I recently came across a small booklet that the South Vietnamese government published in English in 1973 entitled Vietnamese Studies and Their Relationship to Asian Studies.
Written by Nguyễn Khắc Kham, this booklet is wonderful for gaining a sense of where scholarship on Vietnamese culture stood in the academic world in South Vietnam at that time.
While from today’s perspective there are many faults that we can find in this book, for its time, it was quite good, and it is particularly interesting to see the scholarship that Nguyễn Khắc Kham cites.
In particular, we can see that Nguyễn Khắc Kham was building on decades of scholarship by French scholars, and adding to that the scholarship of Vietnamese researchers in South Vietnam, and finally, introducing work from the 1960s by scholars in the English-speaking world.
So in reading a booklet like this today, it is easy to start to wonder “what if this scholarly tradition had been able to continue. . .”
At the same time however, when one reads the conclusion to Nguyễn Khắc Kham’s booklet, it is also amazing to see the degree to which he shared key ideas about Vietnamese culture with scholars in the North.
Let us see what he wrote.
Nguyễn Khắc Kham says that starting in antiquity, three great cultures (Austro-Asiatic, Indian and Chinese) spread across Asia. “The result [is] that there has not been so far any pure culture in any Asian people including India[ns] and Chin[ese] themselves.”
“Thus the cultural past of Southeast Asia has handed down to us many valuable experiences in the various fields of cultural interrelations.”
“With regard to Vietnam especially, she can show us a very interesting case of cultural change.”
OK, so far so good. There is no such thing as a “pure culture,” only “cultural change.”
Then, however, Nguyễn Khắc Kham goes on to say the following:
“In successive contacts with exogenous cultures [such] as Austro-Asiatic, Indian and Chinese cultures, she [meaning “Vietnamese culture”] has taken over some elements from foreign cultures, while rejecting other ones. This process testifies to the preexistence of an indigenous culture in prehistoric Vietnam which must have played a decisive role in cultural selectivity on the occasion of each of her new acculturation[s].”
Ok, so according to Nguyễn Khắc Kham there has never been a “pure culture,” but there was “an indigenous culture in prehistoric Vietnam,” which predated contact with any exogenous cultures and “which must have played a decisive role in cultural selectivity on the occasion of each of her new acculturation[s].”
This may not be a “pure culture,” but certainly Nguyễn Khắc Kham is arguing that there is at least a “pure cultural core” in Vietnamese culture.
Nguyễn Khắc Kham then goes on to say “The most salient characteristic of Vietnamese culture, which is its profound originality in spite of the heterogeneity of its cultural borrowings in the course of its history, may throw much light on the mechanism of transculturation as well of neoculturation. At the same time, it proves to be very instructive for cultural anthropologists. It is the more so because Southeast Asian cultures are undergoing a grave crisis originated from their contacts with other new cultures, of the East as well as of the West, some of which are basically opposed to their traditional spirit.”
“What can we do before this jeopardy which is challenging our national cultures? Our only hope, we dare think, is in Orientalists and their welcome traditionalists to Humanistic sciences.”
OK, so if “the most salient characteristic of Vietnamese culture” is “its profound originality in spite of the heterogeneity of its cultural borrowings,” and if there was “an indigenous culture in prehistoric Vietnam which must have played a decisive role in cultural selectivity on the occasion of each of her new acculturation[s],” then why is there a “grave crisis” in the present originating from contact with new cultures? Isn’t the selective adoption of elements from foreign cultures supposed to be exactly what is so great about Vietnamese culture??
This passage is filled with contradictions, but they all stem from a single issue – the tension between the desire to be original and the reality that one is not really original.
Nguyễn Khắc Kham was correct, I think, in arguing that humanists can provide a resolution to this tension, and their answer has been that there is no such thing as an original or pure culture, so stop desiring this!! However, that is a desire that still dominates Vietnamese academia.
So while there are aspects of Nguyễn Khắc Kham’s booklet that make one wonder “what if,” there are other aspects that suggest that such a “what if” would have still been very hard to obtain.
But I still wonder. . . what if. . .
For anyone interested, here is the booklet: Nguyen Khac Kham_Vietnamese Studies.
I’m always cautious of “what if” scenarios because it may reek of nostalgia and skewers our perspective. That said, I think that there is something to be said about your point here. The story of South Vietnamese intellectuals engaging with thought currents in the West and other noncommunist countries (India, Burma, Taiwan, etc.) remains to be written. But even a glimpse at translations published in Republican Saigon in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests a broadening of views regarding especially literature, but also philosophy, religion, and even history. True, the nation state was firmly the basic unit of analysis. True, too, that there remained a great deal of ethnic nationalism. But general presses were churning out many translations and “adaptations” of works from Europe and the U.S. that it is hard to imagine the tide would have turned around had it not been for the Fall of Saigon. Take this “what if” scenario with a grain of salt, but it’s a scenario worth entertaining.
