Is Protestant conversion a form of protest? Urban and upland Protestants in Southeast Asia

In recent publications and lectures on the Protestant conversion of Vietnam’s central highlanders (or Montagnards), I have drawn attention to the religious profiling of ethnic difference through conversion (Salemink 1997, 2003a, 2003b). In 1997, I wrote that

[b]y redrawing the boundary between the Yuan (Kinh) and themselves (Dega, Montagnards) in the one field where the current regime leaves some space in the form of a theoretical freedom of religion, Montagnards reclaim agency after their political defeat in the construction of a Montagnard homeland with a fixed territory and statut particulier.