What do you think?
Rate this book
Ghosts of War in Vietnam
This is a fascinating study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as the actions of those who hope to liberate these hidden but vital historical presences from their uprooted social existence. Taking a unique approach to the cultural history of war, he introduces gripping stories about spirits claiming social justice and about his own efforts to wrestle with the physical and spiritual presence of ghosts. Although these actions are fantastical, this book shows how examining their stories can illuminate critical issues of war and collective memory in Vietnam and the modern world more generally.
234 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2008
9 people are currently reading
157 people want to read
About the author
Heonik Kwon
10 books7 followersProfessor Heonik Kwon received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a senior research fellow at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. Prior to his current appointment, Prof. Kwon taught at the London School of Economics and Edinburgh University. Prof. Kwon’s scholarship is primarily based in his training as an anthropologist, but his work has far-reaching implications for such disciplines history, sociology and political science. His doctoral research investigated hunter-gatherer societies in northern Sakhalin, and his subsequent research has looked at how people deal with the war and memory in Vietnam and the Koreas. This work uses ethnographic techniques to look at the rituals that war’s survivors use to deal with the aftermath of violence and loss. He has also done innovative work on the Cold War, subverting the grand ideological narrative that is familiar in the West and taking the perspective of the postcolonial nations, where local conditions led to a much different experience. He has also collaborated on work involving the role that art has played in sustaining the dynastic politics of North Korea. Prof. Kwon is currently working with scholars from the US, the UK and South Korea on a project entitled Beyond the Korean War. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to re-conceptualise contemporary Korean history.
Prof. Kwon is a prolific writer with several prize-winning books to his credit, including After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, for which he was awarded the 2008 Clifford Geertz prize, and Ghosts of War in Vietnam for which he received the 2009 George McT. Kahin Book Prize.
Prof. Kwon is a prolific writer with several prize-winning books to his credit, including After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, for which he was awarded the 2008 Clifford Geertz prize, and Ghosts of War in Vietnam for which he received the 2009 George McT. Kahin Book Prize.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 24, 2019
What a stunning book. I read it twice! Am absolutely fascinated by the whole idea of it. The dead of Vietnam's civil war were not treated equally. Some were commemorated as heroes, while those who found themselves on the wrong side were for many years stigmatised and relegated to the status of political ghosts, who could not be honoured with the other ancestors in the family home.
Add to that the belief that 'bad', displaced or violent death can lead to an afterlife as a wandering ghost, overwhelmed by ravenous grief, and you can see how the civil/American war in Vietnam left a society containing a massive invisible community of unconsoled dead.
Add to this a national state that for two decades officially disapproved of traditional religious practices of venerating the ancestors and giving offerings to the unknown and displaced dead. A vitally important communal discourse for dealing with their suffering and loss was denied to the common people.
But as the cold war gradually thawed, and attitudes began to relax, there was in the 90s a resurgence of traditional practices. This book explores the increasing phenomenon of Vietnamese people's encounters with the unknown and displaced dead in their communities, and the ways in which they have ministered to them, worked with them, rather than excluded or banished them. There are countless stories of ghosts that have been transformed from peripheral strangers into adopted kin and guardian spirits for individuals and communities. Daily ritual includes offerings to the ancestors inside the house, and to the strangers in the street - not just to ward off malicious spirits, but as a kind of reciprocal gesture of compassion, carrying the hope that somewhere else, their missing-in-action dead kin, and politically excluded dead kin, may be tended to in a similar way.
Kwon analyses the experiences he observes in terms of a powerful discourse for social reconciliation, for taking back the rights to remember, to tend to the inconsolable griefs and losses that were previously left invalidated and unspeakable, and for transforming the status of the stigmatised dead into 'thou', into kin, into members of the community and the state.
Many communities in East and South East Asia appear to treat the wandering ghosts as a threat to the established order - a frightening symbol of the other, the outsider and the stranger. Kwon suggests that the Vietnamese have an openness to the displaced other because of their own recent experience of massive domestic displacement, and also because of their consciousness in their communal ancestor rituals of their own status as a people whose forbears have not always lived in this land. Perhaps this is so - I am very interested to compare and contrast this idea with studies along similar lines in other countries of this region, if I can find them, and to consider more of the political implications of this attitude toward the displaced other in various contexts.
