French Natural in The Vietnamese Highlands: Nostalgia and Erasure in Montagnard Identity*

Abstract

For roughly three weeks during late October and early November 1999, a number of scholars with an interest in Vietnam took a stand for or against the term “Montagnard,” in reference to the indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands. This debate took place in the virtual space of an Internet discussion site, the Vietnam Studies Group. The debate is interesting for a number of reasons, among them the term itself, and the fact that the issue was not of interest to Vietnamese ethnologists. Montagnard is a foreigners’ term, and the debate was foreign in more ways than one. The issues of the virtual debate are pertinent for an examination of how particular realities are projected onto Vietnam as an object of discourse, realities that may not have any resonance within the country.

For the highlanders, man and society are embedded in nature and dependent upon cosmic forces. In the highlanders’ green milieu of forested mountains, sweeping, undulating plateaus, and valleys through which brown rivers flow, each ethnic group over time worked out its adaptation to nature and shaped its society so that its members could survive, reproduce, and readapt to whatever changes man, nature, and the cosmic forces might impinge on it. This evolutionary process resulted in some social-structural differences, but at the same time, adaptation to the mountain country created among them physical and ideational bonds that have given rise to a common culture, a highlander world.

—Gerald C. Hickey, Shattered World