In 1993, the same year that O. W. Wolters gave the speech in Jakarta about Southeast Asia that I mentioned in the previous post, Vietnamese scholar Đinh Gia Khánh published a book called Văn hóa dân gian Việt Nam trong bối cảnh văn hóa Đông Nam Á (Vietnamese Folk Culture in the Context of Southeast Asian Culture).
Đinh Gia Khánh stated directly in the first lines of the preface of that work that “Taking the title of ‘Vietnamese Folk Culture in the Context of Southeast Asian Culture,’ this study aims first and foremost to establish the place of Vietnamese folk culture in the folk culture of Southeast Asia in particular, and in Southeast Asian culture in general.”
[Với nhan đề “Văn hóa dân gian Việt Nam trong bối cảnh văn hóa Đông Nam Á,” chuyên luận này nhằm mục đích trước hết là xác định tọa độ văn hóa dân gian Việt Nam trong văn hóa dân gian Đông Nam Á nói riêng và văn hóa Đông Nam Á nói chung.]
To do this, Đinh Gia Khánh relied on the earlier work of French scholar George Coedès to argue that there was a “cultural substratum” (cơ tầng văn hóa) across the region. In his The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Coedès described this cultural substratum as follows (I’ve attached images from Đinh Gia Khánh’s text below for those who read Vietnamese. He makes many of the same points.):
“. . . with regard to material culture, the cultivation of irrigated rice, domestication of cattle and buffalo, rudimentary use of metals, knowledge of navigation; with regard to the social system, the importance of the role conferred on women and of relationships in the maternal line, and in organizations resulting from the requirement of irrigated agriculture; with regard to religion, belief in animism, the worship of ancestors and the god of the soil. . .”
So in 1993, O. W. Wolters and Đinh Gia Khánh both argued (as Coedès had earlier and as people continue to do so today) that there was “something” that tied Southeast Asia together, and while Wolters and Đinh Gia Khánh focused on different points, they both concurred that this “something” had very deep historical roots.
Putting aside the fact that many of the factors that these scholars identified can be found in other parts of the world and therefore don’t distinguish Southeast Asia, let’s assume for the moment that there was a cultural substratum that existed far in the past.
Does that matter? If so, how?
I was reminded of these questions when I came across a book by Thai historian Sujit Wongthes, Where Does Thai Music Come From?. Anyone who is familiar with the history of Southeast Asia will immediately recognize that the image on the cover of this book is from a “Đông Sơn” bronze drum.
These bronze drums are now used to demonstrate the antiquity of a cultural tradition in the area of what is now Vietnam, and in works like Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Tìm về bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam (In Search of the True Characteristics of Vietnamese Culture), the same image is used to note the early existence of music in “Vietnam.”
There is a problem, however, with both of these works. Sujit Wongthes argues that “Thai” music is part of the “family lineage” (krua yaat เครือญาติ) of music from all of mainland Southeast Asia, or what he calls Suvarnabhumi, while Trần Ngọc Thêm implies that the instrument that we see people playing on the bronze drums (the khene) is part of “Vietnam’s” musical tradition.
Both people are claiming on behalf of modern nations cultural traditions that existed long before each respective modern nation did.
That said, today the khene can be heard quite widely in Thailand. You don’t hear it in “mainstream” music, but it has been incorporated into modern Lao music, and there are many ethnic Lao in northeastern Thailand, and many of them move to Bangkok to work, so music that employs the khene can easily be heard.
In Vietnam, by contrast, the khene is not part of any major musical tradition. There might be some people in the mountains who play it, but it has not “survived” and remained part of the larger society.
So does this mean that “Thai” musical culture is more closely related to the “Southeast Asian cultural substratum” than the “Vietnamese” music tradition is? After all, today we can easily hear on a radio station in Thailand the sound of the khene, an instrument that is represented on the Đông Sơn bronze drums from the time when the “Southeast Asian cultural substratum” was formed.
Or perhaps the idea of a “Southeast Asian cultural substratum” just isn’t a very helpful concept. If it is helpful, then what does it help explain?
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Again, love your blog, especially entries like this, it gives me something to think about and question what I’ve always thought to be fact.
yea, what I have found is that when students from Vietnam go to a place like the US, if they want to study about culture, then they have to spend A LOT of time “unlearning” what people like Tran Ngoc Them taught them, and then they have to acquire a new body of knowledge.
It’s an enormous waste of time. If students in Vietnam did not have to study the stuff that Tran Ngoc Them’s book teaches them, then they would be much better prepared to study abroad.
I’ve spent a lot of time in Taiwan. Taiwanese academics are very “international.” When students from Taiwan go to a place like the US, there is no “shock.” They can very quickly follow what is going on, because it’s the same as what they were taught in Taiwan. They need to adapt to a new linguistic environment, but the concepts they encounter are not new (because most of their undergraduate professors have PhDs from the US/UK/Australia/Canada, etc.).
