Individualism v. Collectivism
Lilly Nguyen 08/24/2009
Hello all,
I am looking for resources related to notions of individualism (versus collectivism) in Vietnamese society. Does anyone know of ethnographic work that looks at these questions? I would be especially interested in work that looks at these themes in light of liberalism, neo-liberalism, and economic globalization in particular. I am currently working on the cultural dynamics of free and open source software and am looking at the ways in which liberal tropes get translated in technical work in Vietnam.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Lilly
David Marr published an article "Concepts of 'individual' and 'self' in 20th Century Vietnam" in the Cambridge journal Modern Asian Studies (2000).
I think that quite a bit of the contemporary work on issues like sexuality, consumerism, labor, religion, etc. in Vietnam directly or indirectly deal with such questions. If one would go back a few decades, the "Scott- Popkin debate" aka moral economy (collectivism?) vs political economy (individualism?) was the talk of the day when trying to understand the willingness of many Vietnamese peasants to join the revolution. I think much depends on how wide one casts one's net, conceptually speaking.
Oscar Salemink
Lilly,
I would argue that casting the issue in terms of individualism versus collectivism may be casting the net too wide. I'm not sure, for example, that a woman's assertion of the individual right to choose a spouse, hotly debated in the colonial period and onwards, necessarily sheds light on the topics you are looking at.
To perhaps veer off from some of the arguments of my book, what is at stake here are two issues: what is a "public," and what are authors' rights?
Vietnamese have been arguing over the nature of the public since the colonial period. What are public interests? What is a public? And they have done so through media (newspapers, radio, now the internet) whose owners have often professed support for a public, for public opinion, for standing for the rights of this public, while usually denying authors rights to their own creations. This is not a neo-liberal issue per se. To give an example from the colonial period, newspapers often pirated content from other newspapers, translated articles from foreign press without attribution, etc. This was done even though there was, hypothetically, some limited legal protections for authors. If we look at this phenomena sympathetically, this disregard for authors' rights was not simply an attempt to exploit writers. It was simply hard for newspapers or publishers to make a profit in the old days, and so authors often suffered. But suffer they did.
Authors were acutely aware that others took advantage of their work. This has been an enduring feature of Vietnamese public life since the 1920s -- a public sphere that, even then, was integrated into an increasingly globalized world. It is true today, when newspapers routinely take foreign content that is copyrighted, translate it into Vietnamese, and publish it as their own. Old habits endure.
Ironically, the admission to a neo-liberal economic order (and the need to abide by the WTO) should promise to be better for writers (or the creators of any intellectual property) than before. Authors will have a CHOICE of whether or not to contribute their work to the public pro bono, so to speak, or to get paid for it. In the past, authors were *compelled* to get meager recompense for their labor. In Marxist terms, their labor was alienated indeed.
While the impact of today's globalization is indeed remarkable on Vietnam, Vietnamese have been working through these "global" issues for around 90 years.
Shawn McHale
Director
Sigur Center for Asian Studies
Associate Professor of History and International Affairs
George Washington University
Yes, the point of clarification is very well taken. Given my particular interest in technological work, my choice of 'individualism' and 'collectivism' were efforts towards something of a middle ground that could more easily translated into other domains. Thank you for pointing more specific manifestations of these terms with respect to media and reproduction. Although, I am a bit wary of assuming the protection of "author's rights" as an overall social good, given the experiences of monopolistic practices of media institutions in a place like the US is not one I would necessarily want reproduced globally.
-lilly
lilly nguyen
phd student | dept. of information studies | ucla