Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
• Lê, Hồng Lý

Titel

The Revenge of the Object: Villagers and Ethnographers in Đồng Kỵ Village

Ist Teil von

• Asian ethnology, 2008-09, Vol.67 (2), p.323-343

Ort / Verlag

Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In 1996, the residents of Đồng Kỵ (Bắc Ninh) complained to the highest echelons of the Vietnamese state that a book published by the Institute of Cultural Studies depicted their village god as a former manure collector rather than as a mythical warrior. The villagers forced the Institute to produce new ethnographic materials that better reflected their own understanding of their current religious practices and ancient traditions. This paper locates the roots of the conflict between villagers and ethnographers in their clashing representational agendas. In their quest to document "authentic" Vietnamese traditions, urban ethnographers are also exoticizing customs rooted in a vanishing agrarian-based subsistence economy. From the perspective of villagers, however, the revival of these customs is a sign of their new prosperity which is based on the production of furniture for export. With unprecedented access to the outside world, villagers have become self-conscious about their "backward traditions" and now have the means to control how these traditions are portrayed, thus altering the relationship between ethnographers and the traditional objects of their study.