Introduction
Tết Nguyên Đán, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, is the most important festive event of the Vietnamese calendar,Footnote 1 closely associated with the country's history, culture and identity. It has been described as a ‘mega-event’, something like a Western Christmas, New Year, Easter and Thanksgiving rolled into one.Footnote 2 It touches on many aspects of Vietnamese life and provides important insights into the nature of contemporary Vietnamese society and culture. As a calendrical festival, Tết marks the transition between seasons and, as with other such events, is an opportunity to reflect on the past, to contemplate and renew important social ties, and to anticipate and prepare for the future. Existing literature on Tết is largely descriptive and it has been the subject of very little modern research and analysis although the importance of festivals and public rituals for an understanding of contemporary Vietnamese society and culture is well established.Footnote 3 Much of the literature describes Tết in terms of the ‘traditions’ associated with it, often with a bias towards northern Vietnam.Footnote 4
As a major festival and holiday period, Tết centres on the first day of the year in the lunar calendar and is marked by a four-day national public holiday, but the festival lasts for two or three weeks. Tết starts on the twenty-third day of the last lunar month (tháng chạp) when the kitchen god is sent to the Jade Emperor in heaven to report on the affairs of the family, and formally ends with the taking down of the cây nêu on the seventh day of the first lunar month of the New Year (tháng giêng).Footnote 5 The cây nêu is not seen in urban Hồ Chí Minh City (HCMC; Saigon), but some still think of this date as the end of the Tết festival.Footnote 6 Others say it ends on the fifteenth day of tháng giêng (rằm tháng giêng, the important first full moon of the New Year).
Tết is marked by a wide range of activities, especially in the major urban centres, where local government and other organisations provide festive events for the benefit of citizens (and tourists). In HCMC, where my study is located, there are a number of sites at which events associated with Tết take place. Most of these are sites of social activity all year round, such as streets, parks, places of worship and markets, but this activity is transformed and intensified by the ways in which these places are used during Tết. There are also a number of ostensibly private places, such as homes and family graveyards, where kinship activities associated with Tết take place.
The research in HCMC that I have been engaged in since January 2008 has involved participation in and observation of many Tết activities in both the private and public spheres over three successive Tết periods (2008–10). Through the hospitality and kindness of many Vietnamese, I have been present at domestic rituals, family reunions and special meals during Tết; gone on long bus or motorcycle rides to tend grave sites with family members; attended pagoda services and accompanied families on their visits to kin, pagodas and temples, sometimes travelling to family reunions in other centres or to special pagodas outside the city — such as one memorable day travelling to Chùa Bà Đen (the ‘Black Lady’ pagoda) in Tây Ninh province with an extended family of 11. I have observed the preparations made for Tết by individuals and families, including the skilful making of the festive rice cakes (see below), and accompanied people to markets and supermarkets to purchase Tết goods. My observations have been supplemented with extensive interviews with HCMC families and individuals as well as with experts (academics with specialised knowledge of Tết, religious officials in pagodas and temples and purveyors of specialised Tết products such as votive papers). This material has been enhanced by 12 Tết diaries kept on my behalf by high school and university students, in which Tết family activities are documented in detail over a number of weeks, often accompanied by colour photographs. A fair amount of information has been gleaned through perusal of documentary sources and newspaper archives; in addition the news media report extensively on Tết-related issues each year, commenting on topics such as price rises, currency shortages and the availability of goods. I have also attended and documented a wide variety of public activities associated with Tết, usually in the company of associates and research assistants and interviewed officials of Saigontourist Holding Company, the organiser of the main public Tết festivities in the city. The latter have included exhibitions, street parades, music shows, the spectacular annual floral display in the city's streets and rice cake-making competitions. Flower markets, calligraphy craft markets, flower shows in city parks, Tết exhibitions at places such as the Youth Cultural Centre in District One,Footnote 7 and public billboards which display Tết messages and slogans have provided additional information on the nature and significance of Tết in the city.
My own intensive and enjoyable experience of three successive Tết festivals is directly related to the object of this paper, which is to consider the nature of place-making during Tết, and the relationships between different kinds of sites associated with Tết in HCMC. I wish to explore the ways in which these places are used in the construction of Tết by residents of the city, how people and things move between and within them, and to consider what such movements and linkages imply for our understanding of festive sites in the urban environment. In doing this I believe that one gains insights into the nature of Tết as a lived experience, and that certain implications arise that enable one to question conventionally accepted structural binaries such as sacred and secular, public and private, and the production and consumption (or construction) of place.
Tết is in many senses sacred time, time set apart from the everyday and time for worship, and through it activities which would otherwise be regarded as secular (e.g. going to market to buy everyday necessities) are infused with a sacred character, so this is probably the easiest of the three binaries to deal with. Nevertheless, it remains necessary to show how something like a Tết flower show or a street parade should be regarded as non-secular. It is also worth pointing out that in a world where secularisation is still sometimes seen as a dominating trend and associated with modernisation,Footnote 8 the otherwise secular can at times be fused with and dominated by the sacred in a rapidly modernising society such as Vietnam.
Although the categories of private and public remain distinct in many ways, the material that I present below will demonstrate how they also interpenetrate and influence each other. The conflation of public and private space in the everyday life of urban Vietnam has been noted before and in this article I show how this conflation occurs during Tết.Footnote 9 This revolves mainly around the family home, and I will show how the home is linked to a variety of other sites in the city and thus has to be understood in relation to the nature of these sites and the activities of family members within them.
The distinction between the social production and consumption of place is now largely redundant, given the development of the notion of the ‘social construction of place’ frequently used by social scientists. However, there are considerable ambiguities within and around this term, and the notion that the way a place is made (e.g. place-making) is somehow separate from the way it is conceived or used (e.g. place attachment, resistance to place, spatial tactics) persists in various forms.Footnote 10 My argument will question the usefulness of this distinction even though it retains and uses the terms production and consumption (or construction) as analytical categories. In looking at the sites associated with Tết I am not trying to theorise the city, but rather to theorise the festival as it is made by people in the city and to analyse the nature of festive place-making. Nevertheless, this also amounts to saying something about the nature of the Tết landscape in HCMC and therefore about the city. I do not regard this as a landscape produced and then consumed by urban residents; rather, it is a landscape that emerges through social practice, one enacted by residents as they celebrate Tết, each in their own unique way, but nevertheless acting in terms of certain established precedents, expectations, family circumstances, religious convictions, economic imperatives and the like. However, insofar as this takes place within the city it also involves a seasonal construction of the city as festive landscape. The conventional distinction between production and consumption would view sites (and sights) in the city as transformed (produced) for those who flock there to enjoy (consume) them. This would be a very partial and incomplete view of the nature of the Tết activities and practices in HCMC, as we shall see. Instead, I argue that it is what people do that frequently constitutes both the production and consumption of space simultaneously, at a variety of places in the city, and these activities frequently link or connect different places in a holistic manner.
In ‘living’ Tết, people act in accordance with their knowledge and expectations about Tết and in terms of their individual circumstances. There are, of course, general notions about what Tết is ‘all about’; certain ideals, values, norms, expectations and symbols associated with it which are detailed in existing, often idealised accounts,Footnote 11 but although these may help to understand Tết, they do not enable us to specify what the lived experience of Tết is like or enable one to appreciate the temporal and contingent nature of urban place-making during Tết. Furthermore, it is through seeing Tết as a form of social practice that the connections between the home and other places, as well as between the sacred and the secular, and between private and public, may be identified and interrogated. This tension between the economic and social realities impinging on individual agents and the existence of normative conventions associated with Tết runs throughout the paper and is addressed in the conclusion.
The home
Taking the family home (nhà)Footnote 12 as my starting point, I will adopt what Ingold (following Heidegger) calls ‘the dwelling perspective’Footnote 13 in terms of which ‘the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity’, rather than the individual acting in terms of some cultural text or in terms of a pre-existing symbolic structure.Footnote 14 As the most significant annual festival in Vietnam, Tết touches on virtually every aspect of Vietnamese ‘culture’, and to attempt to specify its symbolic structure would thus be a laborious and almost pointless task.
