Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006 (ii)

from anthropologist Hy Van Luong and Vietnamese studies

In the summer of 2003 I discovered a number of French colonial archival documents about Son-Duong and its two neighboring villages of Dung-Hien and Thuy-Son in the Vietnamese national archives.

The anthropologist Hy Van Luong had discovered 5 years before, when delivering the first edition of this book to the village in 1998, that things had changed, such that it was no longer convenient for him to visit the town. He set to work again where he could go, in the past.

Besides conducting in-depth interviews with numerous villagers from all walks of life, I also commissioned a survey of 321 households (29 per cent) selected on the basis of a random probability sampling of 1,093 village households.

In 2004 he visited again. Through a survey instrument he caught the present as his own lengthy interviews followed informants' lives from their beginnings early in the previous century.

Although shaped by the historically constituted context of the narration and inextricably linked to the narrator's reconstruction of his self, the narrative of the major interlocutor (Nguyen Dac Bang) is substantiated by available archival and newspaper accounts, except for a small number of details that will be noted (see also Luong 1991; cf. Knudsen 1990).

Hy found that the memoirs he had read by the fellow, older, refugee in Canada which had brought him to the village were not much different than what anybody there would tell you, or the records say. The members of the village live and remember their lives together.

The following study has two basic goals. First, in examining the socio-economic structure and historical events in a north Vietnamese village through eight decades of Western encounter, the study seeks to highlight the dynamics of a major revolution of our time.

There it is. What happened from 1925 to 2006, in Viet Nam and the world? Vietnamese from the north liberated and unified a nation and engaged with the world system on their own terms. How did they do that? How has it worked out for them?

Second, since ethnohistorical and fieldwork data bear upon the debates on the dynamics of the Vietnamese revolution and market-oriented reforms, the study also seeks to refine theoretical models of modern revolutionary processes in agrarian societies - theoretical models that are firmly embedded in the major traditions of contemporary Western social theory represented by John S. Mill, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Good lord. A literature review. University press editors of the cohort just ahead of me, Hy's age, such as David Perry of the University of North Carolina Press, our nation's first,

started tearing the things out of manuscripts about the time the anthropologist defended his doctoral thesis. The passage this paragraph introduces must be important to the author.

He gives it a subtitle, Revolutionary Processes in Agrarian Societies: Theoretical Models of Structure and History, the only one in the introduction. Theory takes up the remaining 8 pages, half if you don't count the 5 maps in the first half. It begins,

In the Millean tradition of inquiry, structure is assumed to be derived from the goal-directed acts of self-interested individuals.

John Stuart Mill. Maybe the first social theorist I read, On Liberty. Dad, a lawyer, once a landless farmworker, reached for his college Mill to debate my older brother's defense of smoking marijuana. 1970, give or take 2 years.

That is an appropriate scene for Hy's discussion of theory. Hy is fighting the wars again, the one with the French, the one in the village, the one with Saigon, and the one with the United States.

He is asking questions that anyone can ask anywhere with reference to their own consciousness and surroundings. Agency or structure? Individual or collective?

When editors like David Price have published literature review this is not what they have in mind. Their authors do not go to Durkheim, to Marx, to the special love of Hy's as a linguist, Sassure, as my father went to Mill.

They quote authors they know who quote authors they admire who have cited those four. They follow the view of Stanley Fish, a graduate school chum of my teacher Harold Bloom, who argued in 1980 when I was at sea

and Hy was in grad school, that we speak only in interpretive communities. Who you know not what you know.

It is a structuralist as well as cynical argument that Stanley has taken so far that he became dean of a law school without ever knowing any substantive law,

but mastering university procedure. Hy isn't like that. Hy knows about stuff, as he has taken pains to demonstrate. You could say that knowing stuff, living stuff is what tradition and revolution and Vietnamese society are all about.

My friend the anti-linguist Huynh Sanh Thong was an anti-colonialist who railed at any third-worlder making their way as a scholar in the United States who relied on Western social theorists. Have nothing to do with them, he said, especially Sassure who started by saying that a word and what it means have only an arbitrary relation.

I see Hy at a middle point between the anarchic, authoritarian Stanley and the anarchist liberator Thong. He brings up the debates in social theory in and around Viet Nam as social facts, structures any individual has to deal with. Hy concludes,

In sum, I suggest that the structures of both the capitalist system and the indigenous social formation have powerfully shaped historical events in Vietnam in the past century. And these structures are in turn themselves shaped by historical events.

You got to know this stuff.

Next time we begin Hy's first chapter, "Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1884-1930: a Microscopic Perspective on Historical Events.”

This was the second Viet Nam letter of 5 so far on Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925-2006 by Hy Van Luong. The first had posted on April 6, 2022.

The third went out on June 8, 2022, the fourth on July 25, 2022, and the fifth on January 29, 2023.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon, directly above, of these Viet Nam letters shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.