VietnamJournal
https://VietnamJournal.Org

The URL for this story is:
https://VietnamJournal.Org/article.php?sid=142

VietnamJournal

VILLAGE as pretext: Ethnographic Praxis and the Colonial State in Vietnam
Date: 2003-02-12 10:45:05


Colonial Vietnam offered no exception to the South-East Asian rule prevailing at the time that scientific research was embedded in the context of the colonial state and that policing and development purposes were uppermost in the minds of those who facilitated or sponsored scientific research. What Benedict Anderson has called "the confluence between a deeper colonial project and the everyday lives of colonial civil servants" applies to many of the men and (the few) women who were engaged in scientific research during the French colonial period...

Introduction

Colonial Vietnam offered no exception to the South-East Asian rule prevailing at the time that scientific research was embedded in the context of the colonial state and that policing and development purposes were uppermost in the minds of those who facilitated or sponsored scientific research. What Benedict Anderson has called "the confluence between a deeper colonial project and the everyday lives of colonial civil servants" applies to many of the men and (the few) women who were engaged in scientific research during the French colonial period (see Boudarel 1976; 1987; Anderson 1991; 1992: 26-27).

This review will concentrate on the works of French and Vietnamese scholars - those labeled nowadays as social and cultural anthropologists and rural sociologists - who focused their attention on Vietnamese rural society during the colonial period. Some of them wandered easily from one discipline to another, from epigraphy to archeology and from there to history and ethnology. Some disciplines were not clearly demarcated as yet while others encompassed the contours of a larger approach in social sciences as highlighted in Pierre Gourou's model of "a human geography of the tropics". The scholars in this regard were not all colonial bureaucrats per se, but they often worked for colonial institutions such as the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient (EFEO), founded in 1898 with the creation of the Permanent Archeological Mission of Indochina. One of its publications, the prestigious Bulletin d'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient (BEFEO) soon became the main platform for scholarly research on Indochina. Some of the scholars connected with the EFEO became in 1938 the founding members of specialized Institutes like the Institut Indochinois pour l'Etude de l'Homme (IIEH), a late colonial attempt to step into the fields of ethnography and physical anthropology. Not a few, French and Vietnamese alike, went through historical transformations and kept their high intellectual and moral standards as a gauge for their research.(B)



The argument

Like in most colonial situations, the establishment of French colonial rule took the form of an administrative control over land and its populations organized on the principle of territoriality (see e.g. Jan Breman's contribution in this volume). French colonial policy in Indochina differed, however, in many respects from British and Dutch rule elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Conflicting theories of colonization stressed at the same time policies of "association" by governing indirectly through native institutions, and policies of "assimilation" by inviting the colonized populations to absorb the ideas and culture of France (see Betts 1961). Neither of these prevailed, but in practice colonial Vietnam was split into three parts, each with its own principle of rule. The result was an "ambiguous colonization" in which French direct rule gradually took over (Brocheux and Hemery 1995).

Administrative reforms of long established village institutions were undertaken in the same vein as the colonization itself and led to different outcomes in the respective regions under French tutelage. While in colonial Cochinchina the existing village institutions were reduced to sheer administrative structures, similar reforms in Tonkin and Annam were undertaken from the 1920's on but did not succeed (see Kresser 1935; H.G. 1942; Pinto 1946; Popkin 1979; Grossheim 1991; Brocheux and Hemery 1995: 101-105). The limited authority granted to the council of notables still existed at the end of the colonial period and constituted a stumbling block for direct tax intervention from the state. Together with its class-differentiation practices, the village institution in the northern and central part of the country became an excellent target for revolutionary reforms. A deliberate colonial attempt to alter dynastic and mandarin rule in the countryside stimulated, however, scientific study which was to produce actual information about the Vietnamese village system. The majority of the studies undertaken in the colonial period had a purely judicial character and did not reflect factual reality of the life in the villages (the doctoral theses of Paul Kresser, Marcel Rouilly, André Lasaulce, François Malot, Henry Gil to mention a few). The introduction of a French penal code to replace the pre-colonial Gia Long code received first priority and with it came a transformation of the indigenous laws and rules embodied into so-called coutumiers, village charters, which had to be modified and adapted to the new situation. French and Vietnamese scholars were involved in the colonial project of this type.

Any evaluation of the scholars and writings of the colonial period dealing with the ethnography of the lowland Vietnamese should make a distinction between " civil servant" scholars whose writings were geared towards the development purposes of the colonial state and those scholars who tried to find a niche for their work, albeit without much questioning the colonial venture itself. As Anderson has pointed out, colonial scholarship suffered from several setbacks like the inability to criticize the colonial state, the demonstrated show of provincialism which hindered comparative work between colonial systems and a general lack of theoretical interest (1992: 27-28).



Missionaries as early Anthropologists

Of the scholars who worked in the field of ethnography and rural sociology, only a few were not employed as civil servants or colonial administrators, while the great majority of them worked in the bureaucratic framework of the colonial state. Many missionaries came to Indochina with the conviction that the making of the French empire was in the first place a religious affair, but that the conditions for it should be mainly worldly(C). A late 19th century contemporary described them as "the real lords of the country. They install themselves as masters. They like to be carried around on a sedan chair by their servants" (55)(D). An important supplier of ethnographic data was, however, the French Foreign Missions which servants often engaged into ethnographic work. Anthropologists and missionaries were not seen yet as each others rivals, at least not in colonial Indochina around the turn of the century (cf. Bonsen e.o. 1990). An outstanding missionary, Father Leopold-Michel Cadière () came to be one of the most famous amateur-ethnologists of his time. No serious scholar doing research on Vietnamese culture, religion and social relations can do without his extensive writings. Georges Condominas hailed him as "a great ethnologist" and a pioneering "social and cultural anthropologist" (1986: 174), while the French orientalist Paul Mus did not hesitate to single him out as a predecessor of the American professional anthropologists who worked in Vietnam in the fifties and sixties (in Hickey 1964: i).

Cadière's field of knowledge was indeed extensive and variegated, spanning from history, archeology, philology to ethnology and ethnobotany. He developed a specific sociology of religion of the Vietnamese, based on the research he undertook in the villages of his diocese near the imperial capital of Hue in central Vietnam. Cadière's extensive knowledge of the Vietnamese language enabled him to study intensively the oral traditions of the Vietnamese peasants he worked with during his long years of service in the country. He was a prolific correspondent of the EFEO, which he joined as a permanent member in 1918. Years earlier he had founded the prestigious journal Le Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue, a scholarly publication which unintentionally served the colonial " invention of tradition" by stressing the virtues and symbols of the conquered Vietnamese empire (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983). In 1945 Cadière was taken prisoner first by the Japanese and later by the Viet Minh who subsequently limited his freedom to work and to travel for more than 6 years. In 1953 he refused to be repatriated to France and died on 6 July 1955 in Hue at the age of 86. His tomb at the cemetery of Phu Xuan near Hue still exists today.

Cadière's scientific work amount to more than 250 titles, some of them containing more than 350 pages. Most renown is his Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Annamites dans les environs de Hue, published in the BEFEO in 1918 and in 1919. In an earlier treatise Anthropologie populaire annamite (1915), Cadière undertook a pioneering attempt to engage in symbolic anthropology by comparing different parts of the human body with beliefs and representations, showing the meaning of taste, smell and sound (Condominas 1986: 190-191). Later his interest moved more closely towards the link between social relations and religious practices, focusing upon the family as the locus of religious belief[1]. These and other writings are collected in three voluminous publications, representing the best empirical based research in the French language on Vietnamese religion. By treating several great traditions like Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism as a blend with popular beliefs and practices like the ancestor cult, Cadière developed his own definition of religion which came close to Durkheim's moral order (cfr. Hickey 1964: 55ff).

This voluminous oeuvre has its serious shortcomings, however, as Condominas has already pointed out. There is little interest in the material culture of the native people in spite of his notes on the different art forms at the royal palace in Hue. Even more apparent is the scant attention Cadière paid to the political structure of the colonial state in which Cadière lived and worked. Virtual no observations are made about the complicated relationship between the colonial administration and the dilapidated structure of the imperial state upon which the French tried to built their colonial model of Indochina (see e.g. Goscha 1994). This is all the more striking when one tries to seek information about the impact of colonialism on village life and political structures. It is true that Cadière dissented from many of his compatriots in and outside the colonial administration who studied the village purely from a judicial point of view , but even in his analysis of the family he only marginally corrects the normative character of these works mostly based on written sources (Condominas 1986: 186).

Cadière stresses the internal division of villages by family and lineage interests and shows a keen interest the position of women, which was quite novel for his time. He recognizes the male-oriented model of social hierarchy, but clearly has an open eye for the countervailing power of females who exploit gender roles in their favor (Cadière 1930: 353-413). In spite of his enormous knowledge of the Vietnamese language, one wonders why Cadière never developed a comprehensive treatment of the intricate kinship system with its many linguistic expressions (Condominas 1986: 186-187). Nevertheless, Cadière who never graduated from any scientific institution, became a true fieldworker in the Malinovskian tradition. How Cadière collected his data is not exactly known - he never published field notes- , but an impression of it can be gained from a nearly forgotten lecture he gave during a short European stay in 1912 (Condominas 1986: 182-183). Ten years before Malinowski expounded in his famous introduction of The Argonauts the task of the fieldworker, Cadière already defined a methodological approach which we now recognize as "participatory observation": "He who will make religious observations needs to know the language and in a perfect way the language of the country where he operates; he must show respect for the numerous manifestations of religious sentiment he studies, and study the facts with sympathy (...)" (Cadière 1913: 928 [1957: 275]). In 1931 he defended this approach again, now much stronger: "Works about the Annamites [the disparaging name the French referred to the Vietnamese, J.K.] are copies of each other and repeat, since centuries, only generalities. Only a few are based on detailed direct observation which could lead to rich, new remarks and fruitful definite conclusions" (quoted by J.Y. Claes 1934: 86)[2].

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cadière did not comment on religious practices in terms of superstition, pointless ritual or useless and even damaging beliefs. He surely shared some " tics of the period" as Condominas elegantly defended some of the paternalistic and sometimes religiously motivated remarks in the writings of Cadière (1986: 176; 206), but on the whole his scholarly work shows a remarkable detachment and unbiased concern. The way he tried to ask understanding for the colonized Other in his published speeches and memoirs is all the more remarkable at a time when such understanding was not accepted by his compatriots. [3]



Adventurous orientalists

From the early days of the colonial enterprise, the assignment of French officers to run the administration was the rule in Cochinchina. Vietnamese collaborators were expected to serve as intermediaries between them and the village councils. Some civil servants took an interest in the study of the indigenous organizations which they were expected to rule. Men like Jean Baptiste Eliacin Luro, Maurice Labussière and Georges Durwell, to mention but a few, served as "Inspectors of Native Affairs", a colonial name for provincial administrators. J.B.E. Luro () deserves extra attention because of his scientific work. As "technicians of the colonization" (a term coined by the French historian Ch.A. Julien), they made rapid and prestigious careers in the colonial administration. They shared with the above mentioned members of the French Foreign Missions a zealous vocation to execute France's "civilizing mission" in Indochina, but they differed among themselves about the means to accomplish this task[4]. Although Luro did not join the famous 1866 exploration mission of the northern Mekong river, his close contacts with other "civilizing missioners" like Francis Garnier () and Etienne Aymonnier (), made him of one of the more outstanding members of the early administration of Cochinchina. Together with Jean Philastre, an orientalist who studied Gia Long's Law Code, Luro developed the first important critique of the French presence in Indochina[5].

With his posthumous published Le Pays d'Annam (1878), Luro provided an early comprehensive overview of the traditional administration of the Vietnamese village in the southern part of Vietnam. The background information was developed during the courses he gave at the Collège des Stagiaires in Saigon, a short lived institution to train administrators on the spot which was replaced in 1887 by the Ecole Coloniale in Paris (Osborne 1969: 72-73). Being a convinced defender of the "associanist" theory, Luro was in favor of leaving at least formally intact Vietnam's traditional administration including the indigenous school system. He saw it as dangerous to force the Vietnamese to learn French, instead, he urged French administrators to learn Vietnamese. Ironically, his plea for tradition and preservation, even of the corrupt mandarinal bureaucracy, served well the current need for a legitimization of the early French colonial state as the successor of the defeated Vietnamese empire. The institutions upon which this empire was built, the monarchy, its mandarinal bureaucracy and the complex world of Vietnamese villages needed a thorough research which was provided by Luro and his contemporaries. There are good reasons to believe that Luro's presentation of the traditional village administration -in spite of his close contact with the Vietnamese populations- did not reflect the real situation. This observation was made by A. Landes, a scholarly colleague of Luro and administrator of the city of Cholon in the 1880's. According to Landes, the old names and forms still survived, but French interference had already transformed to a great extent the social-political landscape of Cochinchina. In this regard, colonial thinking was heavily influenced by collaborationist mandarins who voiced their frustrations about the negative attitude of the village elites towards the French administration (Landes quoted in Osborne 1969:86-88; Taboulet 1940: 27-165; Osborne 1969: 44-45)[6].

A similar scholarly work which deserves attention in this regard was Paul Ory's La Commune Annamite au Tonkin (1894), but its scope and political influence were different from Luro's. Ory () provided one of the earliest studies of what was to become an "ideal-typical" pre-colonial rural community in northern Vietnam. Ory served as a provincial resident, but his career went totally different from those of Luro and others. Ory served as a civil engineer with an excellent knowledge of Chinese and Japanese on the warship which brought France's chief negotiator, François Harmand, also a native affairs official, to the imperial court of Hue in 1883. After the treaties which turned Tonkin and Annam into "protectorates" Paul Ory became an assistant-resident of Quang Binh, a province north of Hue, where he served between 1886 and 1889. During his term he wrote a monograph of the province, which earned him a laudatory remark from the under-secretary of the Ministry of Colonies[7].

In contrast to Luro and his scholarly successors in the South, Paul Ory did not portray the village community as the traditional Vietnamese arrangement which should be preserved at any price. He recognized, however, the collective character of the 19th century village as borne out of the system of conscription and labor-duties and the difference between insiders and outsiders, but he doubted strongly the autonomous character of the village vis-a-vis the imperial state. Ory was the first Western observer who laid his hands on what Alexander Woodside later has described as, "the semimyth of village "autonomy" " when he explained the changing loyalties of village elites who often disclaimed responsibility for central government control (1976: 117). It was Ory who exposed the double book-keeping upheld by the ruling Vietnamese village elites to deceive the mandarinal authorities in order to withhold income and land-taxes (including corvee) from the imperial and colonial state. He also had an open eye for the repression by the village elite of the inhabitants under their jurisdiction. In this regard he differed strongly from Luro and others whose writings were motivated by a romantic vision of the past in which the collective aspect of the commune was taken for granted (Osborne 1969: 144-155). Although he was in favor of an associanist approach, Ory proposed strongly " to destroy the abuses, to prevent the defects of the indigenous administration and to bring justice with impartiality" (1894: 143). Unlike Luro, he didn't seem to accept the abuses he discerned in the way the village elite ruled the inhabitants of the villages.

What is the importance of Paul Ory's book on the Vietnamese commune, a topic that has been relatively well covered by French colonial authors? According to Samuel Popkin, Ory's book is the best example of the typical " pre-colonial village" with its social differentiation, its corporate leadership and its internal mechanisms to deal with the state on a collective basis. Although Popkin does not take Ory's descriptions as always accurate, this presentation of the traditional village is in line with data from Vietnamese sources written before the French intervention (Woodside 1976: 109-118; Adas 1988; Grossheim 1992)[8]. Not the presentation of the Vietnamese village is at stake here, but the way these French sources depicted the pre-colonial society as rather static (see for the same point Breman 1988: 32-33; 40-51; and Kleinen 1988: 26-27). In his pioneering study, Masaya Shiraishi reveals a third element within state - village relations, consisting of a floating or migratory population out of which thieves, vagabonds and rebels emerged and with whom village elites tried to keep at bay (1984). The French view on the precapitalist normative order did not differ much from that of the emperor or his mandarins.

With Ory's study, the French embarked on the difficult project to transform the grass-root levels of the colonial state only with the purpose to collect tax as much as possible from the native population. The dubious effectiveness of this project has been discussed elsewhere, but the several reforms the colonial state attempted to introduce did not succeed well (Woodside 1976: 138 ff; Gran 1975; Popkin 1979; Murray 1980; Grossheim 1992: 104ff).

