Event

Beginning in the 1820s, the Nguyễn imperial state (1802-1945, including French colonial and protectorate rule) began to pursue an aggressive project to enhance official control over people, animals, and plants in Vietnam. Inspired by Confucian ideals as well as Southeast Asian realities, Vietnamese officials imposed a conceptual grid over the realm, grouping diverse communities into narrow, discrete categories. Despite these grand designs, some non-Vietnamese communities, especially in borderlands spaces and at high altitudes, negotiated spaces within the imperial system. Others became trapped by a rigidly proscribed notion of indigeneity. Against the multiple dislocations brought by official indigeneity, alternative indigeneities emerged as a path to power for some non-Vietnamese imperial subjects, a historical process with strong echoes in the present.

Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, this presentation examines how the imperial Vietnamese state relied upon indigeneity as an exclusionary strategy, particularly to establish “resource frontiers” in areas historically held by Tai, Mien, and Khmer communities, as well as the alternative indigeneities these policies inspired.

Author of Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (2017) and co-editor of The Cultivated Forest: People and Woodlands in Asian History (2022), Bradley Camp Davis is an associate professor in the Department of History at Eastern Connecticut State University. His current projects include an environmental history of imperial Vietnam, the cultural history of the global Mien-Yao diaspora, and chapters in The Cambridge History of Confucianism and The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia.