The Journal of Historical Sociology has just published a special issue that contains an interesting article on English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history.
Entitled “Academic Dependency Theory and the Politics of Agency in Area Studies: The Case of Anglophone Vietnamese Studies from the 1960s to the 2010s,” the article was written by Yufen Chang of National Taipei University and it looks at English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history from the perspective of academic dependency theory.
To reduce a complex topic to its essence, the basic idea of academic dependency is that “the West” creates academic ideas and practices which “the Rest” of the world then becomes dependent on (for various reasons).
However, the article on Vietnam in this special issue argues that in the case of much of the English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history we can discern the opposite in that much of this scholarship has been dependent on Vietnamese nationalist ideas and modern Vietnamese-language translations. In other words, it is an example of what we might call “reverse academic dependency.”
While I’ve been beating up on English-language scholarship on premodern Vietnamese history for precisely these very reasons throughout my entire career, what is novel to me about this article is its use of quantitative information in the form of bibliometrics.
The analysis of bibliometrics enables us to visualize at a macro level the kinds of sources scholars employ to construct their knowledge. What Yufen Chang argues in this paper is that there is a relationship between the kinds of ideas that scholars writing in English have put forth regarding premodern Vietnamese history and the sources that they have depended on for their information, and that bibliometrics can help us see this.
A couple of years ago, I saw historian Vũ Đức Liêm of the Hanoi National University of Education present a paper at a workshop where he also employed bibliometrics. That paper examined the work over time of a single scholar, the now late historian John K. Whitmore, and was very illuminating.
Meanwhile, in this paper, Yufen Chang employs bibliometrics to carry out a broader examination of the field of scholarship in English on premodern Vietnamese history. This paper is currently available for free download for a limited time.
