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Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit
Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit takes the reader on an informed and engaging journey into the social and ritual life of contemporary Vietnam. Created to accompany the first major collaboration between a Vietnamese museum and an American museum on an exhibition of Vietnamese culture, this book moves beyond the troubled wartime history of both nations to a deeper portrayal of how Vietnamese of different ages, ethnicities, occupations, and circumstances live at the start of the twenty-first century. The contributors—most of whom live and work in Vietnam, while others have spent many years in intimate association with Vietnamese life—offer a unique perspective on the country and its diverse cultural mosaic. The text is complemented by a rich collection of photographs and illustrations that capture the complexity and nuance of daily life.
The journeys portrayed in this volume cut across virtually every domain of Vietnamese experience. Some take place on roads, railways, rivers, and footpaths, as family members come home for the New Year and traders carry goods precariously balanced on bicycles. Others are life is a journey marked by significant rituals, and the year is a journey mapped by a calendar with holidays as milestones along the way. Souls travel to the netherworld, while gods and ancestors return to the human world during celebrations in their honor.
Although the Vietnam War dominated the consciousness of a generation of Americans, few understand the country and few can imagine what it is like today. Appearing more than a decade after Vietnam's entrance into the global market and more than a quarter century after the cessation of hostilities between the Vietnamese and U.S. governments, this book provides a new understanding of how Vietnamese live, work, and celebrate critical passages of life and time.
Copublished with the American Museum of Natural History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology
The journeys portrayed in this volume cut across virtually every domain of Vietnamese experience. Some take place on roads, railways, rivers, and footpaths, as family members come home for the New Year and traders carry goods precariously balanced on bicycles. Others are life is a journey marked by significant rituals, and the year is a journey mapped by a calendar with holidays as milestones along the way. Souls travel to the netherworld, while gods and ancestors return to the human world during celebrations in their honor.
Although the Vietnam War dominated the consciousness of a generation of Americans, few understand the country and few can imagine what it is like today. Appearing more than a decade after Vietnam's entrance into the global market and more than a quarter century after the cessation of hostilities between the Vietnamese and U.S. governments, this book provides a new understanding of how Vietnamese live, work, and celebrate critical passages of life and time.
Copublished with the American Museum of Natural History and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology
314 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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June 20, 2020
Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit is intended as an undergraduate textbook, a kind of consensus depiction of the ethnic and cultural diversity of Vietnam. And it's okay, if burdened with a lot of facile cruft, and making the tragic mistake of putting the best chapters at the end.
I'm not an anthropologist (though I am married to one), and a great ethnography is both a descriptive record and a bridge to a understanding different modes of being human. Not every book can be The Hold Life Has, but Journeys sidesteps some major issues. Working backwards from the present of 2003, when the book was published, Vietnam is a developing country dealing with emergence into global markets, especially competing with China on light industrial manufacturing, and undergoing market reform from a strictly Marxist planned economy of unified Vietnam. And before that, you have the decades long Indochina Wars, against France, the United States, China, and Cambodia, and then the period of colonial occupation, and the development of an independent, pre-modern Vietnam which exists in conversation with Chinese cultural hegemony and Indian influences, particularly Buddhism.
So the question, "What is Vietnam like now?" is inextricably tied up in the politics of globalization and Marxism, and since this is an official collaboration from the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology, the researchers can't say anything particularly provocative. The early chapters are taken up with a tour through the lunisolar calendar and the major Tet and harvest festivals, along with tours of market towns developing as part of the tourist trade, and then a discussion of marriages and funerals.
The book only gets interesting towards the end, with a description of the Gia Festival, a mock battle commemorating a local hero from the 6th century named Ly Phuc Man, who has been elevated to the status of the god. Interestingly, the festival was suppressed due to war and official disapproval from 1944 to 1990, and was reconstructed based on an ethnography done in 1937. The last chapter, on shamanic guides, is also an interesting look at a unique practice, though I'm doubtful of the centrality of shamans to mainstream Vietnamese culture.
I'm not an anthropologist (though I am married to one), and a great ethnography is both a descriptive record and a bridge to a understanding different modes of being human. Not every book can be The Hold Life Has, but Journeys sidesteps some major issues. Working backwards from the present of 2003, when the book was published, Vietnam is a developing country dealing with emergence into global markets, especially competing with China on light industrial manufacturing, and undergoing market reform from a strictly Marxist planned economy of unified Vietnam. And before that, you have the decades long Indochina Wars, against France, the United States, China, and Cambodia, and then the period of colonial occupation, and the development of an independent, pre-modern Vietnam which exists in conversation with Chinese cultural hegemony and Indian influences, particularly Buddhism.
So the question, "What is Vietnam like now?" is inextricably tied up in the politics of globalization and Marxism, and since this is an official collaboration from the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology, the researchers can't say anything particularly provocative. The early chapters are taken up with a tour through the lunisolar calendar and the major Tet and harvest festivals, along with tours of market towns developing as part of the tourist trade, and then a discussion of marriages and funerals.
The book only gets interesting towards the end, with a description of the Gia Festival, a mock battle commemorating a local hero from the 6th century named Ly Phuc Man, who has been elevated to the status of the god. Interestingly, the festival was suppressed due to war and official disapproval from 1944 to 1990, and was reconstructed based on an ethnography done in 1937. The last chapter, on shamanic guides, is also an interesting look at a unique practice, though I'm doubtful of the centrality of shamans to mainstream Vietnamese culture.
Displaying 1 of 1 review