Salemink & Stokhof 2009 State classification and its discontents - Bawean ethnic identity in Vietnam...

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m a l t e s t o k h o f a n d o s c a r s a l e m i n k

State Classification and Its Discontents:The Struggle Over Bawean Ethnic Identityin Vietnam

Hidir was sitting outside the mosque in the center of H7 Chí MinhCity looking at the Friday afternoon traffic, discussing his recent

request for Vietnamese citizenship.1 Smoke drifted past, rising up from thehalal chicken grilled behind him in the food stalls erected against themosque’s gate and enveloping a car with diplomatic number plates as itpulled away from the curb into a swarm of motorcycles. Usually the Indone-sian consul general stays for lunch after the Friday afternoon prayer; accord-ing to Hidir he sometimes invites one of the Muslims living around themosque to join him for a meal because he feels connected to these peoplewho share his religion and his country of origin. But not today. Hidir pointedat the car with his head and offered the following comment:

He was no help to us at all when we applied for Indonesian citizenship.We told him, “In Vietnam we are classified as aliens but no foreign countryaccepts us as citizens. We cannot hold land titles or Vietnamese identitypapers. We have not been accepted in universities, we have never beenaccepted for governmental jobs, and we have not been able to leave thecountry legally. Still, even today some of us have actively chosen not to reg-ister with the police or apply for Vietnamese citizenship. We want to askyou to help us become Indonesian citizens again.” But he was no help tous, that one.2

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 4, Issue 2, pps. 154–195. ISSN 1559-372x, electronic ISSN 1559-3738. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct allrequests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University ofCalifornia Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.DOI: 10.1525/vs.2009.4.2.154

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Hidir’s comment hints at some of the main issues presented in this article—ethnic labels and ethnic classification, citizenship, religious identity, andhow people have tried to find a way to deal with these labels.

In this article we present the Bawean, a small Sunni Muslim diasporacommunity in Vietnam belonging to the Austronesian language group.3 Lit-tle is known about this group, currently numbering some two thousand peo-ple in postcolonial, postrevolutionary, and security-conscious Vietnam.From the second half of the nineteenth century onward a community ofpeople who self-identified as Bawean have lived as stateless citizens, largelybelow the Vietnamese state’s radar screen—right in the middle of SàiGòn/H7 Chí Minh City.

In his 2002 Association of Asian Studies presidential address, CharlesKeyes noted that “ethnic classification has been as an instrument of power . . .by modern states to fit in the ‘motley crowds’ located on their frontiers.”4

The Bawean people present us with a case study of these “motley crowds.”Yet they do not live on geographic frontiers—they live in the central busi-ness district of the country’s economic hub and have done so for the past onehundred and fifty years. Rather, they exist on the margins of formal classifi-cation, and in many cases they do so willingly.

In 2001, however, sixty-five elderly men and women within this groupdecided to break with this concealed existence and applied for Vietnamesecitizenship, knowing that they would have to fit into the existing classifica-tory grid. In presenting this case we argue that official ethnic classification asan instrument of power may be—in the words of James Scott—“an author-itative tune,” but it is a tune that is not always listened to.5 People can notonly successfully evade such classification, they can also use it as an instru-ment of power for their own benefit.

We suggest that over the past decade Vietnamese governmental institu-tions have become less restrictive with Muslim communities in Vietnam.Some scholars have even called the Vietnamese state’s relations with itsminorities relatively enlightened compared to global standards.6 This isremarkable if we note that in East and Southeast Asia, relations betweenMuslim majorities and non-Muslim minorities (Indonesia, Malaysia) andbetween Muslim minorities and non-Muslim majorities (the Philippines,Thailand, China, Burma) are under stress and often result in stricter

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governmental control or even violent conflict, such as in Pattani, southernThailand.7 In Vietnam, governmental institutions do not actively set out tocontrol Muslim communities by classifying them into the grid of fifty-fourofficially recognized ethnic identities. In the Bawean case, this tolerancealmost bordered on indifference, but when state agents were confrontedwith a Bawean request for citizenship, for which Vietnamese law seemed tohave no provision, they were serviceable, helpful, and even amiable. Ratherthan presenting barriers to citizenship, these officials helped the Bawean to“classify back,” as it were.

Who Are the Bawean? An Abbreviated Ethnohistory

This article presents a case study based on various periods of field researchfrom 2000 to 2005. But before presenting this research, we will provide somehistoric background on the Bawean. The people we call “Bawean” aredescendants of people who migrated from Bawean Island north of Madurain the Java Sea. These islanders came to Indochina from the NetherlandsEast Indies as early as the nineteenth century, and they now form an Aus-tronesian Sunni Muslim diaspora community in Vietnam. According totheir stories, their migration was firstly prompted by socioeconomic motiva-tions: they wished to escape the repressive Dutch colonial indentured laborsystem.8 Secondly, migration was a structural-cultural element of Baweanculture, known as merantau [travel, migration].9 Thirdly, their migration wasindirectly the result of their religious conviction. Muslim people who couldafford it would travel to Mecca as pilgrims. On the way to Mecca and back,their ships would cast anchor in Singapore. Some individuals would stay on,either to make some money before continuing on the pilgrimage or for theirreturn home afterward. Some travelled along the Mekong River, working forChinese businessmen, and tried to find a job in Sài Gòn once they arrived.During the colonial period, Bawean people were attracted by stories aboutlife in Indochina, where the French colonial administration reportedly wel-comed nonlocals. As a result, some Bawean people travelled from what istoday Singapore’s harbor to Sài Gòn, either over sea, by river, or over land.

According to Bawean informants, around 1850 some three hundred menhad settled on the banks of a small branch of the Sài Gòn River.10 The newlyarrived Bawean migrants constructed their first houses from wood, with

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thatched roofs. But little else is known about their life prior to and duringthe colonial period in Indochina. Informants recall their parents tellingthem that the French officials actively provided them with a variety of jobs,and that their people worked as security guards, customs officials, and con-struction workers.11 From documents still in their possession we can con-clude that upon their arrival in Sài Gòn, the French government officiallylabelled them with the cover term “Malais”—a label that requires someinterpretation.

Certain branches of the colonial administration used cover terms tostructure and control the colonial society. However, the French colonial gov-ernment had such trouble classifying people that contemporary authorsalready complained about these inaccuracies. The ethnic cover term“Malais,” for example, was intended for people from the “Malay world”—the areas now known as Indonesia and Malaysia. As an ethnonym it did notdenote or circumscribe national or citizenship status. Confusingly enough,in many cases local officials classified people from other areas as Malais aswell. The French philologist, Antoine Cabaton, wrote that often state offi-cials made no distinction between Malais and Cham.12 Marcel Ner, anethnographer affiliated with the École française d’Extrême-Orient, com-plained that it was difficult to get a precise count of the number of alienMuslims living in Indochina because the statistics and regulations used bythe colonial administration often mixed them up with Arabs and the groupsthat were classified as “Indien,” which also contained Hindus.

This confusing, changeable, and often inaccurate classification and theallocation of individuals within certain ethnic categories were formalized incolonial administrative law. Different groups or congregations of immigrantsin Indochina had to fit into one of four categories: (1) Chinese: people fromCanton, Foukien, Tchiou-Tchao, Hakas, or Hainam, (2) Indians: both Mus-lims and Hindu-Buddhists, (3) Malais, Javanese, and Arabs, or (4) otherforeign Asians.13 These categories grouped people of different language fam-ilies, geographic origins, and religious affiliations together indiscriminately.They were based only partially on the geographical area of origin, such as isthe case with the first two categories. “Malais” as an ethnic label was to playan important part in the lives of these people and their descendants, as weshall see in greater detail later.


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From their first arrival in the nineteenth century, people from Baweanand elsewhere settled around their mosque in Sài Gòn. Other Muslim com-munities in Sài Gòn built mosques, and it is not clear which group built thefirst mosque.14 Documents found in the Vietnam National Archives II in H7

Chí Minh City indicate that a congregation of Muslims from what today isPakistan and India received land where they started building a mosque evenbefore the Bawean, but it took them many years to finish the project. TheBawean claim to have built their mosque in 1885, and they may well havecompleted the construction of their mosque before the other communities.15

Their temple was called the Chùa Mã Lai [Malay Temple] up to 1972, butsome elderly men interviewed in 2001 recall a name change in 1973: “Wewanted to change that name because we are of Indonesian origin, notMalaysian. Around 1973 we changed the name after a major mosque inJakarta, Indonesia.”16 From the interview it is clear that the informant asso-ciated the term “Mã Lai” [Malay] with the country of Malaysia. With thechange of name they reaffirmed their connection with their land of origin—the Netherlands East Indies—which with independence in 1945 becameIndonesia. We shall return to this confusion later.

The first generations of Bawean tried to keep in touch with their relativesoverseas—either on Bawean Island or in Singapore, and some eventuallyreturned to Bawean Island. As time passed on, however, these contacts withfellow Bawean people abroad slowly diminished and eventually disappearedaltogether. Most of the first migrants were men, and they married local andnonlocal Muslims. Some married non-Muslims under the condition thatthey would convert to Islam. Children born from mixed marriages were con-sidered Bawean. There was also a small contingent of Javanese manuallaborers in Sài Gòn, but the Bawean community did not interact withthem.17 If someone within the community passed away, he or she was buriedat a cemetery in Sài Gòn that was in the care of a Bawean migrant who livedon the plot with his family.

After 1955, President Ngô Aình Di0m’s regime strove for a more mono-lithic Vietnamese nation-state in which the ethnic Vi0t were considered thecore and the standard for the nation.18 This program of forced assimilationwas carried over into a process of ethnic classification and simplification ofthe minority populations, essentially continuing the system that had been


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started under the French. In the process, classifications of foreigners madeby earlier governments were often uncritically accepted, and their eth-nonyms were simply translated into Vietnamese or English versions. For theBawean who decided to register, this meant that they were now no longer“Malais” but had become “Mã Lai.” It should be stressed that this term wasstill used as an ethnic label rather than a reference to the Malaysian state, asmay be clear from anthropological speculations about the “Mã Lai origins”of the Vietnamese as an “ethnic group.”19

In 1976 the community had around two thousand people living close toor directly next to the mosque. Based on interviews conducted from 2000 to2006, the current number of people with Bawean origins is still approxi-mately the same. This is a rough estimate because census data on this groupare lacking and ethnonyms are highly confusing. Moreover, not all descen-dants of this group wish to be known as Bawean or would wish to “come outof the woodwork” to present themselves for a census. As we shall see in thenext section, the reunification of Vietnam in 1976 created a lot of confusionwithin the Bawean community over issues to do with national and ethnicidentity, as it did among other population groups.