People like Luro, Philastre, Ory and some others who are not mentioned here represented a group of "adventurous orientalists" as they were once labeled (cfr. Boudarel 1976: 146). They can be positioned in a political "field" as described by Bourdieu, and derived their status from the education they received. In the period that followed the conquest of the colony, a new "field" for the production of knowledge became more important or at least became more entangled with the political field, that of scientific institutions. [9]



The Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient

The peak of French colonial rule after the turn of the century saw a series of unexpected peasant uprisings, spreading social unrest in the large cities and the emergence of nationalist movements with a sometimes very radical character. Exploring of the conditions that led to these events could be best served by scholarly methods sponsored by the colonial state in the form of an autocratic colonial project (Anderson 1992: 26 - 27).

The opening of the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient in 1901 in Saigon (a year later transferred to Hanoi) and the publication of its Bulletin since 1900 led to serious scientific research of the history and the culture of Vietnam[10]. Ethnograpic studies of lowland and hillside people were undertaken, but one had to wait until the end of the 1930's before ethnology and physical anthropology were treated as separate fields of study. Political considerations set clearly the margins of academic freedom within which the EFEO was expected to work. As Boudarel has pointed out, scholars of the EFEO agreed tacitly to a policy of "autocensure" (self-censorship) in stead of publishing works and articles which could be seen as criticism of the colonial venture (1976: 145-152; 1987: 15)[11]. In other words, the Ecole became a research stimulating and a intellectually disciplining institution in which patron-client relationships dominated (see Bourdieu 1984; 1992). In the colonial setting of Indochina, it meant a strict hierarchical order aggravated by the color line which barred native Vietnamese access to the system.

With the establishment of the EFEO more knowledge at the grass-roots levels of Vietnamese society became available. Between 1901 and 1945, the Bulletin and the Publishing House of the EFEO published 88 articles and books on the lowland Vietnamese out of which 12 (13,6 %) were written by Vietnamese authors[12]. More than one-third (26 articles and 2 books) were devoted to what was called "morals and customs of the Annamese", a twisted, but widely accepted denominator of the Vietnamese population. Léopold Cadière has been already mentioned as being one of the most prolific contributors, followed by Jean Przyluski (), a student of Marcel Mauss. Thanks to his excellent knowledge of Vietnamese and Chinese, Przyluski wrote several articles on Vietnamese customs, language and religion. His academic work did not prevent him from working for the dreaded Sureté.[13] The combination of these functions did not arouse much suspicion, since Louis Marty, who later became Director of the Sureté, also was a correspondent of the EFEO, although both men never became full members (Boudarel 1987: 15). Vietnamese members of the EFEO contributed regularly to the Bulletin after the 1930's were Nguyen Van To, Nguyen Van Khoan, Nguyen Van Huyen and Tran Van Giap. Other Vietnamese worked as research assistants and librarians.

The EFEO did not develop a research program according to what Lakatos (1970) formulated in which basic assumptions are accepted and ideas on what could and what should not be studied are shared by the researchers. French colonialism produced at its best an evolutionist discourse in which notions of a "civilizing mission" and a patronizing attitude towards ethnic groups are the main elements. Emerging dominant paradigms were recognizable as far as the origins of the Vietnamese state are concerned (a diffusionist theme which was put forward by among others, the orientalist, Henri Maspero), but a unified viewpoint inherent in the notion of paradigms in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, is difficult to assess. A general absence of theory is clearly discernable. The evolutionist and diffusionist schools of thought seemed to have succeeded each other without much debate, at least not when discussing Vietnamese history or society. The works of influential sociologists or ethnologists are seldom quoted in the published texts. Scholars like Emile Durkheim, his nephew Marcell Mauss and even Henri Bergson were known among all the contributors to the Bulletin, especially among those who received their education during the Third Republic () and who were involved in the intellectual struggle around the Sorbonne (Wesseling 1994: 72-83)[14]. In 1902 Mauss even presented at the first International Conference of Oriental Studies held in Hanoi a research agenda for the study of indigenous peoples of Indochina. It was moulded in the evolutionist discourse and stressed the conservation of "social facts" by museums and ethnographers for political and administrative purposes[15].

In the treatment of magic, rituals and ceremonies, references were sometimes made to Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim, Mauss, De Groot and Malinowski. Durkheim's central thesis that religion is the projection of power of society in which ritual reinforces solidarity among the members of the society seems to be taken for granted, but seldom discussed. Tylor's influential Primitive Culture (1871) was used by Cadière, who strongly rejected Father Wilhelm Schmidt's notion of an almighty God (Condominas 1984: 180-181). Jean Przyzulski was a former student of Marcel Mauss, which explains his study of tree and earth cults (in BEFEO 1909, 1910 and 1914).



Colonial paradigms on development

The publication of two important in-depth ethnographic studies by Charles Robequain and Pierre Gourou marked the first serious attempt of the establishment of colonial ethnography. Robequain (), a one-time member of the EFEO and professor at the prestigious Collège de France conducted in 1924 and 1925 research in the second largest delta of northern Vietnam, the plain of Thanh Hoa[16]. Whether the original idea to study this delta came from the EFEO itself or from government circles is not clear, but some justifications for the choice of this smaller delta, can be brought up. In the same year, the French archaeologist L. Payot had discovered near the provincial capital Thanh Hoa proto-historic objects of the "Dong Son civilization" (5th - 3rd c. B.C.) named after the site where the earliest objects of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age civilization were found. Serving as the pre-Chinese cradle of Vietnamese civilization, Thanh Hoa became a privileged field of study for French and Vietnamese scientists.

Another reason for such a large provincial study might have been the fact that policies for internal migration to alleviate the congested Tonkin-delta were already in the making and that the province of Thanh Hoa served as a testing ground for it. Given the relatively abundant space devoted to upland agriculture for plantations and the presence of mining possibilities, this motivation must have influenced the decision to implement a scientific study of the province of Thanh Hoa.

Nevertheless, the quality of the voluminous monograph (in two parts) has never been seriously contested by contemporary scholars in spite of its open colonialist overtones (cfr. Adams 1976; Boudarel 1989: 34). The treatment of the research topics is strictly organized according to geographical elements, without any consideration for political or sociological phenomena. The discussion of the Vietnamese village is disappointing because of the lack of political and cultural data on village life in itself (Robequain 1929: 466-510).

Robequain's field methods were not revealed in his publications, but he must have spent several years in the province because of his contract with the EFEO. He and Gourou undertook after their return home two influential studies on the economy and land use of Indochina which were published in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and translated into English[17].

Pierre Gourou's doctorate thesis on the Red River delta was the result of a nearly ten years stay in the colony[18]. Generally considered a landmark of rural sociology, Pierre Gourou's pioneering study Les Paysans du delta tonkinois, étude de géographie humaine (1936) is probably the most quoted work by contemporary scholars of Vietnam[19]. It is remarkable that although the data collection took place more than sixty years ago, no serious scholar of the North Vietnamese countryside can do without this book. The fact remains that until now the world of the Vietnamese peasantry has been scarcely researched. Gourou's comprehensive description of the "human geography" of the Red River delta has been unmatched by other studies at the time, while revolution and war made it impossible to embark on a similar study thereafter. On rereading Les Paysans the contemporary field worker is struck by the hugeness and the accurateness of the data. The problems which faced the inhabitants of the northern delta during the thirties still seem to exist, albeit in a different context and on a different scale.

The bulk of Gourou's field work took place between the end of 1931 and the summer of 1935. The alluvial plain of the Red River delta comprised more than 8000 villages at the time, spread out on a surface of about 15,000 km2 which were relatively accessible by road. Being a paid official of the colonial school system, he was only able to go to the field on Sundays, the occasional days off and holidays, especially during the summer vacation between June and September. Another drawback of this type of colonial scholarship was that living among the local population was simply "not done" given the fact that civil servant scholars were part of the colonial state itself.

Preparations for the study were already preceded by two publications Gourou wrote for the colonial government: L'Indochine Française (Hanoi, 1929) was written for the 4th Scientific Congress of the Pacific held in Java in May-June 1929. Le Tonkin (1931) was published on the occasion of the International Colonial Exposition in Paris and contained already the framework which was to be worked out more in depth in Les Paysans.

Gourou had a sufficient knowledge of the Vietnamese language, still he often visited the villages in the company of Vietnamese friends and occasionally an interpreter, who understood the local dialect. A close collaborator was Nguyen Van Khoan, an assistant at the EFEO who taught him Vietnamese, and whose writings on the communal house and local rituals were highly appreciated. Another was Vo Nguyen Giap, the future victorious general at Dien Bien Phu. Giap was sent to Central Vietnam to study housing types, and his research was used in a book which Gourou published in 1936[20]. The contribution of Giap was not mentioned, because he was a former political detainee set free on probation in 1931 and sent to Hanoi to study (AOM AIX Gougal 53.447). After he was pardoned in 1935, Giap started clandestine activities anew. Giap's extensive knowledge of the countryside enabled him to write The Peasant Question (1936) together with Truong Chinh, the main ideologue of the Communist Party. The book would serve as a manifest for radical reform of the political and economic life of Vietnam's peasantry.

