Upland Transformations in Vietnam

Postscript: Towards a Conjunctural Analysis

Postscript  This book offers rich resources for thinking about the uplands in conjunctural terms. I have in mind the kind of analysis proposed by the geographer Doreen Massey, who argues for an understanding of the specificity of a place not as an expression of its essence, but rather as the outcome of the ways it has been “constructed out of a particular constellation of relations, articulated together at a particular locus” (1993: 66). Three key relations I highlighted in my examination of the Indonesian uplands (1999b)— relations of marginality, power and production—seem to be salient in Vietnam as well, where they are articulated together in distinctive ways. Marginality In Vietnam, as in Indonesia, the positioning of the uplands as the margin or the “other” of civilization, and its characterization in terms of apparently isolated, culturally distinct peoples and places “without history”, is a myth that belies the dense traffic between uplands and lowlands over several centuries, a traffic interrupted only when colonial powers intervened to reshape routes and spaces for ease of rule. The tenacity of the myth is remarkable, and the material presented in this book offers important insights on the purpose it serves in licensing particular forms of intervention: the uplands as a frontier to be settled, wasteland to be brought into productive use, water resources to be tapped, minerals to be mined, forest to be exploited or conserved, poverty to be reduced, and backward people to be civilized. An important goal of this book is to unsettle this set of place-myths by replacing them with more nuanced analyses of the diversity of practices and flows constituting upland spaces. I tried something similar a decade ago, but the myths persist. Their longevity, I would like to suggest, is not simply a confirmation  Postscript: Towards a Conjunctural Analysis Tania Murray Li 0 Upland Transformations in Vietnam that practitioners don’t read scholarly work, or that nothing has changed. Rather, it is an indication that myths continue to be woven into new assemblages. Circa 2010, for example, in both Indonesia and Vietnam, a UN and donor-sponsored global programme to tackle global warming by “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation” (REDD) recalled all the presumed deficiencies of the uplands (poverty, backwardness, forest destruction) and reproduced them for new ends. Power A relational understanding of power enriches many of the chapters in this volume. There are plenty of examples of top-down schemes that reshape people’s lives in drastic and damaging ways: resettlement, eviction, forest enclosure, speculation, and the steering of state land and subsidies away from “the poor”, their intended beneficiaries, into the hands of party cadres or local elites. In Vietnam, as in Indonesia, often it is not material resources (land, capital) that beget power but rather the reverse: a person who holds office ends up holding land. Yet top-down schemes and attempts to grab resources don’t always succeed, as they are contested or undermined by actors wielding countervailing powers: competing government agencies or transnational donors with competing visions of how resources should be used; villagers making moral claims against local officials or patrons; negotiation or quiet evasion of rules, and crossing of boundaries; and forms of solidarity rooted in kinship and community, among others. As the authors demonstrate, the provision of roads that ease state supervision, from one perspective, also enables uplanders to break out from monopolistic trade and credit relations, and receive better prices for their products. Uplanders are not unilateral victims, but nor are they victors in their encounters with power. Rather, they are engaged in ongoing struggles, sometimes achieving small victories or compromises, but still lacking in secure access to land or other resources. Production The continued relevance of land in upland livelihoods stands out in these studies; so too does the role of markets in drawing uplanders into new spaces and new forms of production. In Vietnam, as in Indonesia, agriculture is expanding into forests, and it is also intensifying, as former swidden lands are planted with cash crops such as coffee and cassava. Counter to prevailing assumptions about farmer preferences for subsistence security, some upland farmers take the risk of converting Postscript  all their land to a lucrative cash crop, intent on making all the money they can before boom turns, inevitably, to bust; some are more cautious, keeping various options open. In one case reported in...