Vietnam. Politics of ethnic classification in Vietnam By Ito Masako, translated by Minako Sato Kyoto: Kyoto University Press for Center of Southeast Asian Studies; Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2013. Pp. 229. Maps, Tables, Plates, Appendices, Bibliography, Index.

Abstract

Politics of ethnic classification in Vietnam By ITO MASAKO, translated by MINAKO SATO Kyoto: Kyoto University Press for Center of Southeast Asian Studies; Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2013. Pp. 229. Maps, Tables, Plates, Appendices, Bibliography, Index. Like many other countries, independent Vietnam inherited a polity that was considerably more ethnically diverse than it had been before colonisation, and both of the two Vietnams that coexisted between 1954 and 1975 had to formulate policies targeting their ethnic minorities. Whereas the southern Republic of Vietnam was mainly concerned with pacification and mobilisation of its minorities due to the ongoing conflict, the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam invested considerable time and energy in developing ethnology as a field of study. (In South Vietnam ethnographic research was largely the preserve of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.) Because the minority-inhabited areas of the DRV were not battlefields, Hanoi-based researchers were able to pursue fieldwork aimed at describing and classifying the various ethnic groups--a task which was then continued in the South after reunification in 1976. By the time of the 1979 census, an official list of 54 ethnic groups (including the majority, generally known as Kinh) was promulgated and was intended to be definitive. For roughly two decades this list remained fixed, but as Masako Ito shows in her detailed study, by the time of the 1999 census, there was 'intense negotiation to alter the state framework of ethnic group determination' (p. 2). A number of 'subgroups' or 'local groups' subsumed under a broader ethnonym now expressed their determination to be recognised as a full-fledged 'ethnic group' (dan toe) in their own right. In many cases this development was linked to state policies aimed at improving socio-economic conditions in rural areas, some of which specifically targeted smaller ethnic minorities, thus creating an incentive for individuals and communities to be recognised as distinct from the larger groups with which they were currently identified. Ito's book examines this complex process of contestation and the interaction between minority communities, ethnologists, and policymakers at various levels. As Ito points out, there has been considerable reluctance on the state's part to expand the list of officially recognised minorities, presumably because to do so will open a Pandora's box of demands for reclassification which could potentially generate tensions both among different minority groups and between those minorities and the state. On the one hand, the state wishes to be seen as committed to the survival (as opposed to the assimilation) of all existing ethnic minorities. On the other hand, it also wishes to be the arbiter of their identity and to appropriate for itself the right to define that identity and the labels that go with it. This tension has underlain Hanoi's ethnographic work since its inception in the 1950s. …