Ingold's dwelling perspective is similar in some ways to that suggested earlier by Michel de Certeau in his analysis of ‘spatial practices’. To de Certeau, space is ‘practiced place’. The residents of a city space make its features meaningful to them by the ways in which they use them, creatively selecting in terms of their particular inclinations and interests, in this way producing meaningful space out of what is a temporally fixed place. In ‘walking’ the city people connect places, they ‘weave places together’ in their practices and in this way ‘spatializing’, that is, making and experiencing the city for themselves.Footnote 15 Later approaches in urban sociology adopt a similar perspective, at least in part, by attending to ‘the social construction of urban space … through the daily activity and interaction of people’.Footnote 16 De Certeau's comparison of this with the speech act clarifies his meaning: ‘Walking’ the city constitutes a series of illocutionary acts or performances,Footnote 17 which create spaces by imposing meaning on place. Just as language contains potential, so does the city as a collection of places. Just as speech realises this potential, so does ‘walking’ the city realise the potential of place by creating meaningful spaces within it through the practices involved in relation to these. Just as speech acts often exist in relationship with each other, in a series (e.g. criticism — offence taken — apology offered — apology accepted, etc.), so are the spaces created by the walker related to each other in a meaningful way as part of the walker's life experience and within a particular social context. This is a useful perspective that complements Ingold and informs my analysis. Of course the places in a city also have what we might term ‘meaningful pasts’, i.e. they are not encountered anew each time, but in the context of Tết their previous meanings are transformed and linked to other places in new and creative ways. The home, in particular, is a ‘place’ in de Certeau's sense only as a building before it is inhabited, after which it becomes meaningful space as it is lived from day to day and in relation to specific contexts, of which Tết is one.
In making use of the ‘dwelling perspective’ to understand the nature of festive place-making in the home, I take my lead from the Vietnamese themselves, who think of Tết primarily as family time; many of the activities associated with it take place in the family home and involve kin relations. The home has some advantages over other sites associated with Tết, because if one does make a distinction between the ‘social production’ of place and its consumption or ‘social construction’,Footnote 18 it is apparent that these converge in the home and involve the same people, the co-resident kin group who, through the transformations that they effect in and around the house, experience home in a special way. They do not merely prepare it for the celebration of Tết, but also celebrate Tết by preparing for it. The same principle is evident also in other aspects of Tết, at other places in the urban environment, as we shall see. Through these activities people transform and give special temporal and spatial meaning to their homes during the Tết period while reinforcing and expressing the importance of family and kinship. But in order to do this, connections with other places and relations with others in these places are necessary. The home and its residents cannot be seen in isolation from the wider social process of Tết that it and many other people, places and things within HCMC and its immediate (and sometimes not so immediate) vicinity are part of. This involves examining the nature of the urban landscape as it is made relevant through Tết activities, and the significance and interconnectedness of places (including the home) within this landscape. Using the dwelling perspective we are also able to see how and why the home becomes a kind of heterotopia in Foucauldian terms, and its status as such is considered in the penultimate section of the paper.
In considering the relationship between place and landscape, Ingold asserts that any place within a landscape ‘embodies the whole at a particular nexus within it, and in this respect is different from every other’. And he explains the uniqueness of place thus:
A place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there — to the sights, sounds and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience. And these, in turn, depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage. It is from this relational context of people's engagement with the world, in the business of dwelling, that each place draws its unique significance.Footnote 19
It is the ‘embodiment of the whole’ in each place within the urban landscape that I am interested in developing insights into here. It is the connections between the activities, sights, sounds, tastes and smells associated with places that I will stress. I will argue that it is not useful to see Tết in HCMC as taking place at a number of different sites with different values or meanings and that what is required instead is an understanding of how people act in relation to places and make connections between them over time as part of a social process that constitutes their construction and experience of Tết. It is through their practice that people provide sites with meaning and make places into spaces in de Certeau's sense, but it is also through their practice that different places and qualities (such as sacred and secular, public and private) are linked and partially conflated and that the relationships between them can be discerned. This provides us with an appreciation of the whole — of the Tết landscape — as a particular seasonal construction of the HCMC urban landscape and the environment in which it is situated, and of the Tết festival. In other words, participating in Tết involves a temporal series of embodied actions and interactions that links places as well as people, and that embeds aspects of places into each other.
Thus, after considering the home, I will look at how the home is implicated in the simultaneous social production and construction of place with and by other, extra-domestic actors, and at how this feeds back into Tết practices within the home. Tết is too complex, diverse and extensive to consider all aspects of in a single paper, so it has been necessary to select those aspects relevant to my theme and objective. I will consider aspects of Tết ritual and worship as they take place both within and beyond the home, the ways in which business owners construct and experience Tết, and the ways in which the city's streets are transformed and lived in during the festival, including the role of civic authorities.
Experiencing Tết at home
Given the ubiquity and importance of ancestor veneration in Vietnam, it is hard to separate sacred and secular in examining what happens in the home at any time of the year, and perhaps particularly so during Tết. Renewal in homes in preparation for Tết is simultaneously preparation for the renewed presence of the dead, who are worshipped and attended to at various times and places as Tết unfolds. Ancestor worship coexists in harmony with faiths such as Buddhism and Christianity, but a variety of other deities and spiritual beings are worshipped in and around the home during Tết as well as at other places of worship.
