Anarchy, Swamp, and Utopia
Archeologists offer a new look at a secretive settlement of runaway slaves.
Jamestown Amusement & VendingIn Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed, the anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott explores the idea of nonstate spaces. In such regions, he writes in Art, "owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority." Those obstacles can take many shapes—Scott mentions "swamps, marshes, mangrove coasts, deserts, volcanic margins, and even the open sea"—but the result is the same: They become havens "for peoples resisting or fleeing the state."
It sounds exotic, and the territory that Art ends up discussing in detail—a vast Asian area known as Zomia—is far from America. But such spaces have appeared here in the United States too. The Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virgina is, as its name suggests, an unforgiving landscape. But it was also a refuge for slaves and for others fleeing authority.
Stories have long circulated about maroon colonies in the swamp, but for obvious reasons it's hard to assemble a history of a people who avoided outsiders and didn't leave a written record. There are scattered references in various historical sources, and the swamp people occasionally turn up in works of literature, such as Dred, Harriet Beecher Stowe's follow-up to Uncle Tom's Cabin. The eccentric historian Hugo Prosper Leaming wrote a dissertation on the subject in the '70s, but Leaming was given to speculative fancies—some of his other work has been soundly debunked—and he shouldn't be taken as the last word on anything, fun though he is to read.
The swamp eventually turned up in anarchist texts too, such as James Koehnline's prose-poem "The Legend of the Great Dismal Maroons." But Koehnline didn't pretend to be doing anything akin to conventional scholarship. He was sketching out an imaginative secret-history tale of Masonic conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, of utopian autonomous enclaves and a long war for freedom. Here's an excerpt:
UNC PressBy 1708 political forces in England had determined
that the time had arrived to develop North Carolina
as a commercial plantation slavery colony.
This necessitated a full-scale war against the old settlers,
which was followed by a full-scale war with their allies,
the Tuscarora nation.
The British declared victory and established their colony.
The Maroons never admitted defeat.
They retreated to the depths of the Great Dismal Swamp
and from their sanctuary waged a 160-year guerrilla
war against slavery. In the end, they won.
They fought alongside the British under Lord Dunmore
in the revolution, because Dunmore promised an end to
slavery and gave them uniforms with a special sash
that read "Freedom For Slaves".
They fought as "Buffalo Soldiers" on the side of the Union
in the Civil War, holding all the surrounding territory
without army support.
In between, they sent out continuous raiding parties
to free slaves and discourage slavers.
They established an extensive communication system
throughout the upper south through a network of plantation
preachers and conjuremen and women.
The swamp had been considered a holy place by the Indians
since time immemorial.
It was now doubly so for the slaves and Maroons.
It's a great story, but it's more like a William Burroughs or Robert Anton Wilson novel than a social history of the swamp. If you want to look past that romantic vision to see how those liberated slaves actually lived in that harsh marshy world, it won't get you far.
But gradually we're learning more. The September issue of Smithsonian reports that archeologists have been exploring the swamp and doing what they can to reconstruct the lives of the people who lived there:
In early 2004, one of the refuge biologists strapped on his waders and brought [the American University archeologist and anthropologist Dan] Sayers to the place we're going, a 20-acre island occasionally visited by hunters, but completely unknown to historians and archaeologists. Before Sayers, no archaeology had been done in the swamp's interior, mainly because conditions were so challenging. One research party got lost so many times that it gave up.
When you've been toiling through the sucking ooze, with submerged roots and branches grabbing at your ankles, dry solid ground feels almost miraculous. We step onto the shore of a large, flat, sun-dappled island carpeted with fallen leaves. Walking toward its center, the underbrush disappears, and we enter a parklike clearing shaded by a few hardwoods and pines.
"I'll never forget seeing this place for the first time," recalls Sayers. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I never dreamed of finding a 20-acre island, and I knew instantly it was livable. Sure enough, you can't put a shovel in the ground anywhere on this island without finding something."
Sayers has his own ideological axes to grind—he's a Marxist—but he's finding real artifacts in actual places where the maroons lived, and in the process he and his colleagues are uncovering a long-hidden chapter of our history. At one point in the Smithsonian piece, a museum curator comments that the "Dismal Swamp maroons found a way to remove themselves completely from the United States, in the recesses of its geography." They found their own American Zomia in the Carolinas.
