Suchergebnisse

With this case study of a French Catholic missionary in Tonkin, as north Vietnam was called during colonial times, I wish to illustrate how individual agency might find ways of expression in spite of severe hierarchical clashes. Put differently, I wish to critically reflect on a case where the scientific inclination of a given missionary in the field became his calling. The surprising result being that instead of meeting the expectations of conformity or "toeing the line" of Catholic conversion duties, he intentionally took a significant step outside dogmatic morality.

The mountainous regions of the north of India (here, Ladakh) and of northern Thailand have in common that they are sensitive border regions inhabited by ethnic minority groups with a different cultural identity than that of the neigbouring lowlanders. They lack any substantial economic resources and are, generally speaking, integrated in the national market to a lesser degree than the central governments would wish. In both cases, however, tourist development has recently grown into an economic force which, combined with governmental development policies at the local and regional level, has been increasing the pace of integration of these minority groups with both the national and the world economy. Should the central governments concerned therefore recognise that it is advantageous to support this ongoing process in order to achieve their own objectives of enhanced territorial and political control? Do the ethnic groups involved derive long term profit from tourism? Partly as a result of field work, the conclusion drawn to the two questions is both a yes and a no.

This article narrates a remarkable endeavor, a venture into the colonial ethnography of borderland mountain societies of today's northern Vietnam, then upland Tonkin, from the unlikely cultural perspective of the military. This venture, commissioned by Governors Generals Paul Doumer and Paul Beau, was conducted a little over a century ago, yielding over four thousand manuscript pages penned by seventy different authors.First, I consider the logic of the militarization of the northern borderlands at the end of the nineteenth century, a strategic policy that triggered the launch of two surveys in 1897 and 1903. I then examine the methods used in the performance of these surveys and, building upon material from the original documents, I comment on the mindset of the officers who performed this task and on the strength of this material for anthropological research today.

This article examines the circumstances and logic of French Catholic missionary expansion in Upper Tonkin. It explores how, over a few decades, the missionary push in the mountainous outskirts of the Red River Delta was conceived, how it unfolded, and how it came to a standstill in the 1920s before its decline towards the final exit of the French in the late 1940s.

"In the connected highlands of southwest China, Vietnam, and Laos, recalling the past is a highly sensitive act. Among local societies, many may actively avoid recalling the past for fear of endangering themselves and others. Oral traditions and rare archives remain the main avenues to visit the past, but the national revolutionary narrative and the language of heritagization have strongly affected the local expression of historical memory. Yet this does not prevent local societies from producing their stories in their own terms, even if often in conflict with both national and Western categories. Producing history, ethnohistory, historical anthropology, and historical geography in the Southeast Asian highlands raises significant questions relating to methodology, epistemology, and ethics, for which most researchers are often ill-prepared. How can scholars manage to competently access information about the past? How is one to capture history-in-the making through events, speech acts, rituals, and performances? How is the memory of the past transmitted-or not-and with what logic? Based on the experiences and reflections of a dozen diverse scholars rooted in decades of work in these three communist states, Chasing Traces is the first book about historical ethnography and related issues in the Southeast Asian highlands. Taking a critically reflexive posture, the authors make a plea for the individual, the hidden, and the backstage, for what life is really like on the ground, as opposed to imagined homogeneity, legibility, and unambiguousness. Their investigations on the history of ethnic minority communities adds archival historiography to ethnographic fieldwork and examines the relationship between the two fields. The individual chapters each tell distinctive stories of the conjunction of fieldwork, archival research, official surveillance, community participation, cultural norms, partnership with local scholars, and the other factors that both facilitate and frustrate the research enterprise of writing about the past in these societies. A timely work, this volume also provides guidelines for alternative ways to document and reflect when physical access becomes limited due to factors such as pandemic, political instability, and violence, and offers creative ways for researchers to cope with these dramatic shifts"--