Searching for a Nation to Offer Citizenship

After the Second Indochina War ended in 1975, the newly establishedSocialist Republic of Vietnam gave people of non-Vietnamese nationalitypermission to repatriate. Many who wished to escape the new regime triedto leave the country, but those with alien status who stayed were asked to re-register at the local police office. From our interviews it became clear thatpeople were well aware that their future depended in part on how the newstate officials would appreciate and interpret their old identity papers. Mostpeople had no proper documentation, and this led to questions and con-cerns about the ethnic and national categorization that the new administra-tion might have in store for them. Ahmed, an elderly guard who claimed tohave worked for both the French and the Americans, put it in plain words:

We had no papers because, before, we could do without them. My parentsexperienced many governments, the Dutch government in Indonesia, thegovernment of Singapore, the French, the Japanese, and many differentgovernments before the unification of Vietnam. Of course many of us did


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not learn about the regulations [of various governments] for these kinds ofdocuments. Anyway, we never intended to stay forever. We have also beenthrough three wars, and during times of war we still gave birth or passedaway, but we did not register these facts of life as we would in times ofpeace.20

It is clear from Ahmed’s story that the introduction of new regulations didnot reach some of the Bawean people. What is striking in Ahmed’s accountis the fact that he uses the word “Indonesia” for what at the time was still theNetherlands East Indies. Many informants used “Indonesia” to denote theircountry of origin even though Indonesia as a country did not exist at thetime their ancestors left. Another important point is that Ahmed plainlystates that he and his fellow Bawean had no intention of staying forever butinstead entertained dreams of returning to Bawean Island. In other words,this diasporic notion of belonging to a homeland was found in many inter-views with elderly people for whom “home” was a place they had neverseen. We shall explore these issues of belonging, identity, and nationality fur-ther below.

As has already been mentioned, some of the Bawean people realized thata direct link might exist between the way people were labelled and officiallyclassified and the possibility of leaving the country. This resulted in a scram-ble for national and ethnic identities. Descendants of Bawean immigrantswho had lived in Vietnam for several generations now dug up their grand-parents’ papers from former regimes or looked for foreigners who hadprayed at their mosque and who might vouch for them. Some presentedthemselves as foreigners in the hope that they would be accepted as aliensby the new administration and be allowed to leave the country. Some usedfalse documents, claiming various nationalities such as “Arab” [sic],Indonesian, Malaysian, Yemenite, Chinese, and Cambodian. Quite a fewBawean informants suggested that one could easily buy formal identitiesbecause many of the state officials were corrupt. This is in line withHu-nh Kim Khánh’s contemporary assertion regarding corruption withinthe new regime:

The regime has also tried to deal with an unexpected, yet apparentlyproved to be most serious, problem that had occurred since liberation,that is, corruption and bureaucratism among revolutionary cadres. In a


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few months following liberation, the population of Sài Gòn was astonishedbeyond belief to discover that there were among the supposedly puritanicaland morally upright communist cadres those who willingly accepted bribesor demanded them . . . There are well-known incidents of cadres acceptingbribes or even joining schemes of extortion. Other cadres gave work tounemployed prostitutes (perhaps out of humanity?).21

Some informants suggested that the state officials simply lacked experi-ence: “Because at that time the administration had just entered, they couldnot differentiate, whichever person held this or that paper he would just getthat identity. The new regime only wanted to know what kind of foreign res-ident you were, so all they did was to identify everyone according to thepapers from the old regime.”22

As a consequence of their attempts to leave reunified Vietnam, manyBawean individuals were able to register as alien residents, that is, as nonci-tizens of Vietnam. These people had passed the first hurdle on their way outof the country, but for a variety of reasons they often could not pass the sec-ond hurdle, which was at the consulate of their supposed country of origin.To begin with, many Bawean people had no official papers whatsoever. Ifthey had any documentation at all, it had in most cases been provided by theFrench colonial administration, stating “Malais” as their “ethnic” affiliation.The Indonesian Consulate did not accept these papers as proof of beingoriginally from Bawean Island in the Netherlands East Indies. If applicantshad no proper papers, the consular officials would start looking for relativesor ancestors in Indonesia to vouch for them. In most cases they could notfind anyone in the country of origin to sponsor the Bawean individuals, thusmaking it almost impossible for them to migrate to Indonesia.

Officials of the Indonesian or Malaysian consulates would not directlyaccept as their citizens people who could not provide all needed documen-tation, or—as James Scott put it—people who did not speak the “languageof the state:” “If you wish to have anything standing in law, you must have adocument that officials accept as evidence of citizenship, be that documenta birth certificate, passport, or identity card. The categories used by stateagents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are anauthoritative tune to which most of the population must dance.”23 It waswith this authoritative tune that the Indonesian Consulate rejected Bawean


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men and women who could not provide official and unambiguous docu-ments stating the Netherlands East Indies as their country of origin. This iswhere the second hurdle proved too high.

Many of the Bawean informants suggested that up until that point theyand their families had taken their return to Bawean Island for granted. Theywere now suddenly confronted with the realization that there was no returnfor them to their imagined homeland. For Bawean Island was indeed onlyimagined for many of the Bawean people who lived with this idea of a returntheir country of origin, because they belonged to a second or even third gen-eration of immigrants. These men and women had been born inIndochina, and Bawean Island was the place of their parents and ancestors.This protracted longing for return to a country that one has never actuallyvisited is a phenomenon often found among diaspora communities. We willpursue this issue further below.

Other Bawean individuals, however, decided not to apply for Indonesiancitizenship because they had heard rumors about a new area of settlement inIndonesia. One informant, Mohamed, remembers some of the stories aboutwhere they would end up if they would return:

We heard from people that the Indonesian government was clearing apiece of jungle for the homecomers close to Pontianak [in West Kalimantan].We heard that this area was hardly any good because it was far removedfrom any city and lacked infrastructure. Some of the older ones here didnot want to go there because there were a lot of spirits, ghosts! Because ofthe Japanese, they killed many locals right there. So many here were con-cerned and decided to stay.24

The people who could not or did not wish to leave were formally obligedto re-register at the local police offices. Not everyone complied with thisrequirement, however, because some were not aware of the need to re-register or did not have the funds to do so. Others decided not to comply, asthey feared the new administration and wanted to stay below the state’s radarscreen. Those who did register were classified as alien residents. Almost allBawean who registered received an alien status in Vietnam with quFc t]chMã Lai—Malay rather than Malaysian—as their stated citizenship.

To summarize, the French categorized the Bawean under the cover term“Malais,” which could be equated with the ethnonym “Malay.”25 Under the


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successive US-backed regimes during the Second Indochina War, “Malais”became “Malay,” which was translated into Vietnamese as “Mã Lai,” whichwas still understood as an ethnic label. However, the use of the ethnic label“Mã Lai” in direct combination with the term quFc t]ch [citizenship ornationality] on formal identity papers connected state citizenship with thenonstate ethnic identity of Mã Lai, branding the holders of such identitypapers as citizens of a non-existent “Malay” state. Below, we shall show howthe ethnonym “Mã Lai” became mixed up with citizenship in the presentstate of Malaysia (referred to as Ma Lai Xia in Vietnamese), leading to fur-ther misunderstandings under Vietnam’s current regime.

Classifying the Population

After reunification, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was preoccupied withenhancing national integration, placing great emphasis on unity and soli-darity among the nation’s different ethnic groups (sometimes referred to asIòan kCt dân tzc). The metaphor of the Vietnamese nation as one single I\igia Iình [great family] has been frequently invoked to celebrate Vietnam’smultiethnic character and to officially discourage ethnic chauvinism amongKinh and minorities alike. Influenced by Stalin’s theory of nationalities andby Soviet and Chinese practices, this official celebration of ethnic solidaritywent hand in hand with a program by which cultural differences and ethnicidentities were described and determined in a formal process of ethno-graphic classification.26 After reunification, this program of ethnic classifi-cation became an important state priority as a prelude to the linking ofethnic identities with particular geographic areas and to the administrativedetermination of the ethnic identities of all citizens (as indicated in censusesand on identity cards). The state took the lead in the scientific classificationcarried out by the Institute of Ethnography and a variety of other cadres. In1979, a comprehensive list of fifty-four ethnic groups was officially promul-gated by the General Statistics Office.27

A number of scholars have portrayed Vietnam’s state policies regardingthe classification of ethnic groups and the classification of citizens accordingto ethnic identity as a powerful instrument of political control: of regulatingethnicity, of shaping ethnic boundaries, of influencing patterns of ethnicidentification, of determining what is acceptable behavior, and of almost


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literally “putting people in their places.”28 For instance, Oscar Saleminkclaimed that the 1979 ethnic classification was the last in a series of such pro-grams initiated by successive political regimes, effectively resulting in thetribalization, ethnicization, and territorialization of fluid ethnic affiliationsin Vietnam’s Central Highlands, while Charles Keyes presented ethnic clas-sification as a state instrument of control over people living in border regionsand on the fringes of society. Yet the results of ethnic classification were notalways uncontested, as is brought out by an article in the party newspaperNhân Dân [The People] by census officer Hf Qu5c Thfch, who com-plained of the fact that many ethnic minority people did not know their cor-rect ethnic label for census purposes.29

While highlighting the role of the state in ethnic classification, Viet-namese ethnologists argued that “subjective” forms of self-identificationwere submitted to “objective” criteria determined by scientists. Keyes indi-cated that in cases where self-identifications conflicted with “objective” def-initions, ethnologists were instructed to use “scientific data” collectedamong people or elicited from historical records to explain to the people inquestion which ethnic label fitted them. Such a process has been describedby Nguyen Van Thang, who did research among the Mieu—formally andagainst their will classified as a subgroup of the Hmong.30 When in 1989another ethnographic classification was attempted, the fifty-four ethnic cat-egories were reaffirmed, although, as Priscilla Koh indicated, “based on theresearch findings of a recent investigation in several minority regions, it islikely that the figure is much higher than the present 54. The researchersnoted that a significant number of minority groups wanted to be reclassifiedas a separate or different ethnic group.”31

In contrast with the analyses above, in this article we will show that offi-cial ethnic categories were more flexible and negotiable. Like some of thegroups mentioned above, a number of Bawean individuals went out of theirway to negotiate with state officials. They wished to be classified according totheir own expectations even though these might contrast with state criteria,a desire that was met with sympathy by local state officials.