I really appreciated the way Kwon managed so gently to hold together perceptive anthropological analysis with respectful engagement with such a different culture.
Add to that the belief that 'bad', displaced or violent death can lead to an afterlife as a wandering ghost, overwhelmed by ravenous grief, and you can see how the civil/American war in Vietnam left a society containing a massive invisible community of unconsoled dead.
Add to this a national state that for two decades officially disapproved of traditional religious practices of venerating the ancestors and giving offerings to the unknown and displaced dead. A vitally important communal discourse for dealing with their suffering and loss was denied to the common people.
But as the cold war gradually thawed, and attitudes began to relax, there was in the 90s a resurgence of traditional practices. This book explores the increasing phenomenon of Vietnamese people's encounters with the unknown and displaced dead in their communities, and the ways in which they have ministered to them, worked with them, rather than excluded or banished them. There are countless stories of ghosts that have been transformed from peripheral strangers into adopted kin and guardian spirits for individuals and communities. Daily ritual includes offerings to the ancestors inside the house, and to the strangers in the street - not just to ward off malicious spirits, but as a kind of reciprocal gesture of compassion, carrying the hope that somewhere else, their missing-in-action dead kin, and politically excluded dead kin, may be tended to in a similar way.
Kwon analyses the experiences he observes in terms of a powerful discourse for social reconciliation, for taking back the rights to remember, to tend to the inconsolable griefs and losses that were previously left invalidated and unspeakable, and for transforming the status of the stigmatised dead into 'thou', into kin, into members of the community and the state.
Many communities in East and South East Asia appear to treat the wandering ghosts as a threat to the established order - a frightening symbol of the other, the outsider and the stranger. Kwon suggests that the Vietnamese have an openness to the displaced other because of their own recent experience of massive domestic displacement, and also because of their consciousness in their communal ancestor rituals of their own status as a people whose forbears have not always lived in this land. Perhaps this is so - I am very interested to compare and contrast this idea with studies along similar lines in other countries of this region, if I can find them, and to consider more of the political implications of this attitude toward the displaced other in various contexts.
I really appreciated the way Kwon managed so gently to hold together perceptive anthropological analysis with respectful engagement with such a different culture.
June 13, 2021
“[…] the struggle for liberation continues after the liberation, and that emancipation is something that should be struggled for, even for emancipation beings.” (p.132).
Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam traces collective memory of the Vietnam War through ontological examination of wandering ghosts in Vietnam. According to Kwon, ghosts are “constitutive of the order of social life and [that] ideas about them are instructive to understand wider moral and political issues], not just imagined, representational agents of memory. Just like the book name, ghosts in Vietnam are neither ancestral spirit nor living beings but rather remnants of an extended period of war that get stuck in between the two worlds and constantly seek liberation, or “siêu thoát” in Vietnamese. Kwon’s journey in exploring ghost stories in Vietnam tells us about the death’s past lives, uncovered history of the Vietnam war, and also Vietnamese political and social orientation in the post-war period. For example, the presence or non-presence of heroic death certificates are equally important in constructing an understanding of the socio-political orientation of Vietnam. While the certificate recognizes patriotic war death, the absence of those represents social stigmatization against a family’s wartime collaboration with the opposite side. Throughout the book, it is interesting to learn how the market economy has transmuted spiritual practice within the Vietnamese social community. In fact, Vietnam’s assimilation with the global market facilitates general acceptancy/openness towards ghost narratives, evident in the last chapter on Money for Ghost.
The book also communicates a moral lesson that I found fascinating and worthy to note to myself. Ghost regardless of nationalities, whether apparition of American soldiers or those of VC soldiers should be treated with respect. “Dead people don’t fight”. They only want to be remembered. Being disrespectful to one’s remaining body should be inhibited. Such moral lesson goes hand-in-hand with the argument that ghosts are social actors and should not be disregarded in the study of the Vietnam War.
