The Cham of Vietnam: History, Society and Art

A Study of the Almanac of the Cham in South-Central Vietnam

323 A Study of the Almanac of the Cham in South-Central Vietnam Yoshimoto Yasuko Anthropological research has in many cases abandoned the attempt to represent an ethnic group or its culture as essentialized or homogeneous. Numerous works on ethnic groups in Vietnam, however, still tend to adopt such an approach. The Cham in south-central Vietnam, which I examine in this paper, have also been monolithically described as an essentialized group that still maintains the “orthodox” “Champa culture”. People who are regarded as “Cham” also reside outside Vietnam in countries such as Cambodia, Malaysia, France, the United States and Japan, and their cultural features and way of life vary from place to place. Even the Cham in Vietnam are divided into three main sub-groups on the basis of region, each of which has different cultural features. Those living around the old Panduranga area now known as Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận provinces, referred to as “South-Central Cham” in this paper, follow a mixture of beliefs comprising Brahmanistic, Islamic and/or animistic elements, while those living around the Mekong Delta (primarily in An Giang and Tây Ninh provinces and Hồ Chí Minh City) are predominantly Sunni Muslim. The third group, living around Bình Định and Phú Yên provinces are called “Chăm Hroi”; under the Republic of Vietnam they were considered as a separate “Hroi” ethnic group, but with the official list of ethnic groups promulgated by the Socialist c฀h฀a฀p฀t฀e฀r฀ 13 13 ChamViet.indd 323 1/17/11 11:35:19 AM Yoshimoto Yasuko 324 Republic of Vietnam in 1979 they were reclassified as a sub-group of the “Cham”. This group practices animism with no influence from Hinduism or Islam. In general, the Cham are recognized as the descendants of the inhabitants of Champa. However, it is a fallacy to suppose that all Cham share this particular common identity. Cham vary not only in terms of their dwelling places and cultural features, but also in terms of the basis of their identity. According to Rie Nakamura, while the South-Central Cham do associate their ancestry and culture with Champa, those in the Mekong Delta define their “Chamness” in terms of Islam.1 This paper will use the term “the Cham” to refer collectively to all of the different sub-groups in Vietnam. I make a distinction, however , between “the Cham” as an official category in Vietnam and those “Cham” who are generally recognized as the descendants of Champa. The Cham, no matter how they vary, have been substantialized in the course of the integration of the modern nation-state in twentieth-century Vietnam. Through research to determine the official list of ethnic groups (dân tộc) in Vietnam, the Cham have been accorded the status of one of the country’s 54 dân tộc, classified as such on the basis of three features: culture, language and ethnic identity.2 Various policies targeting them have been initiated since the 1970s. Non-Cham scholars and officials in Vietnam, and some Cham intellectuals, describe the South-Central Cham as the group that still maintains the orthodox culture of Champa, as mentioned earlier — a description which corresponds to narratives found among this particular group. According to some Cham intellectuals, their almanac demonstrates that their society has preserved this culture in its most orthodox form. Such a perspective leads to a monolithic and essentializing description of this group as having retained “orthodox” Champa culture. Colonial and post-colonial scholarship has included several studies of the Cham calendar and almanac.3 Although those studies provided systemic explanations or symbolic classifications, they did not substantially examine how the almanac relates to Cham society. This chapter will examine the almanac in its social and cultural context in order to provide an ethnographic description and to explore the dynamism of this particular facet of Cham culture at a local level. As discussed below, a study of the almanac in its social context will elucidate the diversity based on locality within South-Central Cham society, as well as the processes by which local identity is connected to ethnic identity and by which culture at the community level is related 13 ChamViet.indd 324 1/17/11 11:35:19 AM Almanac of the Cham 325 to “orthodox Cham culture” within the...