In 1976, the newly established Vietnamese government summoned alienresidents to register at the ry ban quân quOn thành ph5 Sài Gòn Gia Ainh[the Military Committee of Administrative Affairs of the City of Sài


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Gòn–Gia Ainh]. Many Bawean men and women received an I{i [sic] chAngnhun th}Nng trú t\m thNi [temporary residence permits for alien citizens].32

Printed on these identity papers were spaces that were used to provide infor-mation about a person, such as hL và tên [surname and given name], nam nT

[sex], and quFc t]ch [nationality or citizenship]. In the case of Bawean indi-viduals, Vietnamese officials recorded “Mã Lai” under the last category.Thus, many Bawean men and women had unwittingly attained quFc t]chMã Lai, meaning Malay nationality. It is important to note here that at thetime there was no slot for dân tzc [ethnic affiliation] in these documents.This term is ambiguous and can denote either “ethnicity” or “nation,” asnoted by Koh: “The term dan toc Tay could refer to the Tay ethnic minorityat one level, and/or a hypothetical Tay nation and nationality on the other.Although this ambiguity was never clarified by party leaders and academicsalike, it seems that in its narrower definition, and specifically with regard tominority groups or communities, the term dan toc refers to an ‘ethnie’ or eth-nic group, not nation or nationality per se (at least not ‘nationality’ as com-monly understood, i.e., in the sense of being part of a separate and sovereignindependent nation-state).”33

With the change of political regime in 1975, the ethnic label “Mã Lai”was interpreted as denoting citizenship in the country of Malaysia [Ma LaiXia or Malaixia] and thus given another meaning. This confusion extends tothe present, as even in 2005, state officials at the local police station used thephrases quFc t]ch Mã Lai [Malay nationality] and quFc t]ch Malaixia[Malaysian nationality] interchangeably in conversations with one of theauthors. In both cases they meant Malaysian nationality.

This confusion about how to classify this group of “resident aliens” isunderstandable in the light of what Liisa Malkki calls the “national order ofthings.” This order provides an “international cultural grammar of nation-hood,” carving up the world into discrete nations and naturalizing the iden-tification of people as necessarily belonging to a state.34 Thus the category ofresident aliens conjures up the question, “to which country do these aliensreally belong?”—evoking a bureaucratic desire to fill in the citizenship spaceon the residence permit. This process of bureaucratic reclassification hasresulted in a reinterpretation of the ethnic category Mã Lai as a national cat-egory, thus conferring the status of foreign citizenship. The fact that these


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people had no prior connection with the country of Malaysia or that theMalaysian Consulate had not acknowledged these “Bawean people” as hav-ing some connection with Malaysia did not seem to matter.

The Bawean individuals who received such papers were caught in a realCatch-22 situation because neither Vietnam, Indonesia, nor Malaysiaaccepted them as their citizens. As aliens in Vietnam they had to re-registerat the immigration office yearly until 1997. Around 1997 they suddenlyreceived a paper called gi{y tN chAng nhun th}Nng trú c*a ng}Ni n}Rc ngoài[permanent residence status for foreigners], which also served as an identitycard. They were told that they did not have to present themselves every yearanymore, but that they would be contacted if deemed necessary—whichusually did not happen. Up until 2003, many individuals of Bawean descenthad no identity papers other than the permanent residence status for for-eigners, which officially classified them as citizens belonging to a “Malaystate.”

Discussions of ethnicity in Vietnam have generally been restricted to theofficially classified indigenous minority groups and communities consistingof Vietnamese citizens. James Scott’s and Charles Keyes’ views of the mod-ern state as a disciplinary state that attempts to bring both human and nat-ural diversity under its control by imposing “standard grids” on both andconnecting both grids are largely paradigmatic. State, civil society, andnationalist precepts constrain processes of ethnic identification and “influ-ence modes of ethnic organization.”35 Transnational immigrants fall outsidethe official ethnic classifications of the fifty-four indigenous dân tzc andhence receive less attention. Nevertheless, the people of Bawean descent liv-ing in Vietnam were also subject to state classification and discipline, albeitof a different kind, for when the state classified them as aliens they were cutoff from all jobs limited to Vietnamese citizens.

However, such decisions are not the state’s alone to make, because in theinteraction of Bawean people with Vietnamese state officials, both partiestried to exercise their agency and achieve their projects.36 Many Baweanpeople chose to avoid or move out of the state’s gaze by staying in whatcould be called “blind spots.” In the past, quite a few of them had not regis-tered but nevertheless managed to live in Vietnam without any papers what-soever until their death. Up to this day, many Bawean parents still do not


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automatically accept that their children are Vietnamese citizens by birth,partly because they do not want to burden their sons with army enlistment.The main reason, however, is that they still wish to hold on to what they con-sider to be their identity as people originating from Bawean Island. Whenthey register the birth of a child, these parents argue and plead with localauthorities to leave their child’s quFc t]ch open so that the child can choosea nationality at age eighteen, when one needs to apply for an identity card.Thus, these Bawean parents try to limit state control by negotiating or avoid-ing the state’s standard classificatory grids.

Such “indiscipline”—to borrow Achille Mbembe’s fortuitous twist to thisterm—has been found among other groups in Vietnam as well.37 Salemink,for example, has described how Central Highlanders—sometimes calledMontagnards—would move their villages deeper into remote forest areas inorder to evade the state’s attempts of control, surveillance, and discipline.38

We have to keep in mind, however, that the Bawean do not live in remotemountainous areas but right in the country’s economic hub—the urban jun-gle of H7 Chí Minh City. It is important to note that people like the Baweanare capable of doing more than living below the state’s radar, so to speak;below we will show that many people are capable of having themselves for-mally classified by Vietnamese state officials on their own terms.

Becoming Vietnamese Muslims

Up until 2003 an unknown number from this group of around two thousandpeople of Bawean origin had no citizenship, even though they had beenborn in Vietnam. Their country of origin, present-day Indonesia, did notaccept them as its citizens, effectively rendering these people stateless. Up tothe present, these people have lived around their mosque and cemetery andhave maintained distinct religious and ethnic characteristics that set themapart from non-Muslims such as the Kinh, as well as from Muslims such asthe Cham.39

In 2003 a group of sixty-five Bawean individuals decided to apply for Viet-namese citizenship, paradoxically in order to be able to perform one of thereligious duties associated with their distinct ethno-religious identity. Whatwas at stake for the group was the fulfillment of one of their religiously inspireddreams, to go on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Religion constituted a


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fundamental part of this group’s (ethnic) identity, for to be Bawean is to bea good Muslim, and a proper Muslim must go on pilgrimage to Mecca atleast once in his (rather than her) lifetime. The sixty-five Bawean in ques-tion were aware that the only way they would be able to leave Vietnam andenter Saudi Arabia was with a passport. So they developed a strategy ofapplying for Vietnamese citizenship in order to leave the country tem-porarily, while at the same time preserving elements of their ethnic identity.We will present this citizenship application process in greater detail in asection further below. Now we first need to reveal more about two impor-tant elements of Bawean ethnic identity, namely diasporic narratives andreligion.

Mohamed is one of the sixty-five individuals who requested Vietnamesecitizenship. When he and others within that group were first interviewed,the depth of their diasporic nostalgia was striking, leading us to believe thatnone of them would ever accept Vietnamese citizenship:

I was born right here at home in 1952. My father came from Bawean Islandand my mother came from Singapore, but her parents came from Baweantoo. We have lived here all our lives. Because of them I am proud of myethnic origins [gFc byn sVc dân tzc mình]. I often think of my parents andgrandparents; it makes me long to return to my origins. They passed away,but when I think of them I remember their stories and then I miss BaweanIsland and I want to go back. I can still hear my mother’s singing, and I amashamed that I don’t know what the words mean anymore.40

Of interest here are Mohamed’s sentiments of loss and of longing for aplace that has he never set foot on. He even felt shame for not being able tounderstand a language he never acquired in his “host country”—Vietnam—where his home was. This idea of return was also expressed in interviewsconducted with most of the other individuals applying for Vietnamese citi-zenship. Bawean informants often mentioned powerful sentiments of long-ing for a return to their roots, for life on Bawean Island. Memories and ideasabout their origins and ideas about what it means to be Bawean fed this long-ing. In discussions, they often mentioned how their senses—taste, sight,smell and hearing—stir up memories that bring about these strong emo-tions, emotions that are both based on and strengthened by their ethnicidentification and sense of belonging.


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Such strong nostalgic sentiments are often found among diaspora com-munities. Robin Cohen sees a diaspora as a postmigration population enter-taining imagined and actual connections with a place of origin and withpeople of similar cultural origins elsewhere.41 “Imagined” does not meanthat this phenomenon has no reality. Rather, the often strong sentiments andmental pictures according to which members of diasporas organize them-selves and engage in cultural practices are fuelled by narratives and images,as well as by sensorial experiences of sight, sound, and smell.

An orientation toward the place of origin might also shape a variety ofcultural, religious, or economic practices. During group interviews, theBawean argued among themselves about the content of their grandfathers’or grandmothers’ life stories taking place on Bawean Island. Sometimessomeone suddenly lashed out with a move from pencak silat, an Indonesianmartial art that they regretted not having learned from their grandfathers.They demonstrated dance moves that their mothers had performed. Theywhispered of magical powers and regretted the loss of their valued keris dag-gers, which they had to surrender under the Japanese occupation. Theystressed how their senses bring back memories of places and times past. Thewaft of a kretek [clove cigarette], the tastes and smells of ayam n}Rng [sic]burning on the grill by the side of the road, were no mere smells, but fra-grances that brought out this yearning for something that their parents andgrandparents had instilled in them.42 They hummed songs and congratu-lated each other when they heard others sing words that they themselves hadforgotten. These memories and emotions affected the actions they took indaily life. An example we mentioned earlier was the renaming of theirmosque in order to stress their connection with a mosque in Indonesia’s cap-ital and to distance themselves from the national connotation of the eth-nonym “Mã Lai.”

