Chapter 1. Introduction: Barbarians against the Father of Forest Thieves

Transcription

1 1 Chapter 1. Introduction: Barbarians against the Father of Forest Thieves F igure 1. Harvesting Season at Puôi village, September Photograph by Hoang Cam. It was late and dark evening of the early fall 2003, during my first extended field research visit at Puôi, a White Thái 1 village of over 1000 people in the Northwestern frontier of Vietnam. As other Thái villages of the flat and fertile mountainous valley called Muang Tấc 2, Puôi village has 1 Tay is the transliteration of what local people call themselves. Like other Tay groups in Vietnam, the Tay of Muang Tấc are distantly related to the Thai of Thailand and the Dai in Xipxongpanna of Yunan, China, and their ancestors have always lived in what is Vietnam today. In Western literature, they are known generally as Tai and in Vietnam they are designated as Thái. In this dissertation, I will use the term Thái to refer to the Tay speaking group in Muang Tấc valley. 2 Muang was the traditional political unit or principality of the Thái and Tấc is the name of the main river running through the region. The French came to Sơn La province and began establishing its colonial administration in the area in However, because of its divide and rule strategies, Muang Tấc principality remained to be an

2 2 an economy based mainly on agriculture of wet-rice cultivation and other non-rice crops on low hillsides. It was the early fall in the region, yet the temperature was still very high even during the night time. After taking a long shower to relieve the heat, Tuấn, Hà, the two friends of mine, and I walked to visit Xưởng 3, also a friend of mine and Tuấn and Hà in the village. I have known Xưởng for almost thirty years. We were born in the same village in the same year, attended district high school together, and became close friends. After finishing his high school program in 1990, Xưởng worked on his family s rice fields and got married in 1996 with two daughters. He had been selected, after a long and difficult process of review, to be a member of the Communist Party at the age of twenty-five. Partly because of this and his higher educational background compared to other young people in the village, he was selected to participate in many development-training programs organized by local development agencies as well as international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Unlike Xưởng, his wife Hà was born in a Thái village about 30 km from the valley. Her family moved to a nearby village in Muang Tấc valley in the early of 1990s under a state-directed resettlement program. Before it was inundated by the waters behind the Sông Đà Dam 4, her home village had been located in one of the most fertile valleys in the northwest region of Vietnam and one of the most productive for wet-rice agriculture. When the two other friends of mine I and arrived at Xưởng s house at around 9 PM, Hà was preparing food for her husband in the kitchen before retiring to bed. Hà told me this daily routine has been practiced for several years ever since her husband joined a group of young villagers, 15 to 40 years old, to go to Khau Li forest for timber called pơ mu. 5 As the forest area where they were going to get the timber is far from the village, Xưởng and his fellow villagers often have to leave home very early in the morning before dawn so that they can return home in the evening on the same day. They have to bring food prepared the night before for lunch on the way to the forest. Today, if they are not caught by forest officials on the way back, each one can earn about 50,000 đồng (slightly over $3) a day. They earn this by buying timber wood at a lower price from sawyers in the forest to sell at a higher price to lowland traders back in the valley. After autonomous polity under the management of the Thai land ruler until the early of 1950s. After the independence of Vietnam in 1954, the muang administrative system was abolished and the valley and its habitants have been integrated into the Vietnam nation state ever since. Muang Tấc is now part of Phù Yên District, Sơn La province. See more detailed discussion on the muong political system in the following chapter. 3 In this dissertation, I follow the usual practice in ethnographic writing to use pseudonyms to protect the privacy of those whom I interviewed. 4 Sông Đà Dam was built in the late 1970s and it has become the largest hydropower plant in Vietnam until recently. The Dam has displaced thousands of indigenous communities of Sơn La and Hòa Bình provinces, including Ha s village. Muang Tấc valley was chosen to be one of the destinations of resettlement for these environmental refugees of this national project. According to statistics given by district authorities of Phù Yên, Muang Tấc, since the early of 1980s, has received over 10,000 people. 5 Pơ mu (see more detail in chapter 5) is one of the most expensive tree species produced as timber for Vietnamese markets today. The most valuable characteristic of this wood is resistance to termites and other tropical wood-eating insects and fungi. Its natural veins are visually striking and stunning. For this reason, there is great demand for pơ mu as a raw material for domestic furniture-making and housing construction. The name pơ mu is used by Chinese and Kinh; the scientific nomenclature is Fokienia hodginsii; there is no English translation since the term pơ mu is a Romanization of the original Fujian word, originating in the Chinese province from which the first specimens were brought to the West. The Thái name is may vac. For discussion of the scientific nomenclature consult the website of the Gymnosperm Databank of the University of Bonn; available at

3 3 enjoying some cups of tea and cigarettes that I brought from Hanoi for Xưởng, he, our friends and I began a wide-ranging conversation, mostly about stories relating to the forest that he was heading to the day after. Parts of our conversation are recounted bellow. Figure 2. Puôi village in a morning of November Photograph by Hoang Cam. The Khau Li forest, where Xưởng and his friends have gone to obtain the timber, was classified as a national natural preservation zone (khu bảo tồn thiên nhiên quốc gia) in This means the area is now under the management and protection of the Phù-Bắc Yên Joint Forestry Department and district forest protection units. That is why all people who go to the forest for timber, including Xưởng and his friends, are considered by state authorities and national mass media as forest thieves (lâm tặc 6 ). Covering an area of 17,650 hectares, the protected zone stretches from the territory of Phù Yên district to the territory of the neighboring district Bắc Yên. Historically, before the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954, Khau Li was a sacred watershed forest for all ethnic groups in Muang Tấc valley under the management of the Thái s phiia (also called by the local Thái people as chau đin the hereditary 6 The term lâm tặc is newly coined in Vietnam and has been used widely by local and national mass media. It is the combination of the Sino-Vietnamese noun forest (lâm) and the verb to hijack (tặc) to denote illegal loggers regardless they are local people or outsiders.

