Farmers and Cadres- Two Kinds of Mental Illness
Farmers and Cadres- Two Kinds of Mental Illness
From: Narquis Barak <narquis@wjh.harvard.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
Dear VSG,
I am looking for sources, fiction or nonfiction, English,Vietnamese, or French, on the following. One of the chapters of my dissertation explores how provincial psychiatry in Northern Vietnam is shaped by the Confucian merged with Marxist ideology which differentiates between the "psyches" of people who work "by their legs and arms" (bang chan tay) and people who work "by their minds" (bang dau oc). This ideological view holds that because farmers are "closer to nature" and their means of production are their physical bodies, they "experience" life differently from cadres, or other people who make a living through mental means. Many psychiatrists explain that because farmers lack analytic interiority, or "consciousness" (su y thuc), they resort to "superstitious" (duy tam) and "primitive" (lac hau) ideas and practices. Through an analysis of patient data, interviews with patients and psychiatrists, and ethnographic accounts of doctor-patient interactions, the study examines how this view of farmers is being reproduced in the medical context, resulting in a pattern of diagnosis and treatment that differs markedly between farmers and cadres. I have assembled enough material that deals with the Marxist origin of this distinction and Soviet and Vietnamese psychiatric texts that describe the difference. I am looking for sources that deal with the distinction between farmers/peasants and cadres/civil servants from the standpoint of Confucian ideology. I am also looking for any sources related to this topic in general.
Thankyou,
Narquis Barak
Dept. of Anthropology
Harvard University
From: mchale <mchale@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
Narquis Barak asked:
>I am looking for sources that deal with the distinction
>between farmers/peasants and cadres/civil servants from the standpoint of
>Confucian ideology. I am also looking for any sources related to this
>topic in general.
There are, of course, some basic (and simple) distinctions that some Vietnamese made between social groups -- si nong cong thuong, or the Confucian hierarchy of literati, farmers, artisans, and merchants jumps to mind. But I guess I would be interested in knowing exactly why you are interested in Confucianism and its ideas of the distinctions between intellectuals and farmers. Is it because Vietnamese today say that this distinction was important in the past? Is it because you believe that this distinction was once important, and therefore you want to study it?
I ask because if you go through Cadiere and some others on folk and religious beliefs, one might come to the not surprising conclusion that Confucianism was only one of several influences on the ways that Vietnamese conceptualize mental and manual labor.
One could also, of course, see such distinctions as derived from literacy and the tenbencies of literate peoples to often disparage non-literate practices.
Shawn McHale
Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs
The George Washington University
e-mail address: mchale@gwu.edu
On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Daniel Duffy wrote:
What an interesting line of thought. I have two suggestions:
Tho*`i xa va('ng, by Le Luu (ca. 1986) deals with a farm boy who becomes a soldier. The first scene of the book emphasizes a "Confucian" setting, in that he is betrothed as a child. The whole story of the book is about how he never really fulfills his promise as a cadre. So, maybe, the novelist is interested in some of the same issues you are investigating.
I know that I have read more than one less-sophisticated fictions on similar themes, in the many scattered volumes of short stories published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House during the war. The simple version of the story contrasts the cadre with the farmers. Come to think of it, the contrast is between selflessness on the part of the cadre and calculation on the part of the farmers, the opposite of what you are talking about.
Another author to look at might be Nam Cao, since he was a revolutionary and he was concerned as an author with the countryside.
Thoi xa vang is available from U Mass press as A Time Far Past, thanks to the work of Chung and the Joiner Center.
One of the FLPH collections is "The Watchmaker of Dien Bien Phu", which has "Young Keng" by Nguyen Kien, on this theme. The hero, like Le Luu's is someone who has a hard time making the transition.
Nam Cao's slim works must be at Yenching. There are FLPH translations in English and French, too, I think both of short stories and of a novel.
I am fascinated that there is an explicit position among psychiatrists that farmers don't have calculating interiority. The Popkin/Scott debate touches on this attitude, though not so baldly, and of course in retrospect one also wonders how and why people took these premises seriously.
In my reading I have noticed in the Nhat Linh's "Viet va doc tieu tuyet" that he also seems to assume that people don't develop calculating interiority as a matter of the normal course of human life (let alone the practice of farming). A fabulously successful publisher, his rap is that these psychic attributes come through engagement with book technology.
