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Vietnam Related Panels and Paper Abstracts at the Association for
Asian Studies Conference 2003
Session 2: Who Finds the Stones to Cross the River? Emergent Social
and Economic Inequalities in Reforming China and Vietnam
Organizer and Chair: Kim Korinek, University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill
Discussant: Jonathan Unger, Australian National University
Keywords: China, Vietnam, class relations, inequalities.
This panel highlights recent theoretical contributions and empirical
findings on social class formation, processes of socioeconomic stratification
and modes of economic organization in China and Vietnam as each country
undergoes a unique, though parallel, process of transition from socialism
to state-initiated, marketizing economy. Incorporating research from
the cities and villages they have visited in recent years, each presenter
brings a geographically and culturally unique set of findings to bear
upon a joint exploration of the roots of social inequalities and structures
of power relations in post-socialist economic life. The origins of new
entrepreneurial classes, of hired workers in private firms, of collective
enterprise workers and managers, and of corporate village leaders, all
are topics of study, as are changing labor standards, strategies of
elites to preserve privileges, and emergent class relations.
By exploring common themes in neighboring societies that share parallel
courses of socialist revolution and market-oriented reform the panelists
transcend not only geographic boundaries, but also methodological (quantitative
and qualitative) and disciplinary (political science and sociology).
The findings of the four papers presented here are integrated into a
broader set of market transition and social inequality theories formulated
to understand changes in reforming socialist countries. Discussion of
the papers will represent an attempt synthesize experiences in the Chinese
and Vietnamese contexts, and to comment upon the strengths and challenges
of conducting comparative work and cross-national study on social inequalities
in post-socialist contexts.
From Privilege to Competition: The Rise of New State Business Interests
in Ho Chi Minh City
Martin Gainsborough, University of Warwick, England
It is tempting to suggest that only those with close connections to
the party-state in Vietnam have achieved business success in the reform
era. However, this would be an oversimplification. Although the evidence
is rather patchy, data from Ho Chi Minh City suggests that people from
seemingly unpromising class backgrounds are making it in business, especially
since the end of the 1990s. Furthermore, it is not the case that having
roots in the party-state means automatic access to key business inputs.
The 1990s saw a gradual hardening of budget and credit constraints while
institutional rivalries within the party-state are such that seemingly
well-connected state business players can sometimes lose out. Nevertheless,
it remains the case that the reform years have seen the rise of new
state business interests in Ho Chi Minh City notwithstanding the city's
popular association with the private sector. Presenting data gathered
in Ho Chi Minh City between 1996 and 1999, the paper will document who
lies behind these new state business interests, the sectors they have
operated in, and the roots of their success. It will argue that while
political status, the existence of various forms of protection, and
privileged access to resources have played an important part in business
success, declining state support and increasing competition is such
that survival increasingly depends on genuine entrepren-eurialism and
business prowess.
Robbers, Slackers, Drones, and Model Entrepreneurs: Inequalities
in Development Opportunities in Rural China
Michelle S. Mood, Kenyon College, OH
Based on extensive interviews, this paper addresses the inequalities
in rural development opportunities in China's reform era. I explore
individual/family-level and village-level inequalities to better understand
the socioeconomic changes wrought by two decades of development and
diversification in rural China. Specifically, I examine the work history,
education, "class" background and party connections of selected
villagers in four Shanxi counties and four counties/suburbs near Tianjin
Municipality in order to see to what degree merit (experience, ability,
education, etc.) influences their opportunities in the job "market."
This micro-level analysis is based on extensive family and factory-level
interviews in communities ranging from one of China's richest villages
to a village with an average per capita income of just US$100.00 per
year, and in villages with varying average income inequality. Analysis
of the cases by age, sex, education levels and wealth reveals typical
trajectories of employment. Robbers (some current and former cadres
who get rich through illegal means), slackers (young uneducated men),
drones (young uneducated women) and model entrepreneurs (successful
money-makers using legal means) are some employment trajectories I identify.
In order to give a macro-context for individual opportunities, I also
compare across villages to weigh the relative importance of economic
and political factors, such as fixed and human capital, infrastructure,
administrative involvement and policy and institutions. I conclude that
employment opportunities remain highly constrained by gendered expectations
and local power relations, such that the degree of merit-based upward
mobility does not yet correlate with the degree of development.
Earnings Inequalities in Post-Doi Moi Viet Nam: Returns to Education
and Political Capital in the Nascent Market Economy
Lynne Taguchi, University of Washington (co-authored with Lan Phuong
Nguyen and Kim Korinek)
Heightened socioeconomic inequalities have been widely observed in China
and former Soviet bloc societies during the course of transition from
a redistributive, socialist economy to state-led market systems. While
Vietnamese researchers have documented an increasing gap between the
rich and poor during the 1990s, few have undertaken theoretically informed
approaches to analyze emergent. disparities in wages and other earnings.
In an effort to understand which social groups are experiencing gains
and losses in Vietnam's post-doi moi marketizing economy, the authors
explore the contours of inequality in wages and other job-related payments
among Vietnamese wage-earners. Limiting our analyses to state and private
sector employees, we use data from the 1997-98 Vietnam Living Standards
Survey to examine workers' earnings in private, joint venture, and state
sector offices and enterprises. By comparing the differential returns
to education and political capital (a measure of cadre status) across
employment sectors, the current research documents the extent to which
earned income inequalities represent returns to human capital versus
returns to status and privilege obtained through ties to state and redistributive
apparatuses. This work also attempts to assess whether there are systematic
differ-ences in earnings that derive from workers' gender and social
class origins. We derive an analytical and interpretive framework from
previous works that address market transition theory. Analyzing data
on the Vietnamese case we aim to enrich this active field of debate
by examining the relative earnings of "cadres," and by exploring
whether earnings inequalities vary systematically across employment
sectors and regions.
Industrial Labor Standards in China and Vietnam Compared
Anita Chan, Australian National University (co-authored with Hongzen
Wang)
This paper is based on documentary and field research carried out in
Vietnam and China, and compares and contrasts labor standards in the
two countries' export-oriented industrial sectors, using Taiwanese owned
and managed enterprises as case studies. One surprising discovery is
that when comparing two important labor standards, wages and work hours,
Taiwanese investors are more apt to violate the standards in China than
in Vietnam. The paper explores the reasons behind this difference in
behavior by the same set of corporate actors, and identifies the role
of the state as a critically important factor that is often ignored
in studies of global production chains. By "state," the authors
refer not only to the states of the host countries of the site of production,
Vietnam and China, but also that of Taiwan, where the investors originate.
The attitudes of these three states and the actions taken by them toward
violations of labor standards in Vietnam and China, it is argued, are
preconditions to the improvement of labor conditions.
Session 42: Compradores, Christians, Collaborators, and Contexts:
Reaping with the Enemy in China, India, and Vietnam
Organizer and Chair: Micheline Lessard, University of Ottawa
Discussant: John L. Hill, Concordia University, Montreal
The papers presented in this panel offer new insights into the complexities
of social and political relations between Asians and Westerners in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They not only examine
the interplay between Asians and Westerners, but they also suggest that
simple categorizations of social groups in Late-Qing China, and in India
and Vietnam are inadequate means to understand East-West contacts within
colonial and quasi-colonial contexts. Specifically, they redefine and
re-formulate the concept of colonial "collaborators," pointing
out that those classified as collaborators were often members of social
groups "liminal," within the context of Asian and Western
contacts. These groups, the Christian converts of Sichuan in Late-Qing
China, the Hindi abolitionists, the moderate Vietnamese nationalists,
and the Irish Catholic "colonials" in India, through their
aims, their positions, and their impact, defy the facile classification
of "collaborator." They illustrate the ways in which they
were perceived as threats by one group and another, and they illustrate
also the complexities and the contradictions inherent in colonial and
quasi-colonial contexts. They provide useful insight into the traditional
historical definitions of "enemies." "nationalists,"
and "collaborators." In addition, each of these papers, through
the use of a variety of original sources (missionary archives, nationalists'
writings, political flyers and jatras) closely examines groups that
have been heretofore largely ignored, thereby providing important contributions
to the study of India, China and Vietnam in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
Collaborators, Nationalists, or Revolutionaries: The Convenient Categorization
of Vietnamese Nationalists
Micheline Lessard, University of Ottawa
The challenges posed by French colonial rule in Vietnam have been analyzed
in detail by many Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese scholars. Particular
attention has been paid to the historical continuity of Vietnamese resistance
to foreign domination, and to the historical legacy of Vietnamese patriotism.