4 4 muang ruler). Customary rules strictly prohibited both local people and outsider s access to the forests. Material sanctions, usually by animals for ritual performance, and social pressures were imposed on those who violated the customary rules and the terror of supernatural forces that were linked to the forests kept people from over-harvesting trees. In fact, until quite recently mysterious stories relating to the forest could be counted in the hundreds. One of the most popular mythical stories that many people in the village like to tell is about a pond or lake called Nong Xam Tang (Pond with Three Branches) said to be located on the top of a mountain where forest spirits are believed to live. Three main rivers run through Muang Tấc valley and are the main water sources for the rice-fields of the whole region. These rivers, according to myth, start in this Pond with Three Branches. According to many people in Muang Tấc, there were very few exploitation activities in the forest even until by the late of 1980s. Some old Thái people told me that they went to the forest for bark (for betel chewing), but they had never dared go deep into the forest. Especially, they had to go in groups as the forest at that time was very dense and therefore they were afraid of being caught by forest spirits. Since the early 1960s, the customary management system of the local people was prohibited by the government and the forest came under the control of the district Forest Protection Unit (hạt kiểm lâm). The forest was then incorporated into the territory of the national natural reserve that exists today. In the late 1970s, due to the demand for wood by the construction of Sông Đà Dam, provincial authorities allowed the district branch of Phù Yên Forest Enterprise to extract timber from this area and other forests in the region for the project. Following roads opened by the Forestry Department, many Kinh 7 traders, who came to settle in the region in 1960s from the lowland areas under a state-sponsor immigration program, hired local laborers to extract timber from the forest to transfer to markets in Hanoi and other provinces in the lowland areas. For the last few years, as the market demand has increased, thousands of people, including the Thái, Hmong, and Muang ethnics in the valley all have participated in this job although the local authorities have mobilized many state foresters (kiểm lâm) and policemen (công an) to control local people s encroachment. Like other young local people in the valley, Xưởng has also gone for the timber wood for sale since then, first as a lumberjack in the forest, then as a medium trader as he is doing now. While sharing with me about his engagement in this work, Xưởng said: It is very difficult to get a piece of pơ mu tree back to the valley to sell this year. Not only does the road make it difficult to bring the wood back, but the forestry officials and policemen always stop us on the way home. There are so many guard stations on the way back here. If we are caught, of course, we get nothing since they will take our timber. However, it is quite easy to get through the stations if we give them money. But if we do so we earn very little since we also have to pay for either the Mèo 8 or Mường, who live near the forest, 10,000 đồng 7 Kinh or Việt are the majority ethnic group in Vietnam. In 1999, the Kinh population was 66 million while the 53 ethnic minority groups numbered 10.5 million (General Statistic Office, Population and Housing Census, Vietnam 1999, Completed Census Results, Hanoi: Nxb. Thống kê, 2001, p. 26). Before state-sponsored immigration programs launched in the early 1960s, most of the Kinh population lived in lowland areas. 8 Mèo is the name of an ethnic group known in Western literature as Hmong. The term Mèo was officially used as the name for this ethnic group by Vietnamese officials before the 1970s. Because of the negative connotation of the

5 5 [of about 75 cents] per piece of wood in order to take the wood out of the forest. That is called làm luật (bribes). And we all have to làm luật since we go to the forest illegally. Now, the state officials and mass media call us lâm tặc (forest thief) 9 and we label ourselves lâm tặc too. But, I think, we are just little lâm tặc; the đại ca của lâm tặc [father of forest thieves] of course, are the people from the Forestry Protection Unit and Kinh traders who are now living in the valley and those who come here to do their timber business. F igure 3. The eastern side of Khau Li forest. Photograph by Hoang Cam. Xưởng continued to talk more about why he and his friends often called the forestry officials and traders the father of forest thieves. Among a variety of reasons for this characterization, he mentioned the collusion (thông đồng) between traders and forestry officials, asking me if I want to write a report for newspapers in Hanoi about the corruption of the local officials in the region. He then criticized the forestry officials and the traders for not having any motivation to protect the forest that the villagers had protected for hundreds of years. He said that I know that we are contributing to the destruction of the forest very fast and that recently this is leading to the term in Vietnamese (meaning cat), since the early 1980s, the term Hmong has, instead, been used in state official documents. Despite this change, however, the local Thái in Muang Tấc, including Xưởng, still call this ethnic group Mèo. 9 The term lâm tặc, combining the Sino-Vietnamese noun forest (lâm) and the verb to hijack (tặc) to denote illegal loggers, has been newly coined in Vietnam and is widely used by state mass media and in official documents.

6 6 lack of water for paddy fields in the valley. But if we did not go for it, others would also take it and in fact, there have been thousands of people going to the forest for the pơ mu everyday for years. I had heard about the overexploitation of the forest many years ago whenever I visited my grandmother in the village during summertime of every year. What surprised me the most during this conversation with Xưởng is that he used the term motivation 10 (động cơ) and forest thief (lâm tặc), which are also used by local and national authorities to blame encroachment on the forest on local people. He repeatedly used this term to criticize people from the district Forestry Protection Unit whenever he talked about the loss of forests in the region. Fragments of my conversation with Xưởng, and the current overexploitation of the pơ mu timber in Khau Li forest, highlight the complicated politics of resource use and management in Muang Tấc valley. In the course of more than 17 months conducting my field research in the region, I realized that the Khau Li and other forests under the direct control of state management agencies and forestry land areas entitled to individual households under ongoing social forestry programs are under similar situations. Throughout the region, local people themselves and outsiders are competing intensely with one another for timber and non-timber forest products. This problem is also reported almost everyday in other areas in the uplands of Vietnam by both local and national mass media. 11 Interestingly, from the point of view of the state, as embodied in local and national mass media and forest management as well as sustainable development discourses, the illegal exploitation by and access of local people to the forests, combined with their agricultural practice of shifting cultivation, are seen as the main cause of forest degradation in the upland areas. However, from the point of view of the local people like Xưởng, the state officials and lowland traders, not the local people, are the primary forces causing forest loss. Questions remain to be answered: What lies behind this disjuncture of explanations between the local people and that of the state authorities on forest degradation? How and why do local people like Xưởng, who is very concerned about the loss of forests surrounding his home valley, become forest thieves, and why do local people also call state management agencies forest thieves too? And finally, why have national forest management systems failed to protect certain forests such as that of the Khau Li? In this dissertation, I undertake to provide an understanding of the nature of these problems. Such a critical anthropological understanding is crucial to identifying the conditions under which we might achieve sustainable development in Muang Tấc valley in particular and the upland areas of Vietnam in general. In order to do so, I examine how shifts in resource management institutions in the upland regions of Vietnam are associated with changes in the environmental practices of the local people and the generation of more intense competition over resource access 10 In another conversation with Xưởng sometime later, he used the Vietnamese common expression no one mourns for the father of everyone (cha chung không ai khóc) to clarify what he meant by motivation. He said that many forestry officials did not care about the fate of the forests although they were paid to manage them. 11 Social conflicts over access to forest resources among local resource users and between local resource users and state management agencies has become a burning topic of most Vietnamese newspapers in the last decade. Lao Động, one of the most well known newspapers in Vietnam, has even devoted a special section to discuss about this topic. Regarding social conflicts over resources in Muang Tấc (discussed more detail in chapter 4), on September 12 th 2005 a television program entitled Forest Ranger, a Dangerous Job (Kiểm Lâm, Nghề Nguy Hiểm) was broadcasted on the Vietnam National Television VTV1, inviting two local state foresters of Phù Yên district to talk about the issue.

7 7 and control among different social actors. In this story, I account for the post-colonial state s policies in Vietnam, and especially how it has articulated its ideology of scientific control and management over land and forest resources through industrial, bureaucratic, and commercial production oriented strategies. This also involves understanding how the post-colonial state had linked this apparent modernization of land and other natural resource management and development with the legal phasing-out of bad customary management institutions of forest dwelling communities. All these factors play very important roles in determining interactions between the local people and their surrounding environment. As noted above in the account of resource exploitation in Khau Li forest, the replacement of local management patterns by the state management system results in the local people competing among themselves over the extraction of natural resources. Moreover, these changes in management regimes are also associated with competing exploitation of resources between the local people and lowlanders. Peluso has noted a similar situation in the case of the teak forests of the Dayak Galik in Kalimantan, Indonesia, where the local people were trying to benefit in whatever way possible before others did and outsiders including state official who had no incentive to be concerned about the future of the local supply since they were either villagers from elsewhere or people whose economic well-being derived from a much broader range of opportunities. 12 The tendency to devalue customary patterns of resource use and management practices of forestbased communities is widespread among conservationists and nation-state policy makers in South and Southeast Asia as well as in other so-call Third World countries. The employment of an ideology in which ecological practices and management institutions of the local upland people are portrayed as primitive, backward and destructive and as needing to be replaced by other more advanced forms is one of the important strategies that the nation-state uses to legitimize its sovereignty over natural resources within a given nation-state s boundaries. 13 In the Vietnam context, therefore, to understand why ecological practices of the upland people are considered bad while the nation-state forms are seen as scientific, it is very important to look into the history of interactions between the upland peoples and the lowland empires including more recently the Communist nation-state. Like other countries in South and Southeast Asia, the mountainous areas of what is Vietnam today are inhabited by a variety of groups of people with diverse origins and cultural traditions; they are also strikingly different from the lowland Kinh. For centuries, these upland and lowland populations have been involved in interactions with one another, both among upland peoples and between the upland and lowland populations. These interactions have undergirded the formation of cultural and economic practices among both upland and lowland peoples. However, from the lowland Vietnamese perspective, the interactions were conceived in terms of a core-periphery relationship, in which the upland people were viewed through lenses of a worldview borrowed from China that 12 Peluso, Nancy An Ironwood Problem: (Mis)Management and Development of an Extractive Rainforest Product. Conservation Biology. Vol. 6, No. 2, p Dove, M.R Theories of Swidden Agriculture and the Political Ecology of Ignorance. Agroforestry Systems, 1: 85-99; Jarosz, Lucy Defining Deforestation in Madagascar. In Peet, Richard and Michael Watts, eds (2005) Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, And Social Movements. London: Routledge.

8 8 considered upland people to be barbarians (mán mọi) who are far removed from the central civilization of the lowland areas. 14 Today, according to the Vietnamese Constitution, both upland and lowland populations are equal citizens of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But, media and popular culture representations of the uplands are not very different from those that prevailed before 1954, and these views continue to dominate contemporary Vietnamese discourses and policies on the uplands. Unlike those of their predecessors, however, the current discursive practices on the uplands are reinforced and scientifically justified by an appeal to the Marxist theory of universal historical development. From this theoretical perspective, cultural differences among different people are the result of the process of universal cultural development in which some groups move more quickly up the evolutionary path than others. The more advanced group is the majority Kinh, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of the nation s population (66 million), while the fifty-three ethnic minority groups number about 10.5 million people. 15 Contemporary upland people and their cultural practices (as discussed in chapter 3) are seen as remnants of earlier stages in the linear course of human evolution, and are defined as inferior to the practices of the more advanced group in the lowland areas. 16 Following this perception, the Vietnamese 14 Keyes, Charles F., 2007, Ethnicity and the Nation-States of Thailand and Vietnam, in Challenging the Limits: Indigenous Peoples of the Mekong Reigon. Prasit Leepreecha, Don McCaskill, and Kwanchewan Buadaeng, eds. Chiangmai, Thailand: Mekong Press, Pp ; and The People of Asia : Science and Politics in the Classification in Thailand, China, and Vietnam, Journal of Asian Studies, 61.4, November, 2002; Jennifer Sowerwine, 2003, Bridging the Divide: The Trade of Minority Herbs and Medicine in the Reproduction of the Vietnamese Nation. Paper presented at the conference Vietnam: Journeys of Mind, Body, and Spirit, New York, March 22 nd 24 th 2003; Pamela McElwee, 1999, Policies of Prejudice: Ethnicity and Shifting Cultivation in Vietnam. Watershed 5(2): 30-38, and McElwee 2002, "Eliminating Feudalism, Developing Socialism: Government Policies for Ethnic Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam", in Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for Minorities. C. Duncan, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press: ; See also Patricia Pelley, 1998, Barbarian and Younger Brother : The Making of Race in Post Colonial Vietnam, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol Hardy, Andrew, and Nguyễn Văn Chính, 2002, A Policy Balancing Act: the Ethnic Questions in the Highlands, Unpublished paper. In the context of China, for discussions of how the majority Han view the non-han ethnic groups of the uplands historically and in more recent times, see the lengthy volume edited by Stevan Harrell, Cultural Encounters on China s Ethnic Frontier, Seattle: University of Washington Press, General Statistic Office, Population and Housing Census, Vietnam 1999, Completed Census Results, Hanoi: NXB Thống Kê, 2001, p This theme has been widely discussed in Vietnam since the 1960s, especially by Vietnamese ethnologists and development practitioners. The prominent Vietnamese ethnologist Đặng Nghiêm Vạn, for example, in his article published in 1986 Some Basic and Urgent Problems about the Socio-economy of the Central Highland on the Beginning Process of Moving up to Socialism, in Một số vấn đề kinh tế - xã hội Tây Nguyên [Some Issues On Socioeconomic Problems in The Central Highland], Ủy Ban Khoa học xã hội Việt Nam, eds. Hanoi: Nhà Xuất Bản Khoa Học Xã hội, has argued that in order to solve the socioeconomic problems in the upland regions, it was important to find the answer for the question: In which evolutionary stages of humankind do they [upland people] live? (p. 40) In the article Some Comments on Shifting Cultivation in the Transitional Period of Moving Up to Socialism, Ethnological Review, no. 1, 1975, Vạn defined the characteristics of the shifting cultivators as follows: 1. personal production, primitive tools, low and unstable productivity; 2. destruction of natural environment, against natural law; 3. self-subsistence and the productivity are consumed locally; 4. no need of scientific knowledge instead reliance on physical labor; 5. poverty, backwardness, and unstable and nomadic life, customs and habits [that] are backward and superstitious. (p. 18) For other references on the issue, see Bế Viết Đẳng (ed.), 1996, Các dân tộc thiếu số trong sự phát triển kinh tế xã hội miền núi [Ethnic Minorities in the Socioeconomic Development in the Upland Regions]. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản chính trị quốc gia; Bế Viết Đẳng, 1980, Một số nét về quá trình xây dựng

9 9 Communist nation-state, right after attainment of independence in 1954, has implemented many policies to create necessary conditions to abolish [the] roots of economic and cultural gaps between the majority and minorities in order to help the highlands catch up with the plains, the highlands and border areas catch up with the heartlands, the ethnic minorities catch up with the Viet. 17 F igure 4. Puôi villagers were helping Xuong s grandmother building a traditional house on stilts. This traditional house, like many other traditional cultural practices of the upland people, used to be seen as remnant (tàn dư) of primitive society. Photograph by Hoang Cam, Similar to other aspects of cultural and social life, traditional practices relating to natural resource management, including shifting cultivation, traditional land rights, and traditional customary forms of resource management, were labeled by state ethnologists, party bureaucrats, quan hệ sản xuất ở miền núi. [Some Characteristics Of The Process Of Building Relation Of Production In The Uplands], Ethnological Reviews. No. 4; and Mạc Đường, 1997, Những đặc điểm kinh tế xã hội trong các vùng dân tộc thiểu số ở nước ta trước và sau 1954 [Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ethnic Minority Regions Before and After 1954], in Dân tộc học và vấn đề xác định thành phần dân tộc [Ethnology and ethnic classification]. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Khoa học xã hội. 17 Lê Duẩn Báo cáo chấp hành trung ương Đảng ở đại hội toàn quốc lần thứ 3 [The Speech to the Third Party Congress]. Nhân dân, 6 September 1960, p. 6.