These feelings are reproduced within the family by grandparents and par-ents, through stories—historical narratives told over and over again to chil-dren and among adults. These stories or—as Keyes calls them, narratives oforigin and migration—are also reproduced within the wider community, forexample, during national Indonesian festivals, sermons, and interactionswith staff of the Indonesian Consulate.43 Bawean individuals were proud oftheir heritage, as it set them apart from Vietnamese—and ethnic Kinh—in


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general and from Muslim Cham living in H7 Chí Minh City and ChâuAhc. The differences within their community were glossed over, and the dif-ferences between their community and other communities around themwere temporarily deepened. This was achieved through their idiosyncraticmanner of performing life-cycle rituals, such as circumcisions and mar-riages, or religiocultural festivities, such as the birthday of the ProphetMohammed and the celebration of national holidays after the independ-ence of Indonesia in 1945.

From conversations with the organizers of the festivities for the Prophet’sbirthday, it became clear that they were proud of the ethnically specific wayof organizing such ritual events. Guests from other Muslim communities,such as the Cham, commented in interviews that the way the Bawean wentabout organizing that celebration was out of order. They confided that itfocused too much attention on the Prophet and therefore was a form ofshirk, or polytheism, which is strictly forbidden in Islam. When theBawean were confronted with this idea, they were quick to deny that it wasa form of shirk, but some of them seemed almost pleased and respondedthat these were the differences between their culture and that of otherMuslim communities.

Apart from feelings of pride, the Bawean also experienced feelings ofshame about losing certain skills that they imagined to be an intrinsic part oftheir ethnic identity. One such skill was the ability to speak or sing in BahasaIndonesia, the variant of Malay that is used as the Indonesian nationallanguage—and the language many people of Bawean descent assumed theirancestors spoke. Mohamed studied the language and even started an onlinecourse in Bahasa Indonesia:

We once had a consul who was a Christian so he did not pray at themosque, but his assistant was really friendly, and he gave a lecture at themosque about us, our roots, about Bawean Island. It filled us with prideand longing, but we were also ashamed because he spoke in Indonesianfirst and we did not understand anything he said then. He was very surprisedthat people had forgotten their own language, and he offered us help tostudy Indonesian at the consulate. That is how I started to learn Bahasa.44

Mohamed studied the Indonesian language for a while but did not pursue itbecause there were hardly any opportunities to use these language skills.


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As it turns out, their Bawean ancestors did not speak Bahasa Indonesiabecause by the time the first migrants left Bawean Island for the Frenchcolony, Bahasa as an official language did not yet exist. It did not become thenational language of Indonesia until after 1949. Before he accepted the offerfrom the consulate to study Bahasa Indonesia, Mohamed had never learnedthe language, or the local variant of Madurese that his parents may have spo-ken. By remembering that Bahasa Indonesia was his forefathers’ language hecreated an anachronistic version of historical narratives of origin. In otherwords, memories of origin may change over time, depending on the timeand context of remembering, and historical narratives are bound to changewith the act of telling. To paraphrase Malkki, people’s roots move, changeshape and color, and grow.45 These narratives focused on what Cohen calls“imagined connections with a place of origin and with people of similar cul-tural origins elsewhere.”46 It is these images of the Bawean’s place of originthat motivated them to rename their mosque, to entertain warm relationswith the consulate, and to acquire a foreign language.

However, from conversations with many informants it became clear thatthe religious element of their identity connected them not only with Indone-sia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, but withMuslims on a global scale as well. Islamic religious practices such as prayerand fasting during Ramadan [the month of fasting] and eating halal foodpromote a sense of belonging to the umma—the worldwide religious Mus-lim community. According to Ralph Grillo, what is at stake in transnationalidentities is a certain degree and form of identification with an imagined“transnational” community, such as the umma.47 The Bawean people realizethat when performing Islamic rituals, they share practices with Muslimsacross political borders. In sermons their imam narrates Islam’s histories andoften mentions Muslims in other parts of the world. Daily discussions inpeople’s homes about Muslims elsewhere, for example in Iraq, Afghanistan,and southern Thailand, create and strengthen an image of an Islamic com-munity transcending the boundaries and borders of their local mosque.

The sources of information they find in their mosque, however, cannotcompete with the information they acquire from transnational interactionsdeveloped through the Internet. For Steven Vertovec, a transnational net-work consists of the communication and interactions that members of a


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group undertake with others in the homeland or elsewhere within a global-ized ethnic or religious community.48 From discussions with various inform-ants, it has become clear that the people of Bawean origin in Vietnam hardlyinteract with other Bawean people, either on the island or elsewhere. Theydo, however, increasingly use the computer to learn more about Islam.These transnational sources of information strengthen their awareness thatthey are part of a larger global religious community. Mohamed uses theInternet to learn about the state of Muslim world affairs or to chat with fel-low Muslims in other countries. For him it is his only source of religiousinformation in Vietnam besides personal narratives of people who havereturned from studies overseas or from pilgrimages. His daily visits to Inter-net cafes connect him and others like him to a transnational religious net-work that forces him to think about his attitude in life, in particular as aMuslim.

Benedict Anderson has suggested that new electronic media may have abigger impact on “long-distance nationalism” than print media may havehad on classic nationalism in the past.49 Dale Eickelman and Jon Andersonemphasize how such a new sense of collective awareness and connectionamong Muslims in various parts of the globe has especially been forgedthrough new communication technologies.50 Ninian Smart adds: “Such aconsciousness of belonging to a world community has grown considerably invery recent times. Even for relatively remote groups, transnational narratives‘construct and negotiate the relationships between multiple identities’ bytying individuals and communities into larger common constituencies.”51

We suggest that new media may well be doing the same for Islamic reper-toires and narratives in Vietnam, where printed matter on Islam is hard tocome by. Bawean individuals expand their religious repertoires through theInternet. Some of them spend several hours a day, a few days a week, inInternet cafes on this digital gateway to global Islamic opinion, science, his-tory, law, gossip, sermons, and popular culture such as music, movies, andmerchandise. They burn audio recordings of sermons, Koran recitations,fatwas [verdicts by Islamic scholars], Arabic language lessons, and news ontoVCDs and watch them at home. They learn about international religiousscholarships and funds that sponsor Muslim pilgrimages. They chat withfellow believers in all parts of the world about topics both religious and


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political. In other words, the new media wave is currently doing for theirIslamic repertoires and narratives what print media have done for national-ism, and the Bawean people are actively surfing that wave.

From conversations with many Bawean informants, both young and old,it was evident that they are able to access every Islamic Internet site they lookfor. This seems surprising, especially if we consider the close scrutiny thatthe Vietnamese state tends to pay to religious communities, according tosome scholars and human rights activists. Tr6n Thi Liên suggests that theVietnamese state carries an inborn distrust of religious communities, rootedin the universal lack of sympathy socialist governments feel for religiouscommunities in general.52 But Jay Willoughby found that the Vietnamesegovernment’s attitude toward the Muslim Cham was becoming morerelaxed, partly due to Hà Nbi’s good relations with Indonesia and Malaysia.53

His observation is supported by interviews used for this article with bothBawean and Cham individuals in southern Vietnam.

It is true that in the past Bawean and Muslim Cham communities in H7

Chí Minh City were periodically visited by police for checkups. Althoughsuch visits do not occur anymore, the công an ph}Nng [neighborhoodpolice] has contacts within the communities who are supposed to report any“irregularities,” such as local people planning a religious festivity withoutstate permission, or informal visits of foreign visitors from Malaysia or SaudiArabia. These informants are also summoned to the police station for spe-cially convened meetings to gauge the reactions of the local Muslims tosome event, as happened, for instance, directly after 9/11. These contactsmay also work to the advantage of religious communities. For example, in2000 when a Vietnamese non-Muslim threw a piece of pork into the NancyMosque in District 1 of H7 Chí Minh City, the man was reported andimmediately arrested, reportedly receiving a sentence of several years ofimprisonment.

These complex notions of belonging—fusing religion, ethnicity, nation-ality, and citizenship—motivated a large group of people of Bawean descentto, first, request citizenship at the Indonesian Consulate, and then to nego-tiate with Vietnamese state officials about the choice of their official eth-nonym. The case below tells the saga of sixty-five Bawean men and women,eager to go on the hajj, on their quest for a passport and, hence, citizenship.


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The case is based on interviews with several informants, but we have chosento narrate the story from the perspective of one individual, Mohamed.

Mohamed has been a spokesperson and leader for the group during theircitizenship application process. In the beginning of the process, all sixty-fourof his fellow applicants would join his visits to state officials, but this provedto be impractical in the long run. Instead he collected their files and sub-mitted their applications along with his. It should be noted from the outsetthat these Bawean are elderly men and women who on certain occasionsplay an important role in the community as ritual leaders. Their views maynot be representative of the community as a whole, since ideas about reli-gion and ethnic identity vary between younger and older generations,between women and men, between families living around the mosque inthe city center and the families living near the Bawean cemetery on the out-skirts of the city.

Case: The Citizenship Application Process

At the time of the interview, Mohamed was a 55-year-old widower living withhis children close to the Bawean mosque. He and his children were born inVietnam and have lived there ever since. Although he had recently receivedVietnamese citizenship at the time of our interviews, neither his daughternor his son, who were both under eighteen years of age, held official Viet-namese citizenship. Mohamed had a lot of time on his hands and regularlyvisited Internet cafes to check his mail and look at a variety of Islamic web-sites.54 Directly after 9/11, for example, he followed discussions about BinLaden, and at the time of the interviews he was trying to keep himselfinformed about America’s War on Terror in the Middle East. He liked tochat with fellow Muslims or take virtual tours around Mecca. He couldspend hours on end on the Internet, playing online games or listening toKoran recitations. Religious information was more widely available onlinethan was information that might feed into a Bawean cultural identity. Likeother interviewees, Mohamed stressed the inherent connection between hisorigins, Islam, and feelings of pride or shame: “Islam is our religion. A goodBawean is a good Muslim, and that makes us different from the Vietnamese,even different from many Cham. When I have prayed five times, like yes-terday, I feel much better about myself. If I forget to live properly or to pray,


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I feel ashamed. I want to live a good life so I try to be close to God. When Ihave a chance I want to go to Mecca as well.”55

Mohamed was free to move around and visit Internet cafes or other peo-ple’s houses whenever he wanted without being harassed. He visited themosque every day and used the opportunity to visit others from the com-munity. During the visits, his friends and neighbors discussed their chil-dren, grandchildren, developments at the mosque, and national andinternational affairs. These international affairs often related to the prob-lems faced by Muslims in other countries, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, orsouthern Thailand.

