VIETNAM
Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit
edited by NGUYEN VAN HUY and LAUREL KENDALL
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 303 pages, $65 (hardcover), $39.95 (paperback)

reviewed by Annabel Jackson

As editor Laurel Kendall informs us in her introduction, the projectan ethnological exhibition with a complementary textthat produced Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit represents the first major collaboration between a Vietnamese museum (the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, Hanoi) and an American museum (the American Museum of Natural History, New York). The exhibition (on view at the American Museum of Natural History through January 4, 2004) is an attempt to present Vietnamese culture in a way that reaches "beyond our troubled wartime history to an understanding of how Vietnamese . . . live at the start of the 21st century."

That the show, and book, should have happened at all is remarkable in the context of the overwhelming juxtaposition of American guilt and Vietnamese paranoia, with the former's tendency to romanticize Vietnam, and the latter's to edit heavily its everyday life. So the book, a series of chapters by different authors, is an uneven text, its limitations compounded by sadly charmless translation (in the chapters that are translated from Vietnamese into English), yet it is a welcome addition to the paucity of material on Vietnam available in the West and represents a startling diplomatic success.

In working toward a definition of Vietnamese culture within its thirteen chapters, the book demonstrates that the country's very lack of homogeneity becomes one of its defining characteristics. Vietnam's fifty-four ethnic groups (and up to twice as many dialects) render it the most diverse country in Southeast Asia. While some would argue that intense differences in culture, skills, and motivations threaten to divide the country yet again, it can also be argued that this strong sense of belonging to a specific region and ethnic group has itself become a facet of the national psyche. Indeed, as Frank Proschan postulates in the second chapter, entitled "Vietnam's Ethnic Mosaic," the country's cultural policy aims to forge unity and draw "strength and vitality from the diversity of its ethnic and regional traditions."

That the country embraces everything from Marxism to Confucianism is also unexpected but emanates from a similar context. "The Vietnamese Communist Party has learned to tolerate religious beliefs and practices," writes Oscar Salemink in the opening essay, "One Country, Many Journeys," the best essay in the collection, "even among its members, and has lately embraced a wide variety of religious practices as a way to chart a road toward modernization via the market economy."

The book's second main aspiration is to reflect contemporary Vietnamese culture, and in this it is less successful. The weakest sections of the book are the essays on traditional Vietnamese festivals, which offer little more than reference material without explanation or analysis, though we do find several such festivals in a state of revival. The Water Puppet tradition, for example, with exposure outside Vietnam, would almost certainly have died out were it not for a series of village guilds that painstakingly control the proper passing on of the art. Almost no contributor to the book writes meaningfully or at length about today's Vietnam. The ubiquitous indicators of bia hoi (street pub) karaoke parlors, Japanese motorbikes, and Korean cosmetics are as significant to everyday life as planning for the next festival, as are U.S. dollars, a good education, and perfecting English. Yet none are touched on in this anthology. Furthermore, some of the country's contemporary tourist destinations are romanticized. The famous pottery village of Bat Trang, just outside Hanoi, is not a creative hub but an ugly, puddled stretch where the quality of the ceramics is at best variable; the town of Sapa, while it is indeed high in the beautiful mountains, can too often produce ugly experiences for the tourist.

What the book does achieve is to at least bring into focus the conundrum of continuity and change within Vietnamese culture (a conundrum not unique to Vietnam). Perhaps the best symbol of the potential for a dynamic relationship between the two is in the Sapa market, where "backpack travelers wear caps fashioned by Hmong traders from [traditional] embroidered collar bands." However, already the (dominant) Kinh are moving into the Central Highlands, where the tiny minorities are based, in search of trading opportunities, their efforts often aided by NGOs and charities, such as Craft Link. The Hmong minority, largely unable to communicate in the national tongue and uneducated, have scant opportunity to access the national debate. Even the unpracticed eye can see that traditional regional street foods which used to be available on every corner can scarcely be found in the cities any longer (although cuisine is not mentioned, either, in this text).

This collection of essays, then, achieves a proportion of what it set out to do in the healing of wounds and the promotion of understanding between (at least) two cultures. But perhaps the most extraordinary fact, as one contributor points out, is that the vast majority of the population of modern-day Vietnam was not even born by the end of the Vietnam (or American) War. At least for the Vietnamese, then, the war was over a long time ago.