Nhat Linh, your psychiatrists, these are all serious people, whose work was supported by the attention of thousands of others. Yet they say these things. Why? My guess is that the explicit discourse assumes a knowledge from practice that can only be known to our scholarship through ethnography. I will be very interested in what you learn.
Dan Duffy
Graduate student
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC
27599 USA
919-932-2624
<dduffy@email.unc.edu>
From: "Stephen O'Harrow" <soh@hawaii.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
Hello,
Re: Nam Cao -- in "Doi Mat," NC portrays the distance between an urban intellectual (from the Hanoi publishing scene) who is evacuated to the countryside after 12/46 and the "nha que that" country people (in a sea of whom he sees himself mired), as viewed through the eyes of a former friend, a young Viet Minh propaganda cadre (NC in disguise), who goes to visit the evacuated intellectual. Perhaps there is some grist for the psychological mill here. In "Chi Pheo" and "Lao Hac," NC talks of the psychology of the pesantry responding to hard times and oppressive social organization and again looks at the psychological gulf between the rulers (with their Confucian patina) and the (nha que) ruled.
Re: Nhat Linh -- I find the character of Doan, the French-trained artist in "Hai Ve Dep," into whose mind NL places seeds of doubt about the value of his constant over-visualization/romanticizing of the bleak rural surroundings to which he, as the adopted son of a landlord family, has now returned, to be a rather telling put-down of what NL saw as the typically "decapitated" Vietnamese intellectual of his day. This might well relate to the tropes which have been brought up relative to Confucian "mind workers" vs. peasant "body workers".
Hope these brief references to a couple of the better-known short stories in the modern corpus are of some assistance to the person who was enquiring about this issue.
Aloha, Steve O'Harrow
From: Chuong Chung <cchung@ccsf.cc.ca.us>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
Dear Marquis,
In Jamieson's Understanding Vietnam, there are several angles on the Vietnamese's worldview as well as in Doan Tuyet (Nhat Linh) which was discussed by Jamieson in same volume. There are other works during the war looking at Khanh Hau Village (long An Province) and Hendry (I believe it was) ethnography work on Duc Hoa Duc Hue and Khanh Hau. Some one mentioned Cadiere and I remember I read Kleiman as well as another psychiatrist when they analyzed the Vietnamese as having the warrior mentality i.e the Bach Dang mentality and the chong ngoai xam mentality as always there. When the going gets rough there were also help either supernatural or magic to come to the rescue.
I also think of the assemblage of all those spirits in Supernatural Power of The Viet Realm (Viet Dien U Linh Tap) and Linh Nam Chich Quai (the Record of Extraordinary Beings of Linh Nam). These exemplary spirits do they have any thing to do with the way farmers and villagers see their surroundings? Keith Taylor has written on this topic.
Cheers,
Chung Hoang Chuong
From: Vinh Quoc Nguyen <vnguyen@fas.harvard.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
Hi Narquis and everyone,
Since we're drifting around fictional representation of this "brain vs. brawn" dichotomy, I'd like to toss out another modern example which engagingly captures the continuing relevance and tension of this conception in contemporary (post-Doi Moi) Vietnam. The short story "Lessons of the countryside" [Bai hoc dong que] by Nguyen Huy Thiep (translated into English by Greg Lockhart in the anthology "The General Retires and other short stories") pits a young boy in between the influence of his "official-minded" urban parents on the one hand and his schoolmate's "farmer-minded" rural host family on the other. There's a lot of stereotyping at work in a sardonic vein, but instead of deconstructing the dichotomy (as he would in most of his short stories), Thiep comes down fairly squarely in favor of romanticizing a kind of "lost innocence" embodied in a sense of connection and empathy with a seemingly atemporal (dare we say "traditional"?) world of idyllic rural simplicity and purity that's brutally crushed by the corrupting and destructive intrusion of the modern urban world. Iconoclast though he is often made out to be, in this instance Thiep seems quite closely aligned with the age-old Confucian celebration of "agrarian utopianism". Sorry about the rambling digression, but I hope the short story will prove to be helpful and thought-provoking to this issue.