Local officials (French and Vietnamese alike) also provided Gourou with a wealth of information from district and provincial offices and archives. Excellent knowledge of the French language enabled many of these assistants to work closely with their French superiors, whose own mastering of the Vietnamese language was comparatively lower. With the help of local mandarins, Gourou organized a survey to collect data from 8000 villages on local handicrafts and industries. Together with a population census, these data served as the backbone of his treatise[21].

Discussing the scholarly work during the colonial period, the French historian Boudarel could find no direct consequences between ethnographic, sociological and historical studies and the decisions of the colonial state (1976: 158-159). In the strict sense of the term, this qualification still holds true for the work of Gourou. Neither Les Paysans nor his L'Utilisation du sol en Indochine française, published in 1940 were policy studies commissioned or used by the French administration, but the dividing line between these studies and those written on contract remained quite thin. The establishment of the Agronomic Office in 1925 and related agencies made it easy for the French colonial government to direct studies for its own purpose[22].

French colonial policy debates on agricultural development became more outspoken around 1930, when the world economic crisis started to hit Indochina, and Vietnamese nationalism threatened the colonial state by fomenting urban and rural unrest. As Daniel Hemery has shown, the colonial government took the question of agrarian poverty seriously and admitted that a part of the causes of the political turmoil had to be found in the growing polarity in the countryside (1977: 11-12). Serious social reforms were rapidly put into effect by the Popular Front Government (), but money and time proved to be the major obstacles to achieve these goals in the long run. Moreover, metropolitan policies and vested interests of influential sectors of French society hindered seriously a comprehensive application of development policies (Hemery 1977: 3-35; see also Marr 1981: 24). The modernization of the technical and scientific infrastructure of the colony remained underdeveloped (Brocheux and Hemery 1995: 127). The results of a huge inventory of the Indochinese land use and -control were published in L'Economie Agricole de l'Indochine (1932) by Yves Henry. Ironically, the survey was conducted during a long period of serious social unrest. The quality of this work, although useful as a benchmark-study for at least 14 provinces of colonial Vietnam, has been contested by later writers (Ngo 1973; Murray 1980). Gourou estimated the results on the basis of the information gathering techniques not without reason as "a very approximative view of reality" and warned against the extensive use of it (1936: 357). Combined with his own findings, Henry's study still pose a most comprehensive analysis of agrarian Vietnam during the thirties.

Gourou's disengagement did not mean, however, that he himself abstained from any direct involvement with the development purposes of the colonial government[23]. Back in France he assisted the Inquiry Commission "Guernut" set up as a response by the Popular Front government to deal with criticisms of French colonial rule (Kleinen 1988: 87-92). In a lengthy report, Gourou spells out the "pathologic" demographic situation of the Tonkin delta, at the time one of the "most densely populated agricultural areas in the world". The document reads like a development program avant la lettre stressing the modernization of the agricultural base of the North-Vietnamese economy in terms of improvement of agricultural techniques, together with proposals for land-reform on a modest scale and the development of village handicrafts and small-scale industry. Most of these proposals remained dead words, largely because of the short time the Commission was able to do its work[24]. By March 1937 the Commission was already curbed financially and subsequently disbanded, following the "pause" in the reforms of the Popular Front, which collapsed several months later[25].

Direct criticism of the colonial state is nearly absent in Gourou's work. He recognizes, however, the extremely low standard of living of the peasants of northern Vietnam, caused by an extraordinary increase in land stratification, which he not only attributes to demographic exhaustion, but also to the attitude of the village elites (267-268; 572-573). The causes of the poverty and misery are, however, seldom attributed to colonial policies. Gourou had an open eye for the superior position and the venality of the village elites, but as Popkin asserted "he admired the way that Vietnamese peasants were integrated into their villages. There was "a strict tyranny" (270), to be sure, but


"the peasant finds in village life powerful motives of his interest: ambition, intrigue, the taste of power, religious sentiment, all these serves his appetite sufficiently; thanks to the intense and well organized village life, the peasant is more than a miserable and ill feeded serf" (1936: 272)[26].


In a footnote, Gourou added

"It is clear that the Annamese village represents for the government an easy and simple "governing machine": it governs itself; it is responsible for the paiement of the taxes based on solidarity and its task to upheld authority is very limited; on the other side the intrigues and rivalries of the parties concerned enable the mandarins always to be informed about what happens in the commune and to intervene in case when the commune might become the place of suspect turbulence" (1936: 272).


To alter the village, Gourou argued, would deprive the peasants of what little happiness they had" (1936: 577; also quoted in Popkin 1979: 183). This does not necessarily mean that he saw the corporate village as a harmonious community as is shown by his description (largely borrowed from the pro-French journalist and writer Nguyen Van Vinh) of the institutionalized opponents within the village and the occasional inter-elite conflicts (269-272). Another journalist and writer Ngo Tat To, whose writings must have been known by Gourou, attacked furiously what he called "the somber receptacle of rotten customs and monstrous and barbaric traditions behind the bamboo hedge"(Quoted by Boudarel 1991: 89).

Gourou nevertheless tackled the colonial administration when necessary, albeit it in guarded terms. The reconstruction of the physical landscape by the French is described as a "contamination", especially the Catholic churches which were depicted as "strange elements in the surrounding countryside" (567). School buildings were erected without much understanding for the environment, he wrote, but the reformed indigenous school system and the medical provisions were seen as direct benefits from the French administration.

In describing the several taxational measures the French took to finance their colonial enterprise, Gourou often deplored the monopolies on salt and alcohol (he surprisingly did not deal with opium) as devastating for the village industries.

Although Gourou stressed in

Les paysans

the ecological adaptation of North-Vietnamese rice farmers, in his later work he laid the foundation for an approach later coined as "French human geography", which stresses the "internal factors" like history, culture and environment as influential (and sometimes all encompassing) factors for development, more so than the so-called external influences. The landscape-producing capacity of civilizations is a case in point, which precludes the influence of other factors like state-intervention or changing social conditions. This view came under attack in the early 1980's by those French academics who call themselves "tiermondistes" and who favored a more dynamic approach in terms of social change. [27]



The beginnings of Vietnamese ethnography

Research in the thirties and forties on the scope and complexity of rituals, ceremonies, life-cycle rites and feasts were more and more conducted by Vietnamese scholars. At the EFEO, the importance of Vietnamese personnel for scientific research was expressed by a growing employment of research assistants, secretaries, archivists and interpreters or translators of texts. They belonged to the French educated elite of the indigenous personnel, but their career was carefully curtailed by the EFEO (see Boudarel 1987: 9). As Vietnamese, they had easy access to the countryside, while many maintained their contacts with their native villages. The foundation of the Institut Indochinois pour l'Etude de l'Homme (IIEH.) in 1938 clearly marked a change in orientation in favor of research in the field of social sciences, even though two of the three foster institutions had a pure medical orientation. Together with the EFEO, the Institut embarked on a prestigious project to collect customary law codes (coutumiers) from Vietnamese villages with the purpose to implement administrative reforms. The EFEO had gained experience with a similar program in the early 1920's when researchers had helped edit and publish law codes from ethnic groups, which had never existed before in an written form. These were used as instruments to define nationhood of these tribes (Salemink 1991: 262).

More and more Vietnamese were able to contribute scholarly work. Nguyen Van To, Nguyen Van Huyen, Nguyen Van Khoan and Tran Van Giap to mention the more ethnographically inclined scholars, acquired prestigious positions at the EFEO and the IIEH. All these men -similar publications and positions of women are not known- enjoyed good relationships with the French, but they kept a certain distance to their French overlords and never advocated Franco-Vietnamese collaboration too openly[28].

