Before we can examine the latest information on Vietnamese prehistory, we have to address a couple of important issues: “race” and the “knowledge divide.”

The term “race” can be found in various writings on Vietnamese prehistory, and that creates certain difficulties. One big problem is that the way that scholars have understood and used the term “race” has changed over time, and now in most “Western/international” writings the term is no longer employed. In Vietnamese writings, however, it is still widely used.

This creates a problem for anyone who wishes to look at the writings about Vietnamese history that have been produced by various scholars (from French colonial, to Vietnamese, to Western/international) because even though they might all use the term “race,” they use it in different ways. Therefore, to fully understand these writings, one needs to be able to determine what each scholar is basing his/her knowledge on.

To do that, one needs to know the history of the concept of “race” and how its usage has changed over time. For some people, this is not possible.

Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this issue is by referring to Wikipedia. If one searches in English for “race,” one first finds a page on “Race (human categorization)” which “is about human races as a social concept and in anthropology.” There is a lot of information in this page concerning how race as a concept for categorizing humans emerged and how it has changed over time.

This, however, is only a small portion of the overall information about “race” on Wikipedia. At the top of this Wikipedia entry on “Race (human categorization),” there is note that points to other Wikipedia pages that deal with race. It states, “For the sociological concept, see Race and society. For ‘the human race’ (all of humanity), see Human. For the term ‘race’ in biology, see Race (biology). For belief that the human species is naturally divided into races, see Racialism.”

By contrast, if one searches for “chủng tộc,” the Vietnamese word for “race,” one finds one (1) Wikipedia page with just one (1) brief paragraph that states the following:

“Races often refer to human classifications within populations or based on ancestral groups, based on different sets of genetic characteristics. [1] Common physical traits are prominent visual features such as skin color, skull or facial features and hairstyles. [1] [2] The concept of race can vary in many countries, according to the variation in specific cultures. For example, in the United States this term is used in personal descriptions (eg white, black, etc.), while in Italy it applies only to a small number of species that are domesticated, and therefore does not apply to wildlife or to humans. The phrase racial is used in taxonomy as a subspecies.” (Thank you Google Translate)

That paragraph is followed by a list of works for “further reading” (đọc thêm) that contains (by my count) 73 works, all written in English.

This points to a major problem. There is an enormous divide between knowledge in the Vietnamese-language world and knowledge in the English-language world. That is to say, there is a major “knowledge divide” between academia in Vietnam (in the Social Sciences and Humanities) and academia in the English-language world.

For a scholar working with the concept of “race” in the English-language world, s/he has to be aware of a wide range of issues and debates concerning that concept that stretch back in time for well over a century, and that continue to evolve and change in the present.

For a scholar working in the Vietnamese-language world, it is impossible to gain a similar understanding of these issues by relying on Vietnamese-language writings, and Vietnamese scholars have therefore worked without the same understanding of this concept.

So where does information about “race” in the Vietnamese-language world come from then? It comes from two main sources – French colonial and Soviet – each of which has its own set of problems.

The French and the Soviets both used the concept of “race,” but they used it differently. Soviet scholars sought to employ race strictly as a biological category, and to not associate any social or intellectual traits with racial categories. That is, they sought to study “race” without being “racist.”

The French, however, and many scholars in “the West” in the first half of the twentieth century, did draw connections between races and different levels of “civilization.”

In the English-language world, such racist connections started to be strongly rejected in the 1950s, and by the 1970s many anthropologists were avoiding the concept of race entirely. Nonetheless, the concept and the term have not disappeared, and one still does find the term “race” appear in certain scholarly writings, and a modified understanding of the concept of “race” is still employed, although scholars will now often use a different term, like “ancestral group,” to refer to that concept.

This is important to realize in examining the scholarship on Vietnamese prehistory, because in some ways the ideas that scholars are presenting today look similar to the ideas that were expressed by French colonial scholars close to a century ago. However, they are not the same, because scholars today have a different understanding of concepts like “race” (which I will explain in more detail in a future post).

Ultimately, one can argue that there are three main bodies of knowledge about Vietnamese prehistory: French colonial, Vietnamese and international/Western. These three bodies of knowledge are not equal.

The French were the first to research and write about Vietnamese prehistory, and the work they completed was pioneering, but it is flawed in various ways, from the use of unprofessional archaeological techniques to the use of now out-dated concepts, like “race.”

Vietnamese scholars expanded on the work of French scholars, and incorporated ideas from the Soviet world, but there are many intellectual developments in the world of international/Western scholarship that they are unaware of (as the stark difference between the Wikipedia pages on “race” and “chủng tộc” demonstrates).

International/Western scholarship has now moved beyond these two earlier bodies of knowledge. First, it employs more sophisticated understandings of key concepts, like “race.” Second, it brings into play the latest ideas in fields like genetics and historical linguistics. Third, it has re-examined key archaeological questions using new archaeological data, as well as more comparative archaeological data.

What this means is that while, for instance, scholars from Madeleine Colani to Nguyễn Đình Khoa to Hirofumi Matsumura have all examined the Mesolithic Hòa Bình archaeological assemblages, their scholarship is really not comparable as each scholar’s work is the product of a very different (and unequal) knowledge world.