This paper examines specific expressions of Vietnamese resistance to
French rule heretofore largely ignored by scholars, those of Vietnamese
intellectuals proclaiming them-selves nationalists while also wishing
to establish an independent Vietnamese nation based on the French republican
ideals of constitutionalism and legalism. These nationalists were also
vocal proponents of the Vietnamese national language, women's rights,
and universal education and suffrage. With the formation of the Indochinese
Communist Party in 1931 and with the radicalization of Vietnamese resistance
to French rule, the term nationalist was increasingly associated with
the term revolutionary. More often than not, those nationalists who
did not share the "revolutionary" vision of an independent
Vietnam, were seen as collaborators. This paper analyzes the liminal
status and the complexity of the ideals of these nationalists. Intellectuals
such as Bui Quang Chieu, for example, were considered collaborators
by Vietnamese radicals, and anti-French by French colonial authorities.
The writings of these intellectuals illustrate the ways in which French
colonial policies in Vietnam inevitably led to a radicalization of the
resistance movement, leaving little room for political alternatives,
and thereby silencing a significant number of Vietnamese nationalists.
Session 6: INDIVIDUAL PAPERS: Spirits, Charisma, and Exchange in Southeast
Asia
Chair: Donald J. Baxter, College of William and Mary
Spiritual Parents of the Viet
Hien Thi Nguyen, American Museum of Natural History
The gods and goddesses of the Tu Phu (Four Palaces) religion-as "mothers"
and "fathers" of the Viet people, are highly adaptive foci
of popular veneration. This is possible because Tu Phu is a syncretic
religion, which has developed from imported institutional religions
and indigenous, localized spirit and ancestor veneration into a coherent
religious system of the Viet people. My paper argues that most Viet
reject an exclusive allegiance to any one religion; rather, the Viet
have compromised, adapting new religious ways to the purposes of their
own popular religion.
The Tu Phu pantheon consists primarily of Mother Goddesses, Saint Father
Tran Hung Dao, Mandarins, Princes, Dames, Damsels, and Boy-Attendant
spirits, among which the Mother Goddess Lieu Hanh and the Saint Father
become spiritual parents of a large population, especially in the alluvial
plain in the north. The Viet venerate these two gods as they do with
their ancestors, following a proverb, "anniversaries of the father
god in the eighth month and the mother goddess in the third month."
My paper suggests that "mothers" and "fathers" are
broad categories permitting the Viet people to adopt new gods over time
and as relevant to local histories. Despite the atheistic ideology of
a communist country, the people have never stopped believing in the
existence of gods. The newest god that has come into the Tu Phu pantheon
is the "Nation Father," Ho Chi Minh, whose statue is present
in a number of temples today.
Spirit Mediumship and the Symbolic Construction of Self and Society
in Modern Vietnam
Kirsten W. Endres, Hanoi University of Technology
Since the "spirit of capitalism" has taken possession of Vietnamese
post-revolutionary society, spirit mediumship has considerably gained
in popularity, and thus in cultural significance. The Party state's
recent permissiveness towards mediumship seems to have unintentionally
opened up an important arena for ritually acting out the upheavals of
the modernization process. Starting from the assumption that spirit
possession serves as a creative strategy and transformative power in
the shaping of life-worlds, this paper focuses on Vietnamese spirit
mediumship as a means of (re)integrating conflicting experiences of
self and society in the context of the new market-oriented economy.
Vietnamese spirit possession rituals (len dong) are a vital part of
a complex belief system that incorporates a pantheon of divinities known
as tam phu (the three domains or palaces: Sky, Water, Mounts and Forests).
Indicators for being chosen as their "servant" (dong) can
range from an illness that cannot be cured by traditional or Western
health systems, a continuous streak of bad luck in business or personal
affairs, or a metaphysical experience that runs counter to the ideologically
dominant "scientific" conception of the world. By examining
individual life-stories of spirit mediums, this paper will show how
becoming part of a group-network of regular spirit possession practitioners
enables mediums to ritually come to terms with their "fates"
in a rapidly changing modern society.
Session 25: Female Desires in Movement: Longings, Acts, and Policies
in Contemporary Vietnam
Organizer: Helle Rydstrom, Linkoping University
Chair and Discussant: Mandy Thomas, Australian National University
Keywords: gender, sexuality, globalization, war, diaspora, space.
Vietnam is undergoing temporal and spatial reconfigurations by rapidly
moving from a past of wars and socialist regimentation into a present
of inclusion in the global market economy. This panel explores the ways
in which these movements encourage new constellations of female desires,
as those desires are tied to females' crossing of boundaries when moving
from the past into the present, from rural into urban spaces, across
national borders into diasporic locations, and when entering new social
classes. The panel addresses desires as differentiated and fluctuating
verbal and/or bodily manifestations of longings and actions in resistance
to or accordance with transformations of the state, market, or history
that, when linked together, craft female and male identities. One paper
looks at female memories in state-promoted models of virtue, public
service, and self-sacrifice in juxtaposition to "desire" in
the state-sponsored market-driven rationale of doi moi. Another elucidates
the complexities of desire to forget the past, while reproducing remembrance
of the wars, as gendered, memories of violence are transferred from
one female generation to another. The third paper examines fiction to
shed light on working class femininity, sexuality, and desire in movement,
as women traverse the distance between rural and urban, national and
diasporic locations. The last considers state policies of public spaces
and circulation of ideas of "the new woman" as females incorporate
these ideas as desires of changed womanhood and femininity. From the
perspectives of political science, anthropology, literary studies, and
geography rich ethnographic data highlight females' complex productions
of desires for becoming and living.
Between Memory and Desire: Gender, State, and Market in Doi Moi Viet
Nam
Jayne Werner, Columbia University
Memory constructions in Vietnamese state cultural production are linked
to gendered models of virtue, public service, and self-sacrifice, while
"desire" has concurrently become the modus operandi of state-sponsored
economic reforms launched under doi moi. How does the Vietnamese state
manage seemingly contradictory state-sponsored messages in the form
of war-time memory production and the commodification of desire in the
expanding market economy? This paper investigates how state power in
Viet Nam is being reconstituted and regenerated in the shifts and pressures
generated by the forces of globalization, in relation to the remembering
of the years spanning the French and American wars. Political subjectivity
is examined in terms of subjects as "desired objects of power"
in terms of approaches which view the state as an "idea" capable
of generating and reconstituting itself in subjects' consciousness.
However, state-linked and state-generated longings, yearnings, memories,
and desires are treated as gendered cultural constructions. Ethnographic
material from the northern Vietnamese countryside is used to explore
these questions.
