[Anthropgrad] Seminar by Binh Nguyen: 'Power and Influence in Rural Vietnam'. Friday 13th March 2009.

[John White]

Anthropology Friday Seminar Series. Semester 1, 2009. Milgate Room, AD
Hope. Friday, 13th March, 3pm.

Post-fieldwork seminar: Power and Influence in Rural Vietnam

In his essay 'the idea of power in Javanese culture', Benedict Anderson 
suggested that power has culturally specific logics that make it 
amenable to comparative analysis. Although few scholars of Vietnam have 
explicitly invoked Anderson's project, many have attempted to understand

the culturally embedded nature of power in Vietnam, with most attention 
devoted to the dynamics of the Vietnamese revolution. However, this 
scholarship tends to assume a tradition that is governed by tacit 
precepts and a culture that is unitary, bounded and defensive. As a 
consequence, it produces a thin concept of culture in general and power 
in particular. In this paper, I engage with this literature by examining

the dynamics of a protest that took place in the early 1990s in a Red 
River delta village. Based on almost one year's fieldwork in this 
village, this paper gives an account of the protest that draws upon the 
recollections, images and concepts of those villagers who were involved 
in it. Their account initially confirms findings from the scholarship on

the Vietnamese revolution, which has argued that power comes from 
hierarchy, proximity, and maintenance of an inside-outside distinction. 
Yet my ethnographic findings also reveal that power is imagined, or 
narratively constructed; it is charismatic, or embodied; and it is 
conceptualized as coming 'from outside'. Relating this account of the 
protest to my findings from other (in-progress) thesis chapters, I will 
present some preliminary conclusions on Vietnamese ideas of power and 
bring them out for comments and discussion.

Binh Nguyen
PhD Student
Department of Anthropology
ASPAS, ANU

All welcome!