Oscar Salemink - The Ethnography of Vietnams Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850-1990

Oscar Salemink

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright 2003 Oscar Salemink

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Typeset in Times by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham, Surrey

ISBN 13: 978-0-7007-1570-1 (hbk)

1. Ethno-linguistic map of Indochina (French period).

2. Ethno-linguistic groups of the Central Highlands (US period).

3. Vietnams official ethnographic map (contemporary period).

4. Northern portion of the Central Highlands.

5. Southern portion of the Central Highlands.

6. Buon Enao expansion.

When I studied anthropology at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, there was a general awareness of the fierce debates that the American involvement in Vietnam sparked within the international anthropological community. This debate was triggered by the advertisement of a position as Research Anthropologist for Vietnam in the American Anthropologist 70: 852 (1968), which invited professional anthropologists to apply for a position with the Psychological Operations Directorate Headquarters of the US Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. The resulting, wide-ranging debates reflected on the disciplinary history of anthropology in the context of colonialism, with accusations being leveled against anthropology as the handmaiden of colonialism a debate epitomized in the volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter edited by Talal Asad (1973). Others mused about the role and responsibilities of a critical anthropology, e.g. in Dell Hymes Reinventing Anthropology (1973). Many anthropologists in the US and elsewhere began to question the ethical principles that should guide anthropological research. By the time I studied anthropology, many of the new ideas about anthropology had become commonplace.

Indeed, many leftist students including myself went one step further and embraced the French Marxist anthropology of Godelier, Meillassoux and others. With respect to the body of theory about ethnic groups and minorities one of the important theoretical debates in anthropology their analyses did not seem very convincing. Simply put, their argument blamed ethnic discrimination and oppression to the capitalist system via theories of the exploitation of minorities through the double labor market and by the appropriation of their natural resources. The implication of such theories was that the discrimination and oppression on ethnic minorities could only be overcome in a Socialist society. This naturally led me to ask the question: what was the position of ethnic minorities in contemporary Communist countries? Being impressed with the images of Vietnam from high-school days onward in 1975 I wrote an essay on the Vietnam War partly based on a publication of one later supervisor, Prof. Jan Pluvier I decided that I wanted to do research in Vietnam on this issue. However, as many pointed out to me then, doing research in Vietnam would not be easy, partly because of the role that anthropology had played during the consecutive Indochina Wars. When I wanted to read up on that issue, it appeared to me that despite the fierce debates in the discipline, there was very little hard evidence and in-depth analysis about the role of anthropology in Vietnam. My provisional conclusion was that any research into the contemporary situation of ethnic minorities in Vietnam which did not take into account this history of anthropological and more broadly ethnographic investigations in Vietnams ethnic minority areas was bound to be seriously flawed.