Report of the Euroviet Conference
Amsterdam, July 1 and 5, 1997
The third Euroviet Conference was held in Amsterdam this year, continuing
its biennial convening scheme since Copenhagen in 1993. The 1997 Conference
was hosted by the International Institute for Asian Studies in cooperation
with the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The
historical centre of Amsterdam in which the Faculty of Social Sciences
is located, offered a superior scene for the more than 250 participants,
who had come from Europe, Asia, Australia and the US. Generous funding
by several organisations enabled the Conference Organisers to invite
more than 30 Vietnamese and foreign guests to present their papers.
Adequate fund raising during the two years the organization of the conference was prepared, allowed the invitation of more than 30 Vietnamese scholars, while a few scholars from Eastern Europe and elsewhere could be supported in consultation with the organizers. The Ford Foundation Hanoi made possible the attendance of 15 scholars, while the Dutch Embassy and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs guaranteed the venue of another six, including one of the key note speakers. The remaining guests were supported by the University of Amsterdam, the National Commission for Development Cooperation, the Royal Academy of Sciences and the IIAS. In some cases panel coordinators had secured funds from donors like UNDP and the ILO. An appeal to bussiness firms with interests in Vietnam, however, brought a negative response, possible reflecting the diminishing euphoria about the country's economy.
This year's focus was on Vietnamese society in transition, a rather broad theme which enabled those with in-country experience to assess the transformation of Vietnam's society since the late eighties, when the reform of Vietnam's economy gained momentum.
Press coverage, not always expected with this type of scholarly meetings, was quite extensive, though the local University press, possible because of the beginning of the vacation, failed to attend the occasion. NRC-Handelsblad draw attention to the conference as a whole and especially to the panel of Foreign Affairs, while radio reporters from the BBC and France-International made interviews with a number of specialists who attended the conference. The Italian based magazine Mekong sent one of her reporters to Amsterdam.
The Conference was preceded by the annual Wertheim-lecture, this year held by Ben Kerkvliet, professor at ANU's Research School for Asian and Pacific Studies. Kerkvliet made a thorough comparison between agrarian regimes in the Philippines and in Vietnam. Either of the countries offered sufficient welfare and basic safekeeping for their rural populations, while in both countries crucial land issues were not settled yet.
The official opening took place with messages from local hosts and Vietnam's vice-minister of Education and Vocational Training, Prof. Dr. Phan Minh Hac. A representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, drs. Teresa Fogelberg, hailed the Conference as an important event and initiative not only because of the presentation of current research and its connection with relevant development issues, but also because of the presence of Vietnamese guests. Her wish to organise the next conference in Hanoi, was foreclosed by an offer Prof. Phan Huy Le made on behalf of the responsible agencies in Vietnam tor organise a Vietnamese Studies Conference in Hanoi, next year. Prof. Hac, the vice-minister, then gave an overview of the development of the educational process in Vietnam.
During the conference, two open sessions attracted interest also from people who were not only interested in Vietnam. On Thursday, a round table discussion took place about David Marr's substantial 1995 study of the Vietnamese August Revolution. Moderated by Bernard Dahm (Passau University), four leading specialists on Vietnam and Indonesia discussed the similarities and differences between the developments in both countries where independence was fought by war and revolution. Next to David Marr (ANU), the Norwegian historian Stein Trnneson, the Australian Robert Cribb and the Dutch expert on Indonesian Islam, Kees Van Dijk participated in the discussion. Charles Fenn, who as an OSS-agent had met Ho Chi Minh and his guerilla's on the border between China and Vietnam, gave an impressive account about the chain of events he was involved in in 991945. A young Vietnamese historian gave his comments from the floor, again stressing the point how important it is to have writings of the Vietnamese and Indonesian themselves (at least to understand contextualization in history). At Thursday night, the Amsterdam based writer and poet Cao Xuan Tu and his Chinese colleague Duo Duo, living in Leiden, offered a fine group of attendants more than a glimpse of Asian poetry. Both are writers in exile for different reasons, but their work resembles in more than one way.