Regards,
Vinh Nguyen
vnguyen@fas.harvard.edu
From: "Hue Tam H. Tai" <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres- two kinds of mental illness
If I replied more promptly to my students' queries, there would not have been this discussion of different kinds of labor, but it's been fun reading the correspondence. Still, I have finally traced the locus classicus of the quotation. As I suspected, it's Mencius (ca 372-289 B.C.). It comes from Mencius: 'some work with their hearts-and-minds, others with their muscles.' Those who work with their hearts-and-minds maintain order for others; those who work with their muscles have order maintained by others. Those whose order is maintained by others provide the food; those who maintain order among others receive food’ James R. Ware, The Sayings of Mencius (New York: New American Library, 1960), p.85.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
From: "Chung Nguyen" <chung.nguyen@umb.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres - two kinds of mental illness
Hi Narquis and all:
Vietnam has about 5 centuries in which Confucianism was the dominant ruling ideology (from the 15th to the 19th). Until the periodic Confucian examinations were dropped in 1910s, all students who aspired to join the mandarinate had to learn by heart the precepts embodied in the Four Books and the Five Classics, one of which is the Analects (the Sayings of Confucius). In this primary text the idea of "quan tu" (the exemplar/righteous noble/person) represents the ideal model for "si" or "scholars/mandarins." Since they trained for "the Way", the most difficult and prized of all knowledge, theirs was a position that surpassed all others in society, including farmers/workers/traders/ and soldiers ("nong/cong/thuong/binh). Since they did not only serve as the principal channel for "the Way" to pass on to students and all others, but also held all levers of power under the king, they were in an auspicious position to validate & transmit this notion without any serious challenges.
Confucianism, however, only ruled on one level. Buddhism, because of its extreme closeness with the common folks in both cities and rural villages, and esp. because of its antiquity (1), operated at a deeper level. Buddhism, even in its earliest forms when introduced into Vietnam and eagerly absorbed into Vietnamese culture, broke down this scholar/farmer paradigm completely. The legendary story of "Chu Dong Tu/Tien Dung" in which CDT, a penniles peasant, and his wife TD, a princess, were converted to Buddhism, gave up their trade to devote totally to the pursuit of the path (CDT eventually became the Guardian Spirit Tan Vien watching over the nation) is a typical non-Confucian trope. Other examples are (a) the story of Man Nuong, a poor farmer's girl, whose shrine still stands (near the famous Dau pagoda) and whose memory is still celebrated every year in Ha Bac province today; or (b) "Quan Am Thi Kinh", a peasant's daughter who had to disguise herself as a man to join the sangha, eventually reached sainthood - a tale familiar to every farmer/scholar in Vietnam.
The farmers, however, understood that not every scholar (or monk for that matter) lived up to their calling. Ca Dao (folk lyrics) and folk sayings are filled with sarcastic remarks re: useless bookworms and overheated minds. Luc Suc Tranh Cong (The Quarrel of the Six Beasts, Lac Viet Series #4), an early anonymous tale in verse in the "tuong" (traditional opera) form, portrays the disputes among six animals, representing the king's six boards (all headed by the country's top "si" (scholars)) in an amusingly unflattering light.
During the French colonial period the term "si" (scholar) was supplanted by the more up-to-date "tri thuc" (intellectual). The old class of scholars had failed following repeated and brutal suppressions by the colonial authority. The country needed to be modernized in order to effectively drive out the more powerful and much more modern French force. The role of the new "tri thuc" became essential. Tu Luc Van Doan (the Self Reliance Literary School) launched a series of novels advocating modernization, renouncing all the backward customs/beliefs of the "nha que" (country people/uneducated folks). Some of these works deal with the conflict of this very paradigm. (Chung H. Chuong mentions one, "Doan Tuyet; Steve O'Harrow mentions another - "Hai Ve Dep".)
In the early days of socialism, both the traditional "si" (scholars) and the modern "tri thuc" (intellectuals), unless they had already served in the ranks of the revolution and seen the light (later called "tri thuc xa hoi chu nghia"/ socialist intellectuals), they were branded as reactionary and could be severely punished. Vo Van Truc's "Chuyen Lang Ngay Ay" (The Story of My Village in Those Days) told of how the entire traditional and cultural underpinnings of his beloved village - pagodas/temples/scholar heroes/etc. were swept away in the overzealous tide of revolutionary fervor. To Hoai's "Chieu Chieu" (Dusk, Dusk) also recounts what happened in the country side during the Land Reform and what happened to the "writer/ intellectual" in the city, including himself. In those days, the "scholars/ intellectuals" had to learn from the farmers. Under socialism, "cong-nong" (workers/peasants) initially became the vanguard force of the revolution in which "tri" (intellectuals) served a mere supporting role. One of Nguyen Minh Chau's short stories (I can't think of its name at the moment) for the first time raises the question whether one can rely on a peasant-based revolution to run the country. The peasant, the story's main character, once having the taste of power, turns out to be no better than the old rapacious landlord he replaces. Since Doi Moi (Renovation), the role of "tri" has been recognized, for only a "cong-nong-tri-binh" alliance could bring about stability and a technocratic revolution.
