I was trying to figure out when the idea of the “folk” (dân gian) started to be used by scholars in Vietnam. In looking at a book called Folk Literature (Văn học dân gian) that was published in 1972, I found that the authors noted that the term “folk” started to be used in the 1950s, and they cited an article by Vũ Ngọc Phan as an example.
I looked up that article. It was called “Vietnamese Farmers in Old Stories” (Người nông dân Việt Nam trong truyện cổ tích) and it was published in 1955 in the journal Văn Sử Địa, an academic journal in North Vietnam.
In the same issue was an article by Minh-Tranh called “Offering an Opinion on the Matter of Understanding the Literature of Our People” (Góp ý kiến vào việc tìm hiểu văn học nhân dân của ta).
I was surprised to find that both of these authors argued that when we read literature we need to look for signs of class contradictions (mâu thuẫn giai cấp) and class struggle (đấu tranh giai cấp).
I was surprised to see this because the 1972 volume did not talk about such matters.
I then found that in between the time of these two publications a conference was held in Hanoi in 1966 on the literature and arts of the folk of Vietnam. It is clear from the presentations from that conference that were published in a volume three years later in 1969 that scholars were being asked to put their scholarship in the service of the war effort.
Understandably, scholars stopped talking about class contradictions and class struggle.
And when the war ended, unity was declared, and as far as I can tell, scholars have never returned to the topic of class contradictions and class struggles in folk literature.
So I wonder what the silence on this topic means. Does it mean that Minh-Tranh and Vũ Ngọc Phan were right or that they were wrong? And how do we know?
This Post Has 4 Comments
I wonder if the interconnection of dân gian and giai cấp was related to the land reform of that time? It hadn’t dawned on my that dân gian only came into use in the 1950s. I’m supposing it must relate to an equivalent word common in Maoist parlance of the time. One of the early instances I’ve seen of the word is in the form of a research team called the Phòng nghiên cứu âm nhạc dân gian – Vụ Nghệ thuật that produced a study of hát xoan in 1958.
http://www.vhttdlvinhphuc.vn/Article.aspx?c=vanhoadangianvp&a=916
Yes, I think the Chinese equivalent, minjian 民間, is a modern term. There was a folklore movement that started earlier in China. My guess would be that it was used in that.
http://books.google.com/books?id=1GhQ6TI7HckC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=china+going+to+the+people+folklore&source=bl&ots=eGhWcy-Sbg&sig=dsD2t7HvWwLUn9LNyHWuJx9aLXY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7FMRU-nrH8T_oQSetYDACg&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=china%20going%20to%20the%20people%20folklore&f=false
Mao probably did too. I’m not sure if Truong Chinh used it much. I’m thinking he used dân chúng.
But in any case, elites “caring” about the common people is a modern phenomenon. . .
Ah, caring… I think the caring might have had it’s impetus in the French scholars who began to investigate Vietnam’s folkways. The earliest instance of a Vietnamese scholar producing a substantial work on the cultural life of the “dân gian” was Nguyễn Văn Huyên’s Les Chants alternés des garcon et des filles en Annam from 1933 (Huyên received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1931). A work like Hoàng Yến’s “Le Musique à Huế, đờn nguyệt et đờn tranh” from 1919 was about an elite art form. By and large the cultural life or the daily life of the “dân gian” is a mystery until the French began to record it. It seems like this recording by the French and Vietnam came from an effort to try to show that Vietnamese culture was not a carbon copy of Chinese culture. Early on Trường Chinh seemed to favor terms like đại chúng and quần chúng.
“The French” also had some scholars go out into villages in the early twentieth century and record information about local rituals, the spirits that were worshiped, the stories of those spirits, etc. This information was all recorded in classical Chinese. Someone recently showed me some of those materials, but I haven’t read enough of them to be able to detect what the overall purpose was, but it seems to have just been an effort to try to figure out what people were doing.
In the second half of the 20th century (and continuing today), when Vietnamese scholars talk about the literature/arts of the “dân gian” they mention things like the Lĩnh Nam chích quái, Phan Kế Bính’s book in the early 20th century, and things like Nguyễn Văn Huyên’s works as if these are all unproblematic ethnographic studies. As a lot of research on “the folk” in Europe has shown, however, the relationship between the elite and the folk is never simple, and there can be many different reasons for why members of the elite would make reference to the folk or appeal to some folk sensibility. That’s a fascinating topic that people have not looked at in the case of Vietnam.