One Foot in the Field and the Other in the Forest: Indigenous "State Hedging" in Cambodia and Beyond.

Summary

This essay uses a comparative approach to investigate the practice of "state hedging" deployed by various peoples moving in and out of the margins of large-scale historical states. Among these peoples are the Kuy ethnic group whose communities in north-central Cambodia have invited me to study them as their traditional forests rapidly disappear. Kuy methods of "state hedging" and the outcomes of pursuing this practice will be compared with the use of similar tactics by peoples in Africa and the Americas. Investigation of "state hedging," I believe, can shed light on under-appreciated facets of both early and more recent complex tropical states, including the advantages of tactical pluralism on the part of those states. It can also reframe the debate over the meaning of "agency" and "marginality" on the part of less-complex indigenous state-hedgers.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Comparative Approaches to Complexity in the Tropics

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Spatial Coverage