The Ê Đê and Central Highlands peoples

Climb up into the central highlands of Vietnam, those red highland lands the Vietnamese call Tây Nguyên ("the western highlands"), and the landscape changes completely. Gone is the tender green of the flooded paddies: here the earth is ochre, almost blood-red from the volcanic laterite; the air is cooler, the hills roll on, planted with coffee bushes and pepper vines. And in the evening, when the light falls, a low, metallic, hypnotic sound sometimes rises, seeming to come from the earth itself: the song of the gongs (cồng chiêng). You are in the country of the Ê Đê, the Gia Rai, the Ba Na, and many other highland peoples — cultures of astonishing richness, where women hold the household, where people live in long wooden houses on stilts, and where music is not entertainment but a sacred language.

Another Vietnam, up in the heights

The central highlands cover several provinces, among them Đắk Lắk, whose capital Buôn Ma Thuột is also the coffee capital of Vietnam. It is home to dozens of ethnic groups. The most numerous and best known are the Ê Đê (also called Rade), the Gia Rai (or Jarai), and the Ba Na (or Bahnar). These peoples did not settle here recently: they have inhabited these mountains since time immemorial, long before the Viet lowlands spread southward. Their languages belong, depending on the group, to the Austronesian family (like the Ê Đê and the Gia Rai, distant linguistic cousins of Malays and Indonesians) or to the Mon-Khmer family (like the Ba Na).

For the learner of Vietnamese, this is a revelation: the country one sometimes imagines as a single block is in fact a mosaic of peoples, languages, and ways of life. Vietnamese is the national language — the language of school, administration, television — but in an Ê Đê village it is the Ê Đê language you hear first, lilting and full of sounds unknown to Vietnamese.

• Tây Nguyên — the central highlands, red highland lands.
• Ê Đê, Gia Rai, Ba Na — among the region's main peoples.
• Buôn Ma Thuột — the great city of Đắk Lắk and coffee capital.

When it is the women who pass things down

Here is perhaps the most fascinating trait of Ê Đê society: it is matrilineal. This means that descent, name, and inheritance pass through women, not men. A child belongs to the mother's clan; it is the daughters who inherit the house, the precious goods, the jars and gongs that make a family's fortune. And — a detail that often surprises — it is traditionally the woman who "asks for" the man in marriage, not the other way around. After the wedding, it is the husband who comes to live in the house of his wife's family.

Careful not to misread this: matrilineal does not mean women rule everything. Men keep a large role, especially in village affairs and ceremonies. But the house, the memory of the clan, the continuity of the lineage pass through the women. It is a complete reversal from the Viet society of the lowlands, traditionally patrilineal and Confucian, where it is the son who perpetuates the name and honors the ancestors. Two visions of the world thus coexist within a single country.

In an Ê Đê family, the maternal grandmother is often the central figure, guardian of the long house and its memory. Around her live her daughters, her sons-in-law, her grandchildren: several generations under one roof — a very, very long roof.

The long house, a village under a single roof

For we must talk about the long house (nhà dài, "long house" in Vietnamese). It is the emblem of Ê Đê dwelling and one of the finest architectural inventions in Vietnam. Picture a large wooden house raised on stilts, roofed with thatch or metal, and above all astonishingly long: as the family grows, as the daughters marry and bring in their husbands, the house is extended by another bay. Some long houses thus reached several dozen meters, sheltering under a single roof an entire extended matrilineal family across three or four generations.

You climb up by a staircase carved from a tree trunk, its steps often adorned with motifs: two breasts or a crescent moon, symbols of the woman and of the motherhood that governs the household. Inside, a long common gallery — the gah, the social space where guests are received, where people talk, where the precious goods are displayed — precedes the private alcoves of the couples. The whole thing is made of wood, bamboo, and rattan, sometimes without a single nail, and breathes coolness and calm. To live in a long house is to live together, in full view of everyone, in a collective intimacy very different from our Western partition walls.

The song of the gongs, heritage of humanity

Close your eyes now, and listen. In the highlands, the most sacred music is that of the bronze gongs (cồng chiêng). A gong ensemble is made of several instruments of different sizes, each giving a single note, played by several people who tune together into a complex, spellbinding fabric of sound — a little like an Indonesian gamelan, but native to these mountains. The sound is low, vibrant; it travels far into the night and makes the chest resonate.

