I was reading a book that contains essays that the late Vietnamese scholar, Trần Quốc Vượng, wrote in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the essays is on the Vietnamese historical tradition in the context of Southeast and East Asia (Truyền thống văn hóa Việt Nam nam trong bối cảnh Đông Nam Á và Đông Á).
In this essay, Trần Quốc Vượng addresses a question that many scholars in the West also asked at that time – Does it make more sense to view Vietnam as part of East Asia or Southeast Asia?
As Trần Quốc Vượng points out, the concept of Southeast Asia has only existed since the time of World War II.
During World War II, the Allies divided the world into different “theaters” (or “regions”) and created military strategies for each theater. The area between India and China was called the “Southeast Asian” theater.
That name stuck, and starting in the 1950s, a lot of money started to get spent (particularly in the US) to encourage research on this region. It was in this context that the question of where Vietnam “belongs” emerged. Prior to that time there had been little question but that Vietnam was a “little dragon” that belonged to the East Asian world. However, the emergence of Southeast Asian studies (and the politics of the Vietnam War) led some scholars to claim a place for Vietnam in Southeast Asia.
This is also what Trần Quốc Vượng attempts to do in this essay. We can see this in his conclusion where he says that over the course of history, while the Vietnamese have been influenced culturally and politically by China/East Asia, they have always maintained their Southeast Asian cultural foundation and geographical context (Tóm một câu, trên diễn trình lịch sử, nước Việt, dân Việt nhân nhiều ảnh hưởng văn hóa – chính trị Trung Hoa Đông Á song vẫn luôn luôn duy trì nền tảng văn hóa, môi cảnh địa – nhân văn Đông Nam Á của chính mình).
Ok, but what exactly is Vietnam’s Southeast Asian cultural foundation? Trần Quốc Vượng never explains this. Instead, he argues that Vietnam is a peninsular (bán đảo) world that integrates the land and sea.
This integration, Trần Quốc Vượng contends, can be seen in legends where we see a pairing of women from the land who marry men from the sea, such as the Vietnamese story of Âư Cơ & Lạc Long Quân and the Khmer story of Liễu Diệp (Liu Yi) & Kaundinya.
Beyond that, Trần Quốc Vượng does not provide any more information about “what is Southeast Asia.” Instead, he spends the rest of the essay talking about how Korea is also a peninsular country (although he doesn’t demonstrate that there are similar legends there about women from the land marrying men from the sea), and how Korea and Vietnam were both deeply influenced by China.
I find this essay to be very representative, as I’ve read many other articles like this, and I have heard many Vietnamese make the same points. The essay makes a claim that many people today want to hear (that is, many Vietnamese want to be told that they are fundamentally different from Chinese), but it does not provide evidence to support its claim. Instead, it is based on superficial evidence and outdated theories.
Trần Quốc Vượng claims in this article to follow the ideas of Géo-Culture (Địa –Văn hóa) and Géo Histoire (Địa – Lịch sử). I’m not sure what he is referring to here as he does not cite any sources. However, his thinking appears to reflect the ideas of the long-discredited idea of “environmental determinism,” that is, the idea that geographical environments shape ideas and culture.
That said, even if we were to believe in environmental determinism, the examples that Trần Quốc Vượng gives to demonstrate the “peninsular” world of Vietnam are examples that only emerged after indigenous people in this region came in contact with non-indigenous cultural worlds (Chinese and Indian), and are stories that were recorded in foreign scripts (classical Chinese and Sanskrit).
Therefore, it is difficult to see how such stories represent some kind of “cultural foundation” (nền tảng văn hóa).
On the other hand, it interesting to see how easily Trần Quốc Vượng switches from talking about “Southeast Asia” to talking about Korea, a land that is, like Vietnam, very much a part of the East Asian cultural world. It is clear in this essay that he feels much more comfortable talking about Korea than he would be talking about say Java or Borneo or Sulawesi or Mindanao or Sumatra.
Why is this? It’s because geography does not determine culture, and it is therefore easier for a Vietnamese to understand and talk about Korea, a place that is geographically different but culturally similar, than it is to talk about Laos, a place that is geographically similar but culturally different.
As I’ve argued many times before, the thing that we today call “Vietnamese” culture was created in opposition to the thing that we today call “Southeast Asian” culture, and that this was done through the use of cultural ideas and practices that came from outside of the region (i.e., “China”).
This, of course, is not something unique to Vietnam. Many of the countries in Europe, for instance, were created through a process of “Latinization/Christianization” that was brought about in opposition to indigenous ways.
This point actually view fits nicely with a larger argument that Trần Quốc Vượng puts forth in this essay about the importance of viewing Vietnam in a larger context. In this essay Trần Quốc Vượng sought to view Vietnam in a regional context, but if we expand our view to a global context, then we can come to a very different conclusion than he did.
