Morality: Growing Up in Rural Northern Viet Nam

Helle Rydstrom

Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 13:27:28 -0400

From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>

Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu

To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>

Subject: short notice of Helle Rydstrom, Embodying Morality

The Wednesday after the Monday I found the Nguyet Cam and Dana Sachs collection of Nguyen Huy Thiep in my mailbox, I stopped by the department to enroll my students and found a package from the University of Hawaii press waiting for me. I thought it was their new collection of Vietnamese fairy tales from Cam and Dana.

Instead it is Helle Rydstrom's Embodying Morality: Growing Up in Rural Northern Viet Nam (U. of HI Press, Honlulu, 2003). I have had my paperbound copy of this as a university thesis for years now. It has been very frustrating trying to tell people how to get one of their own. One of my committee got it out of my hands for a few weeks. Now you can just order it.

I will be writing a footnote for my dissertation about how this fits into the anthropology of feelings and subjectivity, and how it fits with other recent ethnographies from Viet Nam. I am sure that others will be doing the same for regional matters, for gender, for many other contexts. It is a solidly done and widely applicable piece of research.

What I can write about in the next ten minutes that might not occur to several other people in the normal course of events is that Rydstrom's work has proved of great value to me in teaching undergraduates. I taught it in my Social Theory and the Case of Viet Nam in the summer of 2001, and lectured from it in two semesters of General Anthropology in 2001-2.

That summer I paired classics of social thought with short stories from Vietnamese authors and scholarship from Vietnamese studies. Embodying Morality went with The Second Sex. One reason it went well is that Rydstrom's book is very clearly constructed. She engages with theory, she reports on empirical work, she draws conclusions.

The theory is Kristeva and Lacan rather than De Beauvoir, so I got to explain all three and talk about lived connections between these authors and Viet Nam. The research is clever, nailing down as activities and materials something that lecturers often have to discuss airily as a quality. Rydstrom's interest is gender in Viet Nam, tinh cam and nghia. She looks with a clipboard and video camera at how people learn to do these things.

Since my students had in front of them Beauvoir's own account of how one becomes a woman, and had read the womanly Paradise of the Blind to go with the Communist Manifesto, they had plenty of specifics with which to engage Rydstrom's conclusions. Half of the class were rural Southern, African American men who found Rydstrom more exotic than her informants, and the other half were Yankee urban women, white and black, who viewed the book the other way around. It all worked out very well.

For the general anthropology lecture course, the study made a good ethnography to talk about, like Malinowksi on the beach. Here is what cultural anthropologists do, here is how they do it, and this is how they talk about it. My students pay more attention to me when I talk about Viet Nam, so I was happy to have something appropriate to load into the curriculum along with the Trobrianders.

I introduced Embodying Morality in the early lectures, returned to it again when I bore down on linguistics, and then again on ethnography, when I explained how archaeologists try to see gender in material traces of activity, and how medical anthropologists do the same thing. When I talked about human evolution I hammered down on the difference beween what Darwin thinks sex and lineage are about and what the people by the Red River do.

Any book that finds its way into every field of a general anthropology course is likely to end up lots of other places as well. It looks like a classic to me.

Dan Duffy