Nguyen Van To () was according to Marr "a conservative scholar (...) acceptable to radical Vietnamese because of his integrity and patriotism" (179). His early work on the dissemination of quoc ngu for which he earned the presidency of the influential Association for the Dissemination of Quoc Ngu Study (Hoi Truyen Ba Quoc Ngu) and his prolific writings for French and Vietnamese journals, made him one of the pivotal figures among intellectuals who wrote about history, culture, language and literature. To's contribution to ethnography was relatively small and diverse, but as an editor of the weekly journal Tri Tan (To Know the New) which was published between 1941 and 1945, he vulgarized for a large audience scholarly writings published in the Bulletin. Although the bulk of the publications in Tri Tan were criticized by the influential journalist and historian Dao Duy Anh as "not going back to original sources, failing to subject documents to critical analysis, while too much credence is given to oral history and personal prejudice gets in the way of "scientific" interpretation", the more scholarly contributions were of high quality, even at modern standards (Anh quoted by Marr 1981: 280). Next to a long article about the Hanoi dialect (1925), To contributed to scholarly journals articles on indigenous law, family names and children's plays and songs.

To's erudition expressed by his profound knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam and his work for the dissemination of the written language made him a natural ally for the Viet Minh which sought his alignment after 1945. He served as Minister of Social Action under the first Cabinet of Ho Chi Minh and became president of the first National Assembly in 1946. He died in captivity after French paratroopers struck at Bac Can in the North (Boudarel 1987: 10-11).

A colleague of Nguyen Van To at the EFEO was Nguyen Van Huyen (1908 - 1976), who became an official member (Membre permanent), a position higher than To's who together with Tran Van Giap and Nguyen Van Khoan reached the function of assistant. Huyen' s writings can at best be summarized by referring to La Civilisation annamite (1944), and Dieux et immortels en pays d'Annam (1944), his major works in which he presents a sociological overview of Vietnamese history and culture based on the available sources and research by Vietnamese and French scholars. Five years earlier (in 1939) he had already stressed the "traditional organization of the village" as the main impedient for agricultural progress[29]. In this and other remarks, Huyen showed his sensitivity for authors like Vu Van Hien and Dao Duy Anh who were in favor of serious economic and political reforms at the village level[30].

Huyen received his education in Hanoi and in Paris, where he teached Vietnamese at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales vivantes between 1931 and 1935. In february 1934 he submitted his thesis summa cum laude at the Sorbonne on the custom of a singing contest between boys and girls alternating their songs, complemented with a treatise on the stilt house, which deviates from the Vietnamese custom to build houses on flatten ground. On return to Vietnam he taught history and geography at the Lycée du Protectorat at the time when Gourou had just left the colony. Between 1931 and 1945, Huyen published four books and about thirty articles, laying the groundwork for a Vietnamese approach in ethnography and social sciences. Heavily empiricistic in orientation, Huyen wrote extensively about villages's tutelary spirits, spirit cults, religious practices, festivals and local ceremonies. His contributions to the study of social organization and local practices in the Vietnamese village still serve as a good starting point for the study of north-Vietnam during the colonial period. The village of Yen So, about 25 kilometers from Hanoi in the province of Ha Dong, was most likely Huyen's main local community where he collected his data. A comprehensive study of another village (Cong Thuy in the province of Ninh Binh) was proposed, but never effected[31]. At the Université Indochinoise (better known as the University of Hanoi) and the IIEH, Huyen gave courses in social and religious history of Vietnam, while the more ethnographical topics concerning minority groups were handled by Paul Levy, the head of the Ethnological section of the EFEO.

Huyen accepted a political position in the early forties as a member of the powerless Federal Council of Indochina, an advisory body composed of Vietnamese for colonial affairs of which the Governor-General was the chairman[32]. His scholarly reputation made him also eligible for the most respectable educational post which members of the academic elite could accept: the Conseil des Recherches Scientifiques de l'Indochine, an advisory body for the colonial government in matters of all kinds of scientific research[33] . As a consequence of this last function and his impeccable reputation as a patriot, Huyen was asked after the August Revolution in 1945 to assume overall responsibility for the scientific institutions, which were linked to the Ministry of National Education. He became the first director of the new Vien Phuong Dong Bac Co (Institute of the Far East), the successor of the old EFEO, which was already renamed Truong Vien Dong Bac Co. In July 1947, Huyen accepted the post of Minister of Education in the revolutionary government. During the First Indochina War, he gave study courses in Marxism-Leninism and published booklets about the Soviet-Union and China, countries he never visited personally. Since the mid-1950's, he devoted his energy and writings exclusively to promote general education in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)[34].

Nguyen van Khoan (?), research-assistant at the EFEO since 1934, who had taught Pierre Gourou Vietnamese and assisted him in the field, has provided probably the best description of the dinh, the communal house where the guardian spirit is worshipped and in which the worldly power of the notables is ritualized. Khoan's research focused on the ceremonial aspects and the description of the building and its religious objects. The social significance of the institution, which over the years led to an involution of village rituals including the costly custom of banqueting is not discussed. This would become the work of novelists like Ngo Tat To who towards the end of the 1930's began to write about corrupt village notables, moneylenders, poor peasants and landless laborers[35].

Huyen's colleague Tran Van Giap (), an assistant at the EFEO also tackled subjects ranging from religion to folklore and spirit cults. Thanks to his profound knowledge of the history of Vietnamese Buddhism, Giap became one of the best known scholars of classical Chinese. From his later position as deputy director at the Institute of the Far East, he laid the groundwork of his magnum opus, an extensive bibliography of Chinese and Nom texts written by Vietnamese authors dealing with literature, history and geography[36]. Like Huyen, Giap also served at the Ministry of Education in the early years of the newly founded DRV.

Two other Vietnamese ethnographers, Nguyen Thieu Lau () and Ngo Quy Son (dates unknown) deserve to be mentioned here for their contribution to Vietnamese ethnography, but their careers went on different paths from those just mentioned. Both men were appointed at the EFEO in 1940 as assistants. They did extensive research on demography, village customs, rituals and taboos. In their writings, they broke through the parochial overtones which marked many of the older scholars and quoted at length from ethnologists like Mauss, Van Gennep and L. Levy-Bruhl. Lau joint the maquis, but returned to Hanoi in 1950. He left for the South in the 1950's and was appointed a professor of history and geography at the University of Saigon. Between 1958 and 1960 he served as a functionary at the Ministry of Information under the Ngo Dinh Diem government, but was forced to quit after he had insulted the Ngo-family in public. An article on an early 19th century land reform attempt in the province of Binh Dinh is an example of his meticulous scholarship. He died in 1967 after a short hunger strike against the Nguyen Van Thieu government. A collection of his historical writings appeared in 1969[37]. The career of Ngo Quy Son is difficult to follow, but apparently he also went to the South. In 1943 he became president of the Foundation for the Protection of Children based in Hanoi, which published his ethnographic research on children's plays, songs and toys.



Legacies of the Past

The presence of Vietnamese scholars in the EFEO and the short-lived IIEH have highly contributed to a much milder assessment by their successors of these colonial institutions afterwards than was the case in the Soviet Union after 1917 and China after 1949 (see e.g. Douw 1991). Until 1958 pre-1954 books were reprinted with the approval of the Ministry of Culture. The activities of the EFEO were officially halted in 1959, two years after the last French director, Maurice Durand, had left Hanoi.

Written verdicts on "colonial anthropology" are very rare and the few which exist are surprisingly mild. Mac Duong, trained at the Ethnological Section of the History Institute in Hanoi and currently director of the Institute of Social Sciences in Ho Chi Minh -city, judged in the late 1977's in rather moderate wordings the works of the many scholars affiliated with the EFEO as "objectively served to expand notions as to the cultures of the peoples of Vietnam"[38]. He qualified his general judgment about the EFEO with terms as "extensive", "productive" and "learned" although its activity was "predetermined by the policy of enslavement of the Vietnamese people pursued by the French colonialists" (Mac Duong in Evans 1985: 121). Interestingly enough, the period between the two World Wars was seen as prolific when French ethnographers studied "fundamental problems in the history, archeology and ethnography of Vietnam". Especially the "ethnolinguistic classification and the features and forms of [the ethnic groups"] intellectual and material culture" were mentioned. Mac Duong even singled out Madeleine Colani and Jeanne Cuisinier, two researchers at the EFEO for their "greatest contribution to ethnography". Colani () was a reputed archeologist who later organized ethnographic courses at the University of Hanoi in which she defended a comparative approach. Cuisinier [39]() did extensive fieldwork among the Muong (strongly influenced by Mauss) and after her departure from Vietnam did further work in Indonesia and Malaysia[40].

Such balanced judgment of the scientific legacy of the past was not always upheld by those historians who were part of the History Institute of the DRV and of which the Division of Ethnography was a part. Many were divided in their opinions about the value of archeological and historical work left by the French. Some called it "an Augias stable to be cleaned by the waters of a revolutionary Alpheus", while others defended the groundwork laid by historians like Henri Maspero, Léonard Aurousseau, orientalists like Emile Gaspardone and Maurice Durand, who served also as the last director before the EFEO had to leave Hanoi in 1959 (Boudarel 1987: 16-18). The debate was not new and formed a continuation of earlier debates on Vietnamese history (see Marr 1979: 313-339).

