[A few days ago I posted this piece, but then I deleted it because I thought people might see it as too negative. My intent in writing this piece, however, was to be constructive. Ultimately, I would like to see the academic world in Vietnam change in a positive direction. For that to happen, I think the “culture” of academia in Vietnam will have to change. At the moment the Vietnamese government is investing a lot of money in higher education, and thousands of Vietnamese are in PhD programs around the world. That’s great, but it will not amount to much if the culture of academia in Vietnam does not change. I wrote this piece in order to point that out. I always have hope in the future. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t write this blog.]
150 years ago, scholars in Korea and Vietnam viewed each other’s Kingdoms as very similar. These days, Korea and Vietnam are different in various ways,
I just spent two wonderful days in Korea at Sogang University listening to young Korean scholars present (in impeccable English) papers about their research on Southeast Asia. These young scholars all have PhDs from foreign countries (France, the US, etc.) and all have the capability to use a Southeast Asian language (Indonesian, Vietnamese, etc.) in their research.
There are many Asian nations that are striving to achieve this level of excellence, but with all due respect to the rest of Asia, I think the Koreans are currently number one.
Why might this be the case? I think that there are two main reasons for this. The first one, of course, is money. Apparently the Korean government started to invest money in the 1990s-2000s in order to produce experts on area studies, and the young scholars who I met over the past two days are the result of that investment. Needless to say, that was a good investment.
That said, many policy makers in nations in Asian think that if they spent money to send people overseas to get PhDs that this will automatically improve the educational environment at home. However, that is not the case, as there are cultural/social factors that affect what these “returning scholars” can do in their home country.
This is the second reason why I think that Korea is leading Asia in Area Studies. At this conference, there were various senior scholars who commented on the work of junior scholars. All of those senior scholars were critical, but they were also very supportive as well.
I have been to conferences in Vietnam, and have found that many Vietnamese senior scholars are very critical of anyone else, particularly junior scholars. If a junior scholar employs a theoretical approach that a senior scholar does not know about (and there are many theories that senior scholars in Vietnam do not know about) then that junior scholar will be “destroyed” by that senior scholar.
And if a foreign scholar does the same, s/he will also be treated that way by senior scholars.
In contrast to that, I just presented a paper to Korean scholars that contained theoretical ideas that they were not familiar with, and when they asked questions, the questions they asked were very direct in saying “We are not familiar with this theory. Please tell us more about this.”
I can’t possibly imagine a similar situation taking place at a conference in Vietnam. To the contrary, I can easily picture (and have seen on numerous occasions) people in the audience directly rejecting ideas that they don’t understand.
So something is different between the academic environments in these two countries. And while money is essential in producing a new generation of scholars, there are cultural/social conditions that are important too. In terms of those cultural/social conditions, Korea is currently much better positioned to succeed in the realm of scholarly research than Vietnam is.
In the past, these two countries prided themselves as being similar when they were tributary states of the Middle Kingdom, but times have now changed. They are no longer equal. Hopefully, however, someday soon they will be.
How timely this post is!
I have several points to make here:
1. I can see that you’re obviously romanticizing Korea in that it can’t all be as perfect as what you witnessed, but at the same time, the core idea makes sense.
2. I was in Korea before for a small-scale conference (around 30 people in the room with the majority being Korean) and I could relate to a lot of what you said here, although the experience wasn’t all that positive. I did see young female academics’ points get overlooked and ignored, while most attention was on senior professors and foreign (Western) presenters. I enjoyed a somewhat more favourable and yet awkward treatment (being relatively young and foreign and visually not male 😉 ).
3. The dynamics of the interactions between younger and more senior scholars outside of the conference setting was very different from that inside the room. I saw more engaged conversations there.
4. Presenting at conferences in Vietnam can be scary for many, particularly when the efforts made to present oneself properly (in dressing style, in voice volume, in the interaction manner, in making eye contact, in addressing oneself and others, in using words that are not confrontational for politeness and respect, etc and etc) can actually take more energy than the actual content of the paper. I am not totalising this exeprience, but based on so many anecdotal evidence this appears to be a major concern.
