Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520238729
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520238725
- Pub. Date:
- 05/02/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520238729
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520238725
- Pub. Date:
- 05/02/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520238725 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 303 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Vietnam
Journeys of Body, Mind, and SpiritUniversity of California
Copyright © 2003 American Museum of Natural HistoryAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-23872-9
Chapter One
ONE COUNTRY, MANY JOURNEYSOscar Salemink
Many people are surprised to learn that Vietnam has the second largest population in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. At almost 80 million (over 76 million according to the 1999 census), it is larger than France, England, or Italy. Vietnam's population is also immensely diverse, with over fifty officially recognized ethnic groups speaking more than fifty languages (some linguists claim more than one hundred) belonging to three language families subdivided into eight language groups. In addition, most of the world's major religions are represented in Vietnam - Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) - besides myriad other religious beliefs and practices, often described as animism, shamanism, spirit worship, or ancestor worship.
This diverse reality may clash with some images that Westerners have of Vietnam. For decades American and European interest in Vietnam was largely provoked by wars and related events during the Cold War. Westerners were caught by the image of Vietnam either as an enemy of the free world or as David defeating a series of imperialist Goliaths. Both of these images are far from an accurate picture of the country and its history.
In numerous books, reports, and films about Vietnam, the people with the conical hats are portrayed as living in rural village communities that have changed little over time, their lives steeped in tradition. The irony is that such notions and their attendant visual images emerged when Vietnamese society was undergoing a sea change, when much of the countryside was ravaged and villages were being resettled, when much of its population had left the villages to fight a war whose horizons lay far beyond the village boundaries, when migration, both domestic and international, was increasing, when Vietnam's global integration was accelerated by virtue of its being one arena in which the international Cold War was fought. The irony is, too, that a great deal of Vietnam's history and culture is about movement, migration, travel, and change, as revealed by much of its popular art and literature. Rather than discuss various images of Vietnam (accurate or inaccurate), therefore, this overview will pay attention to changes - the journeys of the Vietnamese people over time, in space, and spiritually - without, however, denying significant continuities in Vietnam's culture and history.
* River Deltas, Coasts, and Mountains
VIETNAM IS A TROPICAL COUNTRY in mainland Southeast Asia, located between the Tropic of Cancer and the eighth parallel in the Northern Hemisphere. To the south and east we find the South China Sea (East Sea) and, farther on, the islands of Hainan and Taiwan, the archipelago of the Philippines, and the island of Borneo. To the north Vietnam shares a border with China, and to the west lie Laos and Cambodia, which until 1954 were, with Vietnam, part of French Indochina. The shape of present-day Vietnam is like an S, with the major deltas of the Red River and the Mekong connected by a narrow coastal strip and a mountain range known as the Annam Cordillera (Truong Son in Vietnamese). The northern delta, where the capital, Hanoi, is located, has four seasons, with surprisingly cold winters brought by wet winds coming down from the northern Chinese mainland. The monsoon climate in the southern half of the country results in a rainy season from April to November and a dry season from December through March.
Historically, much of Southeast Asia's present population is the result of myriad waves of migration. Whereas it is assumed that insular Southeast Asia and Polynesia were settled by speakers of proto-Austronesian languages coming from the coasts of Vietnam and southern China, the population structure of mainland Southeast Asia is the result of successive migrations from China southward, of such groups as Thai, Burmese, Lao, and Hmong. According to tradition, the Vietnamese themselves had their origin in the Red River Delta, about two thousand years ago. The legend of Au Co and Lac Long Quan tells the story of the birth of Vietnam, the result of a marriage between the elements of water and land. This legend, graphically depicted in a four-hundred-year-old bas-relief in Binh Da village near Hanoi, is now taken to mean that all ethnic groups stem from the same source, thus signifying the essential national unity of the country. The revival of the celebration of the Hung King Festival in Phu Tho province has recently been taken up as symbol of the birth of an indigenous Vietnam before the Chinese became players in its history.
