The “Fringe History” Of Hà Văn Thùy, Cung Đình Thanh, Lương Kim Định and Lý Đông A
One of the first posts that I ever wrote for this blog was called “Hà Văn Thùy and Ancient Việt Races (Has the BBC Gone Mad?) [5 May 2010]. I…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 3: Sauer, Solheim & Hòa Bình
The late archaeologist Wilhelm Solheim would probably be very surprised to find that statements he made way back in 1971 are cited today as "evidence" that the ancestors of the…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 2: Thought & Solheim
In 1971, archaeologist Wilhelm "Bill" Solheim made some comments in the magazine National Geographic about the origins of agriculture. His comments were premature, and turned out to be false. Then…
Vietnamese Prehistory and International Scholarship – Part 1: Introduction
For the past half century or so there has been an idea circulating in the Vietnamese world that holds that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were the first people to…
Tiền sử Việt Nam và học thuật quốc tế (phần 1)
This is my first attempt at making a video in Vietnamese. . . You gotta start somewhere. . . In recent years some Vietnamese people interested in history, both inside…
Lý Đông A, Lương Kim Định, Trần Ngọc Thêm and Terrien de Lacouperie’s Ancient Chinese Migration
As I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, there is an idea that is of central importance to Vietnamese ultra-nationalists, and that is that in antiquity the Chinese migrated into…
Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 5 – Conclusion)
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…
Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 4)
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…
Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 3)
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…
Racism in Vietnamese Scholarship (Part 2)
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…