It is indeed very hard to separate the two spaces: the conference space and the out-of-conference space, because both of these spaces are social spaces that are often mingled and thus could act to replicate the realworld (academic and status) power structure and hierarchy as well as to reproduce social and cultural practices that can be infavourable to young, female and marginalised voices. Marginalised voices here can include those voices that are not in line with what is promoted in the mainstream knowledge and scholarship.
And of course all these apply to conferences any where, not just in Vietnam or Korea, but the degree of their impacts varies according to specific contexts and localities.
5. I have also noticed a phenomenon of wanting to hold “hoanh trang” or “extravagant/extraordinary/glamorous/celebratory/triumphant” conferences/events in Vietnam and other Asian countries. In this phenomenon, the academic/scholarly side of a conference in many cases is not as important as the celebratory side of it. What a shame when the scholarly side is undermined by the superficial value! Why can’t they go hand in hand? Not difficult to ask this question, but I do think it is still a long way to solve the problem.
And so yes, this post from you is timely and provokes lots of thoughts. Thanks for sharing!
And a lot of Vietnamese scholars do not know a foreign language…
Yea, I think that’s changing. Many young people now are learning foreign languages and many are studying abroad.
One big problem that is not being addressed, however, is the institutional division between “History” and “Han Nom” studies. People who train to become historians do not learn Han (yes, they study a little bit but it’s nowhere near enough to get them to the point where they can read documents in Han) and people who study Han Nom do not (formally) study history.
So the system is set up so that it is impossible to train people to become good historians, and by “good historians” I mean people who can read documents in their original form and who have knowledge of history and different approaches (or theories) to studying the past.
Being an interested outsider, I get the impression that current Vietnamese historical scholarship does not even match the level of that in pre-1975 South Vietnam… How many so-called doctoral dissertations defended at Vietnam’s universities today would be able to rival Tạ Chí Đại Trường’s 1964 MA thesis? Linguistic abilities aside, Vietnamese scholars nowadays seem to lack the worldly sophistication that South Vietnamese have often displayed in their published works – a lack that may have resulted from the glorification of the bần cố nông mentality in the past. Vietnamese researchers shall have to liberate themselves therefrom in order to make significant scientific progress… In this regard, they are not that dissimilar from Republicans who shall have to break the spell of Sarah Palin, lest they keep losing electoral contests…
By the way, how do you translate bần cố nông into English…Destitute peasants?
Thanks for the comments!!
It’s an interesting question, and one I think about a lot. I’ve basically come to feel that the level of historical scholarship in the South and North was more or less equal up until about 1965. In both places you had people who could read Hán and French well, and in both places people were engaged with ideas in a larger world. Those “larger worlds” were not all that “large.” Scholars in the south were engaged mainly with French scholarship and to some extent with the ideas of scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whereas scholars in the North were engaged with ideas coming from the USSR and the PRC.
Today we can find problems in the scholarship from both places, but what I really like is that people in both places did have linguistic ability and they did try to engage with serious ideas. They tried to figure out basic things like who the Vietnamese are and when “the nation” was formed, and they did this in part by engaging with ideas from outside of Vietnam.
By 1965, scholarship in the North started to get used to support the war effort, and while I haven’t seen evidence of that in the South, the war was basically fought there, so that disrupted life already.
After 1975, I think politics prevented scholars from turning back the clock to where things were before 1965, and at the same time, a new generation of scholars came of age. This group was generally not as capable as their predecessors, particularly when it comes to linguistic ability. Having gone to school during wartime, and having studied in the USSR to varying degrees of success (which was difficult in that they had to learn Russian as a foreign language whereas some of their elders had been more or less immersed in French as a colonial language), it’s to a large extent people of this generation who are now the senior scholars in the country (and I’m only talking about people who deal with pre-20th-century history and documents, not archaeologists, anthropologists, etc.).
In the past 20 years, and particularly in the past decade, a new generation has started to emerge. They are more worldly, and their worldliness has come from exposure to various different “worlds” – Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Germany, the UK, Japan, France, the US, etc. Further, some have excellent linguistic skills.
