ABSTRACT
During the French exploration and conquest of the Central Highlands, Catholic missionaries and military explorers inserted themselves into an ethnographic tradition that can be characterized as evolutionist, and eventually Social-Darwinist. The Social-Darwinist version of evolutionary thinking presumed that the ‘primitive’ tribes of Indochina would eventually disappear because they were considered a ‘vanishing race’, incapable of evolution, and an obstacle for the development which would inevitably take place under French domination. Ethnic identities and ethnic boundaries were constantly (re)constructed through French ethnographic and administrative practices – a process termed ‘bureaucratic reproduction’. The ethnographic discourses supporting the policies of ‘sedentarization’ and ‘selective preservation’ are articulations of the evolutionist ethnographic discourse which also attended the French penetration and conquest of the Central Highlands. A contextual historiography of anthropology will be a source of support for an anthropology that likes to see itself as a source of social and cultural critique.