Renewing the home annually in preparation for the New Year includes activities such as spring-cleaning, repainting and refurbishment, in which different members of the family work cooperatively. In the lead up to Tết, removing dust and dirt symbolically removes any ill fortune of the past year, while also preparing to welcome kin, living and dead, as well as other visitors, in the first few days of the New Year and to renew relationships with them. Ancestral altars are cleaned and renewed; brass candlesticks and censers are polished; ancestral tablets or framed photographs of the dead restored. This preparation clearly involves links to a variety of other sites, e.g. shops that polish and repair brass items and those that sell religious paraphernalia. This ‘renewal’ also extends to individuals, who purchase new clothes, get their hair done and so on, in the frantic burst of consumption activity leading up to Tết. Ending the old year in a positive way like this is believed to help ensure that the New Year, too, will be full of good things.
Purchases in the run-up to Tết include everyday necessities but also many special items, bought only during Tết, so the social experience of going to market or supermarket at this time of the year accords with decisions made about what to purchase for Tết based on knowledge of the festival and past experiences of participating in it. Home and market/supermarket are linked. Thus, the meanings that people enact in making purchases at retail sites, as with the later visit to the city centre to enjoy the sights, is distinctive, different from everyday procurement of food and other necessities, and this meaning is created with the needs of the home in its engagement with Tết in the minds of the consumers as well as suppliers and retailers.
At various points during Tết the house is transformed in other ways too. In some homes rooms are temporarily cleared and outside areas readied for the assembly and cooking of festive rice cakes, which requires a large open floor space to accommodate a number of people working cooperatively and a large wood fire outside for the cooking of the cakes, which are usually prepared in large numbers.Footnote 20 This takes a number of hours, during which time the members of the household and their helpers (usually kin and perhaps one or two close friends) relax, play cards for low stakes and catch up with each other's news. In terms of the Tết ideal, this is a time for pleasant sociability and the reinforcement of kinship ties.
Transformation of space outside the house also occurs at various times in the Tết calendar when temporary altars are erected on balconies or at front entrances, such as for the Tết eve (giao thừa) worship (see below) or on the eighth day after Tết, for ‘star worship’ (cúng sao).Footnote 21 Tết rituals welcoming or sending off the ancestors (ông bà, tổ tiên) usually require supplementing the already heavily laden ancestral altar with a table on which food and other offerings are placed for worship prior to the family meal that follows immediately afterwards.
During Tết there is extensive worship in and about the house on a number of days as the ancestors are invited into the home to join the living for the festival, and provided with special food and other offerings. These are also occasions for special meals, with a range of symbolically important dishes linking living kin to their ancestors, to their regional and national identities, and to their places of origin. Among the common offerings on the ancestral altar is a ‘five fruits bowl’ (mâm ngũ quả), which symbolises the good fortune and prosperity hoped for in the coming year.Footnote 22 Another is the festive rice cake, made at home, received as a gift, or bought at the market or supermarket, the style of which enables identification with the nation and its origins, as well as with one of the country's three main regions — north, centre or south. Rice cakes are also an important food offering on ancestral altars, manifesting the important symbolic link between rice and kinship, and an important item of gift exchange between kin and friends.Footnote 23 Both items — the five fruits bowl and the rice cakes — are also experienced in public (non-domestic) religious settings, as we shall see, linking the home with sites outside of it.
Tết ritual, then, discussed more fully below, is concentrated in the home, which serves as an axis mundi,Footnote 24 a social, cosmological and emotional centre around which the universe revolves and to which it is connected in various ways, and in relation to which Tết as a whole is lived and made meaningful. How this is done always involves agency. For example, people choose which style of rice cake to make or purchase, and thus which region/s to identify with, and it is possible to choose more than one style and region, depending on the family's history. How they make Tết meaningful to themselves thus varies accordingly. The home as a centre that references and condenses other sites of significance during Tết allows one to view it as both utopia and heterotopia.
