On Ruling the Savage Periphery

This is a characteristically Foucauldian piece of scholarship that seems—to my reading, at least—to direct itself directly against the premises of James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott argues that the peoples of upland Southeast Asia (which he calls “Zomia”) actively fought against state rule through a wide variety of different techniques and ultimately managed to maintain their independence.

In this book, Benjamin Hopkins contests Scott by arguing that, “although many peoples have sought to maintain some level of independence in the wake of expanding colonial empires, they were actually subjected to both epistemic and physical violence, ultimately being subjected to (although not being included as part of) the state.” This was done through a process that Hopkins calls “frontier governmentality.” Like Foucault’s idea of governmentality, “frontier governmentality” is a concept that suggests administrators, officials, and other agents in power managed peoples (“biopolitics”) through a variety of different techniques including statistics, cartography, and exploration to develop “knowledge-power.” However, in this case, the peoples of “frontiers” are not directly controlled by agents of the state. Instead, in the cases listed here, state officials used these technologies in order to effectively segregate peoples to ensure that “unruly,” “barbarous,” or “savage” behaviors did not interfere with people living within the boundaries of a given state.

As a result, “customs” and “traditions” were “preserved” (that is, invented—customs and traditions are constantly contested and in flux, both officials in Hopkins’s case study reified them, rendering them eternal and inflexible), developing a legal regime for peoples in frontier regions while making them economically dependent on regions controlled directly by the state.

At the same time, Hopkins argues that it does not make sense to think of the “frontier” as a physical region—they are constantly shifting and, realistically, cannot be solidly identified in geographical terms. Instead, the frontier is a conceptual space where traditional technologies of state power begin to falter.

To make this case, Hopkins examines a number of different regions, including the North West Province in British India, Zululand, the Argentine desert, the United States’s border with the Apache, Kenya’s North Eastern Province, and sections of northern Nigeria, all in the late nineteenth century. He finds that, in some of these cases, attempts to “rule the ‘savage’ frontier” continue in 21st century states, although instead of calling them “savage,” people today generally call them “failed” or “failing” states.

As I thought through this book—which is really dense—I found the material that I’m most familiar with to be that on the United States, and making sense of the argument through thinking about the Native American reservation system was very helpful.

It’s also significant that Hopkins finds that “frontier governmentality” is not the only way that colonial empires tried to rule over frontiers. The two primary alternatives were to “civilize” those living there (basically, to assimilate them into the dominant culture while maintaining peoples as subjects—think of the nineteenth century Russification campaigns in eastern Europe and France’s mission civilisatrice) or to exterminate them and replace populations with settlers (as Americans tried to do through much of the North American west, the British tried to do Australia and New Zealand, the Ottomans tried to do Armenia, the Germans in eastern Europe, etc.). However, frontier governmentality was much cheaper and efficient—it didn’t require much in the way of state resources and could be done without too much physical violence.

As a result of his coverage, Hopkins’s argument is theoretical in nature and it seems applicable to a number of other cases. I’ll have to think much more about this work, but I believe that it will be useful in reframing the way I think through a lot of colonial historical issues.