Does this mean that everything is ok now? Not entirely, because there are many differences between what people are learning and experiencing. If, for instance, you take 2 people with an equally good knowledge of Hán and expose one to say China and Taiwan, and the other to North America and/or the UK, then these two will develop very different ideas about what is important and how to examine the past (even though we’re supposedly living in this “flat” globalized world). They will both be “worldly,” but like the worldliness of South and North Vietnam, it’s a worldliness that comes from contact with different worlds.
As for “the glorification of the bần cố nông mentality in the past” (I looked this term up in one of Nguyễn Đình Hòa’s dictionaries and he has “poor(est) and (most)wretched peasant”), I think there is a definite glorification of “the established academic knowledge.” I would be interested to hear what other people think, but I suspect that there are a lot of reasons for that: 1) respect for one’s teachers, 2) the absence of a tradition of academically challenging one’s predecessors [but as one reader pointed out once, that might simply be an American “defect” rather than the normal way of doing things, I’m not sure], 3) the fact that there was a generation where many people did not become better than their teachers, 4) an understandable glorification of the founding scholars of the post-colonial era (although as time passes that gets less and less understandable), 4) politics, the list can probably go on and on.
So to get back to your comments, I agree with you that the work that gets produced in Vietnamese universities today probably does not compare with what Tạ Chí Đại Trường produced in the early 1960s. That said, there is a lot of good that is happening these days. But confirming what you suspect, I think it’s happening despite the academic system that exists rather than because of it. Young people are finding their own ways to learn, and they are doing it in multiple ways (and there is money for them to do this now too). This is starting to create a somewhat “chaotic” world of knowledge where different people have differing degrees of ability and exposure, and their exposure is to different worlds of scholarship, but I think it’s great to see. This doesn’t mean that the future is completely rosy, but it looks like it’s going to be more interesting than things have been.
Vương Trí Nhàn has recently written about this issue, and has a much more pessimistic view. He views the social sciences in Vietnam as bent entirely to political and bureaucratic ends.
http://vuongtrinhan.blogspot.com/2013/11/vong-kim-co-tren-au-gioi-khoa-hoc-xa-hoi_7.html
He points out that scholars often do not have the authority to write the truth even when they know what the truth is. And this colors the entire educational system.
This goes back to your previous entry querying the issue of “Western” vs. “Asian” knowledge. In Vietnam’s case, Asian knowledge does appears to mean a kind of state theology (thần học) as Vương Trí Nhàn writes. And he thinks it so entrenched at every level that it will never change.
I think what distresses me the most is not the system, but that people both inside and outside the system just criticize, they don’t produce anything. The skill that people have at criticizing is very well developed, but the number of people who actually PRODUCE something new rather than just criticize what exists is extremely small.
There was an article on BBC recently about a “historical debt” that needs to be repaid. The idea was that young people have been learning distorted history and that this needs to change. And the author’s suggestion was that people address various historical issues, virtually all of which dealt with sensitive 20th-century political issues.
I’m sure that writing that article made that author feel good, and it was one of the most read articles on the BBC site for a while, so other people probably liked it, but in reality it accomplishes pretty much nothing.
There is nothing stopping anyone from PRODUCING good scholarship. If you think that there is a problem with the history that young people learn, then PRODUCE an alternative. It’s easiest enough to open a free blog and put your scholarship there. Or just open a free academia.edu account and put it there.
That, however, requires that someone actually PRODUCE new scholarship. But that’s exactly what people both in and outside the system rarely do.
As for criticizing, that never ends.
That’s why I like, and have praised on this blog, the work of people like Huy Đức, Trần Quang Đức and Hồ Trung Tú. Sure they all criticize people/institutions, etc., but they have also all made the effort to PRODUCE something new that will move knowledge forward.
Unfortunately, very few people do that. And that worries me much more than “state theology.” Nobody has to pay attention to state theology anymore. It’s not all-pervasive. There are spaces to PRODUCE scholarship and make it available to others.
The problem is that that is a lot more difficult to do than to criticize.