In the past Mohamed had always wanted to go on the hajj, but he did nothave sufficient funds for the journey and hoped that he would be eligible forsponsorship. In 1999 he received the good news that he could apply for asponsorship from the Saudi royal family to go on the hajj. However, hecould not accept this funding because he did not have a passport. When in2001 he again heard of such a sponsorship, he decided to apply for a passport,even if that meant accepting Vietnamese citizenship. He knew that for-eigners had to apply for citizenship at the H7 Chí Minh City Department ofForeign Affairs at the level of H7 Chí Minh City’s People’s Committee.Mohamed and his fellow petitioners would have to purchase and fill in sev-eral official documents and have their knowledge of Vietnamese culture andlanguage tested. Lastly, they would have to provide a document of theembassy of the country where they were currently citizens. That embassy orconsulate had to put in writing that it had been notified of its citizen’schange of nationality and that it gave permission to do so. Only then wouldthe Vietnamese government accept the application for Vietnamese citizen-ship. However, it was impossible for Mohamed and the others to providesuch a document because none of the consulates accepted him and his fel-low Bawean as citizens:

I had studied the documents, you know, I studied law but could not finishit. . . . Anyway, so I knew that we could not get that letter because we hadno citizenship. We did not belong anywhere. Our papers said “qu5c tichMã Lai” and “Malais.” Some officials here told us we were Malaysian, but Iknow those terms on our papers do not stand for a country but for what theyused to call us as a group. Malaysia and Indonesia would not give us such a


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letter. . . . Still, many of us wanted to try to become Indonesian citizensagain. That is why in the beginning I did not go to the Department ofForeign Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City.56

What is striking in this quote is that Mohamed expresses the Bawean’sexplicit wish to become Indonesian citizens “again.” This is an interestinganachronism because, as indicated earlier in this article, none of them hadever been Indonesian citizens. Their ancestors had left an island in the colo-nial territory that would become the independent country of Indonesia in1945, and since then Indonesia had not recognized any of the Bawean descen-dants in Vietnam as Indonesian citizens. Another important point is that sincetheir first settlement in what today is Vietnam, these men and women hadmarried local Muslim and non-Muslim men and women, including Cham,Chinese, and Kinh. Although they had intermarried with people from differ-ent ethnic communities for three generations, Mohamed and others in theBawean group expressed pride in their ethnic identity and Indonesian origin.

Meet for example Abdulhadi, hakim [judge] and caretaker of the Baweanmosque in 2001, who was a descendant of Bawean immigrants and who sawhis grandchildren as ng}Ni Chà Và: “I was born in Sài Gòn in 1924, but I stillconsider myself an orang Bawean [Bawean person]. Most of the ng}Ni ChàVà living in H7 Chí Minh City now are from the same area as my parentswere. Almost everybody is Bawean here around the mosque.”57

The informant used the term “ng}Ni Chà Và” here, denoting Javanese,Malay, and Malayan people.58 This touches one of the nerves of the prob-lem we wish explore, namely, ethnic labelling. Both the labels people usefor their own kin and the labels used by the state officials are subject to sim-ilar processes. Labels change over time, but they may also change instantly,depending on the context. It is far more informative to understand thedynamics behind the acceptance or rejection of certain labels than it is toknow or search for the “correct” or “objective” labels for people based, forexample, on their place of origin. Max Weber spoke of ethnicity as a com-munity’s subjective belief in common descent, sustained by narratives of(past) glory and of suffering.59 In other words, one does not need an “object-ive” kin relationship to feel ethnically connected. On the other hand, ethnicidentification relates to personal experiences and can only work if fuelled bypersonal experiences and political interests.60


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We found this belief in common descent with Mohamed, who was bornin Indochina and whose mother was from Singapore. Like many of his fel-low Bawean, he grew up in the country now known as Vietnam but he stilllongs for a place he has never set foot in. It is this belief in common descentfuelled by diasporic narratives that stimulated the group of elderly Bawean tofirst visit the Indonesian Consulate in H7 Chí Minh City.

The group of sixty-five elderly Bawean men and women presented them-selves at the Indonesian Consulate dressed in what they thought was Baweancostume:

We all went to the Indonesian Consulate because we feel that we areIndonesian and should have Indonesian citizenship so that we may returnto Indonesia. If that was not possible we wanted them to help us receive Viet-namese citizenship. I thought that they would help us because we main-tained good relations with the Indonesian Consulate here. Sometimes ourcontact cooled down. It depended on which religion the consul adhered to.If he or she were Muslim, the consul along with staff would pray here at themosque every Friday. They would invite us to Indonesian national and reli-gious festivities held at the consulate. The consul and some of his co-workershave also asked our imam to teach, to advise on family matters.

I told you that we used to have strong magic. We had a man here, he wasdukun [sorcerer and village medicine man or healer]. He has performed rit-uals such as a selamatan [Javanese ceremonial meal] there. He has passedaway now. He was very strong. He could do exorcisms. One time he had toexorcise a spirit at the Indonesian consul’s house. We all went and spent theafternoon and the night at his place. This was an Indonesian spirit, so hehad to do it. No other nationality [sic] could help her. So that is why I wentthere first.

I dressed in a sarong with a batik shirt and met with the consul general. Hewas so surprised when I spoke using Bahasa Indonesia. I said: “You knowus; we are descendants of Bawean, and we are connected to Indonesia byblood. You pray in our Indonesian mosque, and we have been in yourhouse. We feel we should become Indonesian citizens because our ident-ity is in our blood, our bones, and in our marrow even!”

They [men and women of the consulate] explained that they knew that we[the Bawean in H7 Chí Minh City] were of Indonesian origin, but formallythey could not accept us as Indonesian citizens under Indonesian law. “Weknow most of you, but we cannot help you. You have lost touch with your


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families in Indonesia and you have no papers proving citizenship. It hurtsus, but it is impossible to accept you as citizens. We will help you and writea letter to the Department of Foreign Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City explain-ing that you are all Bawean and of Indonesian origin but cannot be acceptedas a citizens of Indonesia under Indonesian law. We will ask the Departmentof Foreign Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City to help you acquire Vietnamesecitizenship.”61

This quote brings out several important elements. During the presenta-tion of their case at the consulate, the Bawean used the Indonesian lan-guage, dressed in Indonesian attire, and spoke of magic and blood to showtheir affinity with and ties to Indonesia. They also tried to win over the con-sular staff by mentioning the role the imam had played in the past. We haveshown above that the use of the Indonesian language is grounded in dias-poric narratives that shape the community’s ethnic identity. The same is thecase with the Indonesian dress and the expression of blood ties and stories ofmagic.

Also of interest here is not only the theme used during the presentation,Indonesia, but also the way it was communicated. Thomas Hylland Eriksenshows that people are free to choose to either over- or undercommunicatetheir identities.62 Although ethnic identity should not be understood asprimordially given, it nevertheless cannot be completely manipulated;although instrumentally articulated it is not entirely malleable, as it mustbe related to real-life experiences.63 So when Mohamed presented theBawean’s case, he chose the Indonesian Consulate because he and the oth-ers genuinely felt that they were of Indonesian origin and hoped to achieveIndonesian citizenship. He reminded the consular officials of their long-standing relation based on their shared place of origin in the hope that hemight get out from under the Vietnamese state’s control. When this did notsucceed, he changed the way he communicated his case, as we shall seebelow.

When the Bawean’s first attempt turned out to be unsuccessful, theydecided to present their case at the H7 Chí Minh City Department ofForeign Affairs. From then on Mohamed took it upon himself to be the leadperson in presenting their case at the various administrative offices, trustedby his fellow Bawean because of his legal expertise. When the Department


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of Foreign Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City received him, its employees repri-manded him for going to the Indonesian Embassy first:

I knew that they would be angry so I had to be real polite, you know. . . .Oh, I wore pants and a normal shirt with my pair of shoes. I spoke reallypolite, in Vietnamese of course. So I apologized and told them that we didnot know how to do things properly and that we had only asked the Indone-sian Consulate for advice, . . . yes, acting a little gullible [he laughs]. . . .

Then they asked why we wanted to become Vietnamese, so I explainedthat because we hold papers stating that we are foreigners we are in a realpredicament in daily life. Being foreign has negatively influenced our dailyinteractions with the government. We cannot find work because for mostgood jobs we have to show our name documented in our hz khXu th}Nngtrú [family registration book for permanent residence]. But if you do nothave Vietnamese citizenship you do not have a hz khXu, and companiesand small enterprises will not accept foreigners.

I said that because of this we are in a real fix economically, and we do hopethat that you will study the case. We ask you to help us obtain Vietnamesenationality with ease. We want to have our names in a hz khXu th}Nng trú.We were born in Vietnam, Vietnam has fed our bodies, and we grew up inVietnam and have lived here ever since. We use Vietnamese language inour daily lives and have received Vietnamese education. We understandVietnamese history, culture, laws, customs, and traditions, and that is whywe are eligible for Vietnamese nationality.64

From Mohamed’s account we see that in this new context, he and thegroup he represented communicated their “Vietnameseness” rather thantheir Indonesian identity, as they had done at the consulate. He stressedsocioeconomic reasons for his application, described how their alien statushad resulted in difficulties with administrative procedures and made itimpossible to apply for jobs in most companies or small factories. He alsoemphasized that they were all born and grew up in Vietnam, conversed inVietnamese in everyday life and—more importantly—had received Viet-namese education, which meant that they understood Vietnamese history,culture, law, customs, and traditions. In contrast with his presentation at theIndonesian Consulate, at the H7 Chí Minh City Department of ForeignAffairs Mohamed downplayed the Bawean group’s ethnic sentiments. In thismanner he illustrated and embodied the way that agents can partly ascribe


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ethnic identity to themselves, as George de Vos suggested in an expansionon Eriksen’s ideas, mentioned above.65 De Vos indicated that ethnic identityis something that can be actively manipulated in response to a certain needor context, but that ethnic identity simultaneously has a noninstrumental,nonpolitical element that provides a psychological feeling of security.

