Viewing articles tagged 'peoples'

The Rhade (Êđê) The Rhade are the people of the Darlac plateau, the country around Buôn Ma Thuột. They speak a Chamic language, related to Cham and more distantly to Malay; they trace descent through women; and they gave the Dega movement many of its leaders, from Y Bham Enuol onward. This is one of a series of pages on the peoples of the highlands. Reference 15 views Read More The Jarai The Jarai are, on Vietnam’s census counts, the largest of the Central Highlands peoples: the people of the Pleiku plateau and the Ayun valley, and across the border in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri. Like the Rhade they speak a Chamic language and reckon descent through women. Their ritual masters of fire and water were known to the kings of Cambodia, an... Reference 14 views Read More The Bahnar The Bahnar live around Kon Tum and east of Pleiku, and in the mountains running down toward the coast of Bình Định. They speak a Mon-Khmer language, not a Chamic one; they do not have the matrilineal clans of their Jarai and Rhade neighbors; and their villages are marked by the communal house with its high, sweeping roof. Kon Tum’s Catholic chur... Reference 11 views Read More The Sedang (Xơ Đăng) The Sedang live in the mountains north of Kon Tum and across into Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi. They speak a North Bahnaric language, and gave their name to the short-lived “Kingdom of the Sedang” that a French adventurer proclaimed in 1888. They strongly resisted French rule. Reference 15 views Read More The Mnong (Bunong) The Mnong live on both sides of the border: in Đắk Nông and southern Đắk Lắk in Vietnam, and in Mondulkiri in Cambodia, where they call themselves Bunong and are the largest of the province’s indigenous peoples. They are the people of Condominas’s We Have Eaten the Forest, of the elephant hunters of Bản Đôn, and of N’Trang Lơng’s resistance of m... Reference 14 views Read More The Stieng (Xtiêng) The Stieng live at the south-western edge of the highlands, where the plateau falls toward the plains north of Saigon, in today’s Bình Phước and across the border in Cambodia. Their red soils were taken for French rubber plantations, and they rose against both French and Vietnamese settlement repeatedly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reference 11 views Read More The Koho, Maa, Churu and Raglai The southern end of the highlands, from the Lang Biang plateau around Đà Lạt down toward the coast, is the country of four peoples: the Koho and the Maa, who speak Mon-Khmer languages, and the Churu and Raglai, who speak Chamic languages and have the closest ties of any highlanders to the old kingdom of Champa. This page brings them together unt... Reference 13 views Read More Jars, rice wine and the buffalo feast In the old highland villages wealth was counted in buffaloes, gongs and jars — among the Bahnar, a 1966 handbook says, it was “usually measured” in exactly those three. The jars held the rice wine that every rite was drunk from, through long bamboo straws; the buffaloes were given to the spirits at the great feasts. Both were money, law and reli... Explainer 20 views Read More Customary law and the village court Before any state reached the highlands, our villages had law: rules on land, marriage, debt and injury, judged by the headman and elders and enforced by fines paid in buffaloes, jars and gongs. The French wrote some of it down and built courts on it; the Saigon government set out to replace it and then, after the 1964 revolt and the highland lea... Explainer 11 views Read More The smaller peoples of the highlands Beyond the large peoples — Rhade, Jarai, Bahnar, Sedang, Mnong, Koho — the highlands are home to many smaller peoples, some of only a few tens of thousands, whose names rarely appear in the record. This page gathers what the sources say about ten of them, so that each at least has a place in our library. Reference 8 views Read More Instruments beyond the gongs The gongs are the voice of the highlands, but they are not the only one. Our peoples made music from bamboo, gourds, stone and a single string: xylophones, mouth organs, tube zithers, one-string fiddles, jaw harps and panpipes. Most were recorded by outsiders in the 1950s and 1960s, and their names survive in those recordings. Explainer 10 views Read More Hunting, the crossbow and the forest Every highland household farmed, and hunting was part of most men’s lives, with the crossbow as its mark; among the Bru, boys began to learn it at five or six. The forest gave meat, fish, fruit, medicine and poison, and our peoples knew it the way farmers know a field. Explainer 13 views Read More Lower Sesan 2: the dam downstream The Sesan and the Srepok carry water from our highlands into Cambodia, where the same peoples live on both banks. In 2017 the gates closed on Lower Sesan 2, a dam just below the rivers’ meeting in Stung Treng. It flooded some 30,000 hectares and displaced nearly 5,000 people, mostly Indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities — among them Bun... Explainer 9 views Read More