One of the things that makes reading the works of South Vietnamese philosopher Kim Định so interesting is that they are filled with ideas. Kim Định of course had his…
I recently discovered that the French Archives nationales de outré-mer has digitized a treasure trove of historical photographs from France’s former colonial possessions and has made those images available online…
In his book, The Philosophy of the Communal House (Triết Lý Cái Đình), Kim Định has a chapter entitled “The Three Strata of Communication” (Ba Giai Tầng Thông Giao) in…
As I stated in an earlier post, structural anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss sought to employ a “synchronic” (hàng dọc) approach to the study of human societies. The synchronic approach required…
I’ve been thinking about several topics that I’ve written about before on this blog: the promotion of Vietnam’s integration into the global world of scholarship; the absence of engagement with…
In his 1973 work, Việt Nho Structure (Cơ Cấu Việt Nho), Kim Định introducted the theory of structuralism to his readers. Relying heavily on information in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology,…
I’m spending the summer reading the writings of Kim Định, a Catholic priest, philosopher and historian who wrote extensively in the 1960s and early 1970s in South Vietnam. In reading…