10 10 and policy-makers as unscientific (không khoa học) and backward (lạc hậu). 18 Therefore, these traditional customs and practices must be replaced according to the state s policy. The official interpretation of this perception was realized in many programs. The most salient is the policy on shifting cultivation. As commonly found in Southeast Asia upland regions, most upland people in Vietnam practice an agricultural pattern of shifting cultivation or swidden, in which people go to clear forests for new fields to cultivate for several years and then leave them fallow for ten to twenty years before subjecting them to re-cultivation. As a general rule accepted by all upland communities, the fallow portions are not ownerless or available for others to use. Instead, these fallow lands are an integral part of the farming system and are needed to prevent erosion of lands and promote regeneration of forests. These fallow lands are invested in families and in some case ultimate ownership lies with a community whose leaders can reallocate them if there is a maldistribution of land when the rotational cycle comes around. Therefore, while every villager may rotate their swidden fields every ten to twenty years within prescribed territories of the village, customary rules prohibit outsiders from accessing and exploiting this resource. 19 As many ethnographic studies have shown, this pattern of agricultural practice can be sustainable in the context of relatively low population densities and in situations where local community institutions can exercise authority to prevent outsider access to a community s prescribed boundaries. 20 From the point of view of Vietnamese policy- makers, however, the fallow portions are mistakenly considered as abundant or empty lands, which are free for all to use. Shifting cultivators live in villages even when they travel to follow their rotational practices of swidden fields. They are therefore mistakenly seen as nomadic or unstable. This then is constructed as an explanation for why the shifting cultivators are major contributors to the loss of forests and the poverty of the upland people. Based on these faulty assumptions, in 1968 the Vietnamese communist government implemented the Fixed Cultivation and Settlement 18 For a full analysis of national policies of the Vietnamese nation-state toward the cultural practices of the upland people, see Salemink, Oscar, 2003, The Ethnography of Vietnam s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, , London and New York: Routedge Curzon, especially the chapter The Dying God Revised: The King of Fire and Vietnamese Ethnic Policies, pp ; Rambo, Terry et al, eds, The Challenges of Highland Development in Vietnam. East West Center, Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, October 1995; and Jamieson, N., Le Trong Cuc, and Terry Rambo, 1998, The Development Crisis in Vietnam s Mountains, East West Center Special Report, Honolulu, November. 19 Salemink, Oscar, 2000, Customary Law, Land Rights and Internal Migration, Vietnam Social Sciences. Ngô Đức Thịnh (eds), 1998, Luat Tuc Mnong: Tap Quan Phap [Customary Laws of the Mnong], Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi. 20 Hoàng Xuân Tý and Lê Trọng Cúc (eds), 1998, Kiến thức bản địa đồng bào vùng cao trong nông nghiệp và quản lý tài nguyên [Indigenous Knowledge of Highland Compatriots in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management], Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản nông nghiệp; Nguyễn Văn Thắng, 1995, The Hmong and Dzao Peoples in Vietnam: Impact of Traditional Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors on the Protection and Development of Forest Resources, in Rambo, Terry et al, eds, The Challenges of Highland Development in Vietnam. East West Center, Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, October; Vũ Đình Lợi, Trần Minh Đạo, and Vũ Thị Hồng, 1999, Sở Hữu và sử dụng đất đai ở Tây Nguyên [land ownership and use in provinces of the Central Highland], Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội. Outside of Vietnam, similar findings have been produced by researchers, such as Kunstadter, Peter, E. C. Chapman, and Sanga Sabhasri, eds, 1978, Farmers in the Forest: Economic Development and Marginal Agriculture in Northern Thailand. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii (East-West Center Book); and Conklin, H The Study of Shifting Cultivation. Current Anthropology, 2 (1): 27-6.

11 11 Program (định canh định cư) which sought to resettle these nomadic tribes in larger villages under state control and at the same time introduce them to socialist forms of production. 21 At the same time, the state has also established state forestry enterprises (lâm trường quốc doanh), state agricultural enterprises (nông trường quốc doanh) 22 and state forestry departments (lâm nghiệp) throughout the upland areas and launched a state sponsored immigration program to move farmers from the lowland areas to achieve, in the words of a Politburo Resolution, a gradual transformation in the mountains, from the economics of self-sufficiency to a complex commodity economy, ceaselessly improving the people s living standards and serving the country s socialist industrialization. 23 As a result, most forest lands, which used to be the rotational farming systems and managed by customary rules of local communities, were appropriated by state forest enterprises or classified as either national parks or reservation zones. In addition, many portions of forestlands remained in the hands of lowland immigrants, who were legally supported by the state laws to clear and appropriate empty forestlands in the upland areas. In the context of the upland regions where a variety of ethnic minority groups live, each with different traditional patterns of ecological practices and whose economy bases mainly on resources from the forests, the state policies for control of land and forests have created antagonisms between the upland local people and state management agencies. More importantly, the erosion of community management institutions and the dramatic growth in population have led to competition among local upland people themselves and especially between the indigenous population and the immigrant Kinh as the boundaries of communities and traditional rights to community s ancestral resources were abolished. The tensions were especially acute when forest resources have become high value commodities as in the case of pơ mu timber in Muang Tấc valley of Phù Yên district in the above story. The uprisings of ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands which began in February 2001 and continues to the present uniting thousands of 21 See a discussion of the ideology and practices of this program in Hill, R.D., 1985, Primitives to Peasants: The Sedentarization of the Nomads in Vietnam, Pacific Viewpoint, 26(2), p ; and Salamink, Oscar, 2000, Sedentarization and Selective Preservation among the Montagnards in the Vietnamese Central Highlands, in Jean Michaud (ed), Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the South-East Asian Massif, London: Curzon Press (pp, ). 22 According to Vũ Đình Lợi, Trần Minh Đạo, and Vũ Thị Hồng, for example, within 10 years from 1975 to 1985, the Vietnamese state has established approximately 100 state agricultural and forestry enterprises in the two provinces of Đắc Lak and Gialai-Kon Tum, which occupy over 70 percent (3, ha) of the territory of these provinces (Vũ Đình Lợi, Trần Minh Đạo, and Vũ Thị Hồng, 1999, Sở hữu và sử dụng đất đai ở Tây Nguyên [land ownership and use in provinces of the Central Highland], Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Khoa học xã hội. According to McElwee, by the 1980s, there were 420 state forestry enterprises in all of upland areas of Vietnam (McElwee, 2003, Lost World or Lost Causes : Biodiversity Conservation, Forest Management and Rural Life in Vietnam, unpublished dissertation, Yale University). 23 Nghị Quyết Bộ Chính Trị về vấn đề phát triển nông nghiệp ở miền núi, số 71/NQ-TW ngay [Resolution of the Politburo on agricultural development in the highlands, no 71/NQ-TW, 22 February 1963], in Hội đồng dân tộc của quốc hội, 2000, p Fuller analysis may be found in the following books: Mathieu Guerin, Andrew Hardy, Nguyễn Văn Chính and Stan B.-H. Tan, Des montagnards aux minorites ethniques, Quelle integration pour les hautes terres du Cambodge et du Vietnam?, Paris-Bangkok: L Harmattan-IRASEC, 2003; and Hardy, Andrew, 2003, Red hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

