Kon Tum City. Early morning in May 2012. Start of the rainy season.
I was on my way to a Bahnar village located in the heart of the city.
The  road was wide and clean, lined with tall trees and modern
buildings that house the People’s Committee and various local services
— the very nerve centre of the provincial government. Flags and
banners in red and gold fluttered in the wind, commemorating the
centenary anniversary of the foundation of the province (1913–2013).
Further down the road, I saw a dozen men, some squatting on the
sidewalk, some standing idly by. Their weather-beaten faces were
gloomy, their clothes shabby. These were indigenous Bahnar, not too
young or too old, able-bodied males gathering daily at this makeshift
‘labour exchange’ (chợ người), hoping to sell their labour for a meagre
wage at some construction sites or plantations in the region. The scene was emblematic of the marginalisation of indigenous individuals in
their own territory where their ancestors had settled for centuries,
long before the arrival of the Kinh, the French, and the Americans.1
In the context of Vietnam, nearly 12 million people, accounting for
less than 15 per cent of the total population (General Statistics Office
of Vietnam 2010), are classified as ethnic minorities, and, in 2010, they
accounted for 47 per cent of the poor (World Bank 2012). Poverty
has been decreasing among minority groups in Vietnam’s Central
Highlands as market-driven opportunities for off-farm labour continue
to expand. However, indigenous groups such as the Bahnar, Jarai,
and Sedang remain dogged by lower than average literacy and school
enrolment rates, poor housing and sanitation, and over-representation
in unskilled, poorly paid and unstable agricultural work (Socialist
Republic of Vietnam 2013). Despondent scenes such as the improvised
Bahnar labour market in Kon Tum are set against a highlands
landscape that has been reconfigured by explosive capitalistic resource
extraction, the coffee frontier, mining and rubber. Vietnam’s central
highlanders have been marginalised by world capitalism with frontier
characteristics in the wake of dổi mới, a process rewarding those with
favourable social capital, knowledge of markets, political connections
and ties to lowland markets (McElwee 2004).