“On the trails you go barefoot. I’m still barefoot! I wonder how one can stuff one’s feet into shoes that hurt so much. Feet are like hands, they start narrow and end broad. And shoes, they’re quite the opposite, they start broad and end narrow. So, your foot in a shoe—it’s completely absurd!” —Jacques Dournes, speaking of the forest trails of Vietnam’s Central Highlands French anthropologist Jacques Dournes lived in Vietnam for twenty-five years, from 1946 to 1970, studying the culture of the Jarai and other highland ethnic groups. He became a renowned ethnographer and the Jarai people became his lifelong passion. In part 1 of this study, Andrew Hardy explores Dournes’s challenging monograph Potao, une theorie de pouvoir chez les Indochinois jorai and his views on the role of the highlanders in ancient Champa. In part 2, Dournes speaks animatedly with the author about the Jarai, his feelings about culture and economics, his understanding of Vietnam’s history, and his personal experience of living in the Central Highlands.