“Up” and “Down”. “Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands

Vargyas, Gábor (2016) “Up” and “Down”. “Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 61 (1). pp. 243-260. ISSN 1216-9803

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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 concrete 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.

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