Even though the book’s overall messages were articulated well, I found it difficult not to question the legitimacy of the book. There are considerable amounts of Vietnamese being quoted in the book as a means to cite the author’s fieldwork and interaction with the locals in Vietnam. However, those words were not translated well into the context. I felt like the author, despite his commendable understanding of anthropology, the Vietnam war, and so on, lacks a foundational understanding of the Vietnamese culture and the linguistic culture of Vietnam. Such disadvantages deprive legitimacy of his arguments made in the book. Here are some examples I took notes:
• Page 45, he mentioned the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which overlooks Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, and argued that this tomb is often an empty one to attract public reverence. However, the place that he mentioned has never been a tomb, it is a public memorial named “Đài tưởng niệm Bắc Sơn”. A tomb without bodies is abnormal but a memorial without bodies is normal.
• Also, he noted that ghost is called ‘co bac’, while the ancestral spirit is called ‘ong ba’ in Vietnamese is a misbelief. Both ‘co bac’ and ‘ong ba’ are pronounced in Vietnamese, applying to both living humans and ghosts. Often, depending on the ages of the ghosts, people will use appropriate pronounce to call them.
• He claimed that the Vietnamese perspective of ‘mang luoi’ is rooted in their “historical experience of the war and everyday encounters with the informal economy” (p.68). This is new knowledge to me and I could not find any proof supporting this knowledge.
• The unknown soldier is “Chien sy vo danh” in Vietnamese, not “Chin sy vo danh” as written in the book. Additionally, the term “Chien sy vo danh” has been gradually omitted by Vietnamese speakers because of the disrespectful sentiment that it carries. “Vo danh” literally means “no name”. According to the critics, the fallen soldiers have unique names that their parents, their comrades gave to them. It is just that we have yet found their names.
• Finally, Kwon wrote ‘Long me’ is literally translated into ‘mother’s intestine’ (p.91). I think this is a major misunderstanding. The word ‘long’ in ‘long me’ is taken from ‘tấm lòng’ which can loosely translate into ‘warmed heart’, ‘soul’, ‘kindness’, ‘loving’ and so on. Regardless of what meaning as listed in the previous sentence, the meaning is far from ‘intestine’ as the author claimed.
Overall, the book introduces a new perspective of understanding history, contributing to the literature of the Vietnam War. However, I think a revised edition with thoughtful consideration of Vietnamese sources will do great to improve the legitimacy of this book.
Heonik Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam traces collective memory of the Vietnam War through ontological examination of wandering ghosts in Vietnam. According to Kwon, ghosts are “constitutive of the order of social life and [that] ideas about them are instructive to understand wider moral and political issues], not just imagined, representational agents of memory. Just like the book name, ghosts in Vietnam are neither ancestral spirit nor living beings but rather remnants of an extended period of war that get stuck in between the two worlds and constantly seek liberation, or “siêu thoát” in Vietnamese. Kwon’s journey in exploring ghost stories in Vietnam tells us about the death’s past lives, uncovered history of the Vietnam war, and also Vietnamese political and social orientation in the post-war period. For example, the presence or non-presence of heroic death certificates are equally important in constructing an understanding of the socio-political orientation of Vietnam. While the certificate recognizes patriotic war death, the absence of those represents social stigmatization against a family’s wartime collaboration with the opposite side. Throughout the book, it is interesting to learn how the market economy has transmuted spiritual practice within the Vietnamese social community. In fact, Vietnam’s assimilation with the global market facilitates general acceptancy/openness towards ghost narratives, evident in the last chapter on Money for Ghost.
The book also communicates a moral lesson that I found fascinating and worthy to note to myself. Ghost regardless of nationalities, whether apparition of American soldiers or those of VC soldiers should be treated with respect. “Dead people don’t fight”. They only want to be remembered. Being disrespectful to one’s remaining body should be inhibited. Such moral lesson goes hand-in-hand with the argument that ghosts are social actors and should not be disregarded in the study of the Vietnam War.