Important activities within the home during Tết also include receiving visits from kin and friends, exchanging gifts and news with them, and making reciprocal visits. In this way the home is connected to others, and kinship and friendship bonds are acted out and renewed. Tết is frequently an occasion for an extended family reunion, with members gathering in the house of the most senior member of the kin group where they worship in turn at ancestral altars as they arrive and partake in a communal meal. In a similar vein, urban families sometimes receive kin from afar who come to visit during Tết — those living abroad permanently or temporarily, or relatives from the rural hinterland. None of these people arrives empty-handed; they carry with them gifts from their home areas, often special items not easily obtainable in HCMC, making further material connections between the home and other places. These sorts of connections are made also by reciprocal visiting and gift exchange between neighbours and friends, and between business associates, and it is thought proper to visit teachers or former teachers on the third day of Tết. Each home can be seen as the centre of a social network which is manifested through the practice of visiting and gift exchange.
The home is also connected to many other places, to other sites in and around the city. The experience of Tết turns on how and to what extent the members of the home make and experience these connections and in the ways in which these other sites are linked to the home itself. Here we need to examine the nature of the social activities at various sites, the connections between these sites, and between them and the home, to appreciate how people actively make Tết through their actions in and between places over time. This is an important aspect of the ‘dwelling’ with which we are concerned here. Many of the accounts of Tết that I have been given in interviews and in Tết diaries emphasise not only the sociality associated with places, but also movement between places — between homes, home and market, home and pagoda, between cities and towns, from place to place within a city and so on.Footnote 25 These recollections tell not only of places but also of experiences in between places, of events and people encountered, things seen and noted, and of the social activities of others. One of these was from a student, Trang. What stood out in Trang's recollection, and what made Tết 2009 memorable for her, was that on returning from a social gathering one day she saw the President of the country and his entourage visiting a disabled war veteran in his suburban residence, an event witnessed purely by chance.Footnote 26 Trang's close friend, Thủy, somewhat to my surprise, highlighted the Tết experience of being stuck in traffic jams, which she said enabled her to take in and enjoy the Tết atmosphere. Pressed further on this she elaborated: many of the motorcycles on the road carried young families, she pointed out, usually en route to the city centre to enjoy the Tết street lights and atmosphere, and this sight conveyed to her the significance and enjoyment of Tết as a family festival. These accounts of Tết also emphasise things associated with sites that sometimes connect different places — food and drink consumed, gifts given and received, photographs taken at particular spots, items purchased in markets, votive offerings obtained and burnt later at home and so on. This emphasises the view that Tết as a lived and holistic experience unfolds over time between as well as within places as people ‘walk’ the city and make connections between them. This movement involves and facilitates social relationships — between people, between the living and the dead, between mystical beings and the subjects who worship them, and indeed between different kinds of supernatural beings themselves, as indicated below.
Tết worship
Some of the obviously sacred sites associated with Tết activities are non-earthly spiritual sites; others are earthly ones, but with spiritual significance. The home connects to the heavens, to an ancestral graveyard, to the ancestors in the underworld or in heaven, to pagodas or churches, and to other sites associated with the supernatural, in various ways — spatially, temporally, materially and spiritually. The dwelling perspective enables us to see this as part of the larger pattern of connections involving activity and interaction through which people construct Tết for themselves.
The explicitly religious aspects of Tết commence on the twenty-third day of the last lunar month (tháng chạp) when the kitchen god, Ông Táo or Táo Quân,Footnote 27 is worshipped with gifts and offerings to enable him to travel to heaven to give his annual report on the family to the Jade Emperor, the supreme being (Ngọc Hoàng Thượng đế). He is provided with a special meal and votive offerings obtained from specialist purveyors at the market are burnt. Sending the kitchen god away initiates a series of ritual actions which take place over the next two or three weeks, with the details varying from family to family, but within which certain patterns and commonalities can be identified. Some of these are mentioned here in order to illustrate the nature of ritual place-making during Tết, and the links between the home and other places, but it needs to be borne in mind that this is only part of a much more detailed and varied series of ritual actions and events.
