Abstract
Hmong Christian elites as political and development brokers: competition, cooperation and mimesis in Vietnam’s highlands
Highlights
Over the past 30 years, Vietnam’s highlands have witnessed a rapid and widespread religious transformation as perhaps a third of the 1.4 million of Vietnam’s Hmong population have converted to evangelical Christianity.1 This phenomenon is all the more remarkable for the ‘remote’ nature of proselytisation in the absence of physically present missionaries; instead, highlanders tuned into Hmong‐language evangelical radio broadcasts and proactively spread the message from village to village (Ngô 2016; this issue)
One reason why Christian leaders are able to become local elites is that their legitimacy of spiritual and financial success are the very same desires of many within their congregations, who may hold a similar ‘pioneering ethos’ but lack the connections with which to tap into external potency
While religious investment is getting easier in big cities, international Christian organisations have limited direct access to remote highland areas, due to greater state restrictions or controls on the activity of religious NGOs there. These new patrons must rely on Hmong Christian elites to channel their influence into local communities, in a similar role to Lewis and Mosse’s ‘development brokers’ who ‘operat[e] at the “interfaces” of different worldviews and knowledge systems’ by ‘negotiating roles, relationships, and representations ... constantly creating interest and making real ... against the ever‐ present threat of fragmentation’ (2006: 10, 16)
Summary
Hmong Christian elites as political and development brokers: competition, cooperation and mimesis in Vietnam’s highlands. This article focuses on the role of new Hmong religious leaders –predominantly young men –who have played an important role in spreading Protestant Christianity across Vietnam’s highlands over the past 30 years These pastors and evangelists have directly challenged the authority of previously established Hmong local elites, whose legitimacy rested on traditional religious authority and/or state patronage, causing significant social conflict along the way. International religious networks can function as alternative patrons to the state for well‐p laced Hmong Christian elites to tap into and redistribute to their communities –to varying degrees Contextualising such leadership dynamics within wider anthropological scholarship of upland Southeast Asia affirms the ‘pioneering ethos’ of local elites in challenging, complying with or mimicking state forms of governance in their attempts to draw in and channel external potency. This highlights the degree of political manoeuvring space available to non‐state actors in a supposedly authoritarian state, as well as ongoing tensions and controversies facing pastors who negotiate ambiguous relationships with powerful external forces
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