Even though the book’s overall messages were articulated well, I found it difficult not to question the legitimacy of the book. There are considerable amounts of Vietnamese being quoted in the book as a means to cite the author’s fieldwork and interaction with the locals in Vietnam. However, those words were not translated well into the context. I felt like the author, despite his commendable understanding of anthropology, the Vietnam war, and so on, lacks a foundational understanding of the Vietnamese culture and the linguistic culture of Vietnam. Such disadvantages deprive legitimacy of his arguments made in the book. Here are some examples I took notes:
• Page 45, he mentioned the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which overlooks Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, and argued that this tomb is often an empty one to attract public reverence. However, the place that he mentioned has never been a tomb, it is a public memorial named “Đài tưởng niệm Bắc Sơn”. A tomb without bodies is abnormal but a memorial without bodies is normal.
• Also, he noted that ghost is called ‘co bac’, while the ancestral spirit is called ‘ong ba’ in Vietnamese is a misbelief. Both ‘co bac’ and ‘ong ba’ are pronounced in Vietnamese, applying to both living humans and ghosts. Often, depending on the ages of the ghosts, people will use appropriate pronounce to call them.
• He claimed that the Vietnamese perspective of ‘mang luoi’ is rooted in their “historical experience of the war and everyday encounters with the informal economy” (p.68). This is new knowledge to me and I could not find any proof supporting this knowledge.
• The unknown soldier is “Chien sy vo danh” in Vietnamese, not “Chin sy vo danh” as written in the book. Additionally, the term “Chien sy vo danh” has been gradually omitted by Vietnamese speakers because of the disrespectful sentiment that it carries. “Vo danh” literally means “no name”. According to the critics, the fallen soldiers have unique names that their parents, their comrades gave to them. It is just that we have yet found their names.
• Finally, Kwon wrote ‘Long me’ is literally translated into ‘mother’s intestine’ (p.91). I think this is a major misunderstanding. The word ‘long’ in ‘long me’ is taken from ‘tấm lòng’ which can loosely translate into ‘warmed heart’, ‘soul’, ‘kindness’, ‘loving’ and so on. Regardless of what meaning as listed in the previous sentence, the meaning is far from ‘intestine’ as the author claimed.
Overall, the book introduces a new perspective of understanding history, contributing to the literature of the Vietnam War. However, I think a revised edition with thoughtful consideration of Vietnamese sources will do great to improve the legitimacy of this book.
March 31, 2021
When I started reading the book “Ghosts of War in Vietnam”, I wondered why the author, Heonik Kwon, has chosen such a title for his book. Questions like: Why would anyone’s main focus be the “illusions” of the ones who had lost their beloved ones during decades of wars? And shouldn’t we rather shed lights on the victims of the war and their trauma and how they ended up suffering from imaginary foes? were always present in my mind. I have never expected to end up suggesting that it might be even better to go further and name it “The Stories of the Ghosts of War” or something like that, since the original title might not reflect how in-depth and mind-blowing the analysis of this book is.
Since it a mirror of the Vietnamese culture and religious beliefs, the book is full of symbolism and binary interactions. Both missing dead and unknown dead are product of human displacement and opposing conflicting parties. “Death in the street” away from home was considered a bad death while good death was “death at home”. The Vietnamese ontological ideology and the cultural communal belief of staying close to the roots and the eternity of a human soul may be main reasons behind fighting till the end during the “American War”. “Death is not the end” is a message that even the author himself seems somehow confused with. Despite his objectivity, I was wondering how close he was to be able to make us that familiar with the ghosts as readers.
The collective identity of the Vietnamese community, the cultural traditions and religious beliefs and rituals were essential factors in all phases he tackles. Through his dense anthropological contribution, Kwon presents a very well ethnographic study that goes through historical, social, and economic analysis of the Vietnamese communal behavior. The knowledge of the linguistic and moral, and cultural backgrounds of the social contexts he was contributing throughout the book while analyzing the phenomenon of ghosts and ghosts’ behavior, made the book more valuable and more interesting at the same time. Interviewing deity Dai Tien and the direct interaction with the phenomenon made this book a very valuable asset in political, historical, social, and historical fields at the same in addition to being an important resource on the Vietnamese during the post-war era. The sudden shifts from one of the mentioned fields to another urged me search more information to grasp his arguments; about communist-capitalist struggle, and the cultural background of the country for instance.
