Ethnē at the Limits: Collectivities and Change in the China-Southeast Asia Borderlands

My current project traces ethnographic knowledge and modalities of belonging in the gray zones between China and Southeast Asia from the nineteenth century to the present. In East Asia and Vietnam, “ethnicity” remains tethered to somewhat constrained notions of identity, community, and ancestry. However, an examination of nineteenth century ethnographies in imperial Vietnam illumines an alternate arrangement of collectivities with implications for the present. As a capacious and even subversive heuristic, ethnē encompasses a broader field of human interaction, one inclusive of a wider range of historical and even contemporary phenomena.

This paper proposes that ethnicity has a history beyond the strictures of European colonial and postcolonial nationalist discourses. This history can help us make sense of the seemingly complex realities surrounding ascriptions, rejections, and alterations of collective identities from the early nineteenth century into the present. In Vietnam, before European colonial rule an “ethnographic turn” tied to the ambitions of the Nguyen State (1802-1945) was characterized by detailed official accounts of non-Vietnamese communities. Although the term “ethnicity” only emerged from later translations of European works by East Asian intellectual reformers, these Vietnamese empirical researchers produced ethnographies to promote a Confucian civilizing mission. Non-Vietnamese communities, the ethnē of these works, who once existed outside the realm of lowland political control, now found themselves subject to taxation, settlements, and military occupation. Following the establishment of the French Protectorates of Tonkin and Annam (1884-5), colonial officials worked with imperial ethnographic texts to organize a new form of militarized ethnography, one that influenced early twentieth century European anthropology. As a nineteenth century notion of ethnicity moved across Eurasia through French colonial translations of Vietnamese texts, ethnē in Vietnam adapted to, and resisted, more rigid concepts of collective difference.