Desiring to Forget the Past and Move into the Future: Females and
Wars in Rural Vietnam
Helle Rydstrom, Linkoping University
Although Vietnam is currently undergoing rapid socio-economic and political
transformations, the country continues to be marked by its turbulent
past of warfare, especially the prolonged and severe wars with France
and the U.S. Decades of involvement in conflicts of wars have left a
firm imprint on the Vietnamese population as incorporated and gendered
memories of violence, pain, and sorrow. This paper draws on two periods
of long-term in-depth anthrop-ological fieldwork (1993-94 and 2000-2001)
in a northern Vietnamese rural commune and addresses directly the ways
in which the lives of three generations of females have been deeply
affected by the local community's inclusion in wars. The paper examines
how females' experiences of warfare are closely intertwined with strong
desires to dismiss the past of brutality and tremendous human losses
by moving into a peaceful future. The generation of grandmothers was
confronted with the French occupational forces and the bombings of American
planes, while the mothers of today's children and adolescents were born
and/or grew up during the war between Vietnam and the U.S. Even though
contemporary female adolescents have not been directly involved in Vietnamese
warfare, the collective past of wars perpetually is revitalized through
women's narrations. This paper elucidates the motions of females' warfare
memories, as they are transferred from the generations of grandmothers
and mothers through narrations to their adolescent granddaughters or
daughters, and the complex ways in which these narrations are contradictory
to and supportive of female desires and longings to move beyond the
past of wars.
Longing for Elsewhere: Workers and Class Femin-inities in Vietnam
and the Diaspora
Thu-huong Nguyen-vo, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper examines fiction and ethnographic data to shed light on working
class desire as it is connected to femininity and sexuality as women
traverse the distance between rural and urban, national and diasporic
locations. Among other things, it will deal with how working women negotiate
sexualization and its discipline for production in very different spaces.
For the Vietnamese workers in Vietnam, the embodiment of sexualized
longing for an urban middle-class femininity dismembers their subject
position in the working class and thus their voice as workers. For the
Vietnamese workers abroad, longing for a national subject position vis-à-vis
the old country, coupled with perhaps promises of the American dream
as another national subject position, is channeled into racialized and
gendered labor in the sweatshops of the First World. This longing draws
the women out of their class subject position, and thus fragments their
collective class voice. The data suggest that workers' acts, including
their speech acts, operate within this field of disembodiment, and thus
workers seek to re-embody their language in their efforts to represent
their interests. The paper uses Vietnamese and diasporic fiction as
well as ethnographic interviews of garment workers in Vietnam.
Spatializing Desire: Womanhood between Policy and Practice in Public
Space
Lisa B. W. Drummond, York University
The notion of public space in Vietnam differs in a number of significant
respects from the way this term is understood in Western society. A
Western "public" is often taken to be the embodiment of civil
society, and "public space" its spatial manifestation, though
increasingly this notion is complicated both in practice and in theorizing.
In contemporary Vietnam, public space is heavily regulated and policed,
and while incursions upon it are frequent, they are generally of an
individual rather than a mass nature, though some mass occupations of
public space do occur and are perceived by the state as particularly
threatening. At the same time, propaganda about the proper ways of being
in society, particularly with regard to the proper form of feminine
being, are prominently featured in public spaces, such that public spaces
can be said to be saturated with the state's desire to inculcate specific
social norms. But while the state uses public space to promote certain
social identities, public space is also where social identities are
practiced. This paper will consider the intersection of state policies
of public space and female social behavior in public space. The paper
is concerned with how women translate their desires for specific feminine
identities-in accordance with or contrary to the state's notions of
acceptable femininity-into their practices and performances of identity
in public space, and uses recent research on public space in Hanoi to
discuss these issues.
Session 45: De-mystifying the Woman: Gender in Vietnamese History
and Historiography
Organizer: Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair and Discussant: John K. Whitmore, University of Michigan
Keywords: Vietnam, gender, women, Southeast Asia, Vietnamese womanhood,
national symbol, Vietnamese identity.
In the scholarship on Viet Nam, women signify the nation's unique cultural
heritage and serve as a marker of tradition or modernity emerging in
three reified forms: as signs of Confucian oppression, of Vietnamese
uniqueness, or of Southeast Asian permissiveness. Between the two cultural
traditions of the Southeast Asian and Sinic world, another model of
Vietnamese womanhood emerged. This model emphasized Vietnamese uniqueness,
and the woman embodied an ostensibly unified national culture that predates
Chinese influence. As markers of tradition, the existing literature
relegates women's experiences to their contribution to the meta-narrative
of Vietnamese history. As a result, we still know very little about
their lives. What then were women's lives like?
This panel challenges assertions of Vietnamese women's uniqueness by
examining their lives through their participation in the marketplace,
village and urban society, and literature. Two of the papers, Nhung
Tuyet Tran's and Wynn Wilcox's, examine the ways in which early modern
village society and urban colonial society, respectively, constructed
gendered roles and set the rules of sexual activity. Liam Kelley's reading
of Doan Thi Diem's eighteenth-century poetry challenges the mystique
of Ho Xuan Huong, whose apparent sexually-charged poetry has captured
the imagination of Western audiences. George Dutton's examination of
women's participation in the market from the seventeenth through the
nineteenth centuries at last gives attention to their actual experience
in the marketplace. These papers challenge the existing literature by
writing about women's lives without limiting the discussion to Vietnamese
identity, whether Chinese, Southeast Asian, or uniquely national.
Sex in the Village: Local Authority and the Regulation of Women's
Sexuality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century An Nam
Nhung Tuyet Tran, University of California, Los Angeles
Though scholars often highlight the permissiveness of traditional Vietnamese
society towards women's sexual behavior, there has been no attempt to
test such assertions beyond allusion to disconnected Chinese and European
observations. This paper seeks to fill this gap by examining how local
authority regulated women's sexuality and constructed gender roles through
legal, moral and medical mechanisms. Local authority includes officials,
custom, and religious authority. Local medicine, transmitted among the
populace in a form of vernacular poetry, constructed and defined the
feminine body in a certain way; understanding how everyday people understood
women's bodies allows additional insight into women's roles and participation
in the village.
I will focus on how women's sexual activity was regulated by code, custom
and practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period
has a particularly important proliferation of morality texts from state,
religious (Buddhist and Catholic), and local sources. How did each level
regulate sexuality? Was there any perceivable difference between the
way religious teaching, neo-Confucian morality, and local custom constructed
gender? The web of regulations during a period of intense economic and
religious activity reveals in greater relief an aspect of women's lives
often alluded to but seldom examined. Research for this paper is based
on state records, including morality codes, and magistrates' manuals;
religious manuals; and other local records, including village regulations,
stele inscriptions, and medical texts written in classical Chinese and
the demotic script (chu nôm) and collected from various archives
in Viet Nam. Observations from missionaries, located at the Missions
Etrangeres Archives (Paris) and the Jesuit Archives (Rome) provide valuable
ethnographic data.
That Other Vietnamese Woman: Doan Thi Diem and the Truyen Ky Tan
Pha
Liam C. Kelley, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Much of the scholarship on Vietnam that has been produced in the West
in recent decades has been carried out under the general auspices of
Southeast Asian studies. In keeping with the dictates of this larger
field, this research has often sought to illuminate Vietnam's supposed
links with the Southeast Asian region, and has played down the importance
of Vietnam's historical links with the cultural world of East Asia.
Discussions of Vietnamese women have played an important role in this
enterprise as they have been held up as symbols of Vietnamese cultural
difference from the Sinitic/ Confucian world to the north. However,
such arguments have often been based on selective evidence. As such,
while the free-thinking, 19th-century poetess, Ho Xuan Huong, is now
well known to Western readers, the 18th-century writer Doan Thi Diem
is not. This paper will attempt to rectify this imbalance by introducing
readers to Doan Thi Diem's life, as well a famous collection of stories
attributed to her, the Truyen Ky Tan Pha. In the process this paper
will also seek to question the categories that Western scholars continue
to employ in thinking about premodern Vietnamese women.