12 12 people to request for their ancestral lands from state forestry enterprises and the immigrant Kinh people who moved to live in the area after the unification of the state in 1975 is another example. 24 In recent years, in response to the failure of state central management institutions and following environmental agreements signed between the Vietnamese government and international management agencies, the state has implemented new land and forest laws and regulations to decentralize resource use and management and empower local communities to manage forests. 25 In this process, the new Land Law of 1993 allows allocating agricultural and forestry land rights to individual households for both migrant Kinh and indigenous people for a period of 20 years. At the same time, individual households have been entitled certain portions of forestry lands, out of forests classified as protected areas, through usufruct certificates (sổ đỏ or red book) for a period of 50 years to develop industrial plants. 26 My study demonstrates that these new land and forest management laws are not appropriate to solving the dilemmas of sustainable management of resources given the context of intensifying conflicts over resource access and control that occur in a politicized environment in which cultural stereotypes and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity persist. The principal weakness of the new law lies in its predication on the belief that the customary pattern of communal ownership over land and other resources, which was common among the upland populations, is irrational and a mere vestige of a backward and primitive way of life. The 1993 Land Law affirms that only individual households have rights for usufruct certificates, while local communities (clans, villages, and communes) are not considered to be economic units. Therefore, clans, villages, and communities are not given rights to manage and own agricultural and forestry lands. At the community level, by tying agricultural and forest lands to individual households for long term rights, the new law contributes to the erasure of the customary pattern of periodic reallocation of community s resources as practiced in their traditional common pool resource regimes. In a context where all agricultural and forest lands of the community have already been allocated, newly married couples and their children, especially those whose wives or husbands come from other villages, do not have lands to cultivate or they have to share limited portions of entitled lands with parents. The law, in practice, leads to the unequal distribution of resources within and between communities. This, in turn, often generates 24 See more regarding the nature of the conflicts in the Central Highland in Independent WriteNet Researcher, 2002, Vietnam: Indigenous Minorities Groups in the Central Highlands, UNHCR, Center for Documentation and Research at and Salemink, Oscar. Customary Law, Land Rights and Internal Migration, in Vietnam Social Sciences, Vol. 2 (No. 76), P For a succinct summary of the history of land and forest policies in the post colonial context of Vietnam, see Vương Xuân Tình, 2001, Changing Land Policies and its Impact on Land Tenure of Ethnic Minorities in Vietnam, Working paper, Honolulu: East West Center. 26 For a fuller discussion of new forestry policies implemented in the upland of Vietnam in the past few years, see Fox, Jefferson and Deanna Donovan: Social Forestry and Institutional Changes in Upland Development: Lessons from Asia. In Development Trends in Vietnam s Northern Mountain Region. Vol. 2: Case Studies and Lessons from Asia. Deanna Donovan, et al. eds. Hanoi: National Political publishing House for the East-West Center and the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Vietnam National University.

13 13 conflicts not only among members within a family but also between those villagers who do not have to share their lands with their children and those who must. In addition, the insistence of the law on individual household allocations led to a situation of an artificial (i.e., contrived) shortage of lands. Thus, many young villagers are forced to cut down non-timber trees in protected forests owned by state management agencies to cultivate or to seek for timber to sell to make a living. At the watershed level, giving individual households absolute rights over resources while erasing common pool property regimes has created other problems. As briefly mentioned above, in the customary pattern, resources within a community s territory were available for all members of the community to use and these resources could not be sold to outsiders. Under these customary principles of rights of usufruct, and because traditional uplanders lack the concept of individual or private ownership, many individual upland households were eager to sell their lands to outsiders, especially migrant lowlanders and other well-off families. To earn their living, many new landless people have had to find new lands in the forests, which are currently either allocated to other individual villagers or owned by state forestry enterprises. In Muang Tấc valley, for example, this situation leads to many conflicts not only between local people and state management agencies but also between families who own allocated forestry lands and those who are landless. Political Ecology and Social Conflicts over Resources This dissertation focuses on the study of social conflicts over resource access and control from political ecology perspective. Political ecology, according to Peet and Watts (1996), has developed as a field of inquiry within the social sciences since the 1970s as a combination of the concerns and approaches of political economy and cultural ecology. Political economy focuses on the social relations of production operating under the uneven patterns of development and capital accumulation that provides the realms of possibility and constraint for managing environmental resources (Rebecca 2000: 38). In response to cultural ecology, political ecology came from a realization that the traditional cultural ecology approach, which primarily focuses on adaptation and homeostasis of the culture of the local people to their surrounding environment, needs to be reconsidered (Moore 1996, Peet and Watts 1996). The cultural ecology approach focusing on the interaction of human with their surrounding natural environments such as that of the seminal work Pig for the Ancestors developed by Roy Rappaport (1984), under this new perspective, was insufficient because it ignores the interaction of the two. By ignoring the non-local political and economic factors in natural resource use and management, this earlier approach, therefore, was criticized for its tendency to support the conventional explanations, which see overpopulation, ignorance and irrationality of the local people as the main cause of recent worldwide environmental degradation. In the words of Peet and Watts (1996), this new political ecology was not inspired by the isolated and harmonious rural communities studied by Rappaport but by peasant and agrarian societies in the throes of complex forms of capitalist transition. Market integration, commercialization, and the dislocation of customary forms of resource management- rather than adaptation and homeostasis became the lodestones of critical alternative to the older cultural or human ecology (Peet and Watts, 1996: 5).

