Who are the Giẻ Triêng and where do they live?
The Giẻ Triêng are one of the 54 ethnic groups recognised in Vietnam, under the List of Ethnic Components issued with Decision No. 121-TCTK/PPCĐ dated 2 March 1979. They are long-standing residents of the area around the Ngọc Linh massif, in what is now Kon Tum province and Quảng Nam province.
According to the Survey of 53 Ethnic Minorities of 1 April 2019, the Giẻ Triêng numbered 63,322 people. Earlier, the 2009 Population and Housing Census recorded 50,962 people. These two figures reflect different census dates, not conflicting data.
On distribution, Đắc Glây district in Kon Tum has the Gié and Triêng groups. Quảng Nam province has the Bnoong group in Phước Sơn and Trà My districts, and the T'riêng and Ve groups in Giằng district. Other names once used include Cà Tang and Giang Rẫy.
Local groups and self-names
Each group has its own self-name: Gié, Triêng, Ve, Bnoong. The Gié group is the largest. These are local subgroups within one ethnic group, not separate peoples.
| Local group | Other recorded names | Main area of residence |
|---|---|---|
| Gié (Giẻ, Dgieh, Tareh) | Cà Tang, Giang Rẫy | Đắc Glây district, Kon Tum |
| Triêng (T'riêng, Treng, Tơ riêng) | Cà Tang, Giang Rẫy | Đắc Glây district, Kon Tum |
| Ve (La ve) | Cà Tang, Giang Rẫy | Giằng district, Quảng Nam |
| Bnoong (Mnoong, Pa noong, Bơ Noong) | Cà Tang, Giang Rẫy | Phước Sơn and Trà My districts, Quảng Nam |
Which language group does Giẻ Triêng speech belong to?
Giẻ Triêng speech belongs to the Môn Khơ Me language group of the Austroasiatic family, relatively close to Xơ Đăng and Ba Na. There are certain differences in speech between the local groups.
A writing system for this people was created in the period before 1975, building its rhyme system on Latin letters.
What do the Giẻ Triêng do for a living and how do they eat and live?
Their main production activity is swidden farming. They once grew much glutinous rice; today ordinary rice dominates, with many varieties. Cultivation methods resemble those of other mountain peoples in the region.
Main tools include the axe and the billhook for clearing swiddens, a stick sharpened at the tip or fitted with an iron point for making holes when sowing, and a small hoe with a forked branch handle for weeding. Besides rice, the swidden also holds maize, cassava, sorghum, millet, sweet potato, taro, gourds, melons, tobacco, cotton, sugarcane and banana.
Common livestock are chickens, pigs, dogs and buffalo. According to the Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs, these animals were slaughtered only for sacrificial use. Food obtained by gathering, hunting and fishing plays an important role.
The Giẻ Triêng are skilled at basketry, and weaving developed in many places. The Đắc Pét area has a tradition of panning alluvial gold and making pottery at a level without the potter's wheel and without kilns. Goods were once exchanged by barter; money is now used.
As for meals, the Giẻ Triêng eat three times a day: morning, noon and evening. They favour grilled fish and meat. Soup is also common. The habit of eating with the hands has lasted a long time; chopsticks and bowls are now fairly widespread. Traditional drinks are plain water and rượu cần made from rice, maize, cassava and millet, plus a liquor made from the water of a wild palm-family tree. Both men and women smoke tobacco from a pipe.
As for housing, the long stilt house with several hearths is the common traditional form. Especially among the Gié and Bnoong, sometimes a whole village lived in one or a few houses. Later, ground-level houses appeared. In many places, except among the Bnoong, villages built a tall, fine communal house. The custom of arranging houses in a ring around a central open space is a long-standing cultural feature in Giằng and some places in Đắc Glây.
In traditional dress, men wrap a loincloth and go bare-chested, throwing a cloth over themselves when it is cold. Women wear a top and wrap a skirt; in some places a long tube skirt covers the upper body as well, from the chest down. Women like to wear many ornaments: silver rings, bronze rings, bead strings at the neck, wrists, ankles and ears. Women of better-off families even have ivory earrings. Vietnamese-style clothing is now present even in remote villages.
The characteristic means of transport is the gùi basket, in many types and sizes: loosely woven, tightly woven, carried daily on the person, kept at home for storage, with black-dyed patterned slats, without dyed slats, and types reserved for men.
What is notable about traditional social relations?
Villagers belong to different lineages, each with its own origin legend, name and taboos. In the past there were women's lineages and men's lineages. Community relations in the village were regular and fairly close.
The village elder holds high prestige for knowledge and experience, and is often the village founder. Traditional society shows many traces of matrilineal survivals and a transition from matriliny to patriliny.
How are Giẻ Triêng worship customs carried out?
The Giẻ Triêng hold that there are many spirits, and that every object, animal and person has a hidden spirit. This is a many-spirit belief system closely tied to production and community life.