Vietnamese Women in the Marketplace: A Historical Overview
George Dutton, University of California, Los Angeles
Scholars have long commented on the involvement of Vietnamese women
in the economy of Viet Nam, noting the contrast between this involvement
and the alleged greater circumscription of women's involvement in other
realms of society. There has, however, been no closer examination of
this phenomenon and its historical manifestations. This paper is designed
as a preliminary examination of the ways in which Vietnamese women have
historically involved themselves in economic activity, and more specifically
in the commercial venues of the marketplace. In it, I propose to use
available sources, most notably reports of visiting Europeans, but also
what references are found in Vietnamese materials, to sketch aspects
of the roles that women played in this arena.
I will focus on a number of different aspects of women's involvement
in market activities, including the types of goods being sold, the degree
of participation in the procurement and distribution of goods, and their
involvement in the monetary or goods-exchange economies. I also propose,
to the extent that the sources allow, to compare the nature and degree
of women's involvement over time and space, looking at female participation
in various larger market settings in different regions of Viet Nam.
This paper will focus primarily on the period between about 1700 and
1900, a time-frame guided largely by the availability of sources, but
also one that allows a focus on pre-twentieth-century and pre-colonial
economic activity, about which there is virtually no existing scholarship.
In focusing on this earlier period, the paper will provide the basis
for a more concrete understanding of what has often been a convenient
generalization about Vietnamese women rather than a more carefully explored
phenomenon.
Woman as Wholesome National Culture: Configurations of Desire and
Identity in "The Western Vietnamese"
Wynn Wilcox, University of Oregon
This presentation will use Nam Xuang's 1930 comedy "Ông Tây
An-Nam" (The Western Vietnamese) as a starting point for a discussion
about the relationship between gender, foreignness, and national identity
in twentieth-century Vietnam. The play discusses a young man named Lan
who returns home to Vietnam after a long stay in France and is either
unwilling or unable to speak in Vietnamese, recognize his parents, or
re-adopt Vietnamese social and cultural norms. He is unable to woo his
primary love interest, Miss Kim Ninh, because of his excessive "Frenchness,"
even though she gives him the desire to speak Vietnamese. The presentation
will suggest that in the "The Western Vietnamese" the desire
for national identity and the heterosexual male desire for a "pure
woman" are configured with one another. It will also suggest that
the author and the audience are, in a sense, laughing at themselves:
since the play is bilingual and contains references to French literature,
the author and the audience, by their very comprehension of the motifs
in the play, seem to be engaging in the very activities at which they
are laughing. Thus, this play provides a template from which to understand
how the largely wealthy, cosmopolitan, and Francophone male elite of
Hanoi and Saigon produced a nativist Vietnamese nationalism which was
configured with the desire for an idealized and pure Vietnamese womanhood
when the invention of such a nativist "tradition" tended to
negate the very identities that this elite held.
Session 85: Literature, Political Ideology, and State Power in Twentieth-Century
Vietnam
Organizer: Judith A. N. Henchy, University of Washington
Chair and Discussant: John C. Schafer, Humboldt State University
Keywords: Vietnam, literature, censorship, politics, national identity,
socialist realism, Freud, Nietzsche, spy fiction.
This panel explores interrelated aspects of the relationship between
literature and politics in 20th-century Vietnam. Firstly, the papers
examine the localization of global political ideas within Vietnamese
literature during different parts of the century. Examples of this process
are seen in the preoccupation of late-colonial era writers with Marx,
Freud, Nietzsche and Soviet socialist realism (the papers of Zinoman
and Henchy), in the impact of Maoism and the Chinese hundred flowers
movement on writers in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam during the
1950s (Shutte's paper) and in the vogue for Anglo-American-style spy
fiction in the Republic of Vietnam between 1954 and 1975 (Nguyen's paper).
Rather than simply surveying traces of foreign influence within Vietnamese
writing, the papers attempt to illuminate how elements of global political
discourse were selected, modified, recontextual-ized and mobilized to
serve local political projects. The presentation of case studies from
the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s will provide a sense of the significant
changes and continuities in literary localization of political ideas
in Vietnam over time. Secondly, the papers illuminate the enduringly
antagonistic relationship between literature and state power in Vietnam.
Although the colonial admin-istration, the capitalist-authoritarian
southern regime and the communist state were radically different political
entities, each adopted repressive polices towards literature, policies
to which writers responded with resistance, or efforts at accommodation
and collaboration. Hence, the panel's juxtaposition of case studies
from successive eras will bring contrasts and similarities between the
literary cultures and cultural policies of the different regimes into
sharper relief.
Hai Van, The Storm and Vietnamese Communism in the Interwar Imagination
Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley
Among the many reasons that Vu Trong Phung's novel The Storm (Giong
To), first serialized in Hanoi Bao during 1936, should be of more than
passing interest to scholars of modern Vietnam is the depiction that
it provides of the mysterious communist Hai Van. While characters with
vaguely radical politics appear occasionally in colonial-era Vietnamese
fiction, Vu Trong Phung's unambiguous portrayal of Hai Van as a leading
member of the Communist Party is unique. My paper examines what the
characterization of Hai Van indicates about popular attitudes of the
day towards Vietnamese communism and local communist activists. It also
reassesses an enduring (and remarkably high-stakes) debate among Vietnamese
literary critics and cultural officials about what the portrayal of
Hai Van found in The Storm reveals about Vu Trong Phung's famously enigmatic
political orientation.
Revolutionary Deconstructions of Colonial Cultural Narratives in
Early Twentieth-Century Viet Nam
Judith A. N. Henchy, University of Washington
This paper examines some Vietnamese understandings of literature and
its relationship to ideological formulations of culture. It focuses
on the writings of two early 20th-century Southern intellectuals: Nguyen
An Ninh and Phan Van Hum. These French-educated polemicists were amongst
the most influential intellectuals in the South in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ninh was perhaps the first to recognize "culture" as a pliable
category in the service of colonial power and bourgeois capitalism,
with his critiques of French cultural policy, and "orientalist"
French literary genres. After his early attraction to Nietzsche and
anarchism, Ninh came to embrace Marxism, but never relinquished his
artistic will to the constraints of economic determinism. His human-ism
and individualism drew on the models of Tolstoy and Gandhi in his formulations
of political praxis. Hum, who can be seen as revolutionizing Vietnamese
language prose in his writings from the Saigon prison in 1928, established
the genre of realist reportage. As an influential poet and literary
critic, he became one of the primary architects of a Marxist cultural
policy that critiqued the distortion of the peasant and proletarian
condition in popular literary representations. Drawn to theories of
linguistics that emphasized the indeterminate nature of language, but
with an unfailing faith in the scientific "truth" of dialectical
materialism, he examined the role of popular literature as a vehicle
of pedagogy and praxis, engaging in polemics with the proponents of
Art for Art's sake and romanticism, and theorizing the role of Freudian
analysis in bourgeois literary and cultural constructions.
Spy Fiction and Southern Vietnamese Identity: The Case of Z-28
Cam N. Nguyen, University of California, Berkeley
Between 1954 and 1975, Nguyen Thu Tam's sixty-odd novels featuring the
dashing secret agent known as Z-28 were arguably the most popular works
of fiction in South Vietnam. Serialized initially in daily newspapers,
the novels were published and republished in paperback editions throughout
the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and reissued in the United States following
the fall of Saigon in 1975. My paper introduces Nguyen Thu Tam, charts
a history of the Z-28 series and examines its dominant formal features,
plot devices and thematic preoccup-ations. It seeks to understand the
process whereby spy fiction was imported into Vietnam (by way of Nguyen
Thu Tam's translations of Ian Fleming) and domesticated for local consumption.
