Andrew Hardy Wins Benda Prize
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 23:23:30 +1000
From: Ben Kerkvliet <ben.kerkvliet@anu.edu.au>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] academic news
Dear VSG list members,
A couple of items, which I don't recall have yet circulated in our list.
Andrew Hardy, author of Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (2003), is the recipient of the 2005 Benda Prize, awarded by the Southeast Asia Council, Association of Asian Studies. "Pasted" below is the citation about the award.
The second news item is that my book, The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese Peasants Transformed National Policy has just been published. See below the publisher's blurb and a web site address for additional information. I'd welcome comments from anyone about the book.
Best wishes,
Ben Kerkvliet
2005 Benda Prize Citation: Andrew Hardy, a young scholar educated in
England, France, and Australia, has written a marvelous book, Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (NIAS Press,
Copenhagen; and University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2003). Dr. Hardy adroitly uses heretofore untapped archival material as well as official reports, published materials, and conversations with numerous people in several parts of Vietnam to provide a layered and nuanced account of internal migration from the perspectives of officials and especially migrants themselves. Covering much of the twentieth century, Dr. Hardy shows how government migration policies and programs during two regimes –
French colonial rule and the Communist Party government – actually played out over time and why some succeeded but many failed. Above all, by treating migration as a lived experience, Dr. Hardy vividly conveys in engaging prose how institutions, structures, and historical forces affect but rarely completely determine people’s decisions about whether to stay put or to move to remote, unfamiliar places and how those who do migrate can cope – or fail to cope – with the countless challenges posed by their new circumstances. Dr. Hardy’s extraordinarily ambitious research and illuminating analysis make this splendid book an outstanding contribution to Southeast Asian studies.
New book by Kerkvliet: The Power of Everyday Politics: How Vietnamese
Peasants Transformed National Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2005), 320 pp., ISBN: 0-8014-4301-6 $39.95.
Ordinary people’s everyday political behavior can have a huge impact on national policy: that is the central conclusion of this book on Vietnam. In telling the story of collectivized agriculture in that country, Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet uncovers a history of local resistance to national policy and gives a voice to the villagers who effected change. Not through open opposition but through their everyday political behavior, villagers individually and in small, unorganized groups undermined collective farming and frustrated authorities’ efforts to correct the problems.
The Power of Everyday Politics is an authoritative account, based on extensive research in Vietnam’s National Archives and in the Red River Delta countryside, of the formation of collective farms in northern Vietnam in the late 1950s, their enlargement during wartime in the 960s and 1970s, and their collapse in the 1980s. As Kerkvliet shows, the Vietnamese government eventually terminated the system, but not for ideological reasons. Rather, collectivization had become hopelessly compromised and was ultimately destroyed largely by the activities of villagers. Decollectivization began locally among villagers themselves; national policy merely followed.
The power of everyday politics is not unique to Vietnam, Kerkvliet asserts. He advances a theory explaining how everyday activities that do not conform to the behavior required by authorities may carry considerable political weight.
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet is Professor and head of the Department of Political and Social Change at The Australian National University.
For comments about the book from James C. Scott, Mark Selden, and Lynne
Viola, seehttp://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_catalog.taf?_function=moreinfo&Title_ ID= 4276&_UserReference=262EB86E5FA5FDE8425AB104
Ben Kerkvliet
Dept. of Political and Social Change
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA
phone: (61 2) 6125-2677
fax: (61 2) 6125-5523
e-mail: ben.kerkvliet@anu.edu.au
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:14:11 -0100
From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Congratulations to Andrew Hardy
Dear list,
I have been surprised that no one on this list besides Ben Kerkvliet has mentioned Andrew Hardy's Benda prize winning book. Congratulations are due to the author. While Red Hills addresses the topic of the migrations that have refashioned Vietnam, it is not a dry tome. It is a book about the individual experiences of migration as well as one about the aggregate process. The prose is confident.
I first came across Andrew Hardy's writings later than some: I was an outsider reviewer of his article "The Road to Bo Ra," which has become the first chapter of the book. It is a marvelous introduction to his topic: about the search for a place that no longer seems to exist. I will not give the chapter away -- just pick up the book and you'll be hooked.
Once again, congratulations.
Shawn McHale
Associate Professor of History and International Affairs
Associate Director, Sigur Center for Asian Studies
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052 USA
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 13:20:09 -0400
From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] academic news
Parts/Attachments:
As I did not have a chance to attend the AAS, I am very pleased that news of happenings at AAS are beginning to trickle out, and they are such good news. Congratulations to Andrew on his well-deserved Benda Prize and to Ben for his new publication.
Hue-Tam
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 10:37:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: Joe Hannah <jhannah@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] academic news
Parts/Attachments:
Dr. Kerkvliet and all,
I did not find the comments on your book at the URL listed in your e-mail, but I found them here:
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_catalog.taf?_function=moreinfo&Title_ID=
4276&_UserReference=CBCBE1FA9AE117CF425C05E1
If this doesn't work, you can go to http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/ and
click on "Just Released," Click on the book title, and at the bottom of the publisher's blurb, click on "More about this title." That should get you there.
Cheers,
Joe Hannah