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...and race/ethnicity, use the example of recent land conflicts in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam as a starting point toward understanding contemporary debates on indigeneity. Based on fieldwork in 1994, the article describes one community's conflict over resource-use that demonstrates how land law, local rules of access, and the evolution of competing claims to land can create politicized socio-spatial localities overnight. Such communities, though sharing a similar culture, language, and history with the dominant nation, maintain local meanings and rules of access that define a distinct socio-spatial community. This example from Vietnam suggests that contemporary globalization and market integration is creating new indigenous communities that need to be better understood. KEYWORDS: Indigenous, Community, Vietnam, Globalization, Customary Law, Property
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The fields of public policy and planning are concerned with inequality and the fair distribution of economic and other resources, developing projects and policies to facilitate redistribution of wealth to the poor. Such programs often fail to deliver on promised benefits to poor communities in both wealthy and poor countries--especially among communities self--and otherwise-identified as "indigenous." Decentralization and political change under market systems, for example, can open up indigenous communities to social exclusion in cases as diverse as India (1) and Ecuador. (2) Political and policy efforts to address some of the inequalities inherent to indigenous communities have designed social impact assessments and community participation that can also readily override the interests of indigenous groups. (3)
Such difficulties of development and governance regarding indigenous communities may result from problems of "interculturality" that places differing sociocultural and scientific systems in stark opposition, (4) from a lack of recognition of long-standing political claims, (5) and in particular from situations in which those sociocultural, scientific, and political conflicts occur over natural resources. (6)
To understand such development "failures" among indigenous communities, projects must be seen in the context of changing power dynamics, political histories, and competing social meanings over natural resources. Material acts such as planting land, providing credit, and building roads are imbued with sociocultural implications that transcend material benefits, thereby influencing project beneficiaries' decisions. An improved understanding of these changing power dynamics and social meanings may lead to a better understanding of how indigenous communities may behave in a seemingly irrational way toward potentially beneficial development programs. This combination of competing meanings and political power influencing assumptions of rational economic behavior in response to potential material benefits is evident among development projects for indigenous groups around the world. Such behaviors among those communities considered indigenous calls for an examination of how an indigenous community may be "created" rather than "survived."
Instead of describing indigenous communities as collective communities formed in response to colonial (primarily European) processes and race/ethnic differences, I suggest a more refined socio-spatial definition of indigenous, in which race and national sovereignty conflicts are proxies for deeper claims on exclusive social and physical spaces. These claims to socio-spatial identities, I suggest, are increasingly important points of contention as economic, social, and cultural systems become more global and more integrated. In this way, the debate on indigeneity is as much about distinct identity in the face of globalization and the future as it is about historical culture.
The balance of the article describes how migration, culture, and meaning can mobilize residents into symbolic communities of distinction to state development. These symbolic communities of distinction, I suggest, share many characteristics with those often called indigenous and can provide explanations for why indigenous communities may seem to behave in irrational ways regarding development programs.
Such an approach follows Dove (7) in diverging from analyses that consider indigenous communities as having survived through oral and other non-Western traditional knowledge forms or as relics of a previous culture. (8) In the article I describe a reforestation program in Vietnam, its economic goals and incentives, and why technical explanations of why and how they have failed to increase the acreage of forests are inadequate. An important additional explanation lies in historical land-uses and changes to those uses as political change, followed by sociocultural transformation, created sociopolitical insiders and outsiders. This example of conflict, migration, and control of land presents a lens to view the characteristics of conflicts between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples consistent with Hirtz's notion that indigeneity, paradoxically, marks a community's entry into the "realms of modernity." (9)
Recent work has led to interesting questions about land policy in transitional economies (10)--questions that can shed light on how and why socioeconomic development among indigenous communities can be problematic. In particular, differences in how national policies treat local law and custom have been shown to be particularly relevant in post-Socialist contexts like Vietnam. (11) I describe the evolution of two communities in Tam Nong District in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. This history of social, cultural, and political divergence is the platform for a more significant reflection upon how changes in rights to resources and property, as well as the political meanings they reflect, can create local "communities" virtually overnight. These communities may form a necessary, but not sufficient, form of social and political organization that leads to popular concepts of indigeneity.
