Viet Nam: Borderless Histories

1. Research on the Vietnamese Village: Assessment and Perspectives

Research on the Vietnamese Village 23 1 Research on the Vietnamese Village Assessment and Perspectives P H A N H U Y L Ê ViӾt Nam is an agricultural country with the majority of its population living in rural communities throughout the countryside. The village (làng) has played an important role in the country’s historical development and remains significant in its economic transition.1 Even with the gradual shift toward industrialization, agriculture still accounts for over a quarter of economic production in ViӾt Nam.2 As the primary communities in which farmers live and work, villages play important social and cultural roles: they are the settings for major agricultural activities such as land reclamation, dike construction, water resource planning, agricultural and handicraft industry development, the preservation of local customs, and resistance. They have also played an important symbolic role in Vietnamese history. In scholarly studies as well as in the popular imagination, the village remains one of the most important symbols of Vietnamese uniqueness. The village ’s importance as a social and political institution in ViӾt Nam’s historical development and its power as a sign of Vietnamese identity have interested social scientists and scholars internationally. This 23 24 P H A N H U Y L Ê essay will trace the origins of the village studies field and assess the major contributions of the scholarship. Development of the Field Village studies began as an imperial endeavor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when French officials identified rural areas as the key to controlling the colony and protectorates of Cochin China, Annam, and Tonkin. Recognizing that Vietnamese rural life was organized around villages, colonial officials commissioned studies that would enable the state apparatus to reach the lowest levels of society.3 Although ostensibly studies of Vietnamese villages, the earliest French works reified Vietnamese village life based on contemporary European conceptions of Western and Eastern rural lives.4 Limited as they were within the polarity of East and West, the studies emphasized the similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese villages . Such studies portrayed the village as a static, insular community that sharply contrasted with the dynamic European one. Though remaining within the Sinocentric framework, Camille Briffaut’s more sophisticated model emphasized Vietnamese success in adapting Chinese village administration to expand its southern boundaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, rural unrest and administrative difficulties in the northern realms convinced colonial administrators of the importance of village control in their imperial endeavor. Vietnamese village studies were thus catalyzed by the colonial government’s desperate attempt to implement rural reforms through the agrarian reform programs of 1921 and 1927.6 On the administrative side of the reform initiatives, village conventions (hчхng чԒc) were required to be rewritten to conform to a standardized model.7 On the intellectual side of the experiment, the colonial authorities encouraged and trained local scholars to identify and preserve village tradition and customary practice.8 Perhaps unaware of French intentions, local scholars began to publish their findings in journals such as Nam Phong (Southern Wind), Annam Nouveau, and /ông Dчхng TӘp Chí (The Indochinese Journal), which formed a locus for the emergence of the public sphere in colonial ViӾt Nam.9 The proliferation of village studies in the 1930s and 1940s transformed the field as scholars diversified their inquiries into Research on the Vietnamese Village 25 environmental factors, architectural styles, and socioeconomic, cultural , and religious subjects. Based on meticulously collected village surveys, Pierre Gourou’s Les paysans du delta Tonkinois pioneered the anthropological study of village life. His overview of lineage, organization , and cultural and religious practices in the Red River Delta included full-color ethnographic and climatic maps, which served as an important resource for future scholars. Other local and French social scientists trained in the French tradition produced studies on land ownership, village organization, and the village economy.10 Young local anthropologists and historians trained by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), notably NguyӼn V©n Huyên, /ào Duy Anh, and NguyӼn V©n Khoan, focused on the cultural life and beliefs of peasants in the Red River Delta, while southern scholars studied villages in the Mekong Delta.11 The end of the Second World War and the establishment of a new Vietnamese state in the North enabled Vietnamese village studies...