Dông Sơn bronze drums are today a symbol of Vietnam. The images of bronze drums and the details on them (birds, etc.) can be found everywhere in Vietnam. But why do people think that they are so representative?
And if they don’t really represent Vietnam, then what does?
This is a question that Digital Humanities can help answer.
In 2014, as I saw how fast YouTube was transforming the way that so many people access information, I decided to learn how to make videos. The first video I…
In 1980 a conference was held in Hanoi to mark the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Institute of History (Viện Sử Học). The topic of the conference was the question of when the Vietnamese nation formed (vấn đề hình thành dân tộc Việt Nam).
The opening address of this conference noted that this was an issue that had been discussed since 1955, and had been viewed in two main ways over that period of time.
I’ve written a lot on this blog about the South Vietnamese philosopher Lương Kim Định. One thing I like about Kim Định is that he was aware of cutting-edge scholarship in the West in fields like structural anthropology. What is problematic about Kim Định is that he did not actually follow the ideas or purpose of structural anthropology in his writings.
Structural anthropology, as developed by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was supposed to be a way to examine all of the societies of the world together. Lévi-Strauss believed that each society had an underlying structure that was largely similar to the underlying structures of other societies, and that we could identify these structures and then examine them together so that we could gain a better understanding of human societies in general.
A friend recently scanned and sent me some pages from a new book by Vietnamese author Tạ Đức on bronze drums in Vietnam called The Origin and Development of the Đông Sơn Bronze Drums (Nguồn gốc và sự phát triển của trống đồng Đông Sơn).
This friend sent those pages to me because some of the ideas that I have posted about bronze drums on this blog are criticized in this book. In particular, I have argued that the cultural world of the people who used bronze drums for rituals and as symbols of power in the Red River delta in the first millennium BC is different from the cultural world of the people whom we today refer to as the Vietnamese (see, for instance, here, here and here).
One of the earliest texts that contains information about Vietnamese history is a fifteenth-century work known as the Arrayed Tales of Selected Oddities from South of the Passes (Lĩnh Nam chích quái liệt truyện 嶺南摭怪列傳) [“Arrayed Tales” for short]. This text contains stories about various famous people from Vietnamese history.
However, there is something strange about its preface. The preface is written from what we could call a “Chinese perspective.” Here is how it begins:
“Although the Cassia Sea is in [the area of] South of the Passes, marvelous mountains and streams, potent land, outstanding people, and miraculous affairs perhaps can all be found there.”
There is a new survey of Vietnamese history that has just been published. It is a book by Yale professor Ben Kiernan called Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (Oxford, 2017). Kiernan does not know Vietnamese [Correction: I’ve been informed that Kiernan does know some Vietnamese. However, this book does not cite Vietnamese sources, only Vietnamese sources that have been translated into English or French.] or classical Chinese, but he has read a lot of what has been written about Vietnamese history in English, and he has taught about Vietnamese history for many years.
His book therefore can be seen as an effort by an educated person to try to make sense of the extant English-language scholarship on Vietnamese history. His conclusions, I would argue, can in turn enable people who specialize on Vietnamese history to gain a sense of how well they have been able to educate readers about the Vietnamese past.
Having just read and enjoyed the graphic novel, “Such A Lovely Little War,” but having never heard of its author, Marcelino Truong, I decided to contact him and ask him a few questions about his book.
What follows is an “interview” that we conducted over email.
Over the past few weeks the New York Times has published a series of essays in a series called “Vietnam ‘67” in which “Historians, veterans and journalists recall 1967 in Vietnam, a year that changed the war and changed America.”
The historians who have written for this series (Fredrik Logevall, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Christopher Goscha, Heather Stur, Sean Fear, Mark Atwood Lawrence, etc.) are all scholars who did not experience the war directly. They are from a “post-war” generation, and that distance from the war is one factor that makes their scholarship different from that of scholars who experienced the war, and/or who wrote in response to the war.
For several years now I have admired the work of a young UK scholar by the name of Jonathan Saha. Having started out conducting research on criminality in colonial Burma, Saha is now more or less pioneering an emerging field of “Southeast Asian animal history,” or more specifically, of the history of human-animal relations in Southeast Asia.
Beyond that, Saha maintains an impressive blog in which he shares his research-in-progress.