In short, if one looks for Confucian paradigms, one will find them. If one looks for non-Confucian paradigms, or paradigms that will contradict the Confucian worldview, there are plenty. Confucianism placed a high value on knowledge/intellect; Buddhism places a much higher value on the heart. A poor farmer with a great hear can reach Buddhaland while a great scholar with a poor heart can't. The issue of "analytic interiority", in the Buddhist sense, I think, becomes problematic as a factor in psychological illness. It's the ruling current of a time that determines, for that time, what's the preferred public choices/interpretations are. Whether those choices actually reflect the underlying sense of the culture as a whole and in a more enduring sense is a different question altogether.
Nguyen Ba Chung
Research Associate
Joiner Center
(1) Buddhism penetrated and became part and parcel of Vietnam's cultural makeup much earlier than Confucianism. The Ly-Tran dynasties (1010-1400), the first powerful dynasties of independent Vietnam, were Buddhist.
The recent new editions of Le Manh That's works in Vietnam have thrown new light on the early period of Vietnam's history (1st to10th century), confirming beyond any doubt the essential and enormous role played by Buddhism in the formative period of the country.
From: Stephen R Denney <sdenney@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres - two kinds of mental illness
At 09:00 PM 3/3/00 -0800, Chung Nguyen wrote:
>(1) Buddhism penetrated and became part and parcel of Vietnam's cultural
> makeup much earlier than Confucianism. The Ly-Tran dynasties (1010-
> 1400), the first powerful dynasties of independent Vietnam, were
> Buddhist.
> The recent new editions of Le Manh That's works in Vietnam have
> thrown new light on the early period of Vietnam's history (1st to
> 10th century), confirming beyond any doubt the essential and enormous
> role played by Buddhism in the formative period of the country.
Are you referring to Le Manh That who is a Buddhist monk, Thich Tri Sieu, and was arrested in 1984 along with Thich Tue Sy (released in Sept. 1998)? I recall reading that they were working on an encyclopedia of Vietnamese Buddhism at the time of their arrest.
- Steve Denney
From: Giang Minh Le <lg282@columbia.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres - two kinds of mental illness
To Narquis and all,
I have followed the discussion around two "psyches" of farmers and cadres with great interest. I don't know much about the influences of Confucianism and/or Buddhism on this issue, but wonder if you know and how you think about the old saying - Nha^'t si~, nhi` no^ng. He^'t ga.o cha.y ro^ng, nha^'t no^ng, nhi` si~ - or First come the scholar, then come the peasant. But once rice is running out and one has to wander around, then first come the peasant, followed by the scholar. (My translation is not perfect, and anybody's help would be greatly appreciated). I could recall that I learned this saying in elementary school and really enjoyed it. To me, it shows the least a form of resistance - the other side of the story.
Best,
Giang Minh Le
Ph.D student - medical anthropology
Division of Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia School of Public Health
From: Narquis Barak <narquis@wjh.harvard.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Narquis-farmers and cadres
Dear All,
Thank you for your responses to my query. I hope that people who are not particularly interested in this topic forgive me for my continuing discussion of this matter. I am hoping that by clarifying my line of inquiry, I might be able to draw in more advice. The emails so far have been very helpful. The reason I inquired specifically about Confucianism and Confucian discourse about peasant mentality is because I was told by scholars of Vietnam as well as China that the Socialist distinction between peasants and cadres, or people who work by their legs and arms and people who work by their minds, which is a salient theme in Vietnamese psychiatry has roots as well in Confucian thought. Prof. Tai has informed me of a specific reference to this distinction in the writings of Mencius. The fictional accounts that people have referred me to are illustrative of the urban "stereotypes" of farmers and rural life and the contrasts and dilemmas between "traditional" modes of thinking and "modern" world-views. Perhaps, it takes moving to the city to enable one to romanticize rural life. In the context I was in, the "romantic" aspects of farmers lives was overshadowed by the "non-romantic" in the discourse of psychiatrists, other cadres, and farmers themselves and the non-romantic realities of the growing economic divide between cadres and farmers. I am investigating the origins of the "primitivist theme" that characterizes the disourse on farmers in psychiatry as well as the roots of an ideology that focuses on the "mental labor" as an etiological cause of certain forms of illness. While farmers think "suy nghi" as much as cadres do, they are not diagnosed as often with disorders that are associated with psychological problems, or disorders that are characterized by "thinking too much" such as neurasthenia, or other neurotic illnesses. One psychiatrist explained the differences between farmers and cadres, as follows: (This is a transcibed quote)
"There are two states of work, the Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, said this. Work by the body and work by the head. People who work by head have to think about their work always, whereas the farmer works hard sweats it out and then sleeps well."
