In the late 1990s, administrative reports coming out of Vietnam’s northern highlands warned of ‘plots to disturb the peace and disrupt order’. These plots, according to officials, were being perpetrated by ‘hostile forces’ that were funded and supported by the US. The cause of the panic can be traced back to Far East Broadcasting Company (FEBC) which operated out of the Philippines with a mission to spread the Christian message to the ‘least-reached people’. Protestant Christian ministers had been broadcasting in the Hmong language on FEBC since the 1960s. Yet, it was only in the 1990s that their radio shows surged in popularity in the highlands of Vietnam and large numbers of Hmong, though never having had direct contact with missionaries, opted to convert to Christianity. Official statistics on religious conversion are unreliable, but contemporary estimates suggest that Hmong followers of Protestantism may be as many as 500,000 people. To put that figure in proportion, there are 1.4 million Hmong in Vietnam; Hmong believers now account for approximately a quarter of all Protestants in the country (Rumsby 2024, 41).
Why did Protestantism take hold with such dramatic force in the late 1990s and early 2000s? In this examination of religious transformation and everyday politics in Highland Vietnam, Seb Rumsby suggests possible explanations which span the spiritual and the practical. In the late 1980s the northern highlands were a place of poverty and hunger and ‘the New Way’, as it is known to its Hmong followers, offered millenarian dreams of relief and a route out of isolation. Government intrusion and the disruption of Hmong communities, coupled with ethnic discrimination and unfulfilled promises of political autonomy, had created a decades-old legacy of distrust and resentment. In such contexts, the adoption of Christianity could be seen as an opportunity to exercise autonomous agency and to protest official intrusion. At the same time, economic reforms rewarded those able to establish business ties in Vietnam’s urban centres and internationally. The Church provided the most immediate avenue for connecting with wider economic and social networks. A final, more prosaic explanation for the increased number of people tuning in to FEBC in the late 1980s would be the establishment of black-market trade with China which led to an influx of cheap radio sets. Development in Spirit attempts to untangle the overlapping forces that have driven change in Highland Vietnam and to follow the strands to reveal the economic, political, social, and spiritual impacts of Christian conversion among the Hmong.
Vietnam’s local and central authorities responded to what they viewed as a challenge to their legitimacy with campaigns of intimidation and harassment of Hmong converts. Yet, as Rumsby points out, Protestant activity has been most dynamic in the places where repression was most heavy-handed, while there are notably fewer Hmong converts in areas where the authorities took a more relaxed approach. James Scott’s writings on escape agriculture and millenarian religious belief in Montane Southeast Asia provide an obvious starting point for chapters in the early part of the book. But Rumsby goes beyond Scott’s broad historical generalisations of compliance vs. resistance to produce an ethnography of depth and substance. In Chapter 2 he contrasts changing household livelihood dynamics, infrastructure provision, and political structures in three different Hmong villages—the first in which the inhabitants have opted for a ‘selective engagement with modernity’, the second where they enthusiastically following the development agenda of the Vietnamese state, and the third a site of Christian conversion and church-led community mobilisation. Out of these sites emerged a generation of Hmong able to refashion themselves as church leaders, development consultants, and business brokers. Chapter 3 takes up their stories of these men (and it is largely men) to examine the political economy of the new Christian elites.
If the first half of the book is concerned with the art of negotiating governance and managing modernity, the second part takes up Tania Li’s notion of the will to improve and James Ferguson’s work on governmentality. Chapter 4 lays out the different ways in which modernity is conceived and the relationships with markets, the local and national state, church, and community, that underpin development discourses. Examining the ways in which the will to improve manifests itself in discourses about education, occupation, religion, and morality, Rumsby documents complicated and contradictory aspirations for modernity, perceived means to development, and religious techniques of self-fashioning. In showing how the Hmong take different routes along the way to a shared goal, Rumsby highlights the forms of social differentiation that result. Inequality is however not reduced into a binary distinction between winners and losers. Countering assumptions in development studies about the gender regressive effect of religion, it is argued in Chapter 5 that Hmong women who take the lead in shifts to Christianity do so as an act of patriarchal bargaining and are partially empowered through their actions.
Against a background of religious change, state territorialisation, and market expansion, Development in Spirit shows a people who are neither wholly resistant to change, nor the passive recipients of development. Rumsby reconceptualises the people of Vietnam’s northern highlands not as a monolithic group, but as agentive actors seeking to engage in economic structures and negotiate with powerful external forces at the level of the local and the everyday. By doing so he presents a nuanced analysis of intersecting processes that connect the local with the national and global, and the mind with the body and the spirit.