Recently many Vietnamese universities have started to become interested in rising up in the international university ranking system, and one of the main ways to do this is to get the scholars at one’s universities to publish internationally.
Vietnamese scholars are now under pressure to publish in “Scopus-indexed” journals, and many are either producing work in English or are having their writings translated.
Some are also having their papers rejected by international journals.
Having one’s work rejected is never an enjoyable experience, but from what I’ve observed, in the case of some Vietnamese scholars, it’s particularly difficult because it is not clear to some people why their papers are rejected.
As someone who has been interacting with Vietnamese academia for 20+ years, and who has worked for academic journals, it is very clear to me what is happening (at least in some cases), and I’ll try to explain it here.
20+ years ago when I was beginning my academic career, I accepted invitations to present my research in Vietnam. Each time I did so, whatever I said would be rejected by some of the people attending.
For a scholar to have his/her ideas challenged is fine, and is part of the profession, but what I found in Vietnam was that the ideas that were used to challenge what I said were ideas that definitely could not be used in “the West” to challenge someone’s work.
In Vietnam, the ideas that were used to challenge what I said were “essentialized” forms of knowledge. What do I mean by this?
Over the past few decades, an enormous amount of effort has been spent in Vietnam attempting to document and describe the “essence” (bản chất) of the Vietnamese nation (dân tộc Việt Nam), Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese history, etc.
In writings in Vietnam, it is very common to see examples of this, such as the following:
Vietnamese have always been uniting against foreign aggression (người Việt Nam có truyền thống đoàn kết và chống ngoại xâm)
Vietnamese are diligent and hard-working (cần cù, chịu khó)
Vietnamese are flexible (linh hoạt)
Vietnamese are studious (ham học)
Vietnamese have a tradition of respecting women (có truyền thống tôn trọng phụ nữ)
Vietnamese are flexible in the way that they chose the purest essence of humanity and Vietnam-ize international values to enrich the essence of the nation (uyển chuyển trong việc tiếp nhận tinh hoa của nhân loại và Việt hóa các giá trị quốc tế, làm phong phú bản sắc dân tộc)
Vietnam is a wet rice civilization (văn minh lúa nước)
Vietnam has a peninsular character (tính bán đảo)
The list goes on and on. . .
These are all “essentializations” or “essentialized” forms of knowledge. They are all claiming that there is some “essence” (bản chất) that never changes and that we need to understand if we want to understand “Vietnam.”
Meanwhile, for at least the past half century, Western scholars have rejected the idea that nations and cultures have an “essence.” In the process, they have provided tons of evidence that shows that “essentialized” statements about people and cultures are not true.
Societies and cultures are simply too complex. There is no way to reduce them to an “essence” (bản chất). The fact that people try to do that, is because those people want other people to think about a society or culture in a certain way, not because it actually is that way (just look at the above list – they are all positive traits – why is that?).
Vietnam has a tradition of respecting women? It is very easy to show ways that women in Vietnam are not, and historically have not, been respected. Take education, for instance. Prior to the twentieth century, Vietnamese women, in general, were not allowed to get an education. That’s not very respectful of women.
But that makes Vietnam a lot like other places in the world, such as America. If you look at America and American history, for instance, you can find countless ways in which women have been, and continue to be, discriminated against.
The difference is that today no scholar in the US would ever say in an academic article anything about a “tradition of respecting women” in America. What is more, saying something like that has been unacceptable for at least the past 50 years.
So this is now what happens: A reviewer for a journal reads a paper submitted by a Vietnamese scholar that talks about “the tradition of respecting women in Vietnam,” and about how Vietnamese are “flexible,” and how this is all because of Vietnam’s “wet rice civilization,” etc.
That reviewer knows that those are all “essentialized” statements and that we can’t make such claims about an entire society or culture. Societies and cultures are much more complex than that.
However, these “essentialized” ideas serve as the foundation for the Vietnamese scholar’s paper, and as a result, the way that the scholar analyzes the information in his/her paper is problematic too, because the analysis is based on the belief that those “essentialized” ideas are true.
