“Up” and “Down”.”Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands - Part I: Are the Bru Natives in „Zomia“?
“Up” and “Down”.”Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands - Part I: Are the Bru Natives in „Zomia“?
Author(s): Gábor VargyasSubject(s): Ethnohistory, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Demography and human biology
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
Keywords: Continental Southeast-Asia; Vietnamese Highlands; Zomia; ethnohistory; shatter zone; state evasion; self-governing peoples; secondary primitivism; lowland-highland relations;
Summary/Abstract: The 2009 publication of J. Scott’s epoch-making book, The Art of Not Being Governed. An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia initiated a long-standing debate about the ethnohistory of the Southeast-Asian Highlands (“Zomia”) and, more generally, about lowland-highland relationships, “nativeness”, state evasion, self-government, and “secondary primitivism”. This article joins the discourse based on one cocnrete ethnographic example, the Bru, a Mon-Khmer speaking dry-rice cultivator hill tribe in the Central Vietnamese Highlands. Using detailed ethnographic and ethno-historic data, it argues that the Bru are, if not “native”, at least the oldest known inhabitants of the area inhabited by them – a fact that does not contradict Scott’s deep insight concerning their state evasion.
Journal: Acta Ethnographica Hungarica
- Issue Year: 61/2016
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 243-260
- Page Count: 18
- Language: English
- Content File-PDF