Among the Ê Đê, the Gia Rai, the Ba Na, and their neighbors, gongs are not there "to give a concert." They accompany the great moments of life and of the calendar: births, weddings, funerals, buffalo sacrifices, harvest festivals, the inauguration of a house. Each occasion has its own rhythms. It is believed that the gongs speak to the spirits, that they carry prayers to the ancestors and deities. A fine set of gongs is a precious family wealth, passed down from generation to generation.

This art is so remarkable that UNESCO inscribed the cultural space of the gongs of the central highlands of Vietnam on its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. It is a global recognition of a long-overlooked tradition, and an invitation to protect these fragile cultures, now shaken by modernity, coffee plantations, and the exodus of the young toward the cities.

• The gongs (cồng chiêng) are played as an ensemble, each one a single note.
• They accompany rites: births, weddings, funerals, harvests.
• Their cultural space is inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Neighbors of the heights: Gia Rai, Ba Na, and the others

The Ê Đê are not alone up in these heights. Their closest neighbors, the Gia Rai (or Jarai), are likewise Austronesian-speaking and matrilineal; they live mostly around Gia Lai province, to which they gave their name, and are known for their villages ordered around a tall communal house with a steep, tapering roof, the nhà rông, which dominates the landscape like a wooden spire. The Ba Na (or Bahnar), Mon-Khmer speakers, share this spectacular communal-house architecture, the place of gatherings, rites, and the welcoming of guests. On the plateaus you also meet the Xơ Đăng, the Mnông, the Cơ Ho, and many other peoples, each with its own language, its costumes woven with geometric patterns, its festivals.

What strikes you, when you discover this mosaic, is how much it differs from the Vietnam of the lowlands. Here there are no curved pagodas or flooded paddies as far as the eye can see, but perched wooden houses, tombs adorned with funerary statues carved with an axe, forests peopled with spirits, and that music of bronze rising into the night. It is another slope of the country's soul, older perhaps, and long kept apart from the great currents that came from the delta and from China.

Coffee, buffaloes, and forest spirits

Daily life, meanwhile, revolves around the red earth. The highlands are the heart of coffee growing (cà phê) in Vietnam, today one of the world's leading exporters. The highland peoples also grow mountain rice, corn, and pepper, and raise the buffalo (con trâu), the most precious animal of all, which plows the fields and whose sacrifice, at the great festivals, seals the alliance between people, ancestors, and spirits.

For the spirituality of these peoples is deeply animist: the world is peopled with spirits (the yang) — in the forest, the river, the mountain, the house, the rice. They are respected, fed with offerings; people drink together the rice wine sipped through a straw from a great communal jar (rượu cần), a gesture of conviviality and communion that seals festivals and visits. To drink from the rượu cần with the people of a village is to be welcomed as one of their own.

In learning Vietnamese, then, you learn far more than a language: you push open the door of a plural country, where the rice-growing lowlands of the Viet meet the red heights of the Ê Đê, where thousand-year-old gongs resound, and where, in certain very long houses, it is still the women who guard the memory of the clan.

Vietnamese to remember

• Tây Nguyên (tay nguyen) — the central highlands, "the western highlands"
• Ê Đê (eh deh) — the Ê Đê (Rade) people, of matrilineal society
• Gia Rai (zah rai) — a neighboring people, Austronesian like the Ê Đê
• Ba Na (ba na) — another major highland people (Mon-Khmer)
• nhà dài (nya zai) — the "long house" on stilts
• nhà sàn (nya sahn) — the stilt house in general
• cồng chiêng (kong chieng) — the bronze gongs, listed by UNESCO
• con trâu (kon trow) — the buffalo, precious animal of sacrifices
• rượu cần (zuh-oo kun) — rice wine sipped through a straw from the jar
• cà phê (ka feh) — coffee, the wealth of the highlands
• Buôn Ma Thuột (buon ma twot) — great city and coffee capital
• buôn (buon) — "village" in the Ê Đê language, found in many place names