I agree with you – it is still possible to produce new scholarship, and people should do so. And there are people doing it. But if one is living within in that infrastructure there is no incentive to do so, and in fact there are hazards in doing so. We don’t have to work for institutions or join organizations that have political officers. The political leadership can have a great deal to say about the nature of the work that one can do – what classes one teaches, how one’s research is funded. There is still definite censorship of people’s published writing. I have great admiration for those who can function in this system, and feel sympathy for many who don’t feel able to go as far as they would like. Huy Đức only published his work once he was on foreign soil. I strongly agreed with your point about the threshold of 1965 – although I would place it at 1964. But the wider factor in that discussion is that it was exactly the generation who received a French education that had the intellectual wherewithal to create serious scholarship (and have a rich life of the mind). I think you’ll find a few people who studied with teacher who studied with the French who picked up some of this ability. But the further away from this you get the more blinkered the scholarship becomes. (I’m speaking of the North – the South was affected at a later time).
Anh Tây Bụi ơi, thanks for pushing back on what I said. As outsiders we can’t really know for sure what goes on inside Vietnam. And I understand everything you say, and agree with it. However, I also think that the conditions that you describe are too often used as an excuse to not do anything when they aren’t really sufficient to prevent one from not doing something.
When I first went to Vietnam, I was “rich” and Vietnamese were “poor.” In the years since then, I’ve seen a lot changes. I have continued to copy materials by hand in the archives, as I’ve watched young Vietnamese with nice laptops that I can’t afford type away. . . I’ve visited the houses of “poor” Vietnamese professors that are much larger and nicer than the tiny apartment that I live in as a “rich” foreign professor. I look at the osin who cook their meals and take care of their kids, and think about how if I don’t cook. . . I don’t eat. I listen to their stories about their trips to France, China, Holland, Japan and think about how my university has no money to support travel or to buy books for the library. . . I watch them take 2-hour lunch breaks, or go out to a restaurant for lunch and drink alcohol, while I quickly buy something and then go back to my office and keep working. . . And then I look at the endless pictures on Facebook of people smiling at conferences, so well-dressed and looking wonderful as they pose in front of a beautiful banners announcing this or that “international” conference. . .
Do you see where I’m going with this?
So I agree with you and understand what you are saying, but I also think that there is a space for movement that is not being taken advantage of, and the reason for that is quite simply, as far as I can tell. . . laziness. I don’t think any of the 3 guys that I just mentioned have gotten any richer by producing the works they did (in fact I know that one of them lost money in his effort to produce his scholarship). They did it for another purpose, a more scholarly purpose.
That sense of mission is lacking among a lot of other people. Oh, but wow do people look great when they take pictures at conferences!! But how about producing something that advances our knowledge, even a humble effort cũng được? That’s what I don’t see happening. And it’s not the government that is preventing this. It’s people’s own self-centerdness and disinterest in scholarship. It’s easy to blame the government, but when Vietnamese scholars live lives that are more thoải mái than foreign scholars who actually make an effort to produce new knowledge, and when the archives are sitting right there in their own city and they don’t even make the effort to go read what is there. . . I find it difficult to blame “the system.” “The system” might have problems, but “the scholars” also have problems to deal with, in my opinion.
I agree with you there. I’m amazed how people take the “discoveries” that I find, when what I have discovered has always been right there to be found in the National Library, or even in plain view on the world-wide web. And there definitely are people with plenty of time and opportunity to discover them for themselves.
By the way, why do you see ’64 as a turning point?
Reading Hanoi’s War (Nguyễn Liên Hằng’s book), perusing old newspapers, talking with people, reading a diary from that time (by Lưu Quang Vũ) I get the impression that North Vietnamese underwent a major change during 1964. At this time they began sending large numbers of young men and women to the South and all of society’s energy was forcibly directed toward this effort. It was manifested in very small matters — up until 1964 there was actually ballroom dancing in Hanoi (they called it quốc tế vũ and it was actually an informal part of a University education). After this it ceased for many years. There were many campaigns against wasteful weddings, black market activities, extravagant dress or hairstyles. The media began banging the drum heavily to arouse young people to enlist and become active and emulate heroes like Nguyễn Văn Trỗi. This is also when it seems that Vietnam cast its lot with China and began to reject the Soviet Union. Basically all of the air in the collective room of North Vietnam was pushed into this effort, and any activity that did not contribute to this effort was considered an intolerable luxury. Scholarly integrity became one such luxury.
