Salemink 2015 - Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes and Desire for Mordenity in the Vietnamese Highlands

Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes and desire for Mordenity in the Vietnamese Highlands Tác giả: Oscar Salemink The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes and Desire for Modernity in theVietnamese Highlands

Article  in  The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology · August 2015DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2015.1054866

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ISSN: 1444-2213 (Print) 1740-9314 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtap20Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes and Desirefor Modernity in the Vietnamese Highlands

Oscar Salemink

To cite this article: Oscar Salemink (2015) Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes and Desire

for Modernity in the Vietnamese Highlands, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 16:4,388-409, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2015.1054866

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1054866

Published online: 21 Sep 2015.

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Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenesand Desire for Modernity in the

Vietnamese Highlands Oscar Salemink

Inspired by a critical reading of James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009)

capture and state formations’, I offer a contrasting vision of Highlander motivationsand desires from the Central Highlands of Vietnam I argue that, in pre-colonialtimes, lowland states and Highland regions have been mutually constitutive throughtrade, tribute and feasts Economic, political and ritual exchanges and connectionswere far more important for both uplands and lowlands than is usually

areas’ For postcolonial Vietnam, I show that Highlanders were often motivated bythe desire to become modern, and enacted such desires by joining ecumenes thatembody modern universals, in particular revolutionary and Christian ecumenes,exemplifying oppositional pathways to modernity that contrast with those offered byauthors Tania Li and Holly High.

Keywords: Modernity; Ecumene; Christianity; Central Highlands; Vietnam

Resources Management’ (CBNRM) at the Hue College of Agriculture and Forestry(HCAF), organised and funded by the International Development Research Centre

Oscar Salemink is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen Correspondence to:Oscar Salemink, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Øster Far-imagsgade 5, 1353 København K Denmark Email:o.salemink@anthro.ku.dk

Vol 16, No 4, 388–409, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1054866

© 2015 The Australian National University

Vietnamese and international ‘experts’, including myself as—at the time—program

fer-tility Moreover, the weed would make excellent fodder for cows The question ofwhether cows actually liked to eat this particular weed was answered with theremark that they could be trained to like the weed This sparked a joke among Viet-

Anyway, it set the stage for what was to come.

During the subsequent bus ride the HCAF cadres explained the rationale for theproject in the village that we were approaching The village was populated by theBru-Vân Kiều ethnic minority which engaged in shifting cultivation rather than

Indeed, looking around us it seemed that much—if not most—of the surroundingmountain slopes were largely devoid of trees The question was, of course, whetherthe large-scale destruction of forest cover visible could be attributed to shifting culti-vation (often disparagingly called slash-and-burn agriculture) In Vietnam, as in mostdeveloping countries, most state agencies and development organisations tend to attri-bute deforestation to the people who have for generations lived in and with the forestas shifting cultivators, even though most scientific evidence shows that it is not shiftingcultivation but large-scale logging, mining, migration and plantations by outsiders that

has shown indisputably that over the past decades deforestation followed migration by‘lowlanders’ into the Highlands Back to Nam Đông, one expert, Peter Vandergeest,asked about the surface area affected by deforestation, how many people lived inthe village and for how long the village had been inhabited? A quick calculation

cultivation and requiring at most one hectare per year per household, could neverbe responsible for deforesting such a large area The follow-up question was then

mostly due to large-scale timber harvesting by legal and illegal forest companiesbased in the plains.

With the cause of deforestation established and the rationale of the project refuted,

very dusty dirt road The expert group was led on a tour of the village by HCAFcadres who explained the various sub-projects in the ostensibly participatory

village as a commercial crop Noticing the dust of the dirt road in the dry season,someone in the expert group asked whether it was an all-weather road and whetherpineapple traders could make it to the village to purchase the harvest during the

the villagers would be obliged to consume their own pineapples during the rainyseason But there was also another sub-project involving goats Why goats, did Brupeople eat much goat meat? No, but goats can give milk which could be useful forthe Bru and which was certainly very nutritious, according to the cadre This surprisedmany in the expert group, because milk is hardly a staple in Southeast Asia, let alonegoat milk There was no infrastructure to process and sell it, and locals would not drinkit One question was whether goats liked to eat pineapple, which the cadre counteredby saying that they had taught the local population to build stables A quick glancethrough the village revealed that the goats did not mind the stables and simplyjumped fences in search of whatever was edible and available in and around thevillage Further questioning revealed that the Participatory Rural Appraisals (PRAs)

the disciplinary expertise of the facilitator Thus, the goat project was the result of aPRA involving a husbandry specialist, and the pineapple project involved a horticul-ture expert To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, as the saying goes.