The papers were presented in 14 panels, partly simultaneously over two and a half days. More than 150 papers were presented, covering a variety of topics, ranging from history through literature until the Vietnamese diaspore. The main panels covered the following topics.
1. History and Historical Geography
2. Labour and Labour related Issues
3. The role of Women and their links to the nation
4. Rural Transformation
5. Economics
6. Urbanisation I: Hanoi , Socio-Economic and Social-Spatial Responses
to Change
7. Current Issues in Vietnam's Uplands
8. International Relations
9. Urbanisation II: Vietnam, Urbanisation and Regionalisation
10. Religion and Religious Revival
11. Vietnamese Diaspore
12. Literature, Education and Language
13. Environmental Issues
14. Health and Health Related Issues
From what was received by panel-coordinators, it seems general agreement, that the conference produced papers of quality. Many of the discussions in the various panels were informative, productive and opened up new fields of research to the future.
What follows are some highlights based on information from several panel coordinators. Details about authors and titles have been omitted because of problems of space. They can be found in the Book of Abstracts which was distributed among the conference attendants.
The panel on history discussed eleven papers of which most dealt with the 20th century. Perhaps it was a bit unfortunate that there was not more attention to earlier periods since much of the most interesting research going on in Vietnam these days concerns pre-modern times. This research was represented by a paper from a Vietnamese researcher that dealt with the administrative organisation of the Mac dynasty (1527-1592).The main focus of the other contributors was on the colonial period, with some solid, some imaginative papers on the mobility of mandarins, rural conditions, naval affairs, a forgotten ethnologist, and rice exports. There were three papers on the period of the First Indochina War which were interesting because they launched some new perspectives. One took up the role of Cochinchina (Kampuchea Krom) in Cambodian factional struggles, another the civil war aspect of the anti-colonial war, and a third analysed the land reforms in Viet Minh-held territory as precursors of the drastic land reforms after 1954.David Marr (Canberra) and Arthur Dommen (Washington, D.C.) did a remarkable job as commentators. Since the papers had not been distributed in advance, it was a great advantage to have such experienced commentators. They could furthermore discuss without difficulty both with those who presented their papers in English and with those who gave them in French.
The panel on labour saw a fair amount of different aspects discussing the labour market and the changes that have taken place since the early 1990s. Some important points were that the labour market is to a large extent self-regulating, and that it so far has had an enormous capacity to absorb labour in the non-farm and non-formal industrial sectors. 50 percent of the non-farm labour work in the informal sector takes place on family basis. The state sector is small and mainly employing an educated elite.The labour market is still not very mobile with only about 20 percent of the labour force. Vietnamese researchers presented findings on population mobility and pointed to the problem of underemployment which is much more important than open unemployment. Qualitative research mentioned the fate of women fruit traders and (retired) factory workers in Hanoi. With the industrial changes and the accompanying level of employment, panellists discussed widely the labour market in perspective of the official policies. New problems rise facing workers in Vietnam today with the increasing differentiation between foreign companies and local companies. Trade unions gained increasing independence in the state-owned enterprises, but they have to expand the work into the private sector in order to live up to the demands of society. The labour code from 1994 is an important legislation in order to regulate labour relations.
The panel on rural transformation showed the results of a vast amount of research undertaken at the moment. This is a good sign, because our knowledge of Vietnam's rural transformations since the early eighties is still scanty. The first part of three sessions was totally devoted to aggregate topics a like the relation between economic reform, small industry development and poverty alleviation. A team from the successful French financed Programme Fleuve Rouge presented a series of papers based on fieldwork in different provinces ( Hai Hung, Vinh Phu and BacThai). The fate of the much hailed agricultural cooperatives and its remaining role for agricultural development in the new market system was vividly discussed by a number of authors with first hand experience. Long term anthropological research asked for the attention between gender and economic reform, developments in horticulture, the long term consequences of the Doi Moi policy at the local level and the risks and opportunities it has on education for the young.