The "primitivist theme" that characterizes the Vietnamese psychiatric discourse has parallels to French Colonial Psychiatric discourse about "natives" in other regions of the world, as described by Verges, for example, in her book Monsters and Revolutionaries. In the tradition of Foucault us analysis of medical discourse, she examines the construction of native mental illness by French Colonial psychiatry in Reunion (an island in the Indian Ocean), engaging previous analyses of psychiatry and Colonialism by Fanon, Memmi, and Mannoni. Her work reveals interesting parallels to the construction of the peasant mentality by psychiatrists and police in the countryside in Vietnam. These "primitivist" themes also characterize the cross-cultural psychiatric literature on the difference between "developed" and "developing" countries in regards to incidence of mental illness and rates of recovery. Someone emailed me that perhaps the psychiatrists’ way of talking about farmers is characteristic of general ways in which people talk about those who are illiterate in any country. The issue here is that it is not simply about illiteracy, it is about work, the ways in which mind or body are used, as shaping mentality or psyche. The distinction between farmers and cadres and its shaping of medical practice and other interactions in the countryside aside from the clinical encounter may have similarities to other social contexts, such as in America where African-Americans and Latinos tend to be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia more often than whites, reflecting views of psychiatrists about these ethnic groups. Despite the similarities, there are aspects that are uniquely Vietnamese and this is what I am trying to address.
Just as an addition to this, I would like to mention that the distinction between farmers and cadres is also evident in spirit mediumship and the spirit cosmology that I encountered in the countryside. "Minister" spirits when possessing a person behave in different ways from "farmer" spirits and spirit mediums who have the root of a minister spirit are described as having characters (ca tinh) that typify ministers/cadres.
Again, I apologize to those of you who are not interested in this topic.
Thankyou,
Narquis Barak
Phd. candidate
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University
From: "Chung Nguyen" <chung.nguyen@umb.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Narquis-farmers and cadres
Narquis Barak wrote:
> Dear All,
> The reason I inquired specifically about Confucianism
> and Confucian discourse about peasant mentality is because I was told
> by scholars of Vietnam as well as China that the Socialist distinction
> between peasants and cadres, or people who work by their legs and arms
> and people who work by their minds, which is a salient theme in Vietnamese
> psychiatry has roots as well in Confucian thought. Prof. Tai has informed
> me of a specific reference to this distinction in the writings of Mencius.
My understanding is that there is a "socialist view" re: Vietnamese culture in the 1950s, another "socialist view" in the post-DoiMoi in the 1990s, and I am sure, another in the 2010. In the early 1950s, both Confucianism and Buddhism were condemned, one as "phong kien" (feudalistic) and the other as "duy tam" (idealistic). In the North, younger monks were asked to leave their pagodas and return to a more "productive" life style. Many places of worship were converted into village offices or cultural centers; others were simply disassembled, their prized hardwood beams used to construct more useful structures, such as meeting-places or warehouses. In the Doi Moi era, there has been a strong revival of religious interests. Many pagodas have been repaired or rebuilt in the North. With the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, there has also been a renewed interests in Confucianism, to re-situate socialism in the context of ancient cultural traditions, ie. "dam da ban sac dan toc" (filled with the nation/people's [cultural] characters, ie. not imported or alien).
Tri thuc xa hoi chu nghia (socialist intellectual/scholar), however, will understandably hold on to the orthodox view of the primacy of the "materialistic" (duy vat) approach (otherwise, by definition, he or she is no longer a "socialist intellectual"). The entire "duy tam/duy vat" dichotomy (idealistic/materialist, or, in this case, Buddhist/Socialist) represents a profound misinterpretation of the nature of Buddhism. It also employs wholesale Marx's idea that was strictly based on his criticism of Western religions that had no bearing on the place of Buddhism in Vietnamese society and culture (1). This has nothing to do with either a "romantic" or a "non-romantic" view of the peasants. It deals with the fundamental structure of the self, in whatever garb.