Was there a connection between the work done by French and Vietnamese ethnographers during the colonial period and the policies applied by the revolutionary state after 1945 ? The men who are discussed here belonged to divergent intellectual circles, and certainly did not share a common or coherent political vision. None of them converted to Marxism-Leninism, although some served the independent state as government minister or director of scientific institutions[41]. In their writings, they showed in different degrees that the colonial system had failed to meet the needs of the peasantry, but solutions to solve this were not given or only partly offered. Their vision on the village society as the cornerstone of Vietnamese society was shared by many of their French colleagues. In this regard the colonial and nationalist agenda's even went parallel. The radical answer given by Vo Nguyen Giap and Truong Chinh in their analysis of rural socio-economic relations was not always given, but the urge for an agrarian program was shared[42].

After 1945, some made the decision to join the Viet Minh and subsequently stayed in the North, while others left for the South. The available sources in Vietnamese or foreign languages do not warrant any clear indication about personal involvement of the above mentioned ethnographers who served the new government of the DRV into policy debates concerning agrarian policies (see White 1982: 33-68). After 1953, with the prospect of a victory against the French, class analysis studies dominated the policies of the newly established state. Many of these analyses were based upon prior Chinese experience, although the Vietnamese did not comply with it in every aspect (see Woodside 1976: 248ff; Boudarel 1983; Vo 1990: 2-59). The least one can say is that the critical assessment towards the village and its institutions like the village council as a domain where "feudal" elements persisted and class differentiation was upheld by the ruling elites, has prepared the groundwork for more radical policies. The strength of the traditional village institutions, was partly broken by the Viet Minh, but the corporate basis of the traditional rural system was taken into account when it came to change the organizational frameworks. Unlike China, Vietnamese cooperatives mostly covered the territorial and social boundaries of the traditional villages and went seldom beyond it (Woodside 1976: 248-276). The acceleration of the socialist development path in the North did not favor independent scholarly research in the countryside.

In the South, the Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem embarked on a half-hearted land reform which left the majority of the middle-level and rich landowners unaffected. Diem's early "agroville"-program and subsequent strategic-hamlet program had clearly military-strategic motives to steal a march on the Vietcong, but both also served as local variants of the community development movement which was underway in the rest of Asia. A keen observer of South Vietnamese politics pointed in this regard to Diem's ill-conceived vision of Vietnamese rural life based on personal experience in central and northern Vietnam, where villages constituted relatively closed systems. In the eyes of Diem and his successors, the village became a pivotal target in the policy of modern nation-building (Paige 1975: 302-333; Jamieson 1993: 237)[43].

Some village studies were undertaken in the South before and after the Geneva Accords, but the war situation made further longitudinal village studies difficult and even impossible. From 1965, when the war with the Americans got an open character, up to 1976, general scholarly interest in Indochina, and in Vietnam in particular, was comparatively huge, but faded away in the post war years. Virtually nothing is written in the decade that followed. The scholarly sediment of the huge American intervention in Indochina has been labeled as "minute" and as "an enormous price paid for a one-sided scholarship" (Scott 1992: 2). Others also laid the blame for it at the political and institutional shortsightedness from the American central government as well from academe ending up in a surprising "superficiality - spurious contemporaneity - of American knowledge about the region" (Scott 1992: 3; Anderson 1992: 30; cfr. also Pletsch 1981).

Victor King's recent reappraisal of Southeast Asian Studies expressed concern about the sad state of academic field research in the countries generally labeled as Indochina: "(T)here has been very little sociological and anthropological research worth mentioning (...) during the past 30 years, and not much in the radical tradition, either" (King 1994: 176). King put the blame on various reasons, one of the most important being the "divisiveness of the Vietnam War in the U.S. academic community".

Studies based on grass-root research in Vietnam, are indeed, especially in the North, extremely scarce and limited. For several years now the first results of anthropological research have begun to trickle in, trying to bridge a gap of field studies over a span of fifty years[44]. Given this record it is not surprising to find that serious restudies of villages are utterly lacking, which makes any attempt to reassess the development process at the local level a hazardous effort, if not fruitless[45].



Conclusions:

The French colonial state was beset by the dilemma to collect tax and recruit labor from the villages while at the same time it lacked the personnel to enforce, leaving it - at least in the northern and central Vietnam- to an indigenous elite who profited largely from it. This explains why colonial administrators, jurists and scholars have written so much about the "Vietnamese commune". Undoubtedly, these writings have given rise to the well-worn cliché of "the Vietnamese village" as a somewhat "closed" society, "hidden behind thick bamboo hedges". The colonial discourse has surely attributed to reïfied elements of "the Vietnamese village", but it would go too far to suggest that the Northern Vietnamese village serves as a reconstruction by the colonial state (cfr. Breman 1988 and Kemp 1988).

The interlinkage between state and village in Vietnam is mostly expressed by the famous proverb "the laws of the emperor bow to the customs of the village" (Phep vua thua le lang). It led to uncritical assessments of village autonomy by Vietnamese and foreign scholars (Mus 1947; 1952: 24; see also Le Thanh Khoi 1955; McAlister 1970; Fitzgerald 1972). In the North, this notion was reinforced by the practice of village endogamy and by a rigidly established versus outsiders mentality expressed by the term "of the village", "insiders" (noi tich) for those who were born in the village in contrast to "outsiders", i.e. those who were born elsewhere (ngoai tich). These were unable to own land in the village unless they acquired so by marriage, by paying substantial fees to the village council or by the use of middlemen who rent land from outside landowners (Popkin 1979; Luong 1992: 56ff). Romantic Vietnamese images of the village and of rural people go back to the early 1920's and created "a semimyth of village "autonomy" ". At the same time this autonomy was "taken seriously enough by Vietnamese villagers to guarantee the security through non implication of village elites, at times when central governments themselves were incurring great odium" (Woodside 1971: 117).

Another theme is whether the colonial literature generated in this regard enough insight to be used for development purposes of the state. Attempts to reform the village organization have been undertaken since the 1910's, but they did not succeed. Proposals to transform the agricultural basis of the colonial society were presented as well. The revolution and the subsequent Indochina Wars made these proposals obsolete, at least in the North where another developmental path has been chosen. What the colonial state did not accomplish, was succeeded by the Marxist state, at least for a certain period: the transformation of the village.

With it came a thorough reorganization of ceremonies and religious practices. Many of these ceremonies received state-run functions following a pattern similar to what happened in other Asian states which tried to modernize and to build nationhood[46].

The irony of this intervention is, however, that the intended reform has produced an totally unintended outcome: the new predominance of the "family economy" in the wake of market-oriented reforms implemented since the late 1980's has led to a reinforcement of roles and power relations within villages and households. The decreasing influence of the power of the state has led to an intensification of ritual and religious practices (Luong 1993;1994a; Malarney 1993; Kleinen 1993; 1994). Wedding and funeral ceremonies have been modified greatly in line with status differentiation among villagers.

This current upsurge of ceremonies and rituals in Northern Vietnam has led to what Luong has termed the "dialogic re-structuration of rituals" which is not "simply the revitalization of pre-1954 forms and structure" (1994a: 1). Against the backdrop of the paucity of contemporary studies, the works of the above mentioned French and Vietnamese scholars suddenly become important sources of information and priceless reservoirs of knowledge. Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese students of society and culture increasingly use these texts today. In Vietnam itself at the moment these writings are reprinted or translated with the tacit approval of the central authorities who banned most of them after the establishment of the Marxist-Leninist state in North Vietnam in 1954 and later after the military takeover of the South in 1975. By using these texts the risk of reconstructing the past into the present is very real, especially when village society is the object of reification (cfr. Fabian 1983). Critical contextualization is thus called for, especially when one considers the tremendous changes the rural society of Vietnam has undergone since the 1940's.

Many of the pre-1954 ceremonies and rituals have been adapted and modified, but in more ways than one they are not changed intrinsically. The contributions by colonial ethnography can help shed new lights on the ongoing developments in this interesting area of study.




[1] Cadière,L.M., La famille et la religion en pays annamite. In: Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hué. 17:4, Octobre- Décembre 1930: 353-413.

