The village, much like the state, remains impervious to scholarly warnings against its reification. Despite being highly abstracted categories, "the village" and the state are not the same every- where and always. This paper explores their meaning and analyzes the work they do of highlands of Northwest Vietnam. Why are villages necessary for state administration but state-village relations so often misunderstood? How does everyday talk of the state" function in relation to "the village yet obfuscate the real ties between them? In what ways do these discursive invocations both conceal and reveal their ideological effect "state" invite us to bring questions of ideology and practice back into readings of governmentality's modern forms. Village and state scholarly ideas do do something: they legitimate the uneven power relations that link village to state by. for example, obscuring bureaucratic every- conflicts excusing official failures, silencing coercion, and erasing traces of eariier dominations from ostensibly rational. centrally organized institutions.