It also examines what the Z-28 series reveals about the emergence of
a complex and problematic southern Vietnamese sub-national identity
during the cold war era. Finally, it attempts to explain the enormous
and enduring appeal of the series for readers in pre-1975 South Vietnam
and within post-1975 overseas Vietnamese communities.
Hundred Flowers in North Vietnam, 1955-1957
Heinz Schutte, University of Bremen
Early in 1955, a group of writers and artists in the cultural section
of the North Vietnamese army demanded free artistic expression and civil
liberties and questioned the Communist Party's cultural policy. In 1956
they published a collection of writings, "Giai Phâm"
(Literary Works) and, later that year, a journal programmatically entitled
"Nhân Van" (Humanism), viciously attacked by the official
censors. After a few months of widespread creativity, between Khrushchev's
speech on Stalin in February and the USSR's intervention in November,
the movement was crushed in the wake of the land reform, party purges
and the emerging "Revisionism" affair. The questions posed
in those days which contributed to a severe inner political crisis of
the DRV regime, still remain unanswered in contemporary Vietnam.
Session 121: Before and Beyond the Friendship Gate: Ethnic Identity
and Economic Exchange along the Sino-Vietnamese Frontier
Organizer and Chair: James A. Anderson, University of North Carolina,
Greensboro
Discussant: Merrick Lex Berman, Harvard Yenching Institute
Keywords: Zhuang, Sino-Vietnamese relations, ethnic minorities, Guangxi,
Confucianization.
Official relations between China and Viet Nam have long shaped the
local political, economic and social conditions of the border region
between these two nation-states. Sino-Vietnamese relations were necess-arily
a complicated affair. For the historically minded Chinese officialdom,
northernmost Viet Nam had once been an integral part of the Chinese
political and cultural empire for nearly one thousand years. Policies
and practices issued from either northern or southern capitals found
application on the shared frontier, although local conditions have always
exerted a strong influence on the interpretation of these directives.
The papers in this panel will explore the effects Sino-Vietnamese state-to-state
relations have had on ethnic identity and trade relations among local
communities in the border region from the imperial period through the
modern era. James Anderson's paper examines the important shift in the
11th century away from treating the frontier region as a site of tributary
exchange toward the development of the region as a center for trade.
Jeffrey Barlow explores the Qing period trend toward the Confucianization
of the region and the process of assimilating the Zhuang into mainstream
Confucian culture. Katherine Kaup's paper discusses how three periods
in post-1949 Sino-Vietnamese relations influenced local ethnic politics
among Miao and Zhuang communities. The task we all plan to undertake
in this panel involves the reconstruction of the series of negotiations
between border communities and the representatives of the distant imperial
courts during several crucial periods of change in the history of the
Sino-Vietnamese relations.
From Tribute to Trade: A Period of Transform-ation in Middle Period
Sino-Vietnamese Relations
James A. Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
At the founding of the Song Dynasty (968-1279), tribute relations served
as a focal point around which Sino-Vietnamese political, economic and
cultural exchange revolved. However, trade issues, and not tributary
protocol, would define the Sino-Viet exchanges by the late 11th century.
The bonds of the imperial tribute system would remain strong, but both
sides eventually regarded the material benefits of close ties to be
more important than the quest to iron out political differences. An
important factor in this transformation in China's relations with its
southern neighbor would be the continuing development of trade networks
in the South China Sea.
By the early 10th century Silk Road trade conducted along China's long
western frontier faced greater military obstacles than did South Sea
trade, and both Nanhai (modern-day Guangzhou) and the coastal region
near Thang Long (modern-day Ha Noi) had developed as ports of entry
for valued southern products. Moreover, the Vietnamese rulership that
emerged in the 10th century considered the control of trade contacts
to be an aspect of their political authority. In any case, both rulers
and high officials at the Chinese court preferred trade in this region
of the world, where vassal kingdoms demonstrated much less belligerence
than did their northern counterparts, and rare commodities could be
obtained in the course of observing tributary protocol. This trend toward
trade-centered ties had a dramatic impact on Sino-Viet relations and
frontier management, and it is this trend that I will explore in this
paper.
Ethnic Brothers? The Impact of Sino-Vietnamese Relations on China's
Ethnic Minorities
Katherine P. Kaup, Furman University
The nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations has radically influenced the
course of political and economic development within China's minority
regions in Guangxi and Yunnan Provinces since the Communist Party came
to power in 1949. Bilateral relations have at times severely restricted
the Chinese national minorities' political mobilization while at other
times providing new opportunities for articulating minority interests
to the state. The normalization of relations in 1991 together with the
economic and political reforms occurring within both countries over
the last decade have led to greater political activism, particularly
among the Miao and Zhuang nationalities, as well as a reexamination
of the boundaries of ethnic identity. This paper will examine how differences
in three periods of Sino-Vietnamese relations have influenced ethnic
politics among the Miao and Zhuang: the period of close cooperation
in the early 1950s, the tense relations of the 1970s, and the normalization
of relations after 1991. This topic has until recently received very
little attention in the existing literature.
This paper is based on archival materials and interviews collected during
three extended research trips to Yunnan and the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous
Region between 1995 and 2001 as well as more recent data collected in
online and telephone interviews with government officials and members
of the Yunnan and Guangxi Zhuang Studies Associations and the Miao Studies
Association. Within each of the three periods examined, I will address
economic development patterns, shifts in political discourse, and academic
and cultural exchanges sponsored by the Chinese government and by recently
created non-governmental organizations such as the Miao and Zhuang Studies
Associations.
Session 123: Rural Collectives and Cooperatives in Vietnam during
the 1960s-1980s (Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group)
Organizer: Ben Kerkvliet, Australian National University
Chair: Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
Discussant: Mark Selden, State University of New York, Binghamton
Keywords: Vietnam, agrarian studies, collectivization, 1960s-1980s.
While mobilizing citizens and resources in the 1960s-1970s to defeat
the United States and reunify the nation, Vietnam's Communist Party
government was also building a socialist political economy in the north.
Given the country's predominately agrarian features, key institutions
for this project were rural cooperatives and agricultural collectives.
Most research on these institutions, published mainly in Vietnamese,
has relied heavily on official accounts. Only recently have Vietnamese
and foreign scholars been able to look deeper and wider into how collectives
and cooperatives were built, what they did, their problems and successes,
and their political, economic, and social significance.
This panel reports results from some of that new work. During extensive
research in Vietnam, each of the four presenters gathered material through
interviews with villagers and officials, in archives and libraries,
and from provincial newspapers and other Vietnamese publications. All
presenters seek to understand village life, rural cooperatives, and
agricultural collectives during the 1960s-1980s, the period of socialist
construction. Each, though, has a different emphasis. Drew Smith links
persistent poverty in the collectives to problems with large hydraulic
projects. Regina Abrami analyzes authorities' efforts to organize middle
peasants, artisans, and small traders into cooperatives. Truong Huyen
Chi examines conflicts that arose as enlarged collectives encompassed
more aspects of village life. Ben Kerkvliet studies how those enlarged
collectives were eventually dismantled as villagers struggled to escape
poverty by farming on their own.
The discussant, Mark Selden, will consider the papers' findings in light
of his research on China's rural collectives and cooperatives.