[2] The development from amateur ethnographer to the professional fieldworker was not an uncommon feature in the first quarter of the century. See Stocking (1983) and Pels (1990).

[3] I consider one of Cadière's fellow priests, Father Henri-Emmanuel Souvignet () in the same vein. Souvignet worked in the Red River delta, in the provinces of Nam Dinh and Hai Duong (Phu Ly). In his early years, he had defended the mission post of Ke So in the province of Nam Dinh in 1884 against those who at the time were labeled without much nuance Vietnamese "pirates", but who were in reality resisting mandarins who fought bitterly the French. But in his writings Souvignet differed from his fellow priests by not conforming to the dominant view of seeing the Vietnamese as purely objects to convert for Christianity. His encyclopedic works on the language, history and culture of Vietnam deserve renewed attention not the least because of the serious attempt to abstain from pejorative and racist remarks about the conquered population. H.E. Souvignet, Variétés Tonkinoises. Hanoi: F. Schneider, 1903 (published under pseudonym A-B). A second part, totally devoted to the Vietnamese language, was published in 1922.

[4] France's reluctant "civilizing mission" in Indochina is expressed by often contradictory policies emanating from the theories of "assimilation" and "association". See Betts (1961); Osborne (1969). The term "civilizing missioners" is adapted by Osborne 1969: .

[5] J. Perin, La vie et l'oeuvre de Luro. In Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Indochinoises, Ser. II. Tome XV, No 1-2, II, 1940, pp.13-27. In the same issue: an anthology of Luro's writings by G. Taboulet (1940: 27-113).

[6] On Philastre's life, see: Nel, "Philastre, sa vie et son oeuvre" in B.S.E.I.de Saigon, XLIV (1902), 3-27.

[7] His direct superiors in Indochina proved to be less favorable. During the ten years he acted as resident of several provinces in Tonkin, Ory received insulting and negative remarks on his career-list. His profound knowledge of Vietnamese society, however, is highly praised, even by his most outspoken critics. From these notices, one gets the impression that he had tense relations with his fellow Frenchmen and those mandarinal officials who served the French for their own sake. Probably, his close contacts with the Vietnamese population were not appreciated very much by his colleagues, while the mandarins didn't like his muckraking writings about their corrupt practices in the villages. Dossier personnel du M. Paul Ory in Dossiers personnels du R.S. d'Annam, AOM AIX Amiraux, no. 30582.

[8] According to Popkin, the council of notables was composed of 12 men elected by families with full membership in the village (1979: 93). Ory mentions seven different positions within the council, but the number of notables is not limited (1894: 24-26). Popkin confuses the council with a special committee composed of leaders of age-groups to organize the main ceremony of the Tutelary Genius at the beginning of the Lunar Year.

[9] An adequate translation of Bourdieu's term "champ" or "play ground with its specific stakes" (1992: 49) is made by D. Pels as " a network or configuration of objective relationships between objectively defined positions which heavily influence the actors who occupy these positions" (D. Pels in Bourdieu 1992: 12).

[10] The creation of the School followed a 19th century tradition which had started with Napoleon who created the Institut d'Egypte. Subsequent governments founded the Ecoles Françaises d'Athènes and de Rome.

[11] Nationalist sentiments in 1907 and 1908 gave rise to disturbances of the colonial order (an anti-taxation movement in Central-Vietnam led by Phan Chu Trinh and an attempt to poison French soldiers in Hanoi). The French reacted by repression and a closer scrutiny of mandarin-scholars, including the colonial press (See Munholland 1975; Boudarel 1976: 145-152; Kleinen 1991).

[12] Not counted here are the so-called special publications in the series Arts Asiatiques(number unknown), the Bibliothèque de l'EFEO (2), the Mémoires archéologiques (2), the Collection de Textes et Documents sur l'Indochine (6) and the Publications hors serie (11). Except the last one, which contained the highly informative Cahiers, none was devoted to the lowland population.

[13] The obituary of Jean Przyluski was written by the anthropologist Paul Lévy, at the time director of the EFEO, but he did not mention Przyluski's service to the Deuxième Bureau in the form of several well informed reports on various Vietnamese nationalists who had taken refuge in China. See Boudarel 1987: 15; Dân Viêtnam (Le peuple Vietnamien) 2, December 1948, pp. 51-53.

[14] Time and availability of sources prevent me from qualify this statement much further at the moment. It is, e.g., not clear which links existed between the members of the EFEO and the Société d'anthropologie de Paris, founded in 1859 by the physical anthropologist Paul Broca () or the Société d'ethnographie américaine et orientale, founded by the physiologist Claude Bernard () in the same year (See Sylvain Auroux and George Stocking in Rupp-Eisenreich, 1984).

[15] M.Mauss, Essai d'une instruction pour l'étude sociologique des sociétés indochinoises. In Premier Congrès International des Etudes sur l'Extrême Orient. Hanoi:1902; pp. 115-116. The paper was read by H. Hubert, a member of the EFEO.

[16] Robequain was also involved in ethnographic research in Hoa Binh and Cho Bo, but did not publish his findings. The study on Thanh Hoa appeared in 1929: Le Thanh Hoa: Etude géographique d'une province annamite. Paris: Van Oest, 1929 (2 volumes).

[17] Charles Robequain, The Economic Development of French Indochina. London and New York, 1944; Pierre Gourou, L'Utilisation du sol en Indochine. Paris: CEPE, 1940.

[18] Much of the information presented here is taken from a long interview which I had with Pierre Gourou at his home in Brussels in August 1994. Additional data are found in two long papers I presented at the Trivandrum workshop and at the 2nd EUROVIET conference in Aix-en-Provence (May 1995). Biographical information is also obtained by Hugues Tertrais, "Pierre Gourou, Le delta du Fleuve Rouge et la géographie", in Lettre de l'Afrase, No 29, 1er trimestre 1993, and Pierre Gourou, Mon orientation tropicaliste, in Leçons de géographie tropicale et subtropicale: colloque organisé en l'honneur de Pierre Gourou, Nijmegen, 27 October 1988.

[19] The book was accepted as a Doctorate thesis, printed in Brugge (Belgium) and published in an unknown number. A Japanese pirated edition appeared in 1943, followed by an American version, translated by Richard R. Miller, in 1955. Both editions served strategic-military interests. Thirty years later a new, and unrevised edition appeared, published by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris and printed by Mouton, the Hague.

[20] The research for this "supplementary thesis" took place in the summer of 1935 in one and a half month time (see P. Gourou, Esquisse d'une étude de l'habitation annamite dans l'Annam septentrional et central du Thanh Hoa au Binh Dinh. Paris:Eds d'Art et d'histoire 1936b).

[21] Journals like Nam Phong (Southern Winds (or Ethos) Journal) and L'Annam Nouveau regularly published stories with a social background. See for the publishing activities in a colonial setting Marr, op.cit., 1981: 44-53.

[22] The Inspection général de l'agriculture, de l'élevage et des forêts was founded in 1925 and consisted of 3 separate departments with their own research institutes. For agricultural banking and credit, 2 departments were created. In 1930 the Office Indochinois du riz was established which dealt exclusively with rice production, especially in the Mekong delta.The Bulletin Economique de l'Indochine founded in 1898 served as the main platform for agronomic questions. An overview is given in Brocheux and Hemery 1995: 126-127.

[23] At the same time that Gourou undertook his visits to the field, the chief agronomist of the Agronomic Office, Yves Henry, appeared as an expert-witness for a special Criminal Court to investigate the backgrounds of the suppressed Nghe-Tinh rebellion.

[24] "Les solutions locales à apporter au problème du surpeuplement du delta tonkinois", Rapport de M. Pierre Gourou pour la 3e Sous-Commission in AOM AIX Guernut, dossier Bc 23 (1937), 34 pages. With respect to the Montagnard population, the Guernut Commission seemed to have had more success (cfr. Salemink 1992: 262-263).

[25] A roneotyped summary of part III of the conclusion of Les Paysans was presented at the Ninth Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1945.

[26] Nguyen Van Vinh () (aka Tan Nam Tu) was an enthusiastic promotor of the vulgarization of quoc-ngu. Together with a French publisher, F.H. Schneider, he founded in 1912 the Dong Duong Tap Chi (Journal de l'Indochine), a quoc-ngu newspaper which encouraged modernization along French lines. The reorganization of the village administration was a theme Vinh picked up as a member of the Consultative Assembly for North Vietnam. Coming from a poor peasant background, Vinh had a substantial knowledge of village life in North Vietnam (Biographical background in Marr 1981: 116-117; 151-152; Jamieson 1993: 65-69; 71-80).

