ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the establishment of the mission station at Kontum, and the role which ethnography played in early missionary activities and deals with the establishment of European rule in the Central Highlands by military explorers. It aims to compare the ethnographic discourses of the missionaries and the military explorers, and traces the construction of an evolutionist discourse in ethnographic writing concerning the Central Highlanders. The interest of the Vietnamese elite in upholding Confucianism as state religion, and the interest of the missionaries in undermining the authority of the Emperor and mandarins as protectors of Confucianism, inevitably led to religious and political conflicts. In the ethnographic discourse by the missionaries the Montagnards were depicted as good-for-nothing savages, who were childlike, evil, violent, and not to be trusted. The chapter argues that the evolutionist perspective on the Central Highlanders is fundamentally ahistorical, in particular when informed by Social-Darwinist theories.
