In the 1950s, historical scholarship in the DRV was part of an international world of scholarship. First and foremost, Vietnamese historians in the DRV were in dialog with their Communist Chinese and Soviet counterparts, and all were involved in creating a new “scientific” history based on Marxist historical theory.
Edward Yang has written about the dialog between the Chinese and Soviets in his “Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and the Soviet Influence, 1949-1963,” Journal of Contemporary China9:23 (2000): 95-111.
In dialog with Soviet historians, Communist Chinese historians in this time period wrote about such topics as the formation of the Chinese nation, the periodization of Chinese history, the role of peasant wars in Chinese history, signs of the emergence of capitalism in the Chinese past, and the issue of land ownership in “feudal” China.
These are all topics which Vietnamese historians in the DRV addressed as well. They did so in a journal which they entitled Nghiên cứu lịch sử, a title remarkably similar to the title of the journal which Communist Chinese historians published their articles in, Lishi yanjiu. . . As such, Vietnamese historians were part of an international effort to use a certain theoretical approach to address certain issues. (Patricia Pelley deals with this to some extent in her Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past.)
Then in the 1960s this all came to an end. During the war, nationalism took prominence over Marxist theory, and since that time I would argue that the role of theory in historical scholarship in Vietnam has disappeared. For the past 50 years, I cannot find any serious signs that Vietnamese historians have employed any new theoretical insights to advance historical scholarship.
What I do see many signs of, instead, is a “blank space.” What I mean by this is that I find no signs of the major theorists that have influenced historical scholarship in the West over the course of the past half century.
So whenever I read something which a Vietnamese historian writes these days, I get confused. I don’t understand what Vietnamese historians think they are doing.
Do they think that they are participating in the world of “international” scholarship? If so, then they desperately need to fill in that “blank space” because they will not understand anyone outside of Vietnam, nor will anyone be able to understand them, until they do so.
Do they think that they are participating in a more limited world of “Vietnamese” scholarship? If that is the case, then there is really no reason to hold “international” conferences and workshops in Vietnam, and there is no reason for Vietnamese historians to attend such events outside of the country, because these two worlds have no reason to interact with each other.
Ultimately my guess is that historians in Vietnam simply don’t really know or think that much about what they are doing. They are just content to drift through that “blank space.”
This Post Has 4 Comments
just wonder if what you’ve said is really what happens to “Vietnamese” historical scholarship, is it a phenomenon one can see also in other “countries”?
I don’t like the way that many scholars in Vietnam refer to as “international” stuff because no one can tell what the “international standards” mean. Meanwhile, I think the condition of scholarship in a place like Vietnam is pretty much similar to that of the colonial/modernized era. I don’t think Vietnamese scholars need to catch up with the “international” scholarship but to be honest and creative.
I was talking to a friend who studies Russian history and he was telling me that since the fall of the Soviet Union Russian historians have not made an effort to learn about all of the things that happened in the field of historical scholarship in places like France/Britain/the US from the past 1/2 century. So they are also inhabiting their own world.
Yea, I guess what confuses me is that there is so much talk in Vietnam about “hop tac quoc te.” If you look at the web site of any institute or university, it will definite emphasize “hop tac quoc te.” But I don’t see any “hop tac” actually taking place. In fact, it can’t take place because two people can’t “hop tac” when they have completely different knowledge in their heads. They have to share a certain degree of common knowledge first.
I have met South Korean, Taiwanese, HK, Singaporean, Thai, Filipino and Indonesian scholars who can all easily exchange ideas with scholars from Western Europe, the US, etc. If what Vietnam faces is in any way a common problem, then it is probably more common to Communist or former Communist countries. Marxist history was a viable alternative form of history in say the 1950s, but it gradually lost its influence. In the West, there were Marxist historians (and still are), but there were many other kinds of history as well. I think by just focusing on one type of history, Communist countries ultimately created big problems for themselves. Because when historians found that Marxist history did not explain the past effectively, there was no other alternative to turn to.
In response to nguyensau, I would contend that scholars educated during the colonial era and in the Republic of Vietnam had a much more open outlook and awareness of international scholarship and scholarly methods. You can even see that in the work of the north Vietnamese scholars that Khai cites who were working in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That early work is much more solid than most of what came later.
Yea, and while today we can look back and find faults with the scholarship of the 1950s and early 1960s, if at the time one compared what scholars were doing in the South and the North at that time with what their counterparts in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan were doing, I think one would have seen a lot of similarities. The playing field was pretty level back then.