[27] Debates about Gourou's approach have been held regularly, recently with highly critical undertones as is shown in one of the contributions in M. Bruneau and D. Dory 1994. See also the various contributions in the journal L'Espace Géographique, volumes 4(3) and 13 (4), 1975 and 1984. I thank Chr. Taillard (LASEMA) for pointing me to these debates. Gourou's continuous defence of immersion in field work has, however, not remained unnoticed by his colleagues and admirers and explains at least a part of the reason why the University of Nijmegen honored him with a Doctorate honoris causa in 1988.

[28] Nguyen Van Huyen, Nguyen Van To and Tran Van Giap are mentioned in the Notabilités D'Indochine (1943: 26; 37 and 92), a colonial "who's who?" of important Indochinese collaborators of the French. Nguyen Van To even received the Order of the Knight of the Legion of Honor.

[29] Quoted from "Le problème de la paysannerie annamite au Tonkin", published in 1939, but being the modified text of a conference Huyen held in 1937 (see Cahiers de l'EFEO 11, 2e trimestre, 1937, pp.12-14).

[30] Vu Van Hien was the author of a critical thesis on communal lands in Tonkin (1939), which he defended in Paris; Dao Duy Anh was a prominent lexicographer who published in 1938 An Outline History of Vietnamese Culture, a best-seller which was republished in Saigon, 1951. Marr calls it "one of the best works of scholarship produced by the Vietnamese intelligentsia" (1981: 438). Excerpts in Jamieson 1993: 91-92).

[31] Nguyen van Huyen, "Histoire de la fondation d'une commune annamite au Tonkin (17 mai 1940)". In Bulletins et Travaux Institut Indochinois pour l'Etude de l'Homme (III). 1, 1940, pp. 135-136. Other conferences focused on tatoos, the caste-like differentiation among village-elites, funeral customs, name giving practices of the royal family, indigenous law and taoist cults venerating immortal beings.

[32] The first Counseil fédéral was founded in 1941 and its members all Vietnamese. Its successor in 1943 was composed of Vietnamese and European members. Pinto called the institution "a real caricature", "a model of mistrust" and "a parody" comparable to the imperial councils of the past (Pinto 1946: 58-59).

[33] Members were e.g. Leopold-Michel Cadière, Pierre Coedes and Louis Malleret. Other Vietnamese members were Hoang Xuan Han, the later Minister of Education under the Tran Tong Kim government, Ngo Dinh Nhu, brother of the later president Ngo Dinh Diem, Vu Van Hien, a lawyer (see also note 33) and Phan Quynh, who became Minister of Interior of the Tran Tong Kim government.

[34] See e.g. General Education of the D.R.V.N., Hanoi: Vietnamese Studies, 1976. A comprehensive bibliography in Vietnamese was published in 1990, followed by an integral translation into Vietnamese of Nguyen Van Huyen's French writings (forthcoming in 1995; see Nguyen 1990; 1992; personal communication by Nguyen Van Huy, Nguyen Van Huyen's son).

[35] For his and similar work of Nguyen Cong Hoan, see Marr 1981 and Boudarel 1991.

[36] Tim hieu kho sach han nom. Nguon tu lieu van hoc, su hoc Viet Nam (Essay on the bibliography in Chinese and Nom caracters. The sources of Vietnamese literature and history. Hanoi, 1970. See also Boudarel 1987: 13-14).

[37] Nguyen Thieu Lau, La réforme agraire de 1839 dans le Binh Dinh. In BEFEO 45 (1&2), 1951: 119-129. Quoc Su Tap Luc (Essays on National History), Saigon: Khai Tri.

[38] For the continuity between the EFEO and contemporary Vietnamese scholarship, see Boudarel in Ngo Kim Chung (e.a.), 1987: 7-63). The quotation is taken from an article by Grant Evans, Vietnamese communist anthropology. In Canberra Anthropology 8 (1 & 2), 1985, 121-122. Evans gives an overview of post-1945 developments.

[39] Obituary of Colani by E.Saurin in IIEH pour 1943, 1944,pp.17-23.

[40] Obituary in BEFEO, LIII-1, 1965, by Jean Filliozat.

[41] After 1941 Nguyen Van To, Tran Van Giap and Dao Duy Anh formed with others the clandestine "Vietnamese National Salvation Culture Association" (Hoi Van Hoa Cuu Quoc), an affiliate of the Viet-Minh (Marr 1979: 337).

[42] The works of Gourou, Henry and Robequain were used extensively to demonstrate agrarian class relations of the 1930's. In the first official publication covering the Land Reform period and the situation in the South, Henry's L'Economie agricole de l'Indochine is used more than often: Tran Phuong (ed.), Cach mang ruong dat o Viet Nam, Phan I ve VI [The Land Revolution in Vietnam, Parts I to VI], Hanoi, 1968.


[43] Researchers from the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group studied intensively the village of Khanh Hau (in Long An province) between March 1958 and December 1959. In 1962 the village became part of the Strategic Hamlet Program (Ap Chien Luoc). The belief that the village was a pivotal element in nation-building did not disappear with the program. In 1971 political and military strategy still was geared towards community development (see The Vietnamese Village, Handbook for Advisors, by the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), the main agency for pacification programs.

[44] Houtart and Lemercinier's (1981) La Sociologie d'une commune vietnamienne is a useful study, based on a survey-type method of research, of a Catholic village in the province of Nam Dinh, at the time part of Thai Binh, the rice-basket of the Red River delta of northern Vietnam. Le Trong Cuc and A. Terry Rambo (eds) presented a research report of Nguyen Xa village, also in Thai Binh province, using the rapid rural appraisal method (1993). Tuong Lai's (ed) (1991) collection of articles on the Vietnamese family (1991) provides valuable insights of family life in some northern villages. Luong's (1992) Revolution in the village is by far now a most authoritative ethnographic study of Son Duong, a village in the Red River delta. Shaun Kingsley Malarney (1993) studied Thinh Liet commune on the southern outskirts of the city of Hanoi in 1992. My own study in Lang To village, 25 kilometers South-West of Hanoi was conducted in 1992, supplemented with two revisits in 1993 and 1994 (see Kleinen 1993; and forthcoming).

[45] A first attempt is undertaken by Luong (1994) who revisited the village of Khanh Hau in the Mekong-delta, where Hickey (1968) and members of the Michigan State University conducted fieldwork in the late fifties and early sixties.

[46] Ann S.Anagnost termed this the "politics of ritual displacement" to describe the attempt to transform authority from religious communities to the state See A.S. Anagnost in Keyes 1994: 221-255.



(A) The author would like to thank the participants of the Trivandrum
Workshop and the Second Euroviet Conference for making
valuable comments and suggestions on earlier papers.
The following colleagues especially provided insights
and helped the author locate texts: Jan Breman,
Georges Condominas, Do Van Anh, Hanneke 't Hart,
Nguyen Dinh Dau, Nguyen Van Huy and Otto van den
Muizenberg. Special thanks are due to Cao Xuan Tu for
correcting and editing this text. A grant from the
Cultural Agreement with India enabled the author to
visit the Trivandrum Workshop in January 1995. A
preliminray version has been published in Ethnographic
Praxis and the Colonial State in Vietnam. In P.Le Failler and J.M.
Mancini,. Vietnam: Sources et Approches. Proceedings of the 2nd EUROVIET
Conference, Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence,
pp.15 - 49.

(B) This does not mean that Vietnam's intellectuals did not become the
target of harsh Party measures during the fifties and later. See in this
regard G. Boudarel, Cent Fleurs écloses dans la nuit du Vietnam:
communisme et dissidence, .Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991a. Access to
the archives of the Ministries of Education and of Culture reveal a more
complicated story, as is demonstrated by Kim Ninh (1994).

(C) See e.g. Patrick J.N. Tuck, French Catholic Missionaries
and the Politics of Imperialism, . Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press. The thesis is based on archival
sources of the Foreign Missions in Paris.

(D) The quotation is from a protestant pastor Théophile
Boisset in his A travers le Tonkin pendant la guerre.
Paris, 1892. An exemplary attitude is demonstrated by the
French priest L. Girod in Dix ans de Haut- Tonkin. Tours:
Maison Alfred Mame et Fils, (1899). The inscription of the
book is 'to the missionaries and soldiers of Tonkin, one of
them'. The book was reprinted 5 times between 1899 and
1911.

Watch Anime Online | Mortgage Calculator | Fast Loans | Platinum Credit Cards | Loans