“Up” and “Down”. “Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands

The 2009 publication of J. Scott’s epoch-making book, The Art of Not Being Governed. An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia initiated a long-standing debate about the ethnohistory of the Southeast-Asian Highlands (“Zomia”) and, more generally, about lowland-highland relationships, “nativeness”, state evasion, self-government, and “secondary primitivism”. This article joins the discourse based on one concrete ethnographic example, the Bru, a Mon-Khmer speaking dry-rice cultivator hill tribe in the Central Vietnamese Highlands. Using detailed ethnographic and ethno-historic data, it argues that the Bru are, if not “native”, at least the oldest known inhabitants of the area inhabited by them — a fact that does not contradict Scott’s deep insight concerning their state evasion