The papers, presented in the Economy Panel dealt with the transition process and the development of the market economy in Vietnam. In particular, most papers argued about the issue of sustainability of present growth rates, and considered it a crucial issue for Vietnamese livelihoods and the future development of Vietnamese political economy within the global economy context. Sustainability means not only the maintenance of high growth rates of GDP and coordination of major macroeconomic variables to achieve it. Within the context of powerful global economic system and influence, it also requires a wide range of institutions which allow economic factors (individuals or enterprises) to make the best of opportunities (internal and external) available to them, while also ensuring that social costs of growth (i.e., environmental damage, development of a poor underclass) do not outweigh the benefits to individuals. Hence, institutional development is central to the question of long-run sustainability and its impact on the economic well-being of the society as a whole.
For practical reasons, a separate panel was designed to discuss the role of Vietnamese women in the transformation process. Some papers dealt with society at large and focused not only on women. On the whole, the panel on "Women and their links with the nation" concluded with five broad observations. First of all, the family remains the main site of gender construction in Vietnam. Secondly, changing gender identity must be located in changing relations between the state, the family and the market which create a multiplicity of cross-cutting domains that are gendered. As such, a dichotomised approach to public-private faces serious methodological problems. Women still face a serious dilemma in regard to the role of the state, ie. the state can be seen simultaneously as an interference as well as a protector. Therefore is it important to understand the social and local constitution of local notions of public and private, and how these in themselves may be gendered. Thus an analysis of women's agency must move beyond strategic coping strategies at the micro level with meso and macro processes.
The panel on the highlands was composed of nine scholars coming from three continents. They focused on upland peoples, cultures, and environments in contemporary Vietnam. In the discussions there was a general agreement that many highland communities are now facing challenges to sustainable agricultural production, village territorial integrity, and local cultural survival the face of the ban on swidden production, development of the market economy, and acceleration of planned and spontaneous lowland migration to the uplands.
Vietnam's foreign policy, according to a member of Hanoi's Institute of Foreign Relations, is geared towards a better understanding with the European Union and the US, but stresses at the same time the important role of regional cooperation within ASEAN. The consequences for Vietnam's internal development are tremendous, because such a cooperation requires adaptation and openness towards the own population. The relations with China are improved, according to several speakers, but Vietnam is well aware of the importance of an adequate security pact with its northern neighbour. Two different panels on urbanisation were held, one focusing exclusively on Hanoi and one embraced a more general theme including all the big cities Vietnam has at the moment. Both panels were in such a way organised that participants could attend each other's sessions. Hanoi and its socio-economic and socio-spatial responses to change was the topic of the first panel where many aspects of the city were discussed. Divided over three main-sessions the papers focused upon urban history, urban development and urban construction, economic development and urban-rural relations, while also current issues like access to land, housing and infrastructure were dealt with. These themes also came up in the second urbanisation panel, this time focusing upon questions of conservation and architectural reconstruction of old cities like Hanoi and Hue. Contested urban space was discussed in a second session where French and Vietnamese authors outlined the current conflicts about land in the urban environment. Simular developments like in Bangkok or Manila are under way in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh-city unless city-planning in combination with city-dwellers' initiatives will avoid the worst. The whole picture of urbanisation in relation to regionalisation was presented in a third session. Now, the development of Central Vietnam and the growth of Can Tho in the Mekong delta were discussed at large in two papers. The city, it was argued in both panels, is on its way to become a modern place embedded in a transnational context. Vietnam might be a late comer in this field, but the advantage of this retardation could be that Vietnam cities maybe can avoid the errors made elsewhere and modernise while keeping their identity.
A fairly new topic which received broad interest from the Conference attendants was the revival of religion in Vietnam. General aspects like the role of Christianity, the revival of Buddhism at large and the role of the state were discussed. New research dealing with popular cults, re-inventing of tradition aspects and the role of rituals and religion gave impetus to vivid debates. The anthropology of religion is fairly close linked to the theory of practice, leaving the interpretation of texts or theological aspects to other disciplines. Of considerable interest is the phenomenon of secular religion embodied in the worship of revolutionary heroes who became communal deities. Whether "religious revival" seems the right term for what happens in Vietnam can be discussed, but a resurgence of religious activities takes place at a increasing scale.
