As the author tells us in this engaging and provocative study, her book “weaves together an examination of the construction and evolution of Vietnamese discourses on folk music, cultural nationalism, and cultural heritage since the August Revolution of 1945 with an ethnographic account of the changing social practice of quan ho folk song as it has moved from the village onto the stage” (2). Like many other countries that gained independence from former colonial masters in the wake of the Second World War, Vietnam has a long history of State meddling in cultural heritage. Lauren Meeker provides an account of how the particular local singing tradition of a number of villages in the Red River Delta outside of the nation’s capital, Hanoi, has been the target of such interventions for several decades and how it has weathered them, for better or for worse.
The period of Meeker’s fieldwork in Bac Ninh province spanned a particularly eventful period in which quan ho was successfully nominated by the Vietnamese authorities for inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009, among the first batch of nominations to pass through the procedures established by the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. When her field visits began in 2001, Vietnam had recently adopted its 2001 Law on Cultural Heritage, which preceded the 2003 Convention but reflected the ever-increasing global attention to intangible cultural heritage in the last decade of the twentieth century. Importantly, 1998 had seen the publication of the Communist Party Central Committee’s Resolution 5 on Building and Developing an Advanced Vietnamese Culture Deeply Imbued with National Identity, the culmination of a half-century of effort to theorize how to construct a new culture for independent Vietnam. The resulting debates over national cultural identity and cultural policy were in every newspaper and on every scholar’s lips at the time of Meeker’s research. During her last field visit that figures into the study in 2010, the after-effects of inscription on the Representative List were first beginning to be seen. During Meeker’s intensive fieldwork from 2003–2007, Vietnam ratified the Convention (2005) and her host institution began its work of preparing the UNESCO nomination file.
I emphasize these dates and events—seemingly “external” to the quan ho singing tradition itself—because in fact they very much affected the “changing social practice” that Meeker traces in her study. She was in the right place, at the right time, to give us an important case study of how one local tradition has been subject to the evolving cultural policies of a strong and effective Party and State, particularly at the moment when those Party and State discourses are being influenced by new concepts and institutions at the international level. Meeker’s work thus serves as a valuable contribution to the growing critical literature on the impacts and influences of this twenty-first-century international concept of intangible cultural heritage on real communities and their traditions. It could find a prominent place in a syllabus on cultural heritage, cultural policy, folklore and nationalism, or post-Socialist societies. Within the field of contemporary Vietnamese studies, it offers the “back-story” to contextualize a now-ubiquitous cultural expression and provides readers an accessible and vivid account of cultural activity in semi-rural villages that are increasingly integrated into the life of the capital, Hanoi.
The study touches upon the agency of singers, villagers, cultural officials, mass media, and State institutions, but too often, that agency seems diffuse and just out of reach. People are seen all too often as subject to forces greater than themselves, and even when we are provided accounts of contestation or resistance—as in Meeker’s description of singers speaking “against the grain of the official’s speech, but only by speaking another ‘language’, one that they alone possessed fully” (88)—things rest at a collective and rather impersonal level. Even while acknowledging the necessity for Meeker to maintain the anonymity of her informants and to preserve her professional relations with her institutional sponsor (the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies), this reader would have liked to see a fuller account of deliberate and motivated personal action, rather than what is all-too-often impersonal reaction.
Meeker’s argument returns often to the problem of “authenticity,” and it is thus regrettable to see no mention of Bendix’s authoritative 1997 study (although a later article by Bendix on another topic is cited). More serious is that if Meeker wishes that term to be the master trope of her analysis, she fails to provide a discussion of the Vietnamese term or terms to which she is referring and how they are actually deployed by her interlocutors. It is ethnographically interesting that the 2003 Convention is perceived (by some Vietnamese officials? by the author herself?) as embodying “an internationally defined concept of authenticity along with a preservation agenda that may not be entirely compatible with local (indigenous) concepts and agendas” (142), but in fact the term “authenticity” was repudiated by the drafters of the Convention and has been rejected since by those charged with its implementation. The reader is thus left frustrated by not knowing who actually invoked the concept of authenticity, on what occasions, using what Vietnamese words—or is it a concept Meeker herself has intuited? With regard to “preservation,” that too was rejected by the Convention’s drafters in favor of “safeguarding,” and Vietnamese usage (and the 2001 Law) also distinguishes “bao ton” (preservation) from “bao ve” (safeguarding)—to what then is Meeker referring here?
There is also a certain clumsiness in certain translations, when they are provided: “nhac dan toc” is rendered as “national folk music” when “dan toc” can either mean “nation” or “folk” (in the sense of “das Volk”)—or “people”, or “ethnicity”, for that matter—but not both; the English term “national folk” introduces a specificity that is lacking in the Vietnamese term. Meeker erroneously sees “UNESCO quan ho clubs” as arms of the international organization, when in fact they are voluntary civil society organizations operating under the auspices of the Vietnam National Commission for UNESCO, itself an office of the Foreign Ministry. Indeed, such clubs (there are others for chess, or Scrabble, or Esperanto) are examples of local communities creatively coopting UNESCO’s name (with its permission, of course) to permit them to create civil society organizations that would otherwise have no possibility to exist or be recognized under Vietnamese law. Meeker’s off-handed rejection of the earliest scholarly account of the Lim Festival (Nguyen Van Huyen’s magisterial 1934 thesis, Les Chants Alternés des Garçons et des Filles en Annam), gives short shrift to what is truly a masterpiece of Vietnamese ethnography and folklore.
Such small quibbles do not detract overly from the value of Meeker’s study. We can only look forward to a second volume, reflecting fieldwork a decade or so after quan ho’s inscription on UNESCO’s Representative List, when the ongoing evolution of the genre and its communities can be traced further.
Work Cited
Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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[Review length: 1167 words • Review posted on March 9, 2016]