Anthropological studies of Việt Nam typically highlight two dimensions of rural life. First, over the past century, French colonialism, war, socialist cooperativization, and recent market-oriented economic policies have propelled rapid and profound changes in village politics, economy, culture, and social relations. Second, in spite of these dramatic transformations, or perhaps because of them, Vietnamese villages tend to prize tradition in diverse aspects of social and cultural life. Almost twenty years ago, Hy V. Luong's Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925–1988 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1992) offered a groundbreaking analysis of these dynamics by introducing us to the Red River delta village of Sơn Dương. Through the life narratives of teacher Nguyễn Đắc Bằng and other villagers, we learned of Sơn Dương's role in an unsuccessful 1930 anticolonial uprising, its support for the Việt Minh during the First Indochina War (1946–1954), and the impact of land reform and collectivization on a community structured by both male, kin-based hierarchy, and strong communalism. Directing his analysis toward the Popkin-Scott debate about the origins of peasant rebellion, Luong convincingly argued that Vietnamese revolutionary nationalism sprang from neither self-interested calculations nor a traditional moral ethos, but from the collision between the “racial diarchy” of the imperialist system and indigenous northern rural social formations that were both hierarchical and collectivist. This also explains why local intelligentsia and elites led revolutionary activism.
In Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1925–2006, Luong expands his earlier study to consider Sơn Dương's contemporary incorporation into global capitalist markets. Parts I and II cover the same territory as the first book, from anticolonialism to how land reform (1954–56) and collectivization were shaped by a conflict between “the principle of radical collectivism espoused by the Marxist state and a hierarchical model for sociocultural reality centering on the kinship unit” (p. 203). Part III, “Market Economy and Local Dynamics,” introduces important new material on how recent market-oriented policies have increased socieoeconomic differentiation through changing landholding and migration patterns (Chapter 6), intensified social relations and ritual life (Chapter 7), and transformed village governance (Chapter 8). Particularly noteworthy is this last chapter's consideration of how the resurgence (or persistence) of supposedly traditional kinship, religious, and communal associations—which Luong, following Weller, terms “alternative civilities”—has fueled local protest against growing socioeconomic inequality and official corruption in implementing land and taxation policies. Building on this insight, a new concluding section argues that differences in local indigenous frameworks explain the greater tendency toward resistance in northern versus southern Việt Nam, despite the latter's more pronounced commoditization and class polarization.
The result is impressive historical anthropology that deftly tacks between global or national shifts in political economy and the specific personalities and relationships that shape the contours of these events for one community over many decades. Luong definitively shows how northern local cultural ideologies and modes of social organization shaped the nature and extent of villagers’ political resistance. The argument becomes less convincing, however, when Luong expands it in the conclusion to suggest that looser social structures and greater mobility in the south explain its less revolutionary tendencies. Although such observations echo generally accepted regional characterizations, more detailed ethnographic evidence is needed to confirm their explanatory power, particularly in light of David Hunt's recent suggestion that it was precisely southerners’ peripatetic worldliness that led them to join the revolutionary National Liberation Front (Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008]).
As in the first edition, neither Popkin's model of economistic decision-making nor Scott's attention to disrupted moral worlds sufficiently explains the developments Luong details. By the early 1990s, the debate they inspired had stalled, in part because work by Luong and others highlighted a confusion in terms and tendency to over-simplify peasant social worlds. Nevertheless, how economics, social structures, and culture shape individuals’ behavior and broader sociopolitical movements remains a relevant issue. With this edition's new material on marketization, Luong makes an important contribution by emphasizing how the tight social structure of northern villages shapes the efficacy of particular moral claims. It is aging veterans’ status as both elders and revolutionaries that allows them to mobilize resistance to the harsher aspects of the state's new market policies. Luong might, however, have considered further what these current dilemmas of governance suggest about the shift from socialism to late or post socialism in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Luong employed an array of methods, including life history, narrative interviews, archival records, participant observation, and surveys. These diverse sources, some only recently available, enrich this revised text, as in supplementing the recollections of Nguyễn Đắc Bằng with material from the Vietnamese National Archives about colonial landholding patterns, village expenditures, and political organization. Certain types of sources nonetheless figure more prominently for specific periods: life history for the 1930 rebellion, surveys for contemporary marketization. Although reasonable, such patterns do raise dilemmas of comparative analysis across time periods. For example, while Luong clearly demonstrates statistically that inequality has increased since 1986 and that this has alarmed many in Sơn Dương in spite of overall improvement in standards of living, more detailed narrative evidence similar to that provided about the colonial period would help to illuminate the contours of the contemporary communal vision articulated by resistant villagers. Ethnographic data allowing Luong to consider further how communalism in the 2000s may or may not resemble communalism from the 1930s would enhance his argument about the need to consider the relationship between locally specific ideological formations, social structures, and political economic transformation.
Tradition, Revolution, and Market Economy in a North Vietnamese Village, 1926–2006 is a welcome update of Luong's now-classic ethnography that is impressive for its historical scope and ethnographic detail. Like the earlier work, this revised and expanded edition will be indispensable to Việt Nam specialists and to those interested in rural political, economic, social, and cultural transformation under colonialism, socialism, and contemporary global capitalism. It will also be required reading for courses on Việt Nam in anthropology and history.