Photo Credit: Jamestown Amusement & Vending
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Doesn't Warty's basement count as a stateless space? Or is that simply a space the state fears to enter (along with anyone else same and whole)?
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Pobody's nerfect. This mess is a place.
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I AM ALREADY INSANE!
YEARGGGH!
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+1 dragster made of American History
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Doesn't Warty's basement count as a stateless space? Or is that simply a space the state fears to enter (along with anyone else same and whole)?
Based on The Art of Not Being Governed Scott would argue that is a distinction without a difference, citing my wife's headhunting hill tribe ancestors (e.g., Nyaw, Hmong, etc. as having escaped rule by being the craziest, orneriest motherfuckers in the region. It just wasn't worth it to climb up into the mountains to mess with them.
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I worked with a Viatnamese boat person at a steel mill in Cleveland.
That guy had survived pirates robbing him and his family of everything they owned, and months in refugee camp where he participated in two knife fights to establish that his stuff was not up for grabs.
He had zero tolerance for whining. And he was very scary when angry. He also was absent from his desk for hours at a time so that he could devote himself to one side business as well as doing work on behalf of his family's restaurant.
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In other words he was a badass.
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But seriously - an interesting topic an article. Thanks for it.
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Interesting topic for sure. These two passages from the linked Smithsonian article did not even ruin it for me:
On the outside wall of Dan Sayers' office at American University is a large photograph of Karl Marx, and a flier for Great Dismal Black IPA beer. Inside, the office has a comfortable, masculine, lived-in feel. There's an old pith helmet hanging on the wall, and a Jaws poster, and the front page of a newspaper announcing Obama's election. In the bookshelves are the entire works of Karl Marx.
I ask him how his Marxism influences his archaeology. "I think capitalism is wrong, in terms of a social ideal, and we need to change it," he says. "Archaeology is my activism. Rather than go to the Washington Mall and hold up a protest sign, I choose to dig in the Great Dismal Swamp. By bringing a resistance story to light, you hope it gets into people's heads." -
fucking ivory tower
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As if Marxists limit themselves to holding up protest signs.
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Yeah, and hope they can resist the fucking Marxists.
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He should go fucking dig in some places that have tried to escape Marxism, or perhaps some old Soviet prisons or Mao's mass starvation graves, the little shit.
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Thought I had read the word many time I had to look up the definition for "mangrove".
I'm a tad disappointed
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I have many tasteful photos of my personal mangrove that could shed some additional light on the subject.
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They are fascinating pictures, from a biomedical perspective.
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Can we get copies?
/CDC
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Methinks you are alluring to your ungroomed manhood. Though you probably fancy yourself a red mangrove that supports itself with big prop roots, you are probably more like a white mangrove, with little pencil-like pneumatophores reaching for oxygen.
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You're not from Florida, are you?
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I'd stick with the "archaeology" spelling.
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Glad to see this post. The website should be a mix of the print zine and an expanded version of Jesse"s twitter feed.
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It is well established in Call of Cthulhu that minorities who live in the swamp murder people and worship hideous ancient pagan deities.
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Sounds a lot like D.C.
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James C. Scott explores the idea of nonstate spaces.
Also known as "temporary autonomous zones". Its an interesting subject. Burning Man started out as a TAZ. Back in their heyday, Grateful Dead concerts and environs became TAZs, at least mostly.
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+1 Rainbow Family
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Those escaped slaves probably didn't even know what Aleppo is, how could they be qualified to self-govern?
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What a maroon!
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HA !!!!
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Koehnline didn't pretend to be doing anything akin to conventional scholarship. He was sketching out an imaginative secret-history tale of Masonic conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, of utopian autonomous enclaves and a long war for freedom.
So: a Reason staffer.
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Stateless societies? What rubbish.
They established quasi-tribal societies of the type that was know from their own pasts.
Their 'state' was that structure. And that structure was strict.
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Four responses:
1. We do not know enough about the social structures in the swamp to make such sweeping pronouncements.
2. But if the dynamics there resembled the sorts of dynamics that appeared in the nonstate spaces discussed in The Art of Not Being Governed, there would have been more fluidity than fealty to some static past model.
3. In any event, a tribe is not a state.
4. And even if it were, the phrase "stateless societies" doesn't actually appear in the post, so it's odd for you to frame your response around it. Stateless societies may be more likely to appear in nonstate spaces, but the terms are not synonyms.