The French scholar George Coedès has stated that Indochina was not just a geographic space between India and China but also a site of cultural cross-fertilization by Indian and Chinese influences. While Coedès described the Khmer and Lao civilizations as "Hinduized," Vietnam was "Sinicized," thoroughly influenced by Chinese civilization. From 211 B.C.E. to 938 C.E. the northern part of what is now Vietnam was occupied by a succession of Chinese dynasties. During this millennium, Chinese technology, culture, and political and religious concepts exerted a deep influence over Vietnam. After breaking loose from China, Vietnam - as one of the states paying tribute to the Middle Kingdom - continued to model itself on China in many ways, although part of the Vietnamese national narrative is the story of the struggle against China for independence. In recent years, however, Vietnamese archaeologists and historians have begun to stress that the roots of the Vietnamese nation preceded cultural influences from China and, to a lesser extent, India. These roots, found in the Dong Son culture with its famous bronze drums, are often portrayed as alien to Chinese civilization and resembling the material culture of some indigenous ethnic groups of the Annam Cordillera and Central Highlands. Even though such bronze drums have been found all over mainland and insular Southeast Asia, from Yunnan in China to Timor, Vietnamese historical narratives now appropriate the Dong Son culture as quintessentially proto-Vietnamese.
Another major part of the Vietnamese national narrative is the so-called Nam Tien, or March to the South, of the Kinh (Viet). When Vietnam finally became independent from China, the successive dynasties of Ly (1009-1225), Tran (1225-1400), and Le (1428-1786) attempted to pacify their border with China by recognizing China's suzerainty over Vietnam in the form of political and moral overlordship marked by regular tributes to the Chinese emperor. That saved economic and military resources for expansion south through the gradual absorption of Champa, a seafaring Hinduized polity in what is now central Vietnam. The Austronesian-speaking Cham had developed a civilization bearing similarities to the Khmer civilization and the premodern states of Srivijaya and Mataram in what is now Indonesia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Kinh absorbed the declining Champa Kingdom. Kinh culture, actively promoted by the southern Nguyen lords, did not saturate the entire Mekong Delta until the twentieth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, north and south remained politically separate. In the northern part of the country the Le dynasty was kept alive by the Trinh lords, whereas in the south the Nguyen lords had carved out a separate domain while formally recognizing the Le emperors. This led to a state of perennial hostility and a constant search for economic and military resources. The Nguyen lords in particular attempted to increase their domain through southward expansion, gradually absorbing areas where Cham and Khmer populations lived.
After the country's reunification by the Tay Son rebellion (1786) and the subsequent "reconquest" by the Nguyen dynasty, which from 1802 on asserted hegemony throughout Vietnam, the attention of Vietnam's rulers turned west. During parts of the nineteenth century, a stronger Vietnamese state controlled parts of what is now Cambodia and Laos and clashed with Siam (Thailand), which was expanding eastward. This process was stopped by the imposition of French colonial rule and the marking of borders between French Indochina and Siam. Still now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Vietnam has privileged relationships with Cambodia and especially Laos. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the French first annexed the southern part of Vietnam, Cochin China, as a colony and imposed a protectorate over Annam and Tonkin, the central and northern parts of the country, formally leaving the Nguyen dynasty and its mandarinate intact. Vietnam's western borders with Laos and Cambodia became fixed under French colonial rule, creating the political space for a westward movement of the majority Kinh people into the highlands. The creation of a modern nation-state with fixed borders also meant that a variety of upland populations became ethnic minorities in Vietnam.
A key element of French colonial rule was the attempt to link people - both individuals and local/ethnic groups - to particular places, either inhibiting movement or, where necessary, promoting tightly supervised migration. One example of such supervised migration was the exploitation of "coolies" from northern Vietnam on the rubber plantations in eastern Cochin China and the various plantations in the Central Highlands and Tonkin. In terms of village rule, the French attempted to shore up their control of village administration by undermining traditional village autonomy. Administrative measures imposed by the French made the movement and migration of peasants more difficult. According to Jan Breman and John Kleinen, such colonial interventions in village administration had the effect of creating more tightly knit communities, which were subsequently regarded as the traditional model of the village.
