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20th Century Vietnamese Anthropology Contextualized: Debates and Contestations
Organizer: Chi Huyen Truong, Independent Scholar
Chair: Frank Proschan, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
Discussant: Oscar Salemink, Free University
The panel aims at contextualizing the development of anthropology in 20th century Vietnam through changing landscapes of intellectual life. The four papers identify and discuss debates and contestations in the discipline: the birth of Vietnamese ethnology out of and in opposition to the French scholarship at the turn of the century; an alternative ethnography practiced in isolation during the time of ‘high socialism’; and the diverse responses to challenges and opportunities presented by the integration of Vietnam into the world at the end of the last century. Drawing from primary sources, extended field research, and personal experience of training and practicing anthropology in Vietnam, panelists engage with theoretical issues of the production of knowledge, power, and agency. The papers match chronologically but speak to one another complimentarily as well. Both Nguyen Phuong Ngoc and Truong Huyen Chi highlight subjectivity by placing individual careers in their contexts – the formation of modern scholarship in French Indochina and the establishment of Marxist ethnology in socialist Vietnam respectively. Nguyen Van Chinh and Nguyen Van Huy present contrasting perspectives on the same period: the exposure of Vietnamese academia to scientific globalization brings about crisis in teaching and research in one case, and opportunities for new forms of museum practice in another. As a whole, the panel puts forth a novel approach of writing a reflective history of the discipline while practicing it. Challenging the native versus Western dichotomy in anthropological practice, the panel offers an unprecedented reflection on the interaction between Vietnamese and Western anthropologies much needed for the development of anthropology of and in Vietnam.
Adopting Western methods, Understanding One’s Own Culture: The Study of Society and Culture by Vietnamese Scholars under French Colonial Administration
Ngoc Phuong Nguyen, College de France
This paper examines the study of peoples, culture and society by Vietnamese scholars in both French and Vietnamese during the French administration at the beginning of 20th century by contextualizing it as a part of the entire Western scholarship. Using Bourdieu’s concept of “gravity field”, I will analyze the structure of this special ‘field of Vietnamese study’ in different stages to clarify various positions and their movements between the dominating and dominated poles. Examples of collective works in Dong Thanh journal (1932-1934), Bulletin de la SEM du Tonkin (1920-1938), Thanh Nghi and Tri Tan (1941-1945) and the full membership in scientific institutions such as Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient and Institut Indochinois pour l’Etude de l’Homme will demonstrate that from a submissive position, Vietnamese scholars eventually obtained a significant voice in the academic realm. I will then place these movements in the social and ideological context to understand the choice Vietnamese intellectuals made in the 1930s. To compare Vietnamese culture with that of Chinese and French was, I would like to suggest, a game to gain a relfective perspective of one’s own culture, based on which one would construct a new Vietnamese culture. This is precisely a process of ‘ideology liberalization’ that laid one of the foundations for the victory of Vietnamese revolution. I would like to conclude that few decades prior 1945 were experienced as a trial of conscious integration and choices which brought about multiple ideas for the study of Vietnam in the modern era.
The Margin Contextualized: Nguyen Tu Chi (1925-1995) and an Alternative Ethnography in Socialist Vietnam
Chi Huyen Truong, Independent Scholar
Drawing from archival materials and interviews with family members, friends, colleagues, and students, I will reconstruct a biography of Nguyen Tu Chi (1925-1995), a prominent yet perhaps the most controversial anthropologist who chose to be at the margins of Hanoi academic life during three decades of ‘high socialism’ (1960-1980), while conducting scholarly works of finest quality. I posit that Tu Chi’s life can be read far beyond an idiosyncratic story of an eccentric person who fell out of grace of the socialist structure, or someone who self-victimized. I aim at exploring the structural conditions within and against which Tu Chi made his choice by asking, What can be said from his choice about the material, social, and political conditions in which Tu Chi and his contemporaries lived? By material conditions I mean the ways scholars made their living, how research was commissioned, how their findings were published, and so on; social – the ways researchers related to one another in daily life and in scholarly arenas, how they came to identify themselves in terms of teacher-student, master-follower, supporter-opponent relationships, and so forth; and finally, political – the ideological settings within which certain kinds of knowledge could be and should be generated while others not. It is ultimately the power relations in the production of knowledge – in this case specific kinds of knowledge of ethnic groups in Vietnam – and the subjectivity of Vietnamese socialist intellectuals in this structuring that I want to uncover.
In Search of Change: A View from Inside on the Recent Trends of Vietnamese Anthropology
Chinh Van Nguyen, Vietnam National University
Like China and former socialist countries in Eastern Europe, there is no anthropology in Vietnam with four fields of archeology, linguistics, physical and cultural anthropology as understood in the United States. Instead, one can refer to “anthropological sciences” in which those disciplines are built separately. Since Vietnam is emerging as a regionally dynamic economy, Vietnamese anthropologies are likely in a transformation getting closer to the Western concept of social-cultural anthropology. This paper examines the on-going discussions over the field of ethnology as one of anthropological sciences in Vietnam, its development, nature and contribution to the country’s development. I will focus on the recent trends of Vietnamese ethnology and the challenges it is facing in the transition process. I will first provide a context for the discussion on recent trends by tracing the introduction of anthropology to Vietnam and highlighting the legacy of colonial anthropology and the apprenticeship from the Soviet school of ethnology. I will then examine theoretical perspectives, research practices and concerned issues in the field. My major proposition is that Vietnamese anthropology is currently in crisis. For several decades of development, it could not escape the shadow of colonial anthropology while the Soviet school of ethnology is no longer relevant. Vietnamese anthropology is seeking a change to meet the requirements of a changing society, but the questions of why and how to change are likely remained unanswered.
Museum as a Site of Novelty: Constructing by Practicing Anthropology in Contemporary Vietnam
Huy V Nguyen, Vietnam Museum of Ethnology
A decade since establishment (1996-2006) offers an adequate time to reflect on the practice of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME). Through a discussion of the contexts in which VME carves out its way from Vietnamese ethnology, I will highlight its two institutional features, i.e. a continued access to local community and an increased interaction with international scholarships. These characteristics in turn have helped VME turn some of its challenges into opportunities. First, I will describe how VME takes advantage from offering itself as a site of dialogues between different scholarly traditions. I will highlight the process in which VME benefits from intensive interaction with Western scholars, turns their consultation into mutual collaboration, improves its learning capacity and eventually takes its own initiatives. I will then describe how VME has become a site of novelty by fostering new ideas into a continued tradition of an applied approach. Examples of research projects and exhibitions will demonstrate how notions such as native view, local voices, community participation, public ownership, and so forth have to be debated and put into practice. Through the case of VME, I will argue that over the past two decades Vietnamese anthropology has to be created in the first place; yet, it is created not from zero but instead from a continued dialogue between different scholarly traditions. Paradoxically, as VME has reached considerable achievements of museum-community partnership in research and activities, it faces a new challenge of engaging its own anthropological circuit that is increasingly diversified.