This book is essential not only to understand the Vietnamese case itself but would also help us understand other contexts if we use it as scaffolding to refer to. The dynamics between politics and religious rituals, the relationship between ghosts of war and the economic reforms, and social interactions and the way the national identity is shaped through communal beliefs and rituals. In the last chapters, the question of whether the whole theme of the book is about illusions or about a real social interactions between tangible existence and intangible spiritual world becomes less important. Whether we believe in their existence or not, one can’t ignore that ghosts of war are “constitutive of the order of social life” and they are, even if not tangible, important representational agents of memory as Kwon argues (P: 3).
Since it a mirror of the Vietnamese culture and religious beliefs, the book is full of symbolism and binary interactions. Both missing dead and unknown dead are product of human displacement and opposing conflicting parties. “Death in the street” away from home was considered a bad death while good death was “death at home”. The Vietnamese ontological ideology and the cultural communal belief of staying close to the roots and the eternity of a human soul may be main reasons behind fighting till the end during the “American War”. “Death is not the end” is a message that even the author himself seems somehow confused with. Despite his objectivity, I was wondering how close he was to be able to make us that familiar with the ghosts as readers.
The collective identity of the Vietnamese community, the cultural traditions and religious beliefs and rituals were essential factors in all phases he tackles. Through his dense anthropological contribution, Kwon presents a very well ethnographic study that goes through historical, social, and economic analysis of the Vietnamese communal behavior. The knowledge of the linguistic and moral, and cultural backgrounds of the social contexts he was contributing throughout the book while analyzing the phenomenon of ghosts and ghosts’ behavior, made the book more valuable and more interesting at the same time. Interviewing deity Dai Tien and the direct interaction with the phenomenon made this book a very valuable asset in political, historical, social, and historical fields at the same in addition to being an important resource on the Vietnamese during the post-war era. The sudden shifts from one of the mentioned fields to another urged me search more information to grasp his arguments; about communist-capitalist struggle, and the cultural background of the country for instance.
This book is essential not only to understand the Vietnamese case itself but would also help us understand other contexts if we use it as scaffolding to refer to. The dynamics between politics and religious rituals, the relationship between ghosts of war and the economic reforms, and social interactions and the way the national identity is shaped through communal beliefs and rituals. In the last chapters, the question of whether the whole theme of the book is about illusions or about a real social interactions between tangible existence and intangible spiritual world becomes less important. Whether we believe in their existence or not, one can’t ignore that ghosts of war are “constitutive of the order of social life” and they are, even if not tangible, important representational agents of memory as Kwon argues (P: 3).
April 2, 2015
I read this book for one of my Anthropology classes. I enjoyed the content a lot, it was so interesting to me reading about how the Vietnamese see ghosts (especially in comparison to the notion of ghosts in America) and how the Vietnam War really affected that. At times it was really hard to get through because the discussion was so academic but when he stopped talking about Communism (and maybe it's just my dislike of reading about Communism!!) and started discussing more of the actual accounts of his/the Vietnamese people's experiences, it was so much more interesting and enjoyable to read. It made for some good class discussion and I find myself relating much of what I talk about in class on a day-to-day basis back to this book.
April 3, 2020
One of the most unique and holistically satisfying books of my lifetime.
March 27, 2022
Extremely technical analysis of ghosts in Vietnam. It is very dense and difficult to read. I can tell it was written for an academic audience. Overall had some interesting points. I never knew there were such extensive body recovery missions and I really enjoyed reading about money in relation to ghosts but overall this book was not super enjoyable to read.
January 3, 2014
4.5/5 stars. Kwon's interdisciplinary study, exploring the cultural and material reality of war-dead ghosts in the wake of the Vietnam War from the side of the Vietnamese, is a rich and valuable addition to any research into this period. Argument can get a bit abstract and/or politically shrill at times, but provides a bounty of field research not available elsewhere. Awareness of global crosscurrents and intersection with U.S. domestic postwar "ghosts" is superb. Recommended.
February 7, 2013
I was just not interested in this book at all. It was a new type of genre for me- ethnography.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews