The topic of Việt origins is one that people always seem to be interested in. Every year there are articles that get published in the Vietnamese media about this topic.
At the same time, however, it is a topic that never advances. Year after year, the same ideas circulate around and around, and knowledge never progresses.
There are a couple of main reasons why knowledge about Việt origins doesn’t progress. The first is that people keep looking for a single origin, but there is no single origin for what we today think of as the Việt.
Instead, there are multiple origins. There is a genetic origin. There is a linguistic origin. There is a cultural origin. There is a national consciousness origin. The list goes on and on.
What is more, these different origins did not take place at the same time, and some of them are processes that have been developing over many centuries and which continue to develop today.
Therefore, when you look for “Việt origins,” you first have to decide “which origin” you are looking for.
The other main reason why knowledge about Việt origins never progresses is that many people do not evaluate the knowledge that has been produced about this topic.
In trying to understand Việt origins, you cannot simply combine together information that has been produced about this topic in the past. For instance, you cannot combine together information that archaeologist Madeleine Colani produced in the 1930s with something written in the historical text, the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư, in the 15th century and something that Vietnamese scholar Nguyễn Đình Khoa wrote in the 1980s, and something reported in a genetic study produced in the 2010s.
Instead, you have to evaluate all of these sources and determine their limitations. You need to first ask the following questions:
- What are the limitations of Madeleine Colani’s work? How do we know this?
- What are the limitations of the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư? How do we know this?
- What are the limitations of Nguyễn Đình Khoa’s work? How do we know this?
- What are the limitations of current genetic studies? How do we know this?
Only after you have done that can you determine what information can be used to determine whatever “origin” you are trying to understand.
And this is precisely what I don’t see people doing. Instead, I see people combining together all kinds of information (both good and bad), and as a result, knowledge never progresses.
In what follows, I will attempt to write a series of posts that will indicate what we can know about the various Việt origins. In the process, I will do my best to point out the limitations of the knowledge that has been produced to date so that readers can gain an understanding of which knowledge is reliable, which is not, and why.
We will start with the issue of biological/genetic origins.
