Stilled to silence at 500 metres : making sense of historical change in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The dialectical relationship between the nation state and zones of relative autonomy is not unique to mainland Southeast Asia, but it is of particular salience there, demarcating the social cleavage that shapes much of the region's history: that divide between hill people and valley people. It led to a process of state formation in valleys and peopling of hills, and left the latter largely absent from the historical record.