Yes, everything you say makes sense. The following article makes that point too:
Martin Grossheim, “The Lao Động Party, Culture and the Campaign against ‘Modern Revisionism’: The Democratic Republic of Vietnam Before the Second Indochina War,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 2013): 80-129.
ABSTRACT
The article tries to make a contribution to the reassessment of the Second Indochina War and of the significance of culture in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam before and during the conflict. By making use of as-yet untapped sources from the German Democratic Republic archives, DRV periodicals and interviews with Vietnamese informants, I highlight the cultural dimension of the campaign against modern revisionism in 1964, and thus present the Lao Động leadership as an actor on the cultural front of the Vietnam conflict. Moreover, I show that even after the beginning of the war an anti-revisionist undercurrent in cultura lpolicy persisted and that the anti-revisionist campaign in 1964 was closely related to the Anti-Party Revisionist Affair in 1967. The article also sheds light on the impact of the Sino-Soviet conflict on North Vietnam.
I read that article, so I must have been thinking of it as well. But it’s very evident from reading the daily papers and talking in depth with people who experienced that time.
This is “the feel of the archives.” It’s invaluable.
Anh Tây Bụi, I finally came to an understanding that combines what you and I both said. Is it the system or is it the people? Ultimately it’s both and I think colonialism is a good example.
I always feel that what made colonialism “work” was (contrary to the popular image) not the power of the colonizers, but simply the fact that the system allowed the colonized to be nasty to each other, to take advantage of each other, to screw each other over, etc.
There are many famous stories about this (from every colonial society), like how (in the case of French Indochina) after the French set up the alcohol monopoly, if someone didn’t like his/her neighbor, s/he would throw some fermented rice into the neighbor’s yard and go to the authorities and “accuse” the neighbor of making alcohol illegally.
Is the problem there the system or the people? It’s both, but ultimately I think that the people decide how the system is going to function. A senior person can decide to 1) actually do some research, 2) not demand that a junior person write a paper for the senior scholar, or do the research for the senior scholar, or translate things for the senior scholar, etc. I’ve heard of many cases of things like this over the years. And these are just some of the various ways that people within the system use the system to basically screw over other people. Of course not everyone does this, just as there were some people who lived very admirable lives under colonial rule.
So I guess to be optimistic, rather than focusing on the intelligent young people who are starting to emerge, I should also really consider what it is that established scholars do. If I do that, then yea, I find it extremely difficult to be optimistic.
That colonial mentality is very persistent.
(And by the way, if you think that there are problems in Vietnamese academia, try talking to someone about the situation in China. . .)
Let us discuss the system v. the people question on the basis of a concrete example: Tạ Chí Đại Trường’s Thần, Người và Đất Việt. He researched and wrote this book under conditions that were way and way worse than those enjoyed by today’s critically acclaimed scholars like Huy Đức and Trần Quang Đức.
Institutionally speaking, the TCĐT of the 1960s could compete with historians in the North on more or less equal terms, but by the 1980s he had fallen to the lowest sports of the social ladder. And yet he managed to produce what, in my lay opinion, is by far his best work of scholarship. I guess it took a lot of competence, courage, determination, and scientific passion to deliver a tour de force that both indicted official scholarship and showed how real scholarship is to be done.
The North’s equally competent Four Pillars, meanwhile, had not, as far as I know, come up with anything that is roughly as memorable as Thần, Người và Đất Việt. Possibly or even probably because they did not have the scholarly integrity Trường had to challenge the system that granted them their privileges…
The system imposes its limits, but in the end the people can always choose to ignore these limits, if they are willing to pay the price such an act of scholarly independence demands.
The real problem, therefore, is the fact that overwhelming majority of the people are risk averse…
I’m not sure if you’ve read this or not:
Tạ Chí Đại Trương, “Comments on Liam Kelley’s ‘The Biography of the Hồng Bàng Clan as a Medieval Invented Tradition,’” Journal of Vietnamese Studies Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 2012: 139-162.