Mohammed explained how after his plea, staff members of the H7 Chí

Minh City Department of Foreign Affairs were quiet for a moment. Hiswords had turned their indifferent approach around, and they even compli-mented him on his Vietnamese language skills. They offered him tea andsweets and discussed his life with him. They asked him about the kinds ofwork he had done, his religious beliefs, and how he was housed. Eventually,they asked him to sit in the hallway while they studied the case more care-fully in private. They returned after some time and explained they recog-nized that this was a case that fell outside the stipulations of Vietnamese law.They were used to cases where Vietnamese law fell short, but they had notencountered a similar case before. They pointed out that Vietnamese lawaccepts everyone who applies for Vietnamese citizenship if he or she canlive up to the following criteria: proficiency in Vietnamese, knowledge ofVietnamese history, culture, and customs, and a letter from one’s country ofcurrent citizenship accepting the change of citizenship. This means thatonly people who already have citizenship somewhere, people who are rec-ognized by a nation outside Vietnam as its citizens, can officially give up thatcitizenship in order to apply for Vietnamese citizenship. The people at theH7 Chí Minh City Department of Foreign Affairs understood that Mohamedcould not provide them with such a letter.

After further deliberation they advised Mohamed not to follow the regu-lar procedure of citizenship application because this would be a dead endfor his group. Instead, the department wrote a letter to another governmen-tal unit, the H7 Chí Minh City Department of Legal Affairs at the level ofH7 Chí Minh City’s People’s Committee. The letter explained the situationand requested their colleagues at the H7 Chí Minh City Department ofLegal Affairs to take a look at the case and to advise them on the matter.

One of the people at the Department of Foreign Affairs who helpedMohamed on his way was interviewed. She was a legal expert and stillremembered the case quite vividly. She machine-gunned her words in a


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staccato northern accent while she went over the case—simultaneouslyanswering phones and shuffling through papers:

Our law states that people should pledge that they should give up their origi-nal nationality, if they have one, when applying for Vietnamese citizenship.When they do not have a nationality at all, then it becomes a bit of apredicament, and that is why we solved the case of the Mã Lai linh hLat[proactively or expeditiously]. Because, if I remember correctly, some ofthese people did have papers proving that they had been born in Vietnam.These were even from before 1954, mind you. And they had permanent resi-dency papers for foreigners from the “puppet regime.” They knew their ori-gins but could not locate their ancestors there anymore. The Legal Depart-ment here decided to act quickly and ask the Consulates of Indonesia andMalaysia to state that these people were not accepted as their countries’ citi-zens. From then on it had become a case of people who had no citizenshipat all, and it was then that Vietnam was prepared to accept them as its citi-zens. There you have it. That is a way to deal with something quickly andpositively. In our law we had not yet dealt with such cases before, of peoplewho have no citizenship. This department has definitely reported this caseto the president of the country or to the Department of Justice to decidewhat to do with such cases in the future. Because to have fifty or sixty-five orso people who do not have a nationality in a city as crowded as ours makes itreally hard for the administration to govern the city.66

The lawyer’s office composed the letter while Mohamed waited. The letterexplained the situation and requested their colleagues at the Department ofLegal Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City to take a look at the case and to advisethem on the matter.

In contrast with suggestions from scholars like Joane Nagel and CharlesKeyes that the state’s formal ascriptions of ethnic identity are the main fac-tors in the development of ethnic identities, this case study suggests thatthere is some room for manipulation from the side of (aspiring) citizens.67

It shows how the state’s formal classificatory and disciplinary projects weremitigated by the strong sentiments of the people it needed to classify andby the sympathy of officials for their predicament. The state officials at theDepartment of Foreign Affairs tried to classify Mohamed but hardly disci-plined him. On the contrary, when confronted with this case, whichclearly fell outside the stipulations of Vietnamese law, they were quitefriendly and proved proactive in their approach to solving the matter. They


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could easily have forced him to take the regular approach or to keep hisalien status.

However, not all departments in the Vietnamese state apparatus are as sym-pathetic and proactive in their approach, as Mohamed found out when hepresented himself at the Department of Legal Affairs of H7 Chí Minh City:

I dressed like before—no, not in a sarong, but still decent. I went over andhad to wait for a long time. There was a lot of activity, and people were run-ning around with folders. When it was my turn I met with a young woman.She did not listen to me at all. I explained my case like before, but all sheheard was that I was a foreigner and wanted to apply for Vietnamese citi-zenship. So she did not understand the case the way the people at the otherdepartment had. She said: “You want to become a Vietnamese national,you just go to the Department for Foreign Affairs and buy the forms justlike everybody else.” She closed the file and returned it to me so I left.

I knew that I had to find a different way, so the next day I went to the Con-sulate of Malaysia. I dressed the same as before, like a businessman, andspoke Vietnamese. It was so funny. When they heard my story they didnot know what to do. I asked them for a letter stating that firstly I was aMalaysian citizen and secondly that the Malaysian Consulate accepted mychange of citizenship. They must have thought that I was not normal [helaughs] to ask for citizenship in Malaysia just to replace it with Vietnamesecitizenship.68

As he had feared, the Malaysian Consulate could not provide him with sucha letter even though it was sympathetic to his case.

The Department of Legal Affairs might not have been forthcomingimmediately, but eventually its officials went out of their way to provide asolution for this extraordinary case. Mohamed now returned to the H7 Chí

Minh City Department of Legal Affairs and explained to another of itsemployees that neither the Indonesian nor the Malaysian Consulates hadaccepted him as citizen and that as a result they did not provide him withthe letter that was required for the normal Vietnamese citizenship applica-tion for foreigners. The employees of the Department of Legal Affairs nowtook an interest, and they, too, acknowledged the difficulty of the situation.They withdrew to a back office and after some hours of deliberation askedhim to come back the next day. The next day they presented him with theirsolution. Instead of a letter of proof of foreign citizenship, they would now


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also accept a letter of proof of noncitizenship. They needed a letter from theMalaysian Consulate stating that Mohamed was not accepted as aMalaysian citizen. When he presented himself at the Malaysian Consulatethe next day, the officials there looked pained. When he conveyed them hisnew request, they could hardly hide the relief they must have felt. They pro-vided him with the needed document one month later. It stated that he hadnever been a Malaysian citizen. When he left, they apologized for not hav-ing been able to provide him with Malaysian citizenship.

Two and a half years after Mohamed presented the letter provided bythe Malaysian Consulate at the Department of Legal Affairs of H7 Chí

Minh City, he received a document stating he had achieved Vietnamesecitizenship. This is extremely fast compared to the experience of some fel-low Muslims from Malaysia who did have Malaysian citizenship and whofollowed the regular trajectory for citizen application; they had waited forfour years.

Mohamed had taken an important first step, but what he really neededwas a passport. The first thing he arranged after obtaining the citizenshipdocument was a hz khXu [family registration or household register], afterwhich he could request a th^ chAng minh nhân dân [identity card] at thepolice office of H7 Chí Minh City District 1. He could submit a request fora Vietnamese passport only if he had these other documents. WhenMohamed went to the District 1 police office in order to apply for his iden-tity card, however, he needed to fill out a request form called a tN khai chAngminh nhân dân [citizenship application form]; this was the first documentthat—apart from place and date of birth and religious affiliation—requiredhim to record his dân tzc.

Up until that point, dân tzc had not been an issue in the process of citi-zenship application. There had been no request to fill in his dân tzc on anyof the papers he had submitted. Mohamed was aware that now that he hadbecome a Vietnamese citizen, his dân tzc meant one of the fifty-four state-sanctioned ethnic identities. He was aware that his ethnic identity was notincluded in the limited list of fifty-four, so he wrote down “Bawean,Indonésia”:

An employee took one look at my application and did not even look upwhen he said: “‘Bawean, Indonésia’ does not belong to the ethnic possibilities.”


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I explained my predicament and the employee called one of his col-leagues over. Both officers studied my application and asked if I was reallya foreigner: “How long did you study Vietnamese? It is really very good.”I told them that I had been born and raised in this country and that it waspart of me. It had fed me and I knew its customs. They expressed their sur-prise with the fluency of my Vietnamese once again. They asked me:“Where is this Bawean located?” and I drew a map on a piece of paper.Then a third official, a lady, listened in. During the conversation she tookmy application and studied it. Then she said: “But you are a Muslim,aren’t you?” I answered “yes,” and that was what she wanted to hear. Shesmiled, put down my application like this, and as if she had found thesolution she offered: “But then you’re just Cham, right?” So I pointed outthat indeed most Cham were also Muslim, but that I was certainly notCham.

The lady called to the back of the office, where some of her female col-leagues were resting, and asked them to come out and bring the list ofethnic minorities. Two more ladies in uniform joined the group andbrought along a laminated list. The first employee I had spoken to laidmy application next to the list and the group compared [the term]“Bawean” with the official list of ethnic groups in Vietnam. They wereall quiet and I wondered what they would come up with. After carefulscrutiny of both documents, one of them looked up and said that“Bawean” was not on the list. I said I believed he was right, and Iexpressed hope that they would let me use my own chosen name [eth-nonym]. One of the ladies pointed to the list, “How about Ba Na, is thatnot almost the same as Bawean?” So I asked them all: “Would you want tobe called Cham?” and they agreed that they would not. I explained: “Myidentity is part of my blood; it flows through these veins. I cannot acceptsomeone else’s, just like you.”

They discussed the matter further, and one of the uniformed men askedme: “Are you sure that you cannot accept Cham?” But the ladies in thegroup told him off, and one of them even hit him on his upper arm, quip-ping [laughing]: “How would you like to be called Hoa [ethnic Chinese]?”All of them found that unacceptable and giggled. At last I thought of“Indonésia” as an option, and this was accepted after some deliberationbecause they said that “Bawean” was just too obscure, “Indonésia” was bet-ter known [sic]. When my identity card was finished, one of the officialsasked me not to show the card to anyone because “Indonésia” might gethim into trouble.69


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Priscilla Koh, Terry Rambo, and Oscar Salemink stress the Vietnamesegovernment’s preoccupation with classifying each citizen according to oneof the fifty-four designated dân tzc. Salemink described identity cards asone way the state imposes its ethnic categories on the highland popula-tion.70 Rambo, too, mentions the identity card: “Every citizen must belongto one of the fifty-four recognized groups with this affiliation shown on theidentity card everyone carries. No ambiguity is permitted. An individualhaving mixed ancestry must be assigned to only one group, normally thefather’s.”71 But Mohamed’s reception at the neighborhood police officeshows us a softer side of the Vietnamese state. While state policies areengaged in a process of classifying and disciplining the (ethnic) population,state officials do not seem equally preoccupied with strict categorizationand classification, thus leaving room for ambiguity and for a humaneapproach. Mohamed presented himself with an official document statingthat he had already achieved Vietnamese citizenship. There was no needfor him to be careful about his ethnic affiliation now. That is why hepleaded with the officials not to deny him the ethnonym that he chose asthe official ethnic classification. Thus the group of Bawean individuals whoreceived Vietnamese citizenship were handed an identity card with a formal


F I G U R E 1 : A the? chú’ng minh nhân dân [identity card] that

was provided at the police station. The signature of the

official has been removed to protect the identity.

