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Wrestling with spirits 11

Wrestling with Spirits, Engaging with the State:

Animism and settlement policy among the Katu in contemporary Vietnam

Nikolas rhem, Uppsala University

This chapter presents a series of stories which illustrate how the inhabitants of two

Katu communities in the Central Annamite Mountains of Vietnam attempt to

negotiate their relationship with the spirits of the local landscape and the omnipresent

state authorities. In particular, the paper traces the fates of two village elders (takah

tahal), Alang Jrreng of Aurr village and Bling Chen of Dvil village; it explores

how they, as influential representatives of their respective communities, try to guide

their communities through the spirit-animated landscape while, at the same time, not

diverging too far from the governments settlement policy. This is no easy task: on the

one hand, villagers/they have to comply with the governments, often strict, land use

regulations; on the other, they must abide by age-old customary/religious rules

pertaining to the landscape, defining where people can and cannot settle, cultivate

and/or hunt traditional proscriptions ultimately determined by forest spirits, abhuy.

Thus, the two elders and their communities are caught between two

essentially/fundamentally different paradigms/modes of relating to the landscape

that of the state (nh nc) and that of the spirits (abhuy).1

The stories unfold in the forested uplands forming the border zone between the two

provinces of Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue in Central Vietnam at a time of

dramatic social and economic change in the region. The two villages figuring in the

stories, AUr and Dvil, are located in the northernmost portion of what is today

Avung commune in Tay Giang district of Quang Nam province.

The Katu are shifting cultivators, upland rice being the staple. They are also skilful

hunters and fishermen although the yields from the forest have declined sharply over

the past decades due to the rapid policy driven -- transformation of the Central

Annamite landscape. The belief in a plethora of nature spirits still holds sway over

Katu villagers, particularly the older generations of men and women. The spirits

1 Since all the interviews with Katu interlocutors were carried out in Vietnamese I have sometimes

retained some of the Vietnamese words and expressions they used. To differentiate betweenVietnamese and Katu words I will thus use italics in brackets for Vietnamese and italics without

brackets for Katu.

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include Sky, Earth and Hill spirits as well as numerous other local and species bound

spirits in the landscape such as water spirits and the spirits of certain trees, stones and

strangely figured rocks and boulders. [Sacrifice, taboos, etc.. a few lines?]

*

Through their stories about settlement movements, spirits, ominous dreams and death,

we are introduced to a highly complex view of the inter-relatedness of the people (i.e.

the village), the spirits and what we might term the landscape or simply

nature. The latter two concepts, however, are intriguingly interlinked; in many ways

the emic concept of landscape spirit (abuy) can be regarded as corresponding to their

concept of certain features of the landscapes nature. This is so since certain aspects

of their nature is not objectified, in a western, scientific, sense but instead regarded

as imbued with agency.,

The chapter demonstrates how concerns about the landscape spirits and commitment

to state policies combine to influence settlement movements and relocations. Bling

Chen, the elder of Dvil, meticulously attempts to follow his tutelary hill spirit,

Pblow, whereas his brother-in-law, elder Jrreng of Aurr in his attempt to comply

with the demands of the state strays from the unwritten laws of the landscape taught

to him by his father. In the case of elder Chen, the relationship between village and

tutelary spirit is a balanced and reciprocal one the spirits help the villagers but also

demand their due. Elder Jrreng, by contrast, challenges the spirits and chooses to

settle on a place that until then had been taboo. Later, he breaks more

ecological/environmental taboos pertaining to that place. Eventually, this

inconformity with the traditional ethics triggers a sequence of ominous events that

finally, in 2010, prompts Aurr village to move away from its wrong location to

another location which is deemed acceptable from the standpoint of the landscape

spirits.

A fundamental theme that runs through the narratives is the inter-twining of belief and

behaviour, the experiential conviction of the presence and power of landscape spirits,

and their influence over mundane, pragmatic decisions decisions about where to

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settle, cultivate, fish and hunt, if and when to move..; in short decisions central to life

and survival in the local landscape. The two interlinked stories illustrate a

convergence between morality and ecology which appears to be fundamental to

Katu thought, where moral rules and ecological observance always walking hand inhand. Of course, the Katu are not alone to display this eco-moral cosmology, it is

present among many Southeast Asian peoples, but not always emphasised by

ethnographers. What makes this paper interesting, hopefully, is that it shows that

despite their integration into the Vietnamese nation state, and their submission to the

rules dictated by ethnic minority policies, in this particular setting, have not

asphyxiated the local belief systems despite it being essentially incompatible with

state policies. The stories show the great efforts exerted by the two protagonist

communities to navigate between two different paradigms that of the landscape

spirits, and that of state policy. But the narratives allows us to sense the contours of an

indigenous ecology, an animistic understanding of the living dynamics of the

landscape. As such, the balance that needs to be achieved in the dealings with the

landscape spirits is both representative of a cultural/moral attitude, but equally

reflective of the coded knowledge of an ecological understanding of the local

landscapes.

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