Undercurrents of Resistance: Hydraulics and Collectivization in the
Red River Delta, 1960-1980
S. Andrew Smith, Canadian International Development Agency
In conjunction with the collectivization of agriculture in northern
Vietnam, the ruling Communist Party led efforts to construct large-scale
irrigation and drainage systems. Both a modern hydraulic infrastructure
and collectivized production were key components of the party's strategy
in 1960-1980 to increase agricultural productivity and industrialize
northern Vietnam's economy. In this paper, I examine the role that hydraulic
construction played within the collectivized economy. I show how the
large-scale hydraulic systems and collectivization were closely linked
at the policy level. Despite this apparent compatibility, however, three
trends began in the early 1960s that eventually had adverse implications
for collectivized agriculture. They were: a gradual decline in state
subsidies for hydraulic infrastructure construction; poor coordination
among government agencies; and a dichotomy between "production"
and "construction" within the collectives.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as large-scale hydraulic systems proved
to be inefficient, collectives turned to traditional irrigation and
drainage techniques while at the same time pilfering water from the
large systems. In many cases, canal networks were abandoned when the
state proved incapable of ensuring that the systems' pumps would provide
water on time. This paper concludes that the political economy of hydraulic
modernization helped to perpetuate the vicious cycle of declining productivity
and increasing rural poverty that characterized the collectivized rural
economy in northern Vietnam during this period.
My analysis is based on recent interviews I did in Hanoi and Hai Duong
province, documents from Vietnam's national archives, accounts from
provincial newspapers, and numerous Vietnamese books and journal articles.
We Mustn't Be Too Afraid: Coming to Terms with the Private Sector
in Northern Vietnam, 1954-1986
Regina Abrami, Harvard University
Drawing on previously unavailable archival materials, field research
and Vietnamese published sources, this paper examines the politics of
socialist transition in the commercial sector of northern Vietnam during
1954-1986. It focuses especially on the political task of shifting small
traders and artisans into craft cooperatives and trading groups. It
does so in order to show how problems of socialist transform-ation and
economic management in Vietnam were not only the result of "aggravated
shortages" or everyday forms of resistance. The paper argues instead
that these issues are best understood as the result of debates at the
highest level of government over how to identify and treat different
categories of citizen in the early years of transition.
Nowhere were these debates more apparent than with respect to middle
peasants, artisans and small traders. On the one hand, they were sources
of "spontaneous capitalism." On the other hand, they had proven
themselves to be true patriots during the years of resistance against
the French. So, were they friends or enemies of the regime? In this
paper, I show that the answer, as well as indecision regarding this
question, had an important influence on the evolution of central-local
and local state-society relations that we can see not only through state
commercial organization and policies, but also by examination of illegal
commercial activities in pre-reform rural Vietnam. The paper concludes
with a discussion of how these practices have shaped the pattern and
problems of private sector development in contemporary Vietnam.
The "Team" (doi) and Us: Social Conflicts during the High
Time of Collectivization (1975-1981) in the Red River Delta
Chi Huyen Truong, Vietnam National University
Drawing on archival and ethnographic data from research conducted in
1998-1999 in Hoang Long commune (Phu Xuyen district, Ha Tay province),
this paper examines social conflicts that arose while Vietnam's rural
political economy was being restructured during the collective era (1960-1986).
The paper emphasizes the period of large-scale socialist production
(1975-1981), during which two major conflicts intensified: between the
collective and the household and between the collective that embraced
an entire commune (xa) and the villages within it.
I show how conflict between collective and household was reflected in
confrontations between collective cadres and women villagers, who were
struggling to continue their non-agricultural activities on an individual
basis. This confrontation, moreover, was cast in moral terms of contrasting
ideologies and deeply rooted in the historical gender constructs specific
to that locale. Next my paper examines inter-village tensions within
the commune-wide collective. I show how these tensions, rooted in the
historically uneven distribution of local leadership, were brought to
the fore during the high time of collectivization. I suggest that precisely
in this confrontation, villagers came together in collective actions,
sharing a feeling of being marginalized and/or oppressed. In other words,
the sense of belonging or "community" developed during confrontations
between one's village and "others," be they other villages
or the authorities in the collective and commune.
The paper concludes that a historical and ethnographical understanding
of local cultures is crucial for understanding the transformation of
and conflicts between political, economic, and social systems.
Dismantling the Collectives while Expanding the Family Farms: Agrarian
Politics in Vietnam's Red River Delta, 1979-1988
Ben Kerkvliet, Australian National University
Facing widespread discontent among villagers and an alarming decline
in farm production, Vietnam's leaders in 1979-1981 authorized adjustments
in the agricultural collectives. The modifications allowed households
to do some farming tasks that previously were supposed to be done collectively.
Leaders hoped this concession to family farming would preserve the collectives
in the long run.
It did not. This paper explains why. The main argument is that villagers'
low-key methods of coping with harsh rural conditions continued to undermine
the collectives. At first, villagers seemed to accept the new arrangement.
But within a year or two, out of desperation to make a living, disgust
against the collectivized system and often against local and higher
officials, and desire to have their own family farms, most villagers
were turning against it. They did not do so openly. Instead, they essentially
did more and more farming tasks individually rather than collectively.
This de facto dismantling of collectives initially occurred in only
a few places. By the mid 1980s, the process was widespread despite provincial
and national authorities' efforts to stop it. Gradually authorities
gave up trying. By 1987-88, official pronouncements quietly shelved
collectivization and loudly endorsed family farming.
This analysis sheds light on how policy is made in Vietnam and how everyday
politics can significantly affect authoritarian regimes.
Evidence for the paper comes chiefly from government archives in Hanoi;
interviews with villagers in three Red River delta provinces, local
officials, and policymakers; and several provincial and national Vietnamese
newspapers.
Session 139: Poster Sessions
Shoot Back: Worlds through Hmong Eyes
Duong Bich Hanh, University of Washington
Photovoice is a concept where cameras are given to local people and
are being used as a tool for local people to express their perceptions
and views about the world surrounding them. This concept was first developed
by Caroline C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris and described in a series of
research articles. It is a process facilitated through a series of workshops
in which people can identify, represent and enhance their community
through a specific photographic technique. Photovoice enables people
to gain the possibility of perceiving the world from the viewpoint of
the people who lead lives that are different from those traditionally
in control of the means for imaging the world.
With the financial support of the Toyota Foundation and in collaboration
with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, I am currently conducting a Photovoice
project with 25 young Hmong girls, who currently have left their villages
to come to Sa Pa town, Northwestern Viet Nam, to engage in tourist activities
such as selling handicrafts or working as tour guides. Cameras have
been given to the girls and pictures of different themes have been taken.
In this poster session, I will present more detailed information about
the project, the initial analysis of the view of the Hmong girls, as
well as a number of pictures that have been taken by the girls during
the project process. The project also contributes to proving that local
people are not always voiceless-when there are opportunities, they are
very capable of raising their voices, of "shooting back."
Session 142: Health, Gender, and Power in Asian Cultures
Organizer: Lynn Kwiatkowski, University of South Alabama
Chair: Mary Cameron, Florida Atlantic University
Discussant: Carol Laderman, City University of New York, City College
Keywords: health, gender, religion, medicine, globalization.
Panel papers will assess the role of power relations and gender in
shaping the health status, the illness experiences and outcomes and
the form and substance of medical options available in Asian communities.
A focus on how health is differentially impacted for women and men will
engage an examination of gender ideology in power relations. Power is
a culturally shaped symbol and practice that can be secular, religious,
or both, and can be examined locally and globally. This panel examines
gender, illness and healing at focal, national and international levels,
as they are affected by power relations. For example, as the state manipulates
its citizen symbols to fit its modernization projects, female and male
subjects become inscribed differently in health care and other discourses.