14 14 One of the earliest works using political ecology approach which starts looking at the degradation of natural resources by placing the interactive relationship between human and the environment in regional and global historical, political and economic context are Piers Blaikie s The Political Ecology of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985) and Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield s seminal Land Degradation and Society (1987). Starting from the Marxist notion of political economy of social relations of production and wider economic systems, the authors offer a chains of explanation for land degradation in the Third World countries that stresses the interaction of different socioeconomic, environment and political factors affecting land use and management. The principle of this chains of explanation, they maintain: starts with the land managers and their direct relations to the land Then the next link concerns their relations with each other land users, and groups in the wider society who affect them in any way, which in turn determines land management. The state and the world economy constitute the last links in the chain (1987:27). Land degradation, accordingly, is viewed not as the result of population growth, irrational agricultural practices, and ignorance of the local people as conventional explanation, especially the neo-malthusian explanation of environmental degradation, tends to accentuate. Rather, it is the production of multi-social and political economic constraints on land managers who then transmit their social and economic pressures on the environment. Therefore, what we need in studying ecological degradation, according to these authors, is an approach that combines the concerns of ecology and broadly defined political economy so that it could better encompass the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself (pp.17). In the decade following the publication of Baikie and Brookfield s seminal works, a number of works using the political ecology approach were published. These later works have not only encompassed land degradation and more generally environment in consideration but also, as Peet and Watts put it, extended the frontiers of political ecology and have elaborated and developed the important work of Blaikie, Brookfield and others (pp.9). In his paper published in , Bryant, based on the idea developed by Baikie and Brookfield, suggests a research agenda, identifying three areas of inquiry in a framework to study ecological changes. Ecological changes, Bryant contends, need to link to three main socioeconomic and political forces: the contextual sources, questions of access and control, and the political ramifications. While the first inquiry area, the contextual sources, of environmental degradation is identified as state policies, interstate relations, and global capitalism, the second element of the framework addresses conflicts over access and control over resources of the socially disadvantaged groups in struggles for environmental foundations for their livelihood. The third inquiry area of Bryant s framework, namely political ramification, goes into the question of how environmental changes affect the socio-economic and political relationships among social actors, which in turn generates conflicts over nature. In short, in his words, [T]hird-world political ecology is understood as inclusive, premised on the view that it must be sensitive to the interplay of diverse socio-political forces, and the relationship of those forces to environmental change (p.14). 27 The concept presented in the paper has been further developed and published in a book named Third World Political Ecology. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

15 15 Among dynamic socio-political forces contributing to the process of ecological degradation as laid out in Bryant s research agenda, much research in this intellectual trend remains within the contextual sources, emphasizing the determining influences of the nation state and its policies. The nation state, both the colonial and postcolonial regimes, from this perspective, not only shapes and determines the interactions between the local people and their natural environment but also be the instigator of ecological degradation (Bryant 1997, Peluso 1995). In the words of Guha (1995: 13), the influence of the nation-state over the environment can be seen through its various policies of developing and implementing technologies that have dramatically altered the physical environment, irrigation works and dam construction, creating a transport and communications network that, in aiding the process of commodification, has greatly increased the special scale of resource flows (Guha, 1995:13). While many studies focus on the ecological destruction of the nation-state and its policies as stated by Guha, other political ecologists focus on Bryant s second inquiry, examining how political processes of change in control and access of resources or property rights are defined, negotiated, and contested within the political arenas of the household, the work place, and the state (Peet and Watts 1996: 8-9). At the household management level, a number of studies have focused on the ecological consequences of domestic struggles for access and control over resources within the domestic sphere. Suryanata and Schroeder s Gender and Class Power in Agroforestry System, in their case study of agroforestry systems in Gambia and Indonesia, for example, show how the agroforestry system introduced by the state, which is assumed to stabilize the environment through intercropping of trees for commoditization, leads to shifting patterns of resource access and control among household levels. In Gambia, gender conflicts between husbands and wives has grown out of multiple tenure claims to patrilineal land which intensified with the commoditization of fruits trees. In the Indonesia case, the tree boom in upland Java was the cause of inter-class tenure conflict as commercialization polarized the village peasantry (Suryanata and Schroeder, 1996: 201). At other levels of analysis, the community management, many researchers take interest in examining underlying causes of ecological degradation by linking tensions between the local people seeking for their everyday livelihood and the nation state and its agencies who involved a switch from species and labor control to territorial control (Peluso 1995: 208) in the political process of internal territorialization. In addition, they also examine the dynamic relationships not simply only between the nation state and the peasants but among different state agents, parties and rural classes in the struggle over nature. In the context of South Asia, the brilliant analysis of the interrelation between ecological change and peasant-state struggle for access and control over resources is Guha s Unquiet Wood (1989). In the context of Southeast Asia, studies that examine in detail this theme are Bryant s The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma (1997) and Peluso s Rich Forest Poor People (1992). Like Guha s study, both Peluso and Bryant link the historiography of the criminalization of local people s customary rights of forest access and control with everyday peasant resistance to show how the contestation between Indonesia and Burmese peasants with Burmese and Indonesian colonial and post colonial states respectively in the struggle for access to natural resources results in ecological consequences See also Peluso s recent comparative study on the same issue in her Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, in The Journal of Asian Studies, August 2001.

