Fringe History
Fringe History
Since the 1960s there has been a version of Vietnamese early history that is particularly nationalistic. This version of the past argues that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were the first people to inhabit the Asian mainland and that they essentially established the foundation for what we today think of as “Chinese” or “East Asian” culture.
Professional, or establishment, historians in Vietnam do not generally uphold this view of the past. I therefore label this form of history “fringe history,” as it inhabits a space on the fringe of established knowledge about the past.
Nonetheless, over the past 20 or so years, these ideas have increasingly made their way into Vietnamese universities, and can now be found in university textbooks and on university web pages.
The posts that deal with this topic are categorized as “Fringe History.”
Trần Ngọc Thêm and the Dire Condition of Vietnamese Scholarship
I was reading Trần Ngọc Thêm’s Tìm Về Bản Sắc Văn Hóa Việt Nam (TPHCM: Nhà Xuất Bản Tổng Hợp Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh,
Deconstructing Vietnamese Scholarship: Lê Mạnh Thát
A few years ago Vietnamese scholar Lê Mạnh Thát caused some excitement when he argued that an early Chinese Buddhist text, the Lục độ tập
Hà Văn Thùy and Ancient Việt Races (Has the BBC Gone Mad?)
So I read an unbelievable opinion piece in Vietnamese on the BBC website. It was “unbelievable” in both the sense that it contained information that