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ethnic affiliation that does not feature on the list of fifty-four dân tzc,namely “Indonésia.”

This encounter with the local police was the first time in the entireprocess that Mohamed was asked about his religion. Up until that point hehad articulated his ethnic origins at the Indonesian Consulate and he hadused socioeconomic arguments at the Department of Internal Affairs, buton none of these occasions was he asked or did he have to state his religiousaffiliation. Now we look at the state’s approach to this group’s religiousactivities.

The Motley Crowd Classifies Back

This article describes the paradoxical situation of a group of Bawean peoplefor whom Islam—and hence the hajj—is becoming more and more a cen-tral element in their identity as Bawean, and who therefore had to becomeVietnamese citizens in order to be able to engage in the transnational mobil-ity required by their faith. Their actions were motivated by what we mightcall a religious articulation of their ethnic identity. Mohamed and othersexplained how they express and reproduce cultural, historical, and contem-porary religious narratives that make them Bawean. These narratives areinfluenced by identifications that are not only local and national but alsotransnational in character, and that influence their sense of identity andtheir religious subjectivity.

Before 1976, the Bawean diaspora community oriented its transnationalcontacts toward its homeland or toward Bawean relatives or acquaintancesin other places. Bawean identity was framed by narratives of merantau [travel]and of “home” (Bawean Island, Indonesia), and was sustained by their sen-sory experience, registering sights and sounds, smells, language, song, anddance—which became increasingly unfamiliar but which became the stuffof desire and nostalgia. They expressed the hope of returning to Indonesia,but without sufficient knowledge of the language or contacts with (distant)relatives, this seemed difficult to realize. However, because of the latent andsometimes explicitly expressed wish to return to Indonesia, until recently theBawean men and women in this diaspora group did not seek to formallyrequest Vietnamese citizenship and hence escaped formal ethnic andnational classification. In their transnational relations over the past fifteen


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years, the Bawean diaspora community turned its focus away from its geo-graphic locus of origin and its successor state—Bawean Island in Indonesia.These contacts with the homeland were not essential for the reproduction oftheir community, as they intermarried with non-Bawean Muslims and non-Muslims and no longer entertained these transnational kin-based ethnicrelations. They never set foot in their country of origin and hardly spoketheir ancestral language anymore, imagining it to be Bahasa Indonesiarather than the Bawean dialect of Madurese. Yet they still call themselvesBawean people, originating from Bawean Island and ethnically belonging toIndonesia.

While their interpretation and practice of Islam has been an importantmarker for their (ethnic) identity since their arrival in Indochina, religiousideas and practices have become the most important marker of ethnicity andhave increasingly shaped Bawean ethnic narratives, especially as transna-tional religious repertoires and contacts have expanded. More than ever,Islam as such is construed as an intrinsic part of “being Bawean,” partly incompetition with Cham Islamic practices and organizations. TodayBawean people increasingly orient themselves toward Muslim centers else-where and use new media technologies, such as online chatting and cheapinternational calls made possible by the Internet. The pinnacle of their reli-gious efforts is the hajj, as highlighted by the fact that since the sixty-five eld-erly people received Vietnamese passports, many of them have been toMecca, but none of them have visited Indonesia.

In the case study presented here, the Bawean people actively dealt withdifferent governmental institutions and governmental representatives fromseveral states—Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam—as they formalized theircitizenship status and, as a consequence, their official ethnic identity. Whendealing with Vietnamese state officials they downplayed both the diasporicethnic and religious dimensions of their identity and even overcommuni-cated their connection with the host country, Vietnam. Nevertheless, theydid not abandon their status as aliens and did not become Vietnamese citi-zens out of desire to assimilate into Vietnamese society. On the contrary,they perceived citizenship as a way to distance themselves from certainaspects of Vietnamese cultural citizenship. They wished to fulfill a religiousduty that could be realized only transnationally, not locally. xi hành h}o’ng


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[going on pilgrimage]—as the Bawean and Cham call the hajj—is one ofthe five pillars of Islam. Not fulfilling the ritual prescriptions and proscrip-tions of the Islamic faith is seen as a loss of “Bawean-ness.” Paradoxically, thisdesire to engage in hành h}o’ng makes the people of Bawean origin blend invery well with the surrounding “religio-scape” of southern Vietnam, whichaccording to Philip Taylor is characterized by massive religious-inspiredmobility.72

Much current scholarly literature presents state classification as a state’shegemonic instrument, and as an instrument of state power alone. This casestudy of the Bawean balances the widespread view of the contemporary Viet-namese state as classifying the “motley crowds” in frontiers or remote areas:such a crowd at the margins of formal classification exists right in the centerof Vietnam’s economic hub. It also shows that official policies are not nec-essarily followed to the letter at lower governmental levels. State agents didnot force Mohamed into the existing official classificatory grids in line withan oppressive uniform ideology but left space for negotiation and for whatone could call “benevolent ambiguity” by allowing “Indonésia” to becomea dân tzc of Vietnam. This shows that this ideology, supposedly suppressingdiversity for the sake of the idea of a greater Vietnamese family, is not imple-mented the same way everywhere, without respect for regional variation, butrather leaves room for “indiscipline” in the way that Mbembe defined thatterm.73

In this space of benevolent ambiguity left by local state officials, ethnicclassification becomes an instrument that is not used by the state alone.As shown in our case study, when people feel dissatisfied with the ethnicslots offered by the state, they may instrumentally highlight certainaspects of their identity in a power game over their exact national and eth-nic identity. In the past as well as in the case study presented above,Mohamed—representing a larger group of people—has actively manipu-lated aspects of his ethnicity in response to his needs and the challenges hehad to overcome. In the past, his feelings of ethnic pride made him hold onto his ethnic identity and made him choose not to become a Vietnamesenational. Later, when he needed something the Vietnamese state could pro-vide him, he negotiated with state agencies over his formal ethnic classifi-cation, and in doing so he used ethnic classification as an instrument to his


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benefit. These actions provided him with a passport that enabled him toundertake a journey which in turn served an existential desire as part of hisethnoreligious identity. In fact, most people in the group of sixty-five whoreceived Vietnamese citizenship were in the autumn of their lives, andmany claimed that this request for Vietnamese citizenship not only influ-enced their position within contemporary Vietnamese society but also con-stituted a preparation for the afterlife. They became an officially registeredethnic community in order to fulfill the most sacred religious duty of pil-grimage, which provided them with a feeling of religious security in the con-text of their membership in the transnational umma.

Before their naturalization as Vietnamese citizens, the people of Baweanorigin living in H7 Chí Minh City could be regarded as one of the “motleycrowds” that the state seeks to classify and hence make “legible” according tothe state’s classificatory grid. Certainly after September 11, 2001, the Viet-namese state could have had every reason to be suspicious of an undocu-mented alien Muslim presence. However, Vietnamese state officials hardlyinterfered in Bawean daily life, and in the procedure for citizenship appli-cation they even displayed willingness to create a space of benevolent ambi-guity by classifying them in ethnic slots that were not on the officiallyapproved list. In this case, the “motley crowd” did not accept any of the offi-cial ethnic classifications that the state had defined. Rather than denyingtheir agency in terms of ethnic identification, sympathetic local officialshelped this “motley crowd” of people of Bawean origin to classify back. �

List of Interviews Cited

Malte Stokhof has established long-term relationships with severalinformants, and some informants have been interviewed several years in arow. The names of persons and places have been changed in order to protectthe privacy of informants.

Interview with hakim of Mosque Nuhr, July 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.Interview with Hidir, June 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.Interviews with Ahmed, January 2001–June 2003, H7 Chí Minh City.Interviews with Mohamed, 2001 and 2005, H7 Chí Minh City. Interview with lawyer at the Department of Foreign Affairs, November

2005, H7 Chí Minh City.


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M A LT E S T O K H O F is a PhD candidate, Department of Social and CulturalAnthropology, VU University Amsterdam, and Director of the NetherlandsEducation Support Office in Vietnam. The field research of this article wascarried out by Stokhof between 2001 and 2006. This article is based on achapter from his forthcoming PhD dissertation, “Bawean Muslims in H7

Chí Minh City, from Indonesian Diaspora to Vietnamese Ethnic Minority.”OSCAR SALEMINK is Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Anthro-pology, VU University Amsterdam. The authors wish to thank ProfessorPhan Thi Y!n Tuy!t, Professor Tôn N, Qu-nh Trân, Professor Philip Tay-lor, Bradley Camp Davis, Julie Pham, and the anonymous JVS referees fortheir helpful remarks, suggestions, and corrections on this essay.

abstract

This paper presents a group of Muslim descendants of Bawean people livingin HO Chí Minh City who formalized their citizenship status and as a con-sequence their official ethnic identity. Much current scholarly literature pres-ents state classification as a state’s hegemonic instrument, as an instrumentof state power alone. This case study balances the widespread view of thecontemporary Vietnamese state as classifying the “motley crowds” within itsboundaries, showing that the state leaves room for “indiscipline.” Ratherthan denying their agency in terms of ethnic identification, sympatheticlocal officials helped these people of Bawean origin to “classify back.”

K E Y W O R D S: Vietnam, Indonesia, ethnic classification, ethnic identity,religion, citizenship

Notes

1. In order to protect the privacy of informants and other research subjects, wehave anonymized informants by changing their names and have chosen not todisclose research locations.