16 16 Staying apart from the political ecology tradition, which highlights the materialist approach to study human-nature relation as briefly mentioned above, Escobar (1996, 1999) developed his own political ecology analytical framework, which he terms post-structural political ecology or anti-essentialist political ecology. Drawing directly on poststructuralist philosophy of discursive formation of knowledge and social reality, Escobar argues that nature is socially and culturally constructed. From this perspective, then, culture and especially discourse are seen as active agents to produce nature and frame knowledge and related conflicts associated with nature (Peet and Watts 1996: 262). Escobar s post-structural ecology approach, which puts emphasis on discursive formation of social reality in general and the nature regimes in particular, have contributed rich insights to the tradition of political ecology approach in that it offers an understanding of how different cultures and ideologies shape and create knowledge and meaning about nature in ways to meet different social actor s own interests. In the third world setting, Escobar s idea of discursive formation is especially important for its providing, as Stonic once (1999) notes, a constructivist examinations of the role of science in environmental campaigns/debates and the role of discourse in framing environmental conflicts related to development (cited by Rebecca 2000: 48). The struggle for access and control over natural resources, therefore, is not only the struggle in the domain of production, but also of cultural meanings among various social actors. In Vietnam, the discourse of shifting cultivation in both colonial and postcolonial regimes, for example, is one of manifestations of Escobar s idea of the discursive formation of nature, which in turn generates social conflicts between the shifting cultivators and the nation state authorities over the meaning of nature. Through the discourse, traditional agricultural practices of the upland people are defined as irrational and destructive by the nation state and its academic allies, who produce their own rationality due to their possessing power over these people. This rationality, as will be illustrated in the following chapters, nevertheless, is always contested by the peasants, who see the relations with their surrounding nature from their own cultural values. Despite this contribution, I share with Peet and Watts (1996) and Stonic (1999) their criticism of Escobar s constructivist position toward nature and social conflicts associated with it. According to these authors, the concept of social construction of nature overestimates the transformative powers of human practice while underestimating the significance of non-manipulable nature (Peet and Watts 1996: 262). This perspective, in other words, diminishes the concern for material issues of social relation of production, which, I believe, must be the foundation of the discursive formation among different actors in their struggles to control and access over natural regimes as many political ecologists have pointed out. In their recent book published in 1996, Peet and Watts suggest an analytical framework of combining of post-structuralist s perspective of cultural construction of nature proposed by Escobar and the tradition of political ecology approach, which highlights discourse and environmental practices as grounded in the social relations of production and their attendant struggles (263). In other words, the framework to study the problem of nature, in their view, should focus on and link these two different issues simultaneously: the struggles of different social actors over access to productive resources at a particular place on the one hand, and symbolic contestation among these different actors that in turn generates the former on the other (See also this analytical approach in Moore 1996, and Jarosz 1996). Thus, the social conflicts between Thái people and the state authorities under

17 17 discussion, under Peet and Watts s analytical framework, is not only the conflicts about meanings between two different actors at the ideological level as Escobar tend to expect, but also the conflicts associated with material issues: conflicts between the local people who go into forests for their everyday livelihood and Vietnamese powerful authorities who find ways to control the resource of the local people and conflicts among different social classes at the community level for their own material interests as well. In this dissertation, I have adopted a political ecological approach in emphasizing the interrogation of social conflicts over resource use and management in Muang Tấc valley. I have done so with the aim of examining the sociopolitical motivation underlying the degrading and destroying activities of different social actors including poor farmers like Xưởng, state forestry officials, and well-off traders from lowland areas in the specific historical contexts of local institutional changes of access and control over land and forest resources in particular and processes of regional and national political economic changes in general. Methodology and Data Sources To begin, it is worth telling my own story about how I came to be interested in doing research on the relationship between social conflicts over resource use, changes in ownership and management regimes, and processes of ecological change, and why I chose Muang Tấc valley as a field site. This is important because it not only provides background on how I generated the principal research questions but also to show how and why I chose certain perspectives to study this social phenomena. My story begins in 1999 when I was a team member for a research project conducted by the Institute of Folk Cultural Studies (now the Institute of Cultural Studies). This study focused on the role of the customary laws of the indigenous people in the Central Highlands in resource management; it was done with the financial support of the Ford Foundation in Hanoi. 29 I was assigned to stay in Buôn Trinh, an Ê Đê (known in Western literature as Rhade) village about 30 kilometers from the center of Đắc Lăk province. One afternoon, while interviewing villagers to have an understanding about customary patterns of forest and land management, I witnessed the reactions of the villagers to a Vietnamese television program. The program was about an ethnic minority man, dressed in traditional Ê Đê costume, who was using an axe to cut trees for his swidden fields. The purpose of the program was to popularize national programs on sustainable use of forest resources throughout the upland regions. The reporter for the program commented that the ongoing forest destruction in the upland Vietnam was a result of shifting cultivation among ethnic minorities in the uplands. Therefore, ethnic minorities had to give up their 29 With Ford Foundation support, this research project was carried out in two years ( ). Following this, in November 1999, an international conference was held in Buôn Mê Thuật (Đắc Lăk province of the Central Highlands) to discuss the role of customary law in the contemporary uplands of Vietnam. Approximately 500 participants, including local villagers from the Central Highlands, academics from across Vietnam, and international scholars were invited to participate. At the conference, I presented a paper based on my field research in among the Ê Đê in Tring Village, Krong Buk district, entitled Properties Ownership in Customary Laws of the Ede People in Vietnam [Tài sản và sở hữu tài sản trong luật tục Ê Đê]. Proceedings of the conference were selected and published in Ngô Đức Thịnh and Phan Đăng Nhật (eds), 1999, Luât tuc và phát triên nông thôn hiên nay ở Viêt Nam: kỷ yếu hội thảo khoa học [Customary Laws and Rural Development in Contemporary Vietnam: conference proceedings]. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội.