Dust beneath the mist: state and frontier formation in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the 1955-61 period

Abstract

As an undergraduate student, I read about the distinctiveness of the Central Highlands of Vietnam and its inhabitants in comparison to the Kinh people, the dominant majority from the plains. I was often left with the feeling that these people and their cultures were teetering on the edge of endangerment with the arrival of Kinh settlers and the Vietnamese state. This is the typical storyline of state formation on the frontier, telling how a sophisticatedly organized and technologically powerful people arrived to reign over the margins (of its heartland domain) and the inhabitants there...Another facet to this story of state formation on the frontier, however, is missing from the prevailing literature. I am talking about a facet of the story that paints a less bleak picture of life on the frontier. It tells of how actors on the frontier try to make everyday relations bearable and operational, born out of attempts to understanding one another, albeit sometimes involving misunderstandings. This facet tells of mutability in the state formation process. This thesis explores this facet of the story and uses more nuanced conceptualizations of state, frontier, power, government and social orderings. I call this approach a 'recombinant model' of state formation. This thesis is about one particular period of Vietnamese state formation on the Central Highlands frontier, 1955-61 under the government of the First Republic. I argue that the prevailing approach to understanding Vietnamese state formation on the Central Highlands frontier conceptualizes the state as an a priori formed entity engaged in a process of immutable diffusion on the frontier. I call this the 'diffusion model' of state formation. Using recently available archival documents and the optic provided by the 'recombinant model', I argue that Vietnamese state formation between 1955 and 1961 on the Central Highlands frontier was a mutable process that produced a state form that was hybrid and recombinant in nature. I support this argument with a thick description of policy making and modification of policies by the government on four key issues: administrative standardization, frontier formation program of Dinh Dien, state formation via agrarian change and management of the land question. The story reconstructed through these archival documents does not fit nicely with the storyline advanced by the diffusion model. The recombinant model provides a better framework for understanding this story.