by Dang Anh-Minh Nguyen

Join us Friday, Sept 26^th, 2025, 5:00 – 6:00pm in the Ethnography Lab Boardroom

Land ownership remains a significant lacuna in the historical scholarship on ethnic minorities in Vietnam. As a historian, I began investigating this subject through archival research; however, the available records were primarily produced by French administrators, explorers, and missionaries—external actors who engaged with the Central Highlands for diverse and, at times, conflicting purposes. Consequently, documentation on land tenure and property among highland communities is frequently incomplete, inconsistent, or shaped by colonial biases. Furthermore, highland groups such as the Bahnar and the Jrai did not historically possess their own writing systems. The transcription of their languages was only developed through the efforts of French missionaries in the 1850s. To address the limitations of colonial archives, I undertook long-term fieldwork, including the study of local languages, to better understand the terminology and conceptions of land, property, and ownership. This approach enabled me to engage with indigenous epistemologies and recover historical perspectives from within the communities themselves. The talk, “Highlanders’ Land Ownership: From Archives to Fieldwork,” reflects on the methodological challenges and possibilities of integrating archival and ethnographic approaches in the study of land politics and historical memory in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.

Dang Anh-Minh Nguyen is a postdoctoral fellow and course instructor in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Toronto, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in History and Religious Anthropology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris Sciences Lettres (PSL), France, in 2021. Her research explores land ownership, migration, and the religious politics of ethnic minorities in Vietnam’s Central and Central Highlands regions, with a particular focus on the Bahnar and Jrai communities. Her work combines extensive archival research, long-term fieldwork, and the use of sources in the languages of these communities.