In many Asian countries, where health care needs compete with other
development agendas, the medical landscape becomes significantly challenged
in many arenas. Indigenous medical practitioners and bearers of local
medical knowledge, many of whom are women, must fight for legitimacy
and support in the wake of globalizing, and hegemonic discourses of
modern medical science. In such contexts, indigenous medicine comes
to stand for new ideas of national, gender, and ethnic identity, hence
resisting state sponsored subjectivities. Power in other forms comes
to shape biopolitical and gender discourse that is tied to illness and
healing, like that found in diverse arenas such as marital relations,
the family, workplace conditions and policies, state laws, national
welfare, state medical policies, and reproductive technologies and ideology.
Women's Bodies and State Power: Wife Battering in Two Vietnamese
Communities
Lynn Kwiatkowski, University of South Alabama
In Vietnam, state management of the majority of social and health services
has had an important influence on the ways that people conceive of,
enact, experience, and attempt to resolve wife battering and its gendered
emotional and physical health effects. In this paper, I will address
the significance of the role of the Vietnamese state in shaping the
lived experiences of battered women in two communities in northern Vietnam.
I will particularly emphasize women's health and well-being at the analytical
level of the body politic, examining issues of power and social regulation
and control of bodies in society. This paper will stress the state's
role in framing local conceptions of wife battering and in intervening
in specific cases, in order to examine the impact of state approaches
to wife battering on women's health and sense of bodily/emotional integrity.
Vietnam has seen minimal development of non-governmental organizations
that address wife battering, though some have been emerging in recent
years. A discussion of the influence of international ideologies and
practices on Vietnamese state policies will depict the shifting quality
of state power in relation to wife battering, as societies that have
developed a broader spectrum of services to assist battered women, beyond
those managed by the state, introduce new approaches to the problem.
Session 162: The Social Lives of Vietnam's Iconic Practices: The Spiritual
and Symbolic
Organizer: Van Pham, Xavier University
Chair: Quang Phu Van, Yale University
Discussant: Neil L. Jamieson, Kyoto University
Keywords: Vietnam, cultural history, spiritual practices, art and literature,
twentieth century.
This panel will explore. "cultural biographies" and social
histories of Vietnam's celebrated iconic practices. The production,
mediation and reception of symbolic practices, such as worship of goddesses
and village patron saints, the creation of artistic works, or readings
of the national epic poem, provide an ideal way of investigating the
transformation of social life in modern Vietnam.
After years of suppression under socialism, the recent resurgence of
rituals, festivals and other artistic events has given rise to a wave
of "traditionalism" in modern cultural life seeking to recapture
these spiritual and symbolic practices as vestiges of a "remembered
past." Nevertheless, in reality this past is widely refracted in
multiple ways depending on audience and position. This panel presents
the diverse ethnographic contexts in which cultural icons have been
created, sustained, and contested, and attests to the continued saliency
of iconic practice in establishing, supporting, and transforming social
and political identities.
Philip Taylor's paper looks at goddess worship as emblematic of debates
over social history and gender relations writ large. DiGregorio's paper
explores how the nationally encouraged reclamation of village patron
saints has led to confirmation of more "localized" identities
and lineages. Nora Taylor's paper delves into the internationalization
of the Vietnamese art market, which has created new incentives for artists
to disavow the conservative and "iconic" art that proliferated
under socialism. Pham's paper analyzes The Tale of Kieu from the perspective
of the Vietnamese diaspora, where themes of memory and parable become
distilled anew in the reception of the poem abroad.
The Rise of Female Spirits in Vietnam and the Burdens of Collectivity,
History, and Occult Sociality
Philip Kenneth Taylor, Australian National University
Shrines to goddesses are important focal points for a diverse range
of symbolic, ritual and social projects in Vietnam. They draw together
large numbers of people who visit them on pilgrimages and at festivals,
symbolically "front" a variety of collective identities and
excite commentary from a host of different interpreters. This paper
will address the rise in stature of these feminine icons, exploring
their cultural, religious and social implications in three lines of
inquiry.
As symbols of collectivity these female spirits are critical to the
articulation, reproduction and transcendence of a range of political,
ethnic, cultural and gendered identities. An intriguing quality of such
icons is their ability to symbolize significantly different projects,
divisions and collective realignments without precipitating conflicts.
For spirits sometimes rendered as survivals of an ancient or "animist"
substratum, equally remarkable are the powers and effects attributed
to them by social actors at the forefront of Vietnam's integration into
global capitalist markets. Are these spirits expressions of "millennial
capitalism" in post-revolutionary Vietnam? Or can one see in their
authoritative powers the encoding and negotiation of local histories
through salient cultural frameworks? Finally, as protector spirits (than
bao ho) with whom many people negotiate for assistance, these spirits
are hidden agents in major social and economic transformations. As consociates
of the socially marginalized, and partners in the acquittal of onerous
burdens, can they be seen as empowering allies or do they thrive on
vulnerabilities or in some cases reproduce abjection?
Remembering the Source: Affirming Identities in the Icon of a Patron
Saint
Michael DiGregorio, Ford Foundation
Through a decade-long dialogic process, the desire of an aging generation
to recover rituals and festivals associated with lineage and village
identity were matched by a cautious rescinding of state mandated prohibitions
on their practice and a progressive reformulation of guidelines for
their reinstitution. By accepting these guidelines, village committees
could affirm the state's ideological mission while carrying out their
own particular interests in reaffirming identities through the reconstruction
of landscapes and rituals of remembrance. As a result, policies that
were intended to affirm a national consciousness of common traditions
have also reaffirmed localized identities of lineage and village. Nowhere
is this more evident than in the Red River delta's craft villages. In
those craft villages that worship an ancestor or saint regarded as the
founder of the craft, communal and lineage icons, rites and ritual space
provide physically and ceremonially constructed supports for identities
rooted in blood and soil that intermingle with common commercial interests
and identities.
This paper presents the story of the elder branch of the Tran lineage
in Da Hoi, a village of steel producers, to instate their ancestor,
a founder of the village and its craft, as guardian spirit of the village.
This process, carried out over three generations, has reached its conclusion,
supported by the cultural policies of a socialist state, not only in
the formal re-affirmation of a common village identity but also in the
de facto leadership of the elder branch of the village's majority lineage.
The Vietnamese Artist in the Age of Globalization
Nora A. Taylor, Arizona State University
Over the past decade, artists in Vietnam have seen their works multiply
tenfold in cash value in the art galleries that have sprung up all over
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Whereas in the past, when artists were encouraged
to display "national character" in their paintings, artworks
were considered "symbols" of Vietnamese national pride and
means of displaying the beauty of the Vietnamese landscape and Vietnamese
life. Today, artworks are means of making money by selling pictures
of Vietnam to tourists eager for exotica and "authentic" Asian
art. The aim of this paper is to discuss the transformation of the role
of Vietnamese art and artists in the era of globalization. What has
happened to the work of art in Vietnam in an era of the market economy
and commodification? What is the role of the artist in a society increasingly
outward looking and internationalized? Is the burden on artists still
to portray the essence of iconic "Vietnam" or are they influenced
by international art trends? While some artists are trapped in fulfilling
the demands of tourists for "quaint pictures of traditional Vietnam,"
others are responding to the global art market by creating new identities
for themselves as "international Vietnamese artists" and denying
their work any means of becoming "icons" of Vietnamese-ness.
This paper will attempt to problematize these examples and situate them
in an art historical context.
