Modern states dominate the lives of minorities to an extent never experienced before. As the lines between respective ethnicities blur under pressures to change and assimilate into the mainstream, the question of how to preserve cultural distinctions arises. This may lead less to the preservation of identity than its reconstruction under the constraints of powerful central governments unschooled in the finer points of ethnology. In Vietnam, the dominant ethnic group, the Kinh, have long sought to transform and absorb cultures and peoples perceived as backward.
If self-identity among tribal peoples is linked less to national ideology than the persistence of traditions and beliefs, groups like the Mieu, the subject of this book, have much to fear. Architects of the nation's main institutions, the Kinh, stern and implacable in matters of governance, brook little dissent. For Communist countries in particular, the freedoms and individualism possible with social and ethnic plurality within porous borders, is untenable. In the modern world we must all be accounted for. Those outside the circle of civilization must be brought in.
Indigenous minorities in Vietnam have had to endure policies promulgated not only by successive courts of the Le, Mac, Trinh and Nguyen dynasties, as well as a period of French colonial rule, but the traumas and displacement of modern warfare, and the about-turn of a counter-traditionalist Communist regime resorting to capitalist solutions for state management.