This article critically engages with James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed through a historical anthropological analysis of upland Laos, particularly Houaphan province. While Scott’s framework emphasizes purposeful statelessness and state evasion among upland societies, archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic evidence from Laos reveal a more complex reality of negotiation, interaction, and mutual appropriation between highland and lowland communities. Rather than a simple dichotomy of state versus non-state spaces, upland Laos exhibits hierarchical relationships within the müang system, cycles of resistance and collaboration, and evolving socio-political structures shaped by both indigenous agency and external forces. The article calls for a nuanced historical anthropology that moves beyond rigid binaries to better capture the dynamic processes of ethnogenesis, political ecology, and transregional exchange in the uplands.