Simply put, in a culture with at least 15 centuries of Buddhism, 5 centuries of Confucianism, and less than a century of socialism, how can one go about determining which features would have the most impact on certain human behavior? Mental illness is, I presume, the response of the entire body-mind, not one particular part or facet of the individual. How can one tell that its diagnosis should be simply based on this or that "Confucian" notion? (2)
True, Confucian thought did make a distinction between people who work with their legs and arms and people who work with their minds. Buddhism, however, though recognizing this distinction, disregards its dualism altogether. It insists on the notion of a
bodymind whole, and works to attain the freedom of that whole. If a "Socialist specialist" uses the Confucian distinction as an aid in his diagnosis, that's certainly his choice, but it doesn't presuppose that the peasants became ill because they were under the influence of that notion, ie. the Confuctian distinction somehow affects their mentality. Mencius doesn't say anything about mental differentiation; what he describes is about the division of labor and social order, which is one of the Confucians's prime interests (3).
To put it another way, supposed one goes and studies this problem with psychiatrists in pre-75 South Vietnam: would the Socialist/Confucian categories apply ? What would the "non-socialist intellectuals" in pre-75 SVN say ?
Perhaps the answer to this question would make precisely your point: that (a) the diagnosis is always colored by the ideological view one shines on it (the "Socialist distinction", as you say). I would agree completely.
My point, however, is that, given this scenario, as we would have two widely different diagnoses, one in the North and one in the South, are we then concluding that (b) the Vietnamese peasants in the North and the South are fundamentally different ? I don't think this is tenable. (Or what would happen if we let the pre-75 SVN psychiatrists diagnose northern peasants and vice versa ?)
There may be, of course, a third answer: (c) that we would reach identical, or nearly identical, results in both cases. I find that difficult to accept, but others may not.
But, this is really going too far afield, and I would not waste any more of your time in any more posts. The issue I raise may perhaps properly belong to a study in the field of religion, philosophy, or sociology. And given (a), you have every reasons to work with Narquis-farmers.
Cheers,
Nguyen Ba Chung
Research associate
Joiner Center
(1) Things are changing in Vietnam. In a 1992 conference on "Tue Trung Thuong Si", one of the most interesting Buddhist figures in the Tran dynasty, Prof. Tran Van Giau, a well-known Marxist critic, made the following remarks: "This is one of two or three conferences with a genuine scientific content ! We can be proud because Vietnam indeed does have a philosophy of its own." (Tue Trung Thien Si voi Thien Tong Vietnam, Trung Tam Nghien Cuu Han Nom, 1993, p. 3.)
(2) One can argue that the Buddhist notion of "A-Lai-Da Thuc" (the common storehouse of universal knowledge) puts any human being on a fundamental equal basis with any other human being: we all share the same "A-Lai-Da Thuc" whatever our external props - what Jung translates as the common storehouse of the unconscious. This would require the psychiatrist to deal with the patient, whether "primitive" or not, or whether "cadre" or not, with a vastly different attitude.
(3) The great gap between "head worker" and "hand worker" is a recent phenomenon, starting with the French occupation. In feudalistic Vietnam, out of 1000 scholars who aspired to pass the mandarin-grade exams, perhaps less than 5 made it. The majority would have to return to the village, edged out a living as teachers or scribes, etc. Most remained poor, and lived very closely with the peasants. Some would have to resort to other odd jobs or even planting to supplement their meager income. Nguyen Trai, one of the greatest intellects in Vietnamese history, actually turned to farming after he was ejected from the Court.The path of a scholar, however, remained attractive because it was the only way a peasant family could hope for advancement. Only with modern society, when even a lowly "ong thong", an interpreter for the French, could live a comfortable life with such unheard of luxury as "champaign" and "milk" while the peasant might starve.
From: Stephen R Denney <sdenney@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: farmers and cadres - two kinds of mental illness
Thank you, Chung. That is good news. A brief biography of him can be found at:
http://www1.minn.net/~saoirse/poc.html
This is the site of an Amnesty International group in Minnesota which had adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. In 1988 he and this colleague, Thich Tue Sy, were sentenced to death but the sentences were commuted to 20 years imprisonment after international protest.
- Steve Denney