The Highlander is an academic, open-access, and peer reviewed online journal, broadly concerned with the study of highland communities historically situated at the margins of the state, inspired by debates on the spatio-cultural heuristic of ‘Zomia’. This concept was used originally to imagine an alternate cartography of upland Asia, which in turn spurred debates on state, culture and social formation in the so-called peripheries. The journal is a unique and accessible forum for multidisciplinary and comparative discussions that take these concepts within and beyond Asia and thereby engage with global conversations on interconnection and fragmentation. 

The journal extends its scope beyond traditional area studies and invites contributions that enlarge conceptual and comparative discussions within and across ‘Highland’ contexts in Asia and elsewhere. The circulation of the concept and its utility as a paradigm to view relations of Highland societies in their immediate context as well as global connections opens up new possibilities for discussion. These may complicate the heavily debated tropes that are framed as a lowland-upland dichotomy, often articulated as ‘state’ versus ‘stateless’, ‘centre’ versus ‘periphery’, or indeed ‘developed’ versus ‘backward’. Despite its contested historicity or empirical status, such tropes have spurred prescient debate about cultural elaborations of power, about identity and belonging, about relationships to the natural environment, and indeed about the sources - secular and religious - from which societies draw inspiration, and attribute their power. It is also a dialectic that influences academic publishing, and indeed academia more generally. The Highlander, in the articles it publishes, and in its methodological ethos, problematizes these dynamics, seeking to create a space that privileges interventions that foster openness, and promote debate across material, language, epistemological, and perhaps most critically, imagined boundaries.

The Highlander welcomes submissions that contribute to these debates, and add to the limited but growing knowledge-base of ethnographic, historical, and archival studies on Highland Asian (but not limited to) communities and their interactions with the world. Themes of interest include but are not limited to: religious nationalism, indigenous spirituality and theology, orality and narrative, ancestral knowledge, dreams and dreaming, millenarian prophets, kinship systems, patriarchy and gender, material heritage, spirituality and ecology, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, borderland politics, human-animal relations, territoriality, governmentality and sovereignty. We also invite contributions that engage the Asian Highlands (or Zomia) and its interconnections in convergent or comparative discussions that engage other Highland regions in Europe, Africa, Americas, Australasia and the Poles. Apart from articles, we also accept contributions in several other formats, which are geared towards fostering rigorous, open, accessible and continuous conversations.