With all due respect, I disagree with you on three points. First this essay, and the previous ones you wrote on this issue, have misused the terms “essentialism” and “essentialized.” In philosophy of social sciences and philosophy in general, essentialism refers to the reification of certain concepts (e.g., reason, rationality, modernity, idea, and agency) in Enlightenment philosophical work and social scietific explanations. By this definition essentialist thinking is pervasive in Western academic culture. In history, sociology and philosophy, postcolonial theorists have advanced the argument that the West has produced hegemonic, essentialized forms of knowledge; particularly the continuous projection of western-centric discourses on world history, culture, science, literature, and philosophy have contributed to the systematic neglect of the East’s agency in knowledge production and scientific development. (On in depth postcolonial/postmodernist critique, please reference, “Orientalism” by cultural theorist Edward Said in literature studies, John Hobson in “the Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation” in historical sociology, “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe” by historian Hay White, and Spivak’s “Post-colonial Critique of Reason” in philosophy). This is not to imply that Vietnamese scholars do not essentialize, but to point out that western scholarship is also fraught with essentialism too, albeit in a less overt and more sophisticated manner.
Second, i disagree with your statement: “at least the past half century, Western scholars have rejected the idea that nations and cultures have an ‘essence’. It oversimplifies the fact that the debate between constructivist and primordialist (essentialist) theories of nationalism still remains quite relevant to nationalism scholarship nowadays. Constructivists believe that nation as a social/symbolic construct is subject to historical development of cultures and societies, whereas primordialists maintain that it is not possible to define or describe an ethnic category without specifying its unique (essential) characteristics. In the next sentence, you claim that, “[i]n the process, they have provided tons of evidence that shows that “essentialized” statements about people and cultures are not true.” Based on your previous blog, “on(not) discussing the nation in Vietnam,” I understand “they” in this context as referring to the constructivist theory of nationalism with which Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” is associated. You are right in saying that constructivists and other critics of primordialism have over decades adduced a wide range of historical evidence to show that ethnic traditions are contested and subject to reshaping. However, what the historical evidence really invalidates is the ahistorical, functionalist explanation of primordialism which even hard-core primordualists, like Clifford Geertz, have avoided [see Calhoun, C (1993) Nationalism and ethnicity. Annual Review of Sociology]. The second wave of primordialist theorizing of nationalism, initiated by Anthony Smith, has been sensitive to history without resorting to the constructivist line of thinking. Smith’s theory of ethnonationalism posits that nationalism has deeper roots in premodern ethnicity and thus there exists some form of continuity in ethnic groupings and the construction of national narratives.
The first two points lead to my third point. I concur with your conlusion echoed in your previous blogs that Vietnamese scholars need to change their writing practice in order to get published in international journals. Nonetheless, I disagree with your articulation of the problem. The failure has more to do with “learning how to write a standard academic paper in accordance with western standard of “being scientific.” To be “scientific” means that researchers avoid injecting their personal prejudice and moral value into their paper. In their research locally educated Vietnamese scholars implicitly conflate the “categories of practice” with analytical concepts used in academia. The meanings of scientific concepts describing a particular research object are not to be equated with the everyday (layman) understandings of the object. Let’s take one of your examples; “Vietnamese have always been uniting against foreign aggression (người Việt Nam có truyền thống đoàn kết và chống ngoại xâm).” The problem with this sentence is that it blurs the distinction between Vietnamese nation and nationalism as analytical tools to describe the contestation and meaning-making process of how Vietnameseness has been understood across historical periods and the everyday understanding of Vientamese nationalism embedded in a hegemonic nationalist discourse so “banal” that even the author unconsciously subscribes to it. The sentence is highly prejudicial, and the word “always” only makes it worse, because it is merely an expression of the author’s taken-for granted belief about Vietnamese nationalism rather than a vigorously tested scientific claim that is receptive to new empirical challenges.
As a former lecturer in international relations at the university of social sciences and humanities, I find that there are two systemic reasons for why Vietnamese scholars, especially in the history department, continue to refrain from following the international standard of research. First, the local histography of Vietnam serves as a tool for state propaganda and thus the discursive norm is catering to the Marxist-Leninist discourse of nationhood that was first articulated in writing during the 1950s. My students once proposed a research topic for their BA thesis that was immediately rejected because of its political sensitiveness. Second, the lack of access to international sources and language incompetency is another barrier to intellectual freedom.

While wandering through the internet, I was reminded of the insight that the historian A.J.P. Taylor owed his fame in no small part to his essentialist depiction of the German people. He managed to capture their alleged essence in just one pithy sentence: “In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.”