On the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth day of the last lunar month ancestral graves, if accessible, are visited, tidied and cleaned, often in company with kin from other homes, and the deceased are invoked and worshipped with flowers, food and incense. These are placed on the graves together with votive offerings (hàng mã — clothes and other accessories, television sets, vehicles, imitation money, etc., all made from paper or cardboard) which are burnt at the foot of the grave itself or nearby and thereby transferred to and used by the dead in the underworld. In the invocations to the dead the latter are told why the living have come, what they are doing, and what they wish for in the New Year for themselves and their families. This practice of tảo mộ (tending the graves) again highlights the importance of the family, which include the dead as well as the living, and is part of the ongoing relationship between living and dead on which the happiness and well-being of both depend. It is followed by kin meeting with each other, worshipping at ancestral altars, eating a communal meal and exchanging news. For many urban families, however, graves are too far away in their original towns or villages, and cremation means that many ancestors do not have grave sites at all. Pagodas and churches offer acceptable substitutes; they have special rooms (nhà để hài cốt) in which ashes of the deceased are kept in jars, and dedicated altars at which congregants may place photos of their dead relatives. In the days leading up to Tết people visit these places in order to worship and make offerings to their ancestors and to participate in prayers for the dead by priests and monks. Theravada pagodas and Catholic churches have special Tết services for the dead, the former before Tết itself, the latter on the second day of the New Year.Footnote 28
Religious activity on the last day of the lunar year also illustrates the importance of kinship and of links with dead kin, and includes a late morning or mid-day ritual at which the ancestors are welcomed into the home for Tết and provided with food and votive offerings,Footnote 29 followed by a family meal. Ancestral altars are prepared for this event, laden with fruit and flowers, and with gifts from various sources. Worship takes place also at the other altars in the home, of which there are usually several, and culminates with worship at a special Tết altar (bàn thờ thiên — ‘altar for the heavens’) near the front door or outside on a balcony at the midnight hour, the sacred moment marking the transition to the New Year. This transition and its associated ritual are known as giao thừa. The object is to secure the blessings of the gods for the New Year and to keep misfortune away. More specifically, the supreme being (Ngọc Hoàng) is said to send one of his 12 mandarins to look after the earth every year, and on this occasion the new mandarin is welcomed and the previous one thanked. It is also a time when homeless spirits (cúng cô hồn), such as people who died in warfare and did not receive a proper burial, and who are thought of as wandering the streets and potentially dangerous, are placated. In some families this is immediately preceded by worship in front of the altars inside the house and it is at this time that the kitchen god returns from his journey. Immediately after giao thừa or early the following morning, Buddhist families go to a nearby pagoda to participate in the formal worship that takes place there to mark the New Year, receive li xi (‘lucky money’) from the celebrant, and perhaps eat some food afterwards.
On the first day of the New Year, pagodas are full of people from morning till night. Many devout Buddhists, often women of the middle or older generation, undertake a pilgrimage to a number of pagodas, often in small groups of friends and/or kin who hire a vehicle to take them to worship in different pagodas in succession, believing that this will bring them special blessings and benefits.Footnote 30 Attendance at pagoda services continues on a regular basis during Tết and many people provide the monks with donations and ask them to add the names of their kin in need of prayer to the lists kept there and displayed on pagoda walls. Famous pagodas that have what are believed to be special qualities are very popular during Tết. Some of these are within easy reach of HCMC, such as the pagoda associated with the Jade Emperor, not far from the city centre, or One Pillar pagoda in Thủ Đức (modelled after a pagoda of the same name in Hanoi), or Hoằng Pháp pagoda on the city's outskirts. Other famous pagodas, such as Chùa Bà Đen (the ‘Black Lady’ pagoda) in Tây Ninh province or Bà Chúa Xứ (‘Lady of the Realm’ pagoda) in Châu Đốc, both near the Cambodian border, require at least a day's excursion, but nevertheless draw thousands of visitors during Tết, many of them from HCMC.Footnote 31 These pagodas are established places but they are not experienced passively by those who patronise them during Tết. Nor are they experienced uniformly: the faithful who go there make Tết meaningful to themselves, expressing their wishes for the New Year and their thanks for past blessings through their prayers, invocations, offerings, purchases and other actions at these sites, which in turn are linked to their individual economic and social circumstances, to their beliefs, and to their expectations and understandings of Tết. Philip Taylor has vividly illustrated the kind of variability in the motivations, actions, and attitudes that exists among worshippers in his study of Bà Chúa Xứ.Footnote 32
Religious activities also take place at certain sites associated with former national or regional heroes who are worshipped as sources of good fortune and spiritual soothsayers. The temple and mausoleum devoted to the early nineteenth-century southern statesman and military commander Lê Văn Duyệt, known simply as Lăng Ông (‘His Lordship's Mausoleum’)Footnote 33 or Lăng Ông Bà Chiểu (‘His Lordship's Mausoleum at Bà Chiểu), is one such site. The temple associated with thirteenth-century national hero and naval commander, Trần Hưng Đạo, is another. At Lăng Ông people worship, burn incense, and make offerings to Lê Văn Duyệt, seek to know their future through a variety of divinatory means (including xin keo, xin xăm),Footnote 34 and attempt to secure luck for the forthcoming year and for their lives in general by buying and freeing birds, touching items in the temple and smoothing the good fortune onto themselves and so on. At this time pagodas and temples such as these are surrounded by a variety of people other than worshippers — purveyors of incense and other religious goods, beggars seeking alms, people selling lottery tickets, flower sellers, fortune tellers and so on. Their experience of Tết, their ‘dwelling’, is somewhat different from those who go there to pray and divine the future, but with whom they interact.