While important in its own right, an examination of how local customs fared as a state consolidates authority and codifies policy governing resources such as land can provide a fresh perspective on how indigeneity might best be seen as a process of political and cultural conflict over meaning and the narratives used to justify access to resources. The following empirical study--based on local evidence from 1994--tells the story of politico-cultural conflict born of a quick shift in these narratives. I conclude, from this evidence, that the lag time between policy changes over natural resources and their influence on the kinds of narratives resource users employ to justify access is central to understanding the precursors for the development of an indigenous community.
A Failed Development Project: Park Protection in the Mekong Delta, 1994
Standing atop the Ca Dam canal in the heart of Tam Nong District in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, one can see for miles to the southeast. The vista boasts a 180-degree view of lush green ricefields bounded on one side only by the village of Tan Cong Sinh. On the other sides, the ricefields stretch out like a desert for miles, interrupted only by scattered reed huts and occasional patches of dark-green, scrubby forest stands. The view's only limit is the eye's capacity to stand the bright sun. Bobbing among these green deserts are the fields' owners, spraying insecticide, spreading fertilizer, or checking small fishnets.
Inhabitants of Tam Nong depend on the revenues generated from these rice expanses for their survival since the district has no industry or other major commercial crop. Since 1976 government institutions and villagers have converted wild grassland and forest into other uses, funneling the district's land-use and its economy down an ever-narrowing path toward monospecific agriculture. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, they both realized the difficulty of growing rice in an ecological environment where much of the soil contains high acid content.
Turning to look northwest one sees a different landscape. The foreground is filled with low, wild grass and wild rice, which abruptly stops at the edge of a thick forest several hundred meters from the canal. As in the rice fields, people move among the vegetation. Unlike in the rice fields across the canal, here users do not own their land, and human activities include setting fires; catching fish with nets or electrocuting them with car batteries; collecting fuel-wood and pole-sized saplings; and grazing water buffalo. Here, the wild and floating rice, along with the tram forests, thrives on the acid content of the soils. This side of the canal is the Tram Chim National Park, the other the Tan Cong Sinh New Economic Zone. Their visual differences represent the two different models for land-use and property ownership in Tam Nong that this article addresses.
In Tam Nong District there are ten thousand hectares of acid-sulfate-soils land. At the time, this area included some of the last remaining native tram (melaleuca leucadendron) forests in Vietnam. Rice can grow in these acid soils, but it requires heavy fertilizer subsidies and plentiful irrigation. Usually four years of heavy fertilizer use and constant irrigation is sufficient to wash the acid out of the soil to permit good harvests. Tram, on the other hand, is a scrub-type forest species native to acid soils, and once it is mature it survives with little care in these areas. Traditionally tram has provided fuelwood and construction material for villagers, as well as a breeding environment for the fish and fowl species that make up much of their dietary protein.
During the mid-1990s, the district began to receive an increasing number of poor migrants from other regions of the country. To accommodate them, the national, provincial, and district governments opened up what they called "wasteland" to development, with few good results. Farmers attempted to plant rice on seven thousand of these hectares. The typical story is of a farmer who planted rice one season, but could not make back his investment capital due to poor harvests. Wealthy farmers were able to afford an irrigation system to wash out the acidity over the four to five years required to do so, but the majority were forced to leave the land in search of labor opportunities, letting the land revert to wild grassland.
In order to help them, the national and local governments attempted to integrate the needs of the migrants with the idea that tram plantations are the most appropriate ecological use of the land. They believed that such tram plantations might take some of the pressure off Tram Chim National Park. To this end, the government rezoned areas for tram plantations and recruited poor villagers to plant tram on the wild lands, promising ownership of the trees once the stand matured after ten years. In this way, the local officials and international NGOs tried simultaneously to provide a livelihood for the truly disadvantaged, reforest the wetland with production plantations, and protect the park.
Initial versions of the program simply asked farmers to plant tram. Even though they had not succeeded at rice planting, many poor farmers refused to plant tram, leading to confusion among program staff and planners. Interviews with local officials revealed the belief among officials that villagers' reactions were irrational, and that this uncooperativeness--according to the planners--resulted from "lack of good knowledge and technical expertise," an "insecure tenure system," or "lack of communication between the government and the farmers."
When asked, however, the farmers' formal explanations for not planting tram centered on three alternative technical...
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More articles from Alternatives: Global, Local, Political
Pathways of "indigenous knowledge" in Yunnan, China., January 01, 2007
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