Vargyas Gábor: Istenek, ősök és sámánok (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2012)

PREFACE This exhibition introduces the visitor to the life and religion of a Vietnamese hill tribe, the Bru (in Vietnamese Van Kiéuk). The Bru are one of the 54 officially recognized national minorities in the Vietnamese Socialist Republic. They live in Quáng Tri and Quáng Binh Provinces in Central Vietnam, around the 17th parallel, the former „demilitarized zone", along the Vietnamese-Laotian border. Their language belongs to the „Western Katuic" branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, they number 55 559 souls (1999). The Bru are a typical Southeast-Asian hill tribe inhabiting the woodlands of the Central Vietnamese Highlands, an ecological zone originally unfamiliar to the Vietnamese majority. Their subsistence is mainly based on slash and burn (swidden) dry rice agriculture; besides which they raise poultry, pigs, goats, cattle and buffalo, and they also fish and hunt. Their material culture is relatively simple, weaving, metal-work and pottery being unknown to them. Bru society is patrilineal, social structure is based on the lineage (ntang): a patrilineal, named, localized, exogamous, corporate and ritual kin group descending from a common ancestor. The political and landowning unit is the village, traditional political power is vested in the village chief. The Bru were thrust into the main course of history after French colonization, in the 20th century. Inhabiting a strategic zone at the border of two hostile political systems, North and South Vietnam, they became unintentional participants and victims of the Vietnam war. The photos presented here were made between 1985 and 1989, one decade after the communist takeover and unification of Vietnam in 1975, when general impoverishment following the war resulted in the revival of traditional Bru culture based on subsistence. I carried out ethnographic fieldwork among them in the framework of cooperation agreement between the Hungarian and the Vietnamese Academy of Sciences. 11