2. Interview with Hidir, June 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.3. The ethnographic material for this article is primarily based on field research

by Malte Stokhof. The analysis constitutes a joint effort by both authors.Regarding Austronesian language groups, see Darrell Tyron, “Proto-Austrone-sian and the Major Austronesian Subgroups,” in The Austronesians: Historicaland Comparative Perspectives, eds. Peter Bellwood, James. J. Fox, and DarrellTyron (Canberra: Department of Anthropology Research School of Pacific


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and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1995), 17–35. According toTyron, the Austronesian language family is very large, with some 1,200 lan-guages and approximately 270 million speakers. It ranges from languages withtens of millions of speakers (Malay/Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog) to a surpris-ingly large number of languages with only a handful of speakers numbered inthe hundreds. Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar in the westto Easter Island in the east. They are spoken almost universally in Indonesiaand the Philippines, in Singapore and Malaysia, by the indigenous populationof Taiwan and by minority populations in Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Mer-gui Archipelago off the coast of Myanmar.

4. Charles F. Keyes, “‘The Peoples of Asia’: Science and Politics in the Classifica-tion of Ethnic Groups in Thailand, China, and Vietnam,” Journal of AsianStudies 61, no. 4 (November 2002): 1163–1203, 1174.

5. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the HumanCondition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 76.

6. A. Terry Rambo, “Vietnam,” in Ethnicity in Asia, ed. Colin Mackerras (Lon-don: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 108–135.

7. J.A. Berlie, The Burmanization of Myanmar’s Muslims (Bangkok: White Lotus,2008); Leif Manger, Muslim Diversity: Local Islam in Global Contexts (Rich-mond, UK: Curzon, 1990).

8. Malte Stokhof, “Javanese in Hochiminh City Today: An Aftermath of CoolieMigration in French Colonial Vietnam?” (master’s thesis, Universiteit vanAmsterdam, 2002).

9. Jakob Vredenbregt, De Baweanners in Hun Moederland en in Singapore: Eenbijdrage tot de Kulturele Antropologie van Zuidoost-Azie [The Bawean Peoplein Their Homeland and in Singapore: A Contribution to the Cultural Anthro-pology of Southeast Asia] (PhD dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1968).

10. This would mean that the Bawean settlement would have coincided with theFrench colonization of the area. While there is no independent record con-firming these stories, French records do indicate a Bawean presence and theconstruction of a mosque in Sài Gòn in the 1880s.

11. Marcel Ner, “Les Musulmans de l’Indochine française” [The Muslims ofFrench Indochina], Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extreme-Orient 41, no. 2(1941): 179–180.

12. Antoine Cabaton, “Les malais de l’Indochine française” [The Malays ofFrench Indochina], Revue Indochinoise [Indochina Review] first semester(1912): 163–171.

13. René Deschamps, La main-d’oeuvre en Indo-Chine et l’immigration étrangère[Manual Laborers in Indochina and Foreign Immigration] (PhD dissertation,Université de Poitiers, 1908).


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14. Ner, Les Musulmans.15. “Note sur l’affaire de la mosque de Saigon,” file no. 2995 (Goucoch divers),

Vietnam National Archives II, H7 Chí Minh City. This document deals withquarrels over money in the “Indian Mosque” and mentions that in 1863 thecolonial government assigned land to the “Congrégation des Indiens Musul-mans” [Congregation of Indian Muslims].

16. Interview with hakim of the mosque, July 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.17. Stokhof, “Javanese in Hochiminh City.” 18. Gerald Cannon Hickey, Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese

Central Highlands, 1954–1975 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982);Rie Nakamura, “Cham in Vietnam: Dynamics of Ethnicity” (PhD dissertation,University of Washington, 1999).

19. Bình-Nguyên Lbc, NguOn gFc Mã Lai c*a dân tzc ViDt Nam [The Malay Ori-gins of the Vietnam Ethnicity] (Sài Gòn: Lá Bhi, 1971).

20. Interview with Ahmed, January 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.21. Hu-nh Kim Khánh, “Year One of Postcolonial Vietnam,” Southeast Asian

Affairs 4 (1977): 287–296.22. Interview with Ahmed, January 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.23. James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 76.24. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.25. The term “Malay world” is still in use among historians to denote the histori-

cal culture and trade area comprising (parts of) the present-day countries ofThailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philip-pines, as well as the seas connecting these lands—as brought out in the nameof the journal Indonesia and the Malay World.

26. Priscilla Koh, “Persistent Ambiguities: Vietnamese Ethnology in the Doi MoiPeriod (1986–2001),” Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies 5, no. 1 (2004),http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/2312 (accessed December18, 2008). See Patricia Pelley, “‘Barbarians’ and ‘Younger Brothers’: TheRemaking of Race in Postcolonial Vietnam,” Journal of Southeast Asian Stud-ies 29, no. 2 (1998): 374–391; Patricia Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histo-ries of the National Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); OscarSalemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders: A HistoricalContextualization, 1850–1990 (London: RoutledgeCurzon / Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawai’i Press [Anthropology of Asia Series], 2003).

27. T%ng cpc Thhng kê, “Danh mpc các thành ph6n dân tbc Vi0t Nam” [List ofAll Vietnamese Ethnicities in Vietnam], T\p Chí Dân Tzc HLc [Magazine ofEthnology], no. 1 (1979): 58–63; Rambo, “Vietnam” (see note 6): 109–135.

28. Stéphane Dovert and Benoît de Tréglodé, eds., Vietnam Contemporain [Con-temporary Vietnam] (Paris: IRASEC Les Indes Savantes, 2004).


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29. Hf Qu5c Thfch, Nhân Dân [The People], March 18, 1999.30. Keyes, “The Peoples of Asia”; Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Cen-

tral Highlanders; Nguyen Van Thang, Ambiguity of Identity: The Mieu inNorth Vietnam (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2007).

31. Priscilla Koh, “Persistent Ambiguities.” 32. One would expect the spelling gi{y; mistake in original document.33. Priscilla Koh, “Persistent Ambiguities.” 34. Liisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National

Order of Things,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523.35. Brackette F. Williams, “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation

across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 426, quotedin Keyes, “The Peoples of Asia,” 1174.

36. For a lucid discussion of agency in terms of power and of “culturally consti-tuted projects,” see Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture,Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

37. Achille Mbembe, “Domaines de la nuit et autorité onirique dans les maquisdu Sud-Cameroun (1955–1958)” [Realms of the Night and Dreamlike Author-ity in the Jungle of Southern Cameroon], Journal of African History 32, no. 1(1991): 89–121; see also Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “The Subject in Africa: In Fou-cault’s Footsteps,” Public Culture 14, no. 3 (2002): 593–598.

38. Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders. 39. For recent ethnographic studies of Cham Muslims in contemporary Vietnam,

see Rie Nakamura, “Cham in Vietnam” (see note 18); and Philip Taylor,Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta: Place and Mobility in the CosmopolitanPeriphery (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007).

40. Interview with Mohamed, May 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.41. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997).42. Note the interesting combination of the Indonesian term [ayam, chicken] and

the Vietnamese [n}Rng, roasted].43. Charles F. Keyes, “Ethnicity, Ethnic Group,” in The Dictionary of Anthropol-

ogy, ed. T. Barfield (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 152–154.44. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.45. Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territori-

alization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,” CulturalAnthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44.

46. Cohen, Global Diasporas.47. Ralph Grillo, “Islam and Transnationalism,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration

Studies 30, no. 5 (2004): 861–878.48. Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism,” Ethnic and

Racial Studies 22, no. 2 (March 1999): 447–463.


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49. Benedict R.O.G. Anderson, “Exodus,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (Winter 1994):314–327; Benedict R.O.G. Anderson, “Western Nationalism and EasternNationalism: Is There a Difference that Matters?” New Left Review, no. 9(May-June 2001): 31–42.

50. Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson, New Media in the Muslim World: TheEmerging Public Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

51. Ninian Smart, “The Importance of Diasporas,” in Migration, Diasporas andTransnationalism, eds. Steven Vertovec and Rob Cohen (Aldershot, UK:Edward Elgar, 1999), 420–429.

52. Tr6n Thi Liên, “La question religieuse” [The Religious Question], VietnamContemporain [Contemporary Vietnam] (Paris: IRASEC Les Indes Savantes,2004), 369–382.

53. Jay Willoughby, “The Cham Muslims of Vietnam,” ISIM Newsletter, March1999, 14.

54. See, for example, the websites IslamWorld, www.islamworld.net/, and Islam101, www.islam101.com/; and the blog site Angelfire, www.angelfire.com/ (allaccessed February 28, 2003).

55. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.56. Ibid.57. Interview with hakim of mosque, July 2001, H7 Chí Minh City.58. Bùi Phpng, TS xiWn ViDt Anh [Vietnamese English Dictionary] (Hà Nbi: Th!

Gi&i, 2003).59. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster, 1968). See also

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “Ethnic Identity, National Identity, and IntergroupConflict: The Significance of Personal Experiences,” in Social Identity, Inter-group Conflict and Conflict Resolution, eds. Richard D. Ashmore, Lee Jussim,and David Wilder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 42–70; ThomasHylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

60. Eriksen, “Ethnic Identity, National Identity, and Intergroup Conflict.”61. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.62. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism. 63. Eriksen, “Ethnic Identity, National Identity, and Intergroup Conflict.”64. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.65. G.A. de Vos, “Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation,” in The Sociol-

ogy of Race and Ethnicity, ed. Malcom Cross (Cheltenham, UK: EdwardElgar, 2000), 3:113–142.

66. Interview with lawyer at the Department of Foreign Affairs, November 2005,H7 Chí Minh City.

67. Keyes, “The Peoples of Asia”; Joane Nagel, “Constructing Ethnicity: Creatingand Recreating Ethnic Identity and Culture,” Social Problems, no. 41 (1994): 51–75.


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68. Interview with Mohamed, May 2005, H7 Chí Minh City.69. Ibid. 70. Koh, “Persistent Ambiguities”; Rambo, “Vietnam”; Salemink, The Ethnogra-

phy of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders.71. Rambo, “Vietnam,” 115.72. Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Viet-

nam (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). The term “religio-scape”is a paraphrase of Arjun Appadurai’s famous “ideoscape,” used by Bryan S.Turner in “Religion and Politics: Nationalism, Globalisation and Empire,”Asian Journal of Social Science 2, no. 34 (2006): 209–224.

73. Mbembe, “Domaines de la nuit.”


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