During Tết members of the Cao Đài faith make a pilgrimage to their spiritual centre in Tây Ninh province, while Catholic churches offer a series of services, parallel in some ways to the Tết activities of Buddhists on the first three days of the New Year. These too provide both spiritual and physical connections to the home and thus enable us to extend the dwelling perspective in another direction. Catholics honour and pray for their dead kin on the second day of Tết, and bring home a paper inscribed with a biblical quote or inspirational saying which they place on the altars in their homes alongside statues of Jesus or Mary and photographs of ancestors. At pagodas and temples people obtain various items which they take away with them and which help them to prepare for the New Year — a small card bearing an inspirational or devotional saying, a leaf or bud picked there (this act is known as hái lộc, to ‘gather luck’) or the leaf of a plant called phát tài (meaning ‘become wealthy’). Pagodas and churches are also retail outlets for items such as religious tracts, incense sticks, statues, portraits of deities, wall hangings and the like, which make their way into homes during Tết. It is not necessary here to provide details of the various rituals and forms of worship that follow the sending off of the ancestorsFootnote 35 and which continue until the fifteenth day, the first full moon of the New Year. Some of these will be referred to briefly below.
To summarise the analysis at this point, the empirical material provided has indicated various connections between places and people, in relation to a variety of ritual and other Tết activities. It seems clear that we have to think about Tết places within the urban landscape of HCMC (and its hinterland) in terms of how people make them significant, and in relational terms — what connects them, how and why they are connected, and how they constitute a whole. Tết provides us with the opportunity to view and analyse a chronotope, in Bhaktin's sense, a complex intersection of temporal and spatial sequences which correspond with each other,Footnote 36 similar to what Ingold has termed a ‘taskscape’, a set of related heterogeneous activities that unfold over a social period, in this case, the time associated with Tết.Footnote 37 Here time and space come together and are joined in a variety of places within which human acts demarcate them as set apart both temporally and spatially, but also as connected to each other materially, sequentially, experientially and ideologically. In the following sections I illustrate this further, first by looking at how one sector of the urban community, business people or shop-owners, make Tết meaningful, and how this sometimes intersects with ethnic or cultural identity. Second, I detail some Tết activities made possible by the local government authority, and how people participate in these. Here too, with the use of the dwelling perspective, one can discern important connections between places as made by people, and extend the argument presented so far.
Business, home and ethnicity
Given the domestic material necessities for Tết, retailers gear up for the festival weeks in advance, providing household necessities as well as specialised Tết goods. Retail sites too are transformed for Tết; they are sites produced for festive consumers, and patronising them is an important part of the Tết experience. But the production of these sites by shop and market stallholders is also a significant part of their own construction of Tết. Business people, retailers and shop-owners also occupy their own homes and the shop is often a physical extension or integral part of the residence, so we need to look at Tết from this perspective also.
For Saigonese who own a business, their experience of home, business and pagoda (or church) may be connected in a specific way. Like other Saigon residents, shopkeepers often have an altar on the floor in the living room of their homes for Ông Địa (God of the land) and Ông Thần Tài (God of wealth). They usually also have such an altar in their shop or business premises, if the latter is physically separate from the home, at which they regularly worship, and during Tết this is supplemented with mai flowers and mandarin trees, floral and paper decorations, etc., to give the shop a Tết flavour. The tenth day of the first lunar month is a special day for the worship of Thần Tài, and it is primarily business owners who practise this ritual. Where the shop is an extension of the home, the Tết altar for ‘all the gods of the heavens’ may be placed at the front entrance of the shop, which may also be the front entrance of the home. Furthermore, many of the people who visit Lăng Ông are shop-owners, who do so in order to ensure the future success of their business. Clearly, the secular–sacred and public–private distinctions are hard to find here, and multiple connections are made between the home-shop and other sites during Tết.