Revisiting the Tale of Kieu (Truyen Kieu) in the Vietnamese Diaspora:
On the Hermeneutics of Reclaiming the Past in the Present
Van Pham, Xavier University
The Vietnamese narrative poem Truyen Kieu is widely regarded as Vietnam's
national poem, the epitome of Vietnamese culture and the greatest accomplishment
of Vietnamese literary heritage. The elegant simplicity of this masterpiece
belies its subsequent complicated history of hermeneutical interpretation,
rooted in its ability to be relevant to and to continue to nourish the
Vietnamese people's ethos and self-identity amidst their daily struggles.
One runs the risk of a reductionistic essentialism as well as decontextualization
if one were to insist that past interpretations of Truyen Kieu could
be transported unchanged into the life experiences of Viet-kieu (overseas
Vietnamese) communities merely on the basis of the need to preserve
Vietnamese traditions, self-identity and socio-cultural cohesion. This
essay explores possibilities for approaching this poem in the contemporary
worlds of Viet-kieu communities using a threefold heuristic framework
of: (1) the context of Viet-kieu life experiences as the starting point
and foundation for interpreting Truyen Kieu; (2) a memory-imagination
epistemological matrix as a hermeneutical framework for raising new
questions; and (3) understanding Truyen Kieu as a parable. There is
a need for contextualizing the time-honored ideals, values and insights
in Truyen Kieu amidst the vibrancy of the life experiences of these
Viet-kieu communities and using the diverse and pluralistic resources
of their multiracial, multilingual and pluricultural worlds. In such
a quest, there is also a need to pay attention to temporality, i.e.,
the here and now, which is characterized by uncertainty, diversity and
pluriformity.
Session 201: Confucianism in Twentieth-Century Vietnam
Organizer: Edward Miller, Harvard University
Chair: Shawn F. McHale, George Washington University
Discussant: Wei-Ming Tu, Harvard University
Keywords: modern Vietnamese history, Confucianism.
This panel highlights new research and new approaches to the study
of Confucianism in Vietnam during the twentieth century. The scholarship
on Vietnamese Confucianism is dwarfed by the literature on Confucianism
in China, Korea and Japan. However, Vietnam scholars have shown new
interest in this subject recently. The historian Keith Taylor has famously
questioned whether Confucianism had any more than a superficial importance
in Vietnam prior to the twentieth century. Whatever the validity of
Taylor's arguments with respect to the premodern period, they only serve
to underscore the importance of Confucianism in the twentieth century.
Even if Vietnam's premodern Confucian history is largely a product of
colonial and postcolonial imaginings, such an observation implicitly
recognizes the ubiquity of Confucian language and ideas in modern Vietnamese
political and intellectual life.
But if Confucianism has been ubiquitous in Vietnam in the twentieth
century, it has also been varied and contested. The lively discourse
after 1900 about the meaning and utility of Confucianism in modern Vietnam
gives the lie to representations of Confucianism as a monolithic and
totalizing force which somehow compels a "traditional" cast
of mind. This panel aims to illuminate the vitality and contested nature
of this discourse. Shawn McHale's examination of late colonial Confucian
polemics on Buddhism and decadence, Sarah Womack's study of the Confucianism
of the critic Ph?m Qu?nh, and Edward Miller's exploration of the Confucian
ideas and policies of Ngô Ðình Di?m will serve to illustrate
the diversity and complexity of this important subject.
Confucianism and Its Discontents in Late Colonial Vietnam
Shawn F. McHale, George Washington University
At the level of popular culture, it would be reasonable to argue that
Buddhism shaped Vietnam far more profoundly than Confucianism. Interestingly
enough, few scholars have made such an argument. The well-known historian
Nguyen Khac Vien, for example, argued over twenty-five years ago that
"for ten centuries Confucianism was the intellectual and ideological
backbone of Vietnam." As Vietnam is modernizing, some Vietnamese
scholars are re-accentuating the value of Confucianism in constructing
a modern culture. Many of today's arguments on this topic have their
roots in debates from the late colonial period.
This paper has two parts. First, it will put forth a series of arguments
on why Confucianism's historical impact has been widely exaggerated.
Then it will explore the intellectual fashions of late colonial Vietnam
and show how these fashions led some individuals to reassert Confucianism's
importance to Vietnam. I will examine two topics in particular: Confucian
arguments against Buddhism and against a literature of decadence. Twentieth-century
champions of Confucianism tended to see Buddhism as decadent or in decline.
These same Confucians also expressed horror over a literature of decadence
in which sexual promiscuity was discussed (See, e.g., Vu Trong Phung's
To Be a Whore). Faced with a perceived decay in "traditional"
teachings like Buddhism, and faced with modern challenges from a Westernized
and decadent literature, advocates of Confucianism reasserted the centrality
of Confucianism to Vietnamese morality.
Creating a Confucian Vietnam: Cultural Nationalism, Social Conservatism,
and Pseudo-Neo-Neo-Confucianism in the Colonial Period
Sarah Womack, University of Michigan
This paper explores the debates on Confucianism, modernity, and the
nature of Vietnamese culture during the "high" colonial period.
Through an examination of printed dialogues on tradition, gender, and
social reform, it emphasizes the content and strategy of the arguments
that linked together social conservatism, cultural nationalism, and
a peculiar form of loose Confucianism, and that were deployed most notably
by the editor and journalist Ph?m Qu?nh.
The manufacture of the debate that raged by the mid-1930s over whether
Confucianism should be the ruling doctrine in a modern Vietnamese nation
preparing itself for eventual independence was, if nothing else, a feat
of manipulation of Vietnamese writers and their audiences. In his writings
on Vietnamese morality and society, Ph?m Qu?nh sidestepped questions
of content and structure by proceeding from the assumption that the
guiding principle was conservative Confucianism of a peculiarly hybrid
kind. He thus moved Confucianism from an object to a subject position
in the debate over the form of the Vietnamese future. Just as Ph?m Qu?nh's
allies reacted to the conflict between "tradition" and "modernity"
by embracing the traditional in its most extreme form without questioning
the terms of the dichotomy, many of his opponents reacted to the attempt
to reassert "tradition" by embracing "modernity,"
without questioning the truth of neo-traditionalist claims. This study
explores the roots and evolution of these assumptions and seeks to place
this manipulation of tradition and debate within the context of a continuing
dialogue on the nature of Vietnamese culture.
Confucianism and "Confucian Learning" in South Vietnam
during the Ðiem Years, 1954-1963
Edward Miller, Harvard University
Ngo Dinh Ðiem, leader of South Vietnam from 1954 until 1963, was
a self-proclaimed Confucianist who frequently invoked Confucian ideas
and Confucian language in his public speeches and his private conversations.
Historians and other observers have often commented on Ðiem's enthusiasm
for Confucianism, but have made little effort to understand his ideas
or to discover how he came to acquire them. Instead, they have tended
to assume that Ðiem's embrace of Confucianism was conditioned by
an inherently backwards and reactionary worldview, and by an affinity
for outdated notions of government, power and rulership.
This paper offers an alternative interpretation of Ðiem's Confucianism
by placing it in the context of modern Vietnamese political and intellectual
history. It will show how the Confucian ideas which Ði?m espoused
during the 1950s and 1960s were appropriated from Vietnamese writings
about Confucianism produced earlier in the twentieth century. In particular,
Ðiem was profoundly influenced by the notion of "Confucian
Learning" (Không Hoc) as presented by the anticolonial activist
Phan B?i Châu in his commentary on the Confucian canon. This paper
will also show how Ðiem's Confucianism was shaped by contemporary
political imperatives, especially by his efforts to mobilize public
support for his regime's nation-building programs. By drawing on Ðiem's
writings and speeches and on South Vietnamese newspapers and journals,
this paper will reveal how Ðiem sought to incorporate Confucian
ideas into the "Personalist Revolution" (Cách Mang
Nhân Vi) that he hoped to carry out.