I agree with what you say, but if you look around the region (or all of Asia), I don’t think any place has really created a solid space for good historical scholarship. Cornell hand-picked a few people from Southeast Asia in the late 1960s/early 1970s and sent them back, sort of like germinating seeds, but those seeds never really reproduced. Instead, many of them became something more akin to public intellectuals and did not produce significant scholarship on new topics.
Public intellectuals are of course important, but the fate of those scholars makes me wonder if a different Vietnam would have been any different from any of these other places.
At the end of the day, I think that one of the things that has made history so fascinating in a place like the US is the fact that in the second half of the twentieth century the field changed alongside certain social revolutions in the US (women’s rights, the civil rights movement, etc.), or to put it the other way, those social revolutions pushed historians to look at the past in new and exciting ways.
When societies do not undergo such change (such as Thailand or Malaysia) can their history be interesting? The critiques of the social order by Thai Marxist historians in the 1950s were new and interesting, but what has happened since then to either society or the writing of history in Thailand?
The democratic changes that took place in Taiwan in the late 80s and early 90s definitely shot some energy into the field of historical scholarship. I’m out of touch now and don’t know where things stand today, but my point is that society and history are linked, and that having a “free” society does not necessarily mean having a society that will energize the writing of history.
So I don’t know where things would stand in that “what if,” situation. I think they would be better than they are now, but would we all be impressed? Maybe not.
Ok, I see your point. Are you familiar at all with the situation in South Korea? It may be provide a better case for comparative purposes. I wonder if South Korean historians, some of whom were educated in the U.S. since the 1970s, were affected by trends from social and other sorts of history from American and European scholarship. Or, perhaps Japanese historians?
One problem about “what if” scenarios is that the outcome might turn out just the same as (or close to) the actual situation. Would JFK withdraw American presence in SVN were he not assassinated? Maybe – or maybe he’d increase it. I agree that the situation might not be any much better had SVN survived to this day. Nationalism, again, may still outweigh post-industrial critiques that functioned as a backbone of historical scholarship in North America and Western Europe. Have such critiques been widespread in culture and society of SEA countries?
As for SVN, yes, I’d guess that academics and public intellectuals would have to work under strenuous
Good question about South Korea. I don’t really know. A couple of years ago I was at some conferences about historical Sino-Other relations and the Koreans there were all pretty sophisticated. The fact that Korea had been a vassal of Chinese empires was something they could deal with.
And then there are books like this, for which there is no Vietnamese counterpart (a deconstruction of origin myths):
Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 187 / Harvard Hallym Series on Korea. By Hyung Il Pai. Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2000.
That said, my sense is that Korean scholarship is still very conservative. There has been good work on labor (understandably since the push against autocracy came in large part from laborers), but women? I think topics like that have fallen to people outside of Korea, like Jun Yoo:
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Gender-Colonial-Korea-Education/dp/0520252888/ref=la_B001JSDXP6_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444097373&sr=1-1
But that then leads to another interesting “what if.” Even if the South Vietnamese tradition of scholarship did not lead anywhere in Vietnam, its connections to the non-communist world of scholarship should have opened up the possibility for the Vietnamese equivalents of Jun Yoo to emerge much earlier than they are now (finally) emerging in the diaspora.
The Koreas , Vietnams and others were in the past , to tell it appropriately , tributaries states of tne numerous succeeding ” Chinas ”
They were not vassals , in the European feudal meaning .
Here’s a Korean ‘s analysis ( rather accurate ) of the relationship between Korea and ” China ”
http://askakorean.blogspot.fr/2014/06/korea-was-never-part-of-china.html
[ “Vassal” state had no other formal obligation to China. “Vassal” states had its own king, and had its own manner of choosing its king. “Vassal “states had its own government, which independently governed its own country. “Vassal” state collected its own taxes and had its own military. Throughout its relation with China before the modern times, all of the foregoing was true for Korea as well. China never chose any king on Korea’s behalf. China had no formal role in forming Korea’s domestic policies. China had no authority over ordinary Koreans, and China’s authority over Korea’s royal family was symbolic rather than real.
……the relationship between China and its “vassal “states (including Korea) was based on Confucianism, which provides for a hierarchy with mutual obligations. Casual observers often say Confucianism is hierarchical, while losing sight of the fact that under Confucianism, there are obligations that run both downward and upward within the hierarchy. Even as the subordinate recognizes the authority of the superior, the superior must play its part to earn the authority.]
How do we know that the “Ask a Korean!” blog is accurately representing anything about the “European feudal meaning” of “vassal.” Does “Ask a Korean!” cite any academic scholarship from anywhere in the world on this topic?
No.
So why should we believe something which some random person wrote on some random blog?
We shouldn’t, because we have no evidence that whoever wrote what s/he did has any authority to say what s/he did and we don’t see any evidence that it is based on.
The only way that knowledge can “progress” is if people learn what kinds of information/knowledge is worth considering as accurate.