Upland Transformations in Vietnam

1. A View from the Mountains: A Critical History of Lowlander-Highlander Relations in Vietnam

A View from the Mountains  1 A View from the Mountains: A Critical History of LowlanderHighlander Relations in Vietnam Oscar Salemink1 Introduction In the summer of 1996, when I worked as programme officer for the Ford Foundation in Vietnam, I met with Dr Hoàng Xuân Tý, who wanted to discuss a project proposal about “indigenous technical knowledge” among Upland minorities in Vietnam. A soil scientist working for the Forest Science Institute of Vietnam in Từ Liêm, Hanoi, Dr Tý explained why he had become interested in the concept of “indigenous knowledge”. Up until that point, (Highland) ethnic minorities were generally seen as backward (lạc hậu), primitive (nguyên thủy) and steeped in superstitious beliefs (mê tín dị đoan), and their “slash-and-burn” agricultural practices (phá rừng làm rẫy) were regarded as the main cause of deforestation (Jamieson et al. 1998). From that perspective—widely shared by Vietnamese scientists, government officials and media—development consisted of bringing science, technology and the superior civilization of the Lowlander Việt to the Highlands. Dr Tý recalled his years fighting for his country, when he and his fellow soldiers could survive in the mountainous jungles only because local people taught them how to. After his studies in Hanoi he went back to the mountain areas and was involved in dozens of projects with the aim of lifting local ethnic groups out of their backwardness and poverty. But, Dr Tý insisted: “All of our beautiful science and technology projects failed, while local people were successful in what they did. The trees that we brought died within one year, but the trees that local people planted still stand. Their local knowledge is much better than our so-called   Upland Transformations in Vietnam scientific knowledge; it is time that we come to the Highlands to learn instead of to teach.” In the face of suspicion from scientists and other experts, the project was implemented with funding from the International Development Research Centre (Canada) and the Ford Foundation, and it resulted in a number of publications and other projects in “indigenous knowledge” in Vietnam (see Hoàng Xuân Tý and Lê Trọng Cúc 1998). This anecdote serves to illustrate the complex and contradictory relationships between Highlands and Lowlands, between Upland ethnic minorities and the majority Việt, through history. Much international colonial and postcolonial scholarship on Highland ethnic minorities in Vietnam emphasizes a fundamental cultural difference between Kinh or Việt Lowlanders and minority Highlanders. According to this view, in precolonial times Highlanders were politically, culturally and economically largely autonomous and lived undisturbed lives until they were “pacified” by the colonial state. The fundamental divide, then, runs along ethnic and geographic (Highlands-Lowlands) lines. Eager to deny the cultural divideand -rule implications of colonial scholarship, Vietnamese historiography and ethnology tend to emphasize perennial political solidarity and unity between Lowland and Upland ethnic groups within the frame of the Vietnamese nation, while acknowledging and celebrating cultural diversity. In this view, the state border is the most relevant dividing line. That said, efforts to stress national solidarity and other connections between ethnic groups are predicated on prior distinctions between Highlands and Lowlands, between ethnic minorities and ethnic majority, between ethnic(s) and nation. However, the relations between Lowlander Việt—who affixed their ethnonym to the country’s name—and ethnic minority Highlanders within the national borders are in both discourses also classified along a temporal axis (of advanced and backward, civilized and primitive, centre and periphery), thus connoting a denial of coevalness to minorities (Fabian 1983). Remote areas are discursively conceived as the “natural” abode of ethnic minorities, despite a historical reality of travel, mobility, migration and resettlement, including migration of Việt people into Upland areas. Although recent critical scholarship has tended to debunk cultural essentialism by looking at the role of the (post)colonial state in ethnic classification (Keyes 2002; Koh 2004; Pelley 1998, 2003; Salemink 2003a; Taylor 2001), the net effect of the action of the state—as a vehicle of the Việt-dominated nation—is to stress the essential difference between Lowlanders and Highlanders. In present-day “development-speak”, this notion of a cultural and geographic gulf to be bridged is brought out in A View from the Mountains  expressions such as “remote areas” or vùng sâu, vùng...