The Restructuring of Vietnamese Nationalism, 1954-2004

Hy V. Luong

Department of Anthropology

University of Toronto

The paper analyzes how the construction and reconstruction of culture and the vision of national development are inextricably intertwined in the restructuring of Vietnamese nationalism from 1954 to 2004. It draws upon the dominant discourses in the print media as well as field data on local rituals and the televised media in Vietnam.

The dominant discourse of national development in the state-controlled media in Vietnam for the first few decades after independence invoked the theme of heroic anti-foreign (specifically anti-Chinese) resistance as a major part of Vietnamese culture and tradition and as integral to national development. As socialist Vietnam has become more closely linked to the global economy through foreign direct investments and tourism, and as Vietnam has adopted a politics of reconciliation with China, the official discourse has embraced a wider range of past practices and reconstructed sites as an integral part of Vietnamese identity and culture. These include the reconstruction, mainly initiated by local communities, of shrines, temples, communal houses, and pagodas, as well as the efflorescence of local rituals of solidarity. If during the anti-French, anti-American, and anti-Chinese wars, the Vietnamese Marxist state considered most of those sites as linked to an exploitative and superstitious past, and those rituals as wasteful of resources and antithetical to national construction, in the past 15 years, it has come to accept many of those sites and rituals as a part of Vietnamese identity and culture in the age of globalization. The reconstructed culture and identity, however, are not considered unrelated to national development.

Going beyond the details of Vietnamese nationalism, I suggest that an analysis of the dynamic interplay of the different strands and different discourses of nationalism in relation to global political economy as well as state-society relations would be as useful as the answer to the question whether there is a shift from one type of nationalism to another.