The panel on environmental issues first dealt with general problems on a national level: natural resources, impact of population pressure, deforestation, and reforestation. The changes of land use is linked to a large number of factors, specifically to the present socio-economic situation. Among the questions raised were detailed information regarding recent trends in the allocation and privatization of land in recent years and their influence on the environment and sustainable use of natural resources. Another session dealt with methodological frameworks for ecosystem research, conservation of biodiversity, and project implementation.
Considerable changes in of vegetation's patterns occurred in the last three decades and resulted in the impoverishment of native flora. Eco-system dynamics need to be understood better in order to manage protected forests. Projects on environmental rehabilitation like the one in Cat Tien national park should also try to bridge the gap between taxonomic knowledge and information needed for biodiversity conservation. In the third session, policy and management was discussed focusing upon waste management and urban pollution and the industries' impact on environment. Lessons from the past were considered as very important.Technology and know-how were featured, and solutions proposed and reviewed dealing with recycling. Actions against pollutants, standards of environmental pollution, modeling of ecosystem processes, biodiversity conservation, and creation of a Natural History Museum among others will be important challenges for future research projects.
Many attendants expressed verbally or in writing their satisfaction with the way the Conference was organized thanks to the efficiency of the Organisational Committee. Unfortunately, the large number of attendants had forced the organization to cancel a central conference dinner, because central Amsterdam does not dispose of a restaurant large enough to cater such a crowd. In stead of a closing dinner, the participants enjoyed two receptions, one offered by the Centre for Asian Studies at the siege of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and another one at the Amsterdam Historical Museum, offered by the Mayor of Amsterdam and by the Conference Organisers. Collective lunches in the University restaurant which caters also "Asianish" food, at least, enabled many guests to contact each other and to make further scholarly arrangements.
During the business meeting at the end of the conference, questions were raised about the future development of Euroviet as a platform for discussion and exchange. The Amsterdam conference has shown that the limit of what is technical and organisational possible has been reached, unless Euroviet becomes a professional organisation modelled after the Association for Asian Studies in the US. Another option is that Euroviet retains mainly its European character and offers a platform for non-European scholars (especially from Vietnam) on invitation. The Australia Up-date model comes into mind here. A first step into this direction, could be the creation of an electronic newsletter, served and maintained by the IIAS. The current en former Euroviet Organizers (Philippe Le Failler, Irene Nørlund, Stein Tønneson and John Kleinen) agreed to join a temporary executive board and to assist the next convener, Thomas Engelbert of the Humboldt University in Berlin in his task to organise the 1999 Euroviet conference. The theme of this conference would be limited and support from German and international donors need to be secured at a very early stage. The choice for Berlin, in the middle of Europe, and at a University where Vietnam-studies have been established already a long time ago, was acclaimed by all the attendants of the meeting. Arrangements also were made what to do with the papers. The Amsterdam convener received the first right to offer the papers for publication, but close contact with the panel coordinators is needed to see if a part of the papers can be published in separate volumes. After the closing day of the conference, a trip was organised to visit the vestiges of the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam, Hoorn and Enkhuizen. One of the highlights was a visit to the restored VOC ship Batavia on a wharf in Lelystad.
All in all, the study of Vietnam, or for that matter Vietnamese studies, has come to age. The European network will serve as a solid platform in relation to the Vietnam-studies in Australia and the US, and, what is more important, Vietnamese scholars in Vietnam have now a serious discussion partner in the years to come.
John Kleinen
(with thanks to several panel coordinators for their reports; reports on the panels dealing with the diaspore, literature, and health were not received at the time of meeting the deadline for this report).
Dr John Kleinen
University of Amsterdam
Anthropological Institute O.Z. Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam
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