Back in the village I noticed an old Bru man introducing himself as a village elderand beginning to make a speech in Vietnamese to the three busloads of experts.College staff from HCAF tried to hush him up, but what he had to say was extremelyinteresting so I volunteered to translate his speech into English, which made it tempor-arily impossible to silence him The man said that the villagers were not from that areain Thừa Thiên-Huế province but from Quảng Bình, north of the 17th Parallel thatdivided North and South Vietnam during the Second Indochina War The Bru-VânKiều ethnic minority had always followed the Revolution (theo Cách Mạng), he

First Indochina War against the French, and that they supported the Communist

meant that Bru men and women helped and sustained the soldiers coming southover the jungle road network called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and that many Brumen actively took part in the transportation of military goods and stock over theTrail The old man himself and many co-villagers and fellow Bru people were part

the 1970s.

After the end of the war in 1975, he and the other Bru went back north to rejoin

improvements promised by the Revolutionaries nothing much materialised, and theBru felt utterly abandoned and neglected in their dreams of progress in a SocialistFatherland In fact, the situation was worse than before, because of the general scarcityof goods, the defoliation in the area around the 17th Parallel and, consequently, thescarcity of good agricultural land But some of the Bru men who had fought below

decided to move the village southward, but only incrementally A small group of

men, who had fought in, and hence knew the area, wentfirst to clear land in the forest,

location of that new village was not where the village was now, but down the

system, in the face of all stereotypes about them as backwards slash-and-burn turalists who lacked the technical knowledge for wet-rice cultivation So what had hap-

After they had established themselves for a number of years, the old man said, some

constructed the irrigation system themselves, but they did not have the papers toprove ownership The Kinh people, on the other hand, had the power of the authoritiesbehind them, and forced the Bru villagers off their new land As they did not know ofany other place that was suitable for wet-rice cultivation, they moved up the mountainto the site of their present village, and resumed their shifting cultivation practicethrough which they could, at least, survive In his speech, the old man revisited theBru support for the Revolution, and lamented the fact that the Revolution seemed

CBNRM projects based on erroneous notions about the cultural and technologicalbackwardness of the Bru and about the causes of deforestation His story was one

the Bru population in the village faced were political in character rather than logical, as the agents of development would want to have us believe Small wonder that

time the old man found a different audience for his story and his lament.

Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009)? I have little

in their attempts to domesticate and control upland populations and make their tats legible and agricultural surpluses harvestable (= taxable) But what about theinterpretation of the Bru’s actions and motivations? Scott might interpret theiractions in terms of state evasion and state resistance Their participation in the revolu-tionary struggle against the colonial state and the postcolonial South-Vietnamese statemight seem to be inspired by an attempt to get rid of the oppressive hands of force,taxation, corvée and conscription of these states, hence as state resistance Theirtwice-migration is testimony to their mobility; their reversion to shifting cultivationsignals their survival skills in ways that may largely be illegible by the state and itsagents.

but also indicated a (once) sincere belief in its promise of a better future In joining theRevolution and being prepared to sacrifice health and life for this future, he signalled

and felt cheated when these benefits did not materialise Interestingly, their choice

non-state agents, as the Bru soon found out Even in their current village site where they

the projects that the CBNRM people, as agents of modernity, brought them The

back-wards and primitive, but as modern people who had been abandoned by the forces of

exclusion from the benefits of the state and their non-participation in variousaspects of the state projects at various historical junctures, transpired through theold man’s speech The speech of the village elder revealed a profound desire to bepart of the modern world, and part of the state that represented that modern world

The Art of Being Governed

Art of Not Being Governed, which stirred up a lot of debate and attracted much larly interest for the upland regions of East, South and Southeast Asia beyond usual

separate subcontinental regions by taking together the whole upland region straddlingSoutheast Asia, East Asia, Central Asia and South Asia, Scott gives the metaphor ofZomia another, more substantive meaning by attributing common features to theregion—contra predominant subcontinental ethnographic traditions and nationalist

understanding of the relationship between the state and its would-be subjects

features of the Highland populations of mainland Southeast Asia to their ity, by looking at Zomia as a zone of deliberate refuge rather than as a zone abandoned

