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.

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