So the reviewer rejects the article. In the rejection letter, the reviewer mentions that the article “has a lot of essentialized information in it,” but the Vietnamese scholar who submitted the article does not really know what that means.
And to be fair, it is extremely difficult for the Vietnamese scholar to even guess what that might mean because all of the writings that s/he has read in Vietnamese have mentioned those same points (so of course Vietnam has “a tradition of respecting women”!!).
Further, when s/he attended a talk that Liam Kelley (or some other person) gave in Vietnam, s/he listened to some of the Vietnamese scholars say to him that his ideas were wrong because he didn’t understand that “Vietnam has a tradition of respecting women,” and that Vietnamese are “flexible” and that they “have always been uniting to resist against foreign aggression,” etc.
The scholar can therefore only conclude that the reviewer must be racist or biased or something like that.
However, that’s not where the problem lies. The problems lies with “essentialism” (bản chất luận), and that problem has been a huge problem in Vietnamese academia for many many years.
And as long as it continues to be something that people don’t even understand, then there will continue to be Vietnamese who will struggle to get their work published in international journals.
This Post Has 10 Comments
This post leaves me an impressive view! Thanks!
Wow! Your post really captures the “essence” of why there is a disconnect between Vietnamese and Western scholars. But why is it the case? Too much ethno-nationalism at work here for a long time and never corrected?
Yes, I think that’s exactly it. Everything is talked about in terms of the nation (dân tộc Việt Nam). But I deliberately did not use the term “nationalism” in the post because 1) I think a lot of people in Vietnam still don’t understand what that is, and 2) a lot of Vietnamese have a negative reaction to the term, thinking it refers to some extremist view or position. However, all of these essentialized ideas are all about the nation. They’re 100% nationalism. This is what nationalism is. It’s not people walking down the street protesting something. It’s saying “Vietnamese have always united against foreign aggression.” That’s something that I think a lot of people still don’t understand.
With all due respect, I disagree with you on three points. First this essay, and the previous ones you wrote on this issue, have misused the terms “essentialism” and “essentialized.” In philosophy of social sciences and philosophy in general, essentialism refers to the reification of certain concepts (e.g., reason, rationality, modernity, idea, and agency) in Enlightenment philosophical work and social scietific explanations. By this definition essentialist thinking is pervasive in Western academic culture. In history, sociology and philosophy, postcolonial theorists have advanced the argument that the West has produced hegemonic, essentialized forms of knowledge; particularly the continuous projection of western-centric discourses on world history, culture, science, literature, and philosophy have contributed to the systematic neglect of the East’s agency in knowledge production and scientific development. (On in depth postcolonial/postmodernist critique, please reference, “Orientalism” by cultural theorist Edward Said in literature studies, John Hobson in “the Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation” in historical sociology, “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe” by historian Hay White, and Spivak’s “Post-colonial Critique of Reason” in philosophy). This is not to imply that Vietnamese scholars do not essentialize, but to point out that western scholarship is also fraught with essentialism too, albeit in a less overt and more sophisticated manner.
Second, i disagree with your statement: “at least the past half century, Western scholars have rejected the idea that nations and cultures have an ‘essence’. It oversimplifies the fact that the debate between constructivist and primordialist (essentialist) theories of nationalism still remains quite relevant to nationalism scholarship nowadays. Constructivists believe that nation as a social/symbolic construct is subject to historical development of cultures and societies, whereas primordialists maintain that it is not possible to define or describe an ethnic category without specifying its unique (essential) characteristics. In the next sentence, you claim that, “[i]n the process, they have provided tons of evidence that shows that “essentialized” statements about people and cultures are not true.” Based on your previous blog, “on(not) discussing the nation in Vietnam,” I understand “they” in this context as referring to the constructivist theory of nationalism with which Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” is associated. You are right in saying that constructivists and other critics of primordialism have over decades adduced a wide range of historical evidence to show that ethnic traditions are contested and subject to reshaping. However, what the historical evidence really invalidates is the ahistorical, functionalist explanation of primordialism which even hard-core primordualists, like Clifford Geertz, have avoided [see Calhoun, C (1993) Nationalism and ethnicity. Annual Review of Sociology]. The second wave of primordialist theorizing of nationalism, initiated by Anthony Smith, has been sensitive to history without resorting to the constructivist line of thinking. Smith’s theory of ethnonationalism posits that nationalism has deeper roots in premodern ethnicity and thus there exists some form of continuity in ethnic groupings and the construction of national narratives.