Colonial rule introduced sweeping changes in Vietnam, propelling it into the modern world in sometimes unexpected ways. The modern nationalism of the twentieth century was largely fed by contacts with overseas intellectuals and often led by members of a diaspora of Vietnamese living in other Asian countries. The influential Dong Du movement (meaning "study in the east," i.e. in Japan) and the Vietnamese Communist Party leadership based in China until World War II are two examples of how travel and migration - the movement of people, goods, and ideas - were at the root of Vietnam's most successful nationalist movement. When the struggle for independence in Vietnam eventually resulted in an all-out guerrilla war against the French under the Communist Viet Minh movement, villagers from all over the country were mobilized. The temporary separation of the country in 1954 along the seventeenth parallel, after the Viet Minh victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Agreements, undid the previous three-part division of Vietnam and almost restored the division between the Trinh and Nguyen lords that had existed before the Tay Son rebellion of 1786. This division was accompanied by a massive movement of Viet Minh cadres to the north and of anti-Communist Vietnamese, mostly Catholics, to the south.
Enormous upheavals and population movements resulted when the Second Indochina War (known as the Vietnam War or American War) broke out between North and South in 1960, aggravated by the deployment of U.S. troops in 1965. The famous Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route for troops and resources from north to south during that conflict, can be seen as a recapitulation of the Nam Tien in another form and historical context. Successive southern regimes resettled villages and populations on a massive scale in an attempt to gain control over these populations and separate them from the guerrillas. Many villagers from predominantly rural Vietnam fled the war in the countryside and settled in rapidly expanding cities, especially Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and Danang.
After 1975, the now reunified Socialist Republic of Vietnam also resorted to resettlement as an instrument of political control and economic management. Many southern city-dwellers were moved to New Economic Zones in the Mekong Delta and the Central Highlands, many farmers from the densely populated northern deltas came to the south in search of land, and cadres from the north came south to establish social and ideological institutions that would serve as the foundation for the new regime. This movement can be seen in part as another instance of the Nam Tien, with the additional westward movement into the Central Highlands near the western border constituting something of a Tay Tien, or March to the West.
Vietnam remains a largely rural society, with over 75 percent of the population living in the countryside. For many villagers, service in the army constituted not only exposure to the horrors of war but also an escape from geographic and social immobility. After the war, countless demobilized soldiers or cadres settled in new places or returned to their home communities as agents of change. These population movements evoked feelings of bereavement and loss and an intense nostalgia for the home village (que huong) that was inextricably mixed with memories of childhood (tuoi tho), before adult worries and sorrows took away the innocence of youth. This feeling of nostalgia is the stuff of poetry and novels, music and films, both in Vietnam and in the Vietnamese diaspora. In contemporary literature, one of the most poignant evocations of nostalgia and loss of innocence is Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War; in cinema, Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya.
If literature and biography can by any measure be taken as a mirror of society, then it is worthwhile to look at representative works from the literary canon in Vietnam. Vietnam's most famous novel is Nguyen Du's Truyen Kieu (The Tale of Kieu), written in 1813 and comprising 3,250 verses in nom, Vietnam's own character script. It tells the story, in beautiful verse, of a young girl's spiritual and geographic journey through medieval China. The girl, Kieu, rescues her family from ruin by sacrificing herself, giving up her true love. After a life's journey with a succession of husbands, lovers, and pimps, during which her spirit remains pure, she finds her family and her first love again. This novel, though set in China, has been embraced by generations of Vietnamese as representing profoundly Vietnam's cultural identity. Millions of Vietnamese can recite verses from the novel. But why? Perhaps because the novel tells a story of separation and alienation, of appropriation by strangers while preserving one's own spirit.
Continues...
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