There was an article a couple of days ago in the newspaper Dân Trí about the Vietnamese fetish for hearing foreigners say that they love Vietnam. Apparently when Manchester City…
On a recent trip to Malaysia I visited an exhibition on Textile Tales of Pua Kumbu at the University of Malaya Art Gallery that really impressed me. Pua kumbu are…
At the end of his book, Việt Lý Tố Nguyên, Kim Định has a few short chapters that discuss certain political and social issues of his day that can help…
In reading the writings of South Vietnamese philosopher Kim Định, one point that I have found fascinating is seeing the degree to which Kim Định’s ideas were shaped by his…
I’ve said many times that the most important moment in Vietnamese history, in my opinion, is the early twentieth century, because it is the time when the Vietnamese world view…
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…