Spirits invoked include the water spirit, the sky spirit (identified with thunder and lightning), the sun spirit, the earth spirit, the village spirit, the rice spirit, the stone spirit and the banyan spirit. Each village usually has a sacred object as a kind of protective charm, hidden in the forest and kept secret from outsiders. Lineages and families also have sacred objects for harvest prayers tied to rice cultivation. The spirits of the dead are also seen as a force governing life. Related to that supernatural world, there are many customary ritual ceremonies.
It should be noted that this describes religious practice as a cultural practice recorded in ethnographic sources, without asserting or denying the efficacy of those practices.
What are the main festivals and rites of the Giẻ Triêng?
Every worship includes sacrifice, in which the blood of the sacrificial animal is most important. Major rites require buffalo sacrifice. According to Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs sources, in the distant past some places used human blood in a special rite linked to the rice spirit. This is a record of a past custom, not a practice taking place now.
The Giẻ Triêng ritual system can be divided into two large groups: rites of the production cycle and rites of the human life cycle.
| Ritual group | Main recorded milestones |
|---|---|
| Swidden production cycle | Choosing swidden land, clearing the swidden, sowing, times of drought or waterlogging, start of rice threshing, bringing rice to the granary, reaching 100 gùi of rice or more, first eating of newly taken grain |
| Human life cycle | Pregnancy, during and after childbirth, naming, illness, tooth filing, marriage, death |
The ethnic New Year usually comes earlier than Lunar New Year and is held by village.
Marriage and childbirth
Young men and women find their own partners, and parents usually agree if no custom is broken. Marriage passes through many steps, and always includes a rite binding bride and groom together, through feeding each other rice with chicken liver and drinking from one bowl of liquor, or in some places covering themselves with one blanket. The girl must prepare 100 fine bundles of firewood in advance to bring to the groom's house. The groom's family usually gives woven goods to the bride's family and receives woven products in return. In the past, a married couple lived alternately with each side for a few years.
As for childbirth, the husband had to build a hut in the forest for his wife to give birth. The mother managed alone during birth, and only after 10 days could she bring the child home. The baby is considered a family member after a rite is held to admit it into the community of household kin.
Funerals
Customs are not entirely the same across groups. A common feature is a coffin carved from a single log, in some places with a buffalo head carved at the end. The dead are buried; some documents say cremation was used in the past. The grave house is simply built, with a fence around it. Objects placed at the grave for the dead, if they are gongs and jars, are all punctured or broken. In the past, there was a custom of burying family members who died not long apart together in one coffin.
For 10 days after a village death, before the bereaved family holds rites reminding the soul to stay at the burial ground, villagers do not enter the forest and do not go far from home to work. The rite of severing ties with the grave is usually held at the start of the year beside the grave.
What is distinctive about their calendar and artistic life?
The Giẻ Triêng base their day reckoning on the lunar cycle. Accordingly, the names of specific days in the month are mostly repeated, one day in the first half and one in the second half of the month. A year has 12 months, each with certain key tasks.
In music, the richest, most precious and most important instrument set is the cồng chiêng gongs. Depending on place, people use 3 cồng with 7 or 9 chiêng, or 6 chiêng, or 4 chiêng. Sometimes gongs play with drums and with bamboo tubes. Bamboo tubes themselves are instruments to blow, pat and strike. Flutes and mouth organs are simple and common in musical life. The Giẻ Triêng have traditional folk melodies and many old tales.
Typical handicraft objects
Bamboo containers are fairly common in Giẻ Triêng households. The body is shaved down to fit tightly into the lid, and fragile spots are bound with wide woven rattan. There are two-compartment types: one for lime and one for tobacco, a personal item. Alongside are specialised gùi baskets, such as the three-compartment gùi reserved for men going to forest or swidden, woven from rattan, with the upper strap and the mouth resting against the wearer's back reinforced with pieces of muntjac hide. The Gié group also uses gùi woven from bamboo rind to carry rice at harvest, with slats forming glossy black patterns from repeated smoking over resin smoke.
The place of the Giẻ Triêng among Vietnam's 54 ethnic groups
In the List of Ethnic Components of Vietnam, the Giẻ Triêng rank 27th among the 54 groups, with other names including Giang Rẫy, Brila, Cà tang, Mọi, Doãn, and the subgroups Gié (Dgieh, Tareh), Triêng (Treng, Tơ riêng), Ve (La ve) and Pa noong (Bơ Noong).
According to Nhân Dân newspaper's overview of Vietnam's ethnic communities, beside the Kinh, who make up more than 85.4% of the national population, the other 53 groups are called minorities and make up about 14.6% of the total. Ethnic minority people usually live in communities, interwoven with one another and with the Kinh. Minorities live mainly in high mountain, border and remote areas, of which the Central Highlands has about 2 million people. The Giẻ Triêng belong to this Central Highlands and central coastal population group.
