vs. “periphery,” and “developed” vs. “backward.” Zomia studies have unpacked the making and practice of such tropes that reveal cultural explanations of power, identity and belonging, making visible forms of claiming agency, resistance, and world-making by societies.
Zomia debates are particularly relevant in Southeast Asia, offering insights into the region’s place in the broader global context. As a methodology for global history, Zomia draws on intellectual traditions in history, anthropology, politics, and geography that examine human interactions with space, environment, and politics through regional or alternative cartographies rather than nation-states or planetary phenomena. Beyond spatial analysis, Zomia emphasizes highland communities' agency and unique ways of navigating relations with states and enriching global historical perspectives. In this curriculum, we familiarize with and critically engage with the concept, its utility and application to think about highland Southeast Asia, and its further value in thinking comparatively through highlands.