It would be nice if one day Vietnam was like that, because then in reading a blog like this you would not have to “question what I’ve always thought to be fact,” because your professors would have already questioned it. 🙂
Wow, what a response! It sounds rather ‘imperialist’ to me how you referred to those Taiwanese scholars/academics and how ‘international’ they are/have been because of their exposure to ‘the West’. While this holds a certain degree of truth, I also think you may want to take a step back and look more critically at the question of knowledge production and the concept of epistemology (how we know what we know).
Oh, I feel bad to use the term ‘imperialist’ here but I hope you see that I am constructive and just want to further the discussion on the nature of learning and unlearning.
Oh, I LOVE comments like this!!! Thank you, Kuching!!!
Right, so let’s look at what Đinh Gia Khánh wrote in 1993. He said that “from the middle of the 20th century, scholars have defined the factors that created the common cultural substratum (substrat culturel commun) of the various peoples in prehistory. G. Coedès. . . “
[“. . . từ giữa thế kỷ XX, các nhà khoa học đã xác định được những yếu tố làm nên cơ tầng văn hóa chung (substrat culturel commun) của các tộc cư dân ấy trong thời kỳ tiền sử. G. Coedès. . .”]
Who are the “scholars” that Đinh Gia Khánh was referring to? Đào Duy Anh? No. Trần Huy Liệu? No. He was referring to a “Westerner” – Georges Coedès.
In the 20th century, Vietnam became part of the “Western knowledge empire.” At first the “metropole” of that empire was Paris, and then for some it was Moscow while for others it became Washington DC, and then since Đổi Mới it has become a lot of different places – Warsaw, Paris, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Taipei, Bangkok, San Francisco, etc.
The reason why there can be multiple metropoles is because “Western” knowledge has become “universal” knowledge. There is nothing in Đinh Gia Khánh’s work that reflects the ideas of Lê Quý Đôn or Phan Huy Chú or Nguyễn Du or Phạm Đình Hổ. What he wrote in this work follows what Georges Coedès wrote 100%.
The “problem,” however, is that scholarship does not stand still in this “universal world” of scholarship. That said, it doesn’t develop everywhere at the same speed and in the same ways. One idea might get developed in one area and another idea in another area, but ideas keep changing and somewhere in the world of “universal scholarship” the ideas of people like Georges Coedès come to be challenged.
America has been the place where the most “activity” has taken place in the past few decades, but many of the theorists who have influenced that activity have come from other places – Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas, Gramsci, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, etc.
So if everyone is participating in the same world of universal knowledge, how can someone be an “imperialist”? If there are people who do not know about developments that have taken place in this universal world of scholarship, and someone points that out, then how is that person an imperialist?
Đinh Gia Khánh already acknowledged that he was participating in this universal world of knowledge. However, in other places, ideas have moved beyond those of Georges Coedès. Taiwanese scholars have kept up with those changes better than Vietnamese scholars have. In pointing that out, am I really being imperialistic?
Thanks. Your response makes a great sense and raises more questions regarding the origin of knowledge that was pushed a lot during the decolonisation period and has been picked up again by critical theorists and/or academic activists over the past decade.
I think one trouble is that we seem to be stuck in the politics of terminologies and binary terms, despite the simultaneous awareness of the limitations associated with categorising the world in this way.
I asked you the question above and am so glad to see that you acknowledge the multiplicities of ‘origins’ of ideas (we will deal with the term origin later).
Let’s continue the discussion here. Thanks!
The “origin of knowledge” debate[s]? I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Could you explain a bit more?
Well I will need to write a very long response to answer your question, so will try to redirect my response to a related issue, which is the ownership of knowledge and who is considered ‘the knower’ when it comes to talking about Asia or Southeast Asia for instance.
I had a really good conversation with a colleague yesterday about this issue. He is very concerned about many practices endorsed in many places, settings and contexts that conflate one’s ethnic and national background with one’s expert knowledge of where the person was born or comes from. For example, so many public events on ‘Asia and working with Asia’ in the West have identified Asians as the authority figure, the knower of Asia, and the authentic expert of the region just because these Asians are Asian by ethnicity and by their look. He says this practice is so ‘racist’.
Reflecting on himself, he says he would feel totally inadequate to ‘represent’ his country in any scholarly event if he is seen as an expert of that place by virtue of his ethnicity. He acknowledges that his skin colour is Asian, his body look is Asian, but what is in his head about the history of where he comes from is just so superficial compared to that of many foreigners who have been studying about his country and reading and generating knowledge about the place.
He also shares with me his observations of PhD students who claim to ‘know’ their countries when coming to work with their ‘foreign’ supervisors. He says so many assertions such students have made about their countries are so superficial, take policy studies and history for example. He did tell them boldly “You know much better about the history of ideas embedded in this ‘Western’ scholar’s work than you do about anything from where you come from. So in what way is your claim reliable and valid? How can you talk about academic reforms in your country when you yourself have a very superficial idea about what constitutes problems in the academia in your country? Don’t think that just because you come from China or Indonesia you can say with authority about that place and everybody will buy what you claim to know as authentic and valid.”
