Southeast Asian Massif

The term Southeast Asian Massif^[1] was proposed in 1997 by anthropologist Jean Michaud^[2] to discuss the human societies inhabiting the lands above an elevation of approximately 300 metres (1,000 ft) in the southeastern portion of the Asian landmass, thus not merely in the uplands of conventional Mainland Southeast Asia. It concerns highlands overlapping parts of 10 countries: southwest China, Northeast India, eastern Bangladesh, and all the highlands of Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Peninsular Malaysia, and Taiwan. The indigenous population encompassed within these limits numbers approximately 100 million, not counting migrants from surrounding lowland majority groups who came to settle in the highlands over the last few centuries.

The notion of the Southeast Asian Massif overlaps geographically with the eastern segment of Van Schendel's notion of Zomia proposed in 2002,^[3] while it overlaps geographically with what political scientist James C. Scott called Zomia in 2009.^[4] While the notion of Zomia underscores a historical and political understanding of that high region, the Southeast Asia Massif is more appropriately labelled a place or a social space.

The Tibetan world is not included in the Massif, as it has its own logic: a centralized and religiously harmonised core with a long, distinctive political existence that places it in a "feudal" and imperial category, which the societies historically associated with the Massif have rarely, if ever, developed into.^[6]