ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the relations between Vietnamese states and the inhabitants of Vietnam’s northern and central mountains and plains from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on the impact of the Vietnamese Revolution (1930-86) and resulting conflicts, the First (1946-54) and Second (1960-75) Indo-China Wars, during which opposing sides attempted to control the strategic highlands’ regions and to mobilize their inhabitants’ support.1 We conceptualize interactions between the Vietnamese, that is, the Viet or Kinh, and the highlands’ peoples in Kinh-dominated lands as a ‘civilizing project’ which anthropologist of China and Taiwan, Stevan Harrell, defines as a relationship in which
the inequality between the civilizing center and the peripheral peoples has its ideological basis in the center’s claim to a superior degree of civilization, along with a commitment to raise the peripheral peoples’ civilization to the level of the center. . . . [T]he civilizing center draws its ideological rationale from the belief that the process of domination is one of helping the dominated to attain . . . the superior cultural, religious, and moral qualities characteristic of the center itself.2