This piece is both a very scholarly discussion of the tradition of the Hùng kings and also a scathing indictment of scholarship in Vietnam. It gave me goosebumps the first time I read it.
It was originally written in Vietnamese. I’ve been meaning to try to get permission to post the Vietnamese version. Now that I remember that, let me look into trying to do that.
Yes, I did…and what I remember most vividly therefrom is Trường’s comment on the pathethic attempt by a today’s Southern scholar to draw on metal weapons found in Southern soil to prove that his region used to the home of an ancient civilization, which could rival that in Thăng Long. The poor guy, an Associate Professor, apparently failed to take into account the very real possibility that the weapons aforementioned had been brought there by Chinese immigrants in the 17th century…
I also heard that when Tạ Chí Đại Trường’s Thần, Người và Đất Việt was first published in Vietnam, that parts of it were changed. I don’t know if that is true, or of it is, what exactly was changed, but people have shown me clear examples from other works where strong/direct statements by foreign scholars have gotten diluted or completely eliminated in translation.
I do not have the Vietnamese edition of Thần, Người và Đất Việt, but I do have proof that the text of another book by Trường, Những Bài Dã Sử Việt, has been amputated when published in Vietnam. The California edition of this book includes Trường’s elaborated response – written during his imprisonment – to a denunciation of his inquiry into the 18th century civil war by two historians from the North. Its Vietnamese edition does not. It is, in my opinion, a major omission, since the omitted piece amounts to a sustained analysis of what is so fundamentally wrong with Northern scholarship, the problem we are still chatting about today 🙂 …
Click on the links below for both the cover of the California edition and the table of contents therein…
http://imageshack.com/i/0i5p5mj
http://imageshack.com/i/jmk6y9j
And here are the links for the cover of the Vietnamese edition and its table of contents…
http://imageshack.com/i/4jv50yj
http://imageshack.com/i/0bvd4vj
The “Trả Lời Hai Ông Nguyễn Phan Quang và Nguyễn Đức Nghinh” essay at the end of the California edition has been deemed unfit for reprint in Vietnam…
Thank you for pointing this out!!! I haven’t read this, but I just requested a copy of this book from another library.
Oh, but isn’t the cover of the version published in Vietnam so much more beautiful? 😉
One more comment – I’ve long felt that anger can play a very productive role in scholarship when it is felt by scholars who are capable and have a sense of self pride. You pointed out that Tạ Chí Đại Trương produced some of his best work when he was living in difficult conditions. I’ve heard stories about that too. I’ve heard that after he went to the US he worked at some menial job and could only engage in historical research and writing on weekends, etc. but that he didn’t have access to a lot of materials, etc. So why would someone like that keep working in such conditions? Was it merely the love of scholarship? I think that was probably part of it, but I also suspect that anger and self pride were involved as well.
Sometimes on this blog I write things that I think should make certain people angry. I do it with a constructive intent and with the belief that people are capable and have self pride and that their anger will lead them to show that they can produce better scholarship. What led me to start experimenting with that technique was a sense of frustration at seeing countless examples over the years of Vietnamese academics expressing an intense desire to “engage” or “integrate” or “exchange” with the world outside Vietnam, but then doing nothing (or resisting) when the “engagement” (be it an international conference or a workshop or a talk) actually took place, and as a result, scholarship didn’t improve.
That said, I don’t think this technique has worked very well. It’s easy to get people excited for a while, but that’s all that happens. Facebook lights up with comments, emails get exchanged, text messages sent, and then. . . nothing.
So given that years of friendly contact/engagement by many foreign academics and a few years of angry prodding by stubborn me doesn’t seem to have achieved much, I’m starting to conclude that one or more of these qualities is absent among historians in Vietnam (or different people have different combinations but not all): scholarly integrity, capability, self pride.
Tạ Chí Đại Trương clearly has all of those qualities. And so if you get him angry, I think his self pride will lead him to respond, and since he is capable and has scholarly integrity, that response will be meaningful. So I look forward to reading that “amputated” essay very much.
That would be great to post Vietnamese version oF Ta Chi Dai Truong comments on your pape, Prof!