Oh well, I must agree with him that knowledge is in one’s head, not in one’s ‘ethnicity’ by default.
Sorry I wrote this response in a hurry (midnight and I am sleepy after a long day) so my expressions are a little clumsy.
One thing that happens to some people but doesn’t happen to a lot of others is that they find a way to “step outside what they know and then look back at it from the outside.” There are various ways that this can happen.
So, for instance, I wish I could find my PhD dissertation proposal, because I said that I was going to do the opposite of what I ended up writing. In my proposal I said that I was going to write about “Vietnamese resistance to the Chinese hegemonic/Orientalist discourse” or something like that. When, however, I actually started to read primary sources, I realized that there was no “resistance” to anything. I then went back and looked at the studies I had read earlier and then compared what those scholars wrote with what was actually recorded in the primary sources and found that there were major differences.
This was a kind of “wake up call” for me. Similarly, I met a Chinese grad student a few years ago who told me something similar. In her case, it was that she accessed a lot of information about China after she went overseas that made her realize that what she learned in China was not necessarily accurate. This was her “wake up call.”
I don’t know what your colleague’s background is, but my guess would be that he had a “wake up call” at some point too.
That said, many many people never get that “wake up call.” They believe the scholarship that they study, and they never have that experience where they get outside their received knowledge and see the flaws in it. To be fair, every scholar can find faults with earlier scholarship to some degree or another, but there is something “larger” that is possible to see as well, and not everyone sees that. And there can be various reasons for this. The people who get the “wake up call” are not necessary more intelligent [although I of course am. . . 😉 ], it can depend on what they research and what has been written before on that topic, their access to knowledge through a foreign language that other people don’t access, etc.
The people who see Asians as “the knowers” (and the opposite is true too, right? You don’t have to be “European” to “know” “Europe”) haven’t received the “wake up call.”
Yeah I like what you say here about the “wake up call”. I have had such a wake up call at different stages of my learning journey. Actually I think one potential danger of the wake up call could be that it may lead us to the total rejection of our prior knowledge and the total adoption of the opposite to what we’ve learnt; and in fact I have seen a lot of cases like this. Either total adoption or rejection is unproductive.
I think no knowledge is entirely useless or meaningless, because even in the case of totally superficial knowledge it at least offers us some motivation to do better and/or to take a few steps further to understand why such superficial knowledge has had the power to influence so deeply some social behaviours and practices. For example, why such term as “cultural constant” (hang so van hoa) used in “Tim ve ban sac van hoa Viet Nam” by author Tran Ngoc Them has been referred to so often when cultural identification takes place or evolves? Knowledge is hardly neutral.
What’s more, on the one hand while the concept ‘cultural constant’ is problematic, it on the other hand does serve a lot of purposes, one of which is the production of critical scholarship as a result of ‘engaging’ with problematic scholarship.
To give you another example, there is a growing trend to talk about the rise of Asia and how its strong cultural Confucian heritage has been contributing to Asia’s reclaim of economic and intellectual power. This Confucian heritage has been taken for granted by so many scholars as being harmonious, unified, uncontested, and non-political throughout the history of East Asia and some SEA territories. It has been used as a sexy yet value-empty term in explaining the prosperity and the discipline of such societies. A lot of current scholarship is actually celebrating this trend. This is totally superficial, yet there must be something about ‘Confucianism’ that might have given way to North Asia’s competitiveness and its obsession of rankings in all aspects of their societies. So examining superficial scholarship is pretty fun when it gives so much room to ask many many questions.
But I need more wake up calls to deal with the commercialisation brought about by such Confucian heritage cultures as well :). Help!!!!!!
“I think one potential danger of the wake up call could be that it may lead us to the total rejection of our prior knowledge and the total adoption of the opposite to what we’ve learnt” – people who do that haven’t “woken up,” they’re still asleep, but are having an exciting dream.
Thinking about the present importance of “Confucianism” is one such dream. I was at a dinner a few weeks ago where this Taiwanese (mainlander) professor who has lived in the US for many years and has a PhD from the US started saying to a professor from mainland China who has also has a PhD from the US that she was not Chinese.
He asked, “What does ‘zhong/trung 忠’ mean?”
She said, “Loyalty.”
He said, “No!” and then went on to explain how Zhu Xi/Chu Hi 朱熹 had defined that word which was something like 诚心尽力, “to be sincere in one’s heart and to exhaust one’s effort.”
So there is an enormous problem in saying that Zhu Xi = Confucianism, but I liked what he said because it immediately showed that this person (who was young), like many other people, has very little knowledge of the past, and the culture of the past does not continue in the present. And when people argue that “Confucianism” is somehow important for explaining East Asia’s “rise,” there is an assumption that it is some kind of “cultural constant.” But this Taiwan scholar basically said right to this PRC professor’s face, “You have broken the cultural constant.”
Again, I think his view is problematic too, but it was a good illustration of how people don’t think critically about these things.