I recently published an article that dealt with the topic of the prehistory of the area of what is today Vietnam. The articled is entitled “The Centrality of ‘Fringe History’: Diaspora, the Internet and a New Version of Vietnamese Prehistory,” and in it I discuss the writings of a group of authors on the “fringe” of academia who have in recent years produced an extremely nationalistic version of Vietnamese prehistory.
Much of this article is spent pointing out the weaknesses of these authors’ depiction of the past, particularly in the ways that they misunderstand and misuse (outdated) studies from the world of “Western” or “international” scholarship. In the process, I do not present a clear explanation of how “Western” or “international” scholars currently view the topic of Vietnamese prehistory. I have therefore decided to present that information here to the best of my ability.
To be fair, it is not all that easy to find the most up-to-date information about Vietnamese prehistory. One won’t find it, for instance, in general works that cover the early history of Vietnam. While three surveys of Vietnamese history have recently been published in English (Taylor, Goscha and Kiernan), for various reasons none of these works present current information about prehistory. The came can be said for the latest survey of Vietnamese history produced in Vietnam, the 15-volume Lịch sử Việt Nam (History of Vietnam) produced by the Institute of History.
Instead, the most up-to-date information about Vietnamese prehistory has appeared over the past decade or more in various international publications in the general fields of archaeology, genetics and linguistics.
In the days and weeks ahead, I will attempt to introduce and synthesize this scholarship through a series of blog posts. I’m calling this series “Far From Vietnam” (FFVN), and I do so for two reasons.
First, the events of prehistory took place far in time before there was a community that we can refer to as “the Vietnamese,” and in that way the issues that we will discuss here are “Far (in time) From Vietnam.” Second, the story that is emerging about prehistory contains ideas that are far from some of the ideas about the Vietnamese past that have been written in modern times, and in that way the topics cover here are “Far From (the constructed narratives of) Vietnam.”
