Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (ii)

from anthropologist Philip Taylor and Vietnamese studies

How do you study silly bullshit? Philip Taylor prefaces his Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam with the remark, “This work is an ethnographic account of pilgrimages and popular religion in Vietnam.”

Philip and I are ethnographers. Our method is participation and observation. You participate and you observe. That’s it. Graduate students wander the hallways of their departments around the world looking for method

and their advisors say that’s right keep looking. Ethnography is stone soup. You get what you bring. You get what everyone brings. We do have creedal and denominational differences.

Philip, trained in Australia, is a British socio-cultural anthropologist, attentive to the structure of his friends’ lives and their discourse about them. Working with Vietnamese he is something of a French ethnologue, documenting a people.

He has since published two books like that, one on the Cham and another on the Khmer of Viet Nam. I am a country specialist, an area studies man, accustomed to evaluating sources like Philip.

That took me into American anthropology in the tradition of Franz Boas, the history of our kind since speciation, as much an archaeologist as an ethnographer, as informed by evolutionary theory as by linguistics, engaged against race in medicine and science.

Like I said, religion. I am also a born Jew under our law, christened in a Puritan church by my Dutch-speaking grandfather who after the Great War spurned all discussion of one god or the trinity, works or grace.

Sorry you asked yet? I only bring up the churches of anthropology because, like me, Philip not only participates and observes silly bullshit, he knows a great deal about it from books.

That is where we start, in the library, our cathedral. Then we go to the field, our parish, process with our university friends to the seminar, our chapel, then to the study, our cell, to make a book for the scriptoria. See, I too have participated and observed silly bullshit.

I really like silly bullshit. That is the center and the circumference of ethnography. You have to like your friends and what they do. We just don’t study those whose bullshit is not silly but heavy with evil purpose, or even those who can’t cook.

Political scientists and sociologists do that ethnography. They also work undercover and rat out their friends after they sign agreements so it is all ethical and legal. Anthropologists rather drink the kool-aid.

Our horseshit is happy. But we don’t make anything up and we learn things that were not yet in the library at the policy institute.

For instance, Philip’s introduction to his ethnography begins, “At the base of a small mountain on Vietnam’s border with Cambodia stands a shrine to a goddess known as Bà Chúa Xứ, the Lady of the Realm.”

When I tracked down the Vietnamese and Orientalist bookstores and libraries of Paris, France at the turn into this century I don’t find her in any of them. I did find her shrine beyond the edge of the Southeast Asian retail district in the 13e arrondissement.

I may have taken a picture. I didn’t want to make friends. My church and ethnographic plate was full. Now I can read all about her.

“In a country ruled by a single party known for its social and ideological control, the public massing of people engaged in pilgrimages to the Lady of the Realm is a noteworthy phenomenon.”

Looking at that first sentence of the first chapter today I recall for the first time in this connection that I too went on pilgrimage to a lady of the realm. Mine, like Philip’s, is also named Lady. She was the Friend in charge at Ha Noi, far north and east of Philip’s.

Lady Borton represented the American Friends Service Committee. The Society of Friends are one of the Fellowship of Reconciliation along with my birth church, the United Church of Christ.

Lady is a saint, blessed in certain gifts of the spirit. She ran around Ha Noi like a saint in heaven interceding with the powers and principalities to bring pilgrims on our cause of reconciliation between the United States and Viet Nam.

This was all around the same time as the other Lady’s pilgrimages started. Huh. I’ll be damned. Something to think about as I continue to read my colleague and contemporary in another popular movement and religion.