Modern states, on the other hand, have‘distance-demolishing technologies’ whichovercome the friction of the terrain and incorporate Highland terrains and popu-lations into the purview of the state, leaving little refuge for state-evading Highlanders.But even though Scott’s analysis is historical in scope, he does not refrain from making

the past might still be at work today So what about that Bru community today? I havenot done follow-up research on this Bru community, but from a number of other

recent times In 1997 Yves Goudineau, the French ethnographer of the Bru in adjacentLaos, wrote a gloomy report for UNESCO and UNDP about the alarming results of

schemes to unplanned migration and cultural trauma The Hungarian anthropologist

commu-nity vastly changed as many had converted to Evangelical Christiacommu-nity while others

however, was conducted by the Swedish anthropologist Nikolas Århem, who carried

here at length:

In NamĐông, an expanding grid of timber roads today cuts through the forestedlandscape surrounding Katu villages These roads were constructed so thatcompany trucks could access the pulpwood and rubber plantations that had beenestablished on forest land—about a decade ago—previously used by the villagesfor shifting cultivation In the wake of the pulpwood and rubber schemes, andthe concomitant ban on shifting cultivation in the areas designated for industrialrubber and pulpwood production, many villagers ended up with insufficient landto feed their families with rice While a few managed to claim ownership over exten-sive tracts of suitable land for rubber and pulpwood plantations, the many who wereless lucky or astute, ended up virtually landless and destitute (Århem2015, 24)

(which includes the Katu themselves as well as the Bru) His dissertation reads as a

agencies—a confrontation that in his theoretical view takes the shape of a ‘conquest’

‘ontologi-cal turn’ in anthropology In contrast with his framing, the ‘conquest’ does not seem tobe conducted by force alone In his explanation why the Katu engage in illegal and

needed money’ and this was partly attributable to state policies discouraging swidden

spend more labour on cash-crop production and less on the cultivation of

consumption of convenience food, cigarettes, alcohol and prestige items Similarly,

To a large degree, this mirrors my own research experience in the Central lands, where I encountered hardly any Highlanders who did not wish to partake inthe promise of modernity, especially in the guise of consumer goods In spite of pro-cesses of marginalisation, dispossession and exclusion, as well as inter-ethnic tension,

market-driven development programs This recognition puts me in the same leagueas two authors who recently put the concept of desire back into social analysis in

locate a desire to be modern among indigenous groups in Laos (High) and in enclosureof commons by indigenous communities themselves (Li) Both High and Li describesituations where Southeast Asian Highlanders navigate changing state- and market-

albeit often unsuccessfully In Fields of Desire: Poverty and Policy in Laos, Holly

nefar-ious effects of resettlement in Laos on the resettled communities Although she

with him about the degree to which these schemes would be involuntary AlthoughHigh does not dispute the enforced character and serious inadequacies of the resettle-

large consent to resettlement—or even desire it.

Where Holly High focuses on enforced-but-voluntary resettlement and

‘Foucaul-dian’ state power In Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier,

Indone-sia Adopting a Foucauldian notion of desire as situated in the relative autonomy ofpeople as reflective and agentive subjects beyond the binary of power and freedom,

strong state institutions and programs—developed and acted on the desire for ernity They did so by self-enclosing the forests, growing cash crops, integrating them-selves into market and state—in that order—and self-destroying their erstwhile, morecollectivist moral economy This transition towards agrarian capitalism took placelargely in the absence of external compulsion This did not mean that it therefore

others did not succeed as capitalist entrepreneurs, lost their land and assets andbecame dependent on their (casual) labour for their more successful neighbours.

In this paper I explore how the desire for goods and prestige link Highlanders in

the lengthy Prologue which serves as an ethnographic vignette setting the stage for

globalisation operates as much through attraction as through coercion and sion, and that Highlanders often do not seek to evade the state, but seek to belong toecumenes that transcend their social spaces and embody modern universals In the

often motivated by the desire to become modern, and enacted such desires by

Holly High, my cases exemplify oppositional pathways to modernity.

Revolutionary and Christian Ecumenes

The contemporary postcolonial, post-socialist state in the age of globalisation andworldwide market-driven integration is a different entity from the pre-colonial state—in Southeast Asia and beyond In the history of Southeast Asia, Highlanders oftendesired to appropriate lowland symbols and goods of pompous kings and to belongto lowland polities, even if lowland states usually had little presence in the Highlands

kindled an enhanced desire within the various postcolonial states to not just takecontrol of the (core) population but of the entire state territory, symbolically

modern states to actually take control of peripheral zones (from the perspective ofthe core valley/delta), that is to say the uplands, the borderlands and the various popu-lations resident there—in a process called ‘state territorialisation’ by Peter Vandergeest

to offer refuge from the state(s) In many places, the resistance of upland groups

diminish-ing: Tibetans in China; Central Highlanders/Montagnards/Dega in Vietnam; Hmongin Laos; Shan, Wa and Karen in Burma.

The main strategies employed by regional states involve, in some sort of

lowlands; migration of lowlanders into the uplands; the policing of borders and derlands; promotion of nationalism through educational, linguistic, cultural andmedia policies; and—in general—development projects and programs Typically, all

and eminently fundable by a variety of development donors (Ferguson1994; Mosse

pointed at similar processes, namely: enclosures of commons; dispossession;

2004, 2006a) In particular, I emphasised the serious consequences of the enclosure

of dispossession’, that is, the romantic assumption that before state incorporation anddispossession indigenous people lived in harmonious communities.

However, analysing the consequences of certain policies and processes in terms ofdispossession does not necessarily say much about the motivations, desires and aspira-tions of Highlanders themselves Indeed, in some cases there is overt or passive resist-

heavy hand of the state and/or the scarcity of land and resources caused by massive

pre-modern states and the present postcolonial states in the age of globalisation Inthe past, given the friction of the land, pre-modern valley-based state centres werefar removed from the Highlands, but although the splendour of the king was faraway, symbols of the king and his court were readily appropriated by ambitious High-landers Other than that, lowland states held little positive promise or attraction forHighland populations.

But modern, postcolonial states do not only denote extraction and enclosure, for thestate also has a face that promises a better future, the comforts of modernity and devel-opment It promises healthcare, sanitation, education—the stuff of the Millennium

access to metropolitan cultural life In order to offer such services, the state must haveaccess to Highlander communities, and Highlander communities must have access tomarkets and be integrated into the national community Vietnam has invested a lot inrural infrastructure and resettlement schemes designed to discourage shifting cultiva-tion and to force households to make their living by growing cash crops, assisted abun-dantly by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the UN system, bilateraldonors and NGOs The effect of this is a profound change of livelihoods from subsis-

detri-ment of their more collective prior livelihood arrangedetri-ments Two years before the

pro-vince near the 17th Parallel, and site of the infamous Battle of Khê Sanh (1968), to be

roads to connect their villages with National Road No 9 (to Laos), allowing occupationof the land along the new roads by ethnic Kinh in-migrants desiring to set up coffeefarms, effectively leading to the dispossession of the Bru.

The wisdom of Vietnam’s development policies seems to be borne out by its rapid

that made Vietnam into a donor darling and a badly needed success story for theWorld Bank and other donors eager to promote market-based solutions InVietnam, the market emphasis goes hand in hand with a state-sponsored policy dis-course and praxis which at once spatialises, temporalises and culturalises develop-

development in the sense that state services should be extended in those areas,

health, education—in situ, glossed by the word ‘access’ The focus on ‘backwards’ethnic groups temporalises development in evolutionist terms, focusing attention ontheir culture—customs, traditions, superstitions—as the obstacle to development In

in Vietnam, which was attributed to backwards cultural habits and hence blamedon the poor themselves In this thinking, economic development requires a thoroughcultural transformation, which—for shifting cultivators—implies a weaning awayfrom that moral economy/ecology which nurtures autonomy from state and

as a livelihood strategy which renders communities illegible to the state.

In spite of Vietnam’s development successes in the global arena, recent World Bankanalyses and statistics indicate that it is much less successful than assumed in alleviat-ing poverty among a number of different ethnic minorities The 2012 Vietnam Poverty

remarkable economic progress across the board, but that pockets of ingrained and pening poverty remain In particular, ethnic groups that historically have been shiftingcultivators in the northern and central uplands continue to have high poverty rates.Ethnic groups indigenous to the Central Highlands and surrounding upland regionshave poverty rates from 75–80 per cent and up—even by the ‘very low standard’

state-related services like education, sanitation, health, electrification—resulting inmuch higher levels of stunting (low height for age) and wasting (low weight forheight) for minorities than for the Kinh majority (128–29).

the presence of services does not guarantee access This is unsurprising, given the fact

insti-tutions charging more or less officially condoned fees in order to shore up their meagre

Vietnam—and with service providers (medical staff, teachers, but also civil servants,