https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGHzv7Ur2Y8&feature=youtu.be UPDATE: If you cannot see the above video, either click where it says “Watch on YouTube” or click here. This is an audiovisual version of the first part (see…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ld9vN5iq1Y For an explanation of this video, see the post below.
By the time medieval Việt scholars first started to compile historical records, Chinese scholars had already produced a considerable amount of historical information about the Red River Delta region. Medieval…
In looking at all of the racialized/essentialist/Orientalist concepts that Trần Ngọc Thêm employs in his textbook, Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa…
Having developed a racialized/essentialist argument that Eurasia is divided into two main racial/cultural groups that can be described through various binary categories - East/West, Southeast/Northwest, agricultural/nomadic, static/dynamic - Trần Ngọc…
In his 1978 book, Orientalism, Edward Said documented how Western scholars and writers, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, produced knowledge about “the Orient” which, taken together (as a…
Having argued, by distorting the ideas of Soviet ethnologist Nikolai Nikolaevich Cheboksarov, that humankind was divided into two main racial groups in the early Paleolithic that then led to the…
So I was reading Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Searching for the True Nature of Vietnamese Culture (Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam), a textbook on Vietnamese culture that has…
A few days ago, Donald Trump made an incendiary comment in public about the supposed actions of an American military officer in the Philippines more than a century ago. In particular, he repeated a myth that an American officer by the name of John Pershing had ordered that Muslims be executed with bullets that had been dipped in pig’s blood.
I had never heard of this myth, and I’m not sure where it came from, but in looking at some information about John Pershing one can get a sense of how such a myth could have been created.
What I’ve come to realize is that in order to understand information about the Red River Delta region in early Chinese sources, one has to view that information from the…