For anyone interested, here is the essay that I am referring to: Truyen thong van hoa VN. . ..
This Post Has 4 Comments
I have question about the Viet (kinh) ethnic group. How much influence did the ethnic minorities have in the modern day group? If the Viet kingdom really did start in Cao Bang or the Red River Valley, how much influence did the Zhuang or the Murong groups have on the Kinh group?
The Murong were far northern barbarians , I think they have nothing to do with Proto- Vietnamese or present Vietnamese
Contrariwise , according to DNA analysis of Vietnamese people , they have some blood links with the Zhuang ( Tráng ) or Buyei
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people
[According to a 1999 research study done by the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, France: “the comparison of the Vietnamese with other East Asian populations showed a close genetic relationship of the population under investigation with other Orientals”, with the exception of seven unique markers. These results, along with remnants of Thai enzyme morphs, indicate a theory of a dual ethnic origin of the Vietnamese population from Chinese and Thai populations. A 2001 HLA study headed by laboratories at the Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei (Taiwan) classifies the Vietnamese people in the same genetic cluster as the Miao (Hmong), Southern Han (Southern Chinese), Buyei and Thai, with a divergent family consisting of Thai Chinese and Singapore Chinese, Minnan (Hoklo) and Hakka
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10583463
Mitochondrial DNA polymorphism in the Vietnamese population.
The mitochondrial DNA variation was screened in a sample of 50 unrelated individuals of the Vietnamese population originating from Hanoi. A combination of long and standard PCR and restriction endonuclease digests with the enzymes HpaI, BamHI, HaeII, MspI, AvaII and HincII were used to reveal mtDNA variation. Twenty enzyme morphs were detected, three of which (HaeII-13Viet, MspI-19Viet and MspI-20Viet) are new and are produced by a single mutational event in already known enzyme morphs. Ten already known and four new mitotypes [93Viet (1-1-2-4-1), 94Viet (2-1-13Viet-1-1), 95Viet (2-1-13Viet-19Viet-1) and 96Viet (1-1-2-20Viet-12)] were found in the Vietnamese population. The 9-bp deletion occurring in the COII/tRNALys region of the mitochondrial genome was also analysed and 10 samples were found to have this deletion. The comparison of the Vietnamese with other East Asian populations showed a close genetic relationship of the population under investigation with other Orientals. However, the Vietnamese population can be differentiated by the significantly higher frequency of the enzyme morph HincII-5 and by seven new markers. These results strongly support the hypothesis of a dual ethnic origin of the Vietnamese population from the Chinese and Thai-Indonesian populations based on HLA markers and linguistic evidence.
More about Zhuang ( Tráng ) people
http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng%C6%B0%E1%BB%9Di_Tr%C3%A1ng
If you enjoy to get a hearty headache,read about the Bai Yueh and ” China ”
http://www.imperialchina.org/Vietnamese.html . It mentions a professor Li Hui ( who is he ? )
This forum http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=142271&st=20 talks also about the Bai Yueh and mentions Pr Li Hui
Genetics are important, but at the moment the people who cite genetic findings the most make a major mistake – they tend to link together genetics with ethnicity/culture.
Blood is real. Ethnicity and culture are constructed.
Genetically I can be linked to certain peoples, but in terms of culture and ethnicity, I am not the same as the people whom I’m genetically connected to.
That is something that we have to keep in mind when we think about the past.
I think baiyueh meant the “Muong.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever headed up into the mountains of mainland Southeast Asia, but that’s where I think we can get a sense of what things were like in antiquity. When I say this I don’t mean to say that ethnic minority groups somehow are “trapped in time.” What I think, however, is that people like the Vietnamese, the Thai, the Khmer, etc, are seen today to be clear, distinct ethnic groups because they are subject to powerful governments. If people are not under the control of a government, then. . . they can be whoever they want. . . or they can be “nobody,” just human.
Up in the mountains, people can point out that one village is a Hmong village and another village is a Dao/Yao village, etc., but in reality, many people are multilingual and there is intermixing between groups, so people can change their ethnicity with relative ease (anthropologist Edmund Leach pointed this out years ago in a famous study on ethnicity in the mountains of Burma).
So to answer your question, you didn’t have any “Kinh” until you have a local (non-imperial Chinese) government in the Red River delta. The “Kinh” were then created when people in the Red River delta started to follow the language and customs of the leaders of that local government.
Who were the people who started to do that? People whom we would today label “Muong,” “Thai” etc.
So did the “Muong” influence the “Kinh”? I don’t think that’s really the right question to ask. Instead, I would ask, “How did a sense of being ‘Kinh’ emerge in the Red River delta.”