Patrick Slack

Grant Type

Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Institutional Affiliation

McGill U.

Grant number

Gr. 10349

Approve Date

April 13, 2022

Project Title

Slack, Patrick (McGill U.) "Negotiated Frontier Territorialities and Agencies: A Longitudinal Study Comparing Two Ethnic Minority Rural Districts in Northern Vietnam."

PATRICK SLACK, then a graduate student at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Negotiated Frontier Territorialities and Agencies: A Longitudinal Study Comparing Two Ethnic Minority Rural Districts in Northern Vietnam,” supervised by Dr. Sarah Turner. This archival and ethnographic study explores how borderland ethnic minority farmers in upland northern Vietnam have navigated semi-subsistence livelihoods amidst territorialization schemes over the past century, catalyzed by French colonial consolidation of power. Colonial authorities, and Vietnamese governments following independence, have attempted to incorporate ethnic minority farmers, natural resources, and commodities (namely opium and black cardamom) at the cultural, economic, and geographic margins into centralized state-making projects. This study investigates 125 years of territorialization in the country’s northern borderlands (1897-present), embedded with political, economic, and environmental objectives for integrating these borderlands, ethnic minorities, and borderlander livelihoods. While facing tremendous pressure to embrace unilateral frontier agrarian and market interventions, ethnic minority Mien, Hmong, and Hani farmers have used prudent agency, selectively engaging with schemes that seem helpful, while rejecting or modifying others they deem precarious. Informed by archival files and an emphasis on long-term ethnography with including oral histories and semi-structured interviews, this longitudinal study examines how borderland ethnic minority famers have adapted, adopted, or resisted semi-subsistence livelihoods in two neighboring districts, in two neighboring provinces. This comparison will assess diverging impacts of nested jurisdictional policies amidst numerous political, economic, and environmental upheavals, plus state actors and agencies implementing frontier interventions.

Publications

Slack, Patrick, et al. (2024) Forest Tales? Unravelling Divergent Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) Maps and State Narratives in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands. Land, 13(1), 71 Slack, Patrick, et al. (2023) Ethnic minority livelihoods contesting state visions of ‘ideal farmers’ in Vietnam’s northern borderlands. Journal of Political Ecology, 30(1), 448-470