The first two points lead to my third point. I concur with your conlusion echoed in your previous blogs that Vietnamese scholars need to change their writing practice in order to get published in international journals. Nonetheless, I disagree with your articulation of the problem. The failure has more to do with “learning how to write a standard academic paper in accordance with western standard of “being scientific.” To be “scientific” means that researchers avoid injecting their personal prejudice and moral value into their paper. In their research locally educated Vietnamese scholars implicitly conflate the “categories of practice” with analytical concepts used in academia. The meanings of scientific concepts describing a particular research object are not to be equated with the everyday (layman) understandings of the object. Let’s take one of your examples; “Vietnamese have always been uniting against foreign aggression (người Việt Nam có truyền thống đoàn kết và chống ngoại xâm).” The problem with this sentence is that it blurs the distinction between Vietnamese nation and nationalism as analytical tools to describe the contestation and meaning-making process of how Vietnameseness has been understood across historical periods and the everyday understanding of Vientamese nationalism embedded in a hegemonic nationalist discourse so “banal” that even the author unconsciously subscribes to it. The sentence is highly prejudicial, and the word “always” only makes it worse, because it is merely an expression of the author’s taken-for granted belief about Vietnamese nationalism rather than a vigorously tested scientific claim that is receptive to new empirical challenges.
As a former lecturer in international relations at the university of social sciences and humanities, I find that there are two systemic reasons for why Vietnamese scholars, especially in the history department, continue to refrain from following the international standard of research. First, the local histography of Vietnam serves as a tool for state propaganda and thus the discursive norm is catering to the Marxist-Leninist discourse of nationhood that was first articulated in writing during the 1950s. My students once proposed a research topic for their BA thesis that was immediately rejected because of its political sensitiveness. Second, the lack of access to international sources and language incompetency is another barrier to intellectual freedom.
Thank you very much for your detailed and eloquent comments!!!
I wrote this post based on various experiences over the past few years of reading works by Vietnamese scholars that were submitted for publication in “international” journals/books. And the problem of essentialism is one that I repeatedly noticed.
From what you wrote, it looks like you are not denying that there is essentialism in Vietnamese scholarship. What you are disagreeing with is that I am pointing this out, and you are trying to discredit my argument, rather than the fact that there is essentialism in Vietnamese scholarship.
To be perfectly honest with you, the points you make are ones that I’ve heard before, and I would even go so far as to say that they have become a kind of established means of responding to critiques of Vietnamese scholarship.
First is the idea that “the West” is guilty of the problems it is criticizing others of, and the implied message is, therefore, that Vietnamese scholars do not need to take seriously those critiques. Second is the idea that Anthony Smith provides some kind of alternative to modernist/constructivist views of nationalism, and the implied message is, therefore, that Vietnamese scholars do not need to address/accept such a perspective.
As for the first point, yes, I totally agree that Said pointed out the problem of essentialized knowledge. However, he did so in 1978 (obviously, the problem of essentialism was discussed by more people than Said, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just use him and that general time period as an example). Since that time, it has been unacceptable to essentialize.
Therefore, it is not correct to say that “western scholarship is also fraught with essentialism too.” That is simply not true. If you take the example of academic writings on Vietnamese history in English, there is an enormous difference between Keith Taylor’s 1983 The Birth of Vietnam (lots of essentialism) and Christopher Goscha’s 2016 Vietnam: A New History (extremely careful to avoid any essentialism).
In other words, the fact that Keith Taylor essentialized in 1983 does not somehow negate my critique of essentialim in Vietnamese scholarship today, because Taylor can’t say the things he did in the past anywmore, and he doesn’t repeat a lot of the essentialized information from his 1983 book in his 2013 A History of the Vietnamese.
Today it is unacceptable to build an argument based on the idea that “the Vietnamese have always been fighting off foreigners” or that “the Vietnamese are a wet rice civilization that respects women.” However, that is a type of essentialized argument that was present in English-language scholarship in the past.
Again, the fact that such scholarship existed in the past, does not negate my argument about the present, because such scholarship is not acceptable in the present.
As for Anthony Smith, I think many people are aware of a basic point he made – that before modern nations there was something like a nation – but are unaware of how much Smith contradicted himself over the years, and how much he ended up essentially agreeing with the modernists/constructivists.
There is a recent article that does a good job of pointing out the flaws in Smith’s work:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/abs/primordialism-for-scholars-who-ought-to-know-better-anthony-d-smiths-critique-of-modernization-theory/781AD528CCC34DD89ADC276E7EE12519
So, just as we need to differentiate between the past and the present when we talk about essentialism in scholarship, we also need to update ourselves about what Smith’s scholarship actually argued/demonstrated.
As for the systemic reasons, thank you for sharing that example. By this point, I think that “lack of access to international sources” isn’t really a valid point anymore. That was certainly true in the 1990s, but for the past 20 years, it has been more and more difficult to make that point.
Again, thank you very much for your comments. Your knowledge and eloquence are very impressive. It was a joy to wake up and read this. But ultimately, I think you are repeating a set way of responding to criticism, and it does so by pointing to issues that do not actually negate the critique. Maybe we’ll agree to disagree on this, but this is how I see things. 🙂
Very interesting discussion here. Since we are on the subject of “essentialism” or “nationalism” and the problems associated with bringing it into scholarly articles by the Vietnamese, I would like to ask some follow-up questions here. As I understand it, Liam Kelley made the observation that Vietnamese scholars are still employing essentialism, an outdated concept, to write about Vietnamese history, and therefore getting rejected by major publications. Mr. Cuong Nguyen then argued that “the West” does it too, so it’s not just the Vietnamese. Rather than looking at this as an issue between “the Vietnamese” and “the West”, which I find very problematic, I wonder if either Mr. Cuong or Mr. Kelley has looked at the neighboring countries to make a comparison with the Vietnamese case? More specifically, do scholars in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. still “essentialize” their history like their Vietnamese counterparts? Have they ever done so, and when, if they did, stop doing that? In other words, I would like to see if the Vietnamese are, in fact, as I suspect, a lot more “nationalistic” than their neighbors, who share a more common situation with them than “the West”. Thank you.
Good question, Winston!
In the case of the countries of Southeast Asia, if you look at publications on history in local journals and in local languages, then yes, you can definitely find evidence of essentialism. If, however, you look at scholars who publish on history in international journals (which these days most frequently means in English), you can find scholarship that does not essentialize.
One of the things that Vietnam lacks which some of the other countries in the region possess is a long-standing journal of international stature. Journals like the Journal of the Siam Society and the Journal of the Malayan/Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society have been around for over a century. The Thai and Malay scholars who publish in these respective journals produce scholarship that meets “international standards.”
There used to be journals like this for Vietnam, like the Bulletin de la Société des études indochinoises, but they didn’t survive the 1945-75 period.
While wandering through the internet, I was reminded of the insight that the historian A.J.P. Taylor owed his fame in no small part to his essentialist depiction of the German people. He managed to capture their alleged essence in just one pithy sentence: “In international affairs there was nothing wrong with Hitler except that he was a German.”
Good point!! 🙂
i am sure that i must read it again and again to “steal” some ideas that i think it will be helpful for my research topic :))