As retailers, shop-owners and market stallholders are implicated in Tết as it is constructed and experienced by others through their retail activities, and their own construction of Tết has to do with the interpenetration of home and business as well as with the multitude of interactions and negotiations with their customers, suppliers and employees (who usually get Tết bonuses). It is they who help to make the streets what they are during Tết and to attract people to the city. Finally, markets and businesses are closed for a number of days over Tết, again changing the nature of the city as landscape and the experience of it, but precisely when they open varies, depending on the proprietor's assessment of which is an auspicious day to do so. Many shops signal the fact that they have reopened after Tết with worship and a special altar at the front entrance directed at the earth god, Thổ Địa.Footnote 38 So while their homes may share many of the elements of Tết with non-shop-owners, the ‘dwelling perspective’ forces us to examine how they connect various urban Tết sites through their business and associated practices or, to put it slightly differently, how the way in which they live Tết connects various people and places in the urban landscape.
What this brief look at shop-owners rather obviously suggests is that the experience and meaning of Tết varies across groups and individuals in the city, with the connections between sites, and between sites and homes, made in varying ways. But there are nevertheless certain general patterns that can be discerned, and some that link certain kinds of activities with certain kinds of social groups — based on factors such as age, gender, occupation and ethnicity. The HCMC district known as Chợ Lớn is associated with Vietnamese of Chinese origin and ethnicity. Not only do different subgroups within this broad ethnic category have certain distinctive Tết practices (e.g. relating to food),Footnote 39 but they also signal their general distinctiveness as Chinese Vietnamese during Tết by embodying it publicly in specific ways. One of these is the practice of carrying large burning incense sticks from pagodas and temples back to their homes, usually on motorbikes. This explicit linking of temple/pagoda worship with the well-being of the home is something that other Saigon residents generally do not practise in this particular manner — they worship with incense in pagodas and at home but generally do not transport burning incense between the two. What connects this topic (Chinese ethnicity) to the previous one (shop-owners) is that in HCMC there is an association between the two in the minds of many residents.
Tết in the streets
During Tết, the streets of HCMC are transformed and become a space of contemplation, leisure and enjoyment. How the members of the home experience Tết is related to the extent to which they leave their homes and help to make various places in the urban landscape. This is an important aspect of the analysis based on the dwelling perspective that I have been developing so far and involves various connections between places not yet mentioned. Large businesses and hotels decorate their premises with Tết themes, some spectacularly so, and viewing and enjoying these are part of the attraction of visiting the city during Tết. Dragon and unicorn dancers and their accompanying musicians are hired by businesses to perform in front of their premises (to bring good luck for the New Year). They are accompanied by a variety of other acts as well as by men in Thần Tài and Ông Địa dress and masks who dance into the business or shop in order to remove evil influences and bring it good fortune. Sometimes Thần Tài and Ông Địa figures go around from shop to shop by themselves accompanied by a small percussion band, collecting donations as they do so, sometimes posing for photographs with sightseers. As indicated above, most Vietnamese homes also have Thần Tài and Ông Địa on a single small altar on the floor in the front room of the house, where they are worshipped on a daily basis, making for another symbolic link between home and the city.Footnote 40
The city's People's Committee sponsors a variety of entertainments during Tết, including free public music shows and other events. There are also many billboards that transform streets and offer Tết messages, often in combination with political ones, and at night the main streets are beautifully and lavishly lit. Youth centres and other public institutions stage concerts and exhibitions, and well-known buildings and monuments are bedecked with appropriate slogans. Some of these places host craft markets at which artists attired in the garb of traditional calligraphists (Ông Đồ) produce and sell Tết artefacts such as the well-known ‘parallel sentences’ which are bought and hung on walls in homes. Parks are transformed into flower and bonsai markets, or into displays of floral and other forms of decorative art. These productions, too, may incorporate political messages and be sites of social memory — Tao Đàn park's flower show in 2009 included a large replica of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail with accompanying photographs and illustrations. In Phạm Ngũ Lão, 23rd September Park becomes a market for the mai tree and other plants in demand in homes over Tết. The mai tree's yellow blossom is a ubiquitous symbol of Tết in the South, and the park's name recalls the French reoccupation of Saigon and the start of the resistance that ultimately led to Vietnamese unity and independence. The monument on the street outside the site of the former US Embassy building which commemorates the attack on the Embassy on 31 January 1968 by North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops is transformed with banners bearing slogans that make explicit its link to the Tết Offensive, which is now commemorated every Tết through slogans, banners, exhibitions and parades, while the memory of those who died in that attack is sacralised through the addition of flowers and incense to the memorial during Tết in honour of the fallen. Thus, memories are embodied in the urban landscape through the conscious actions of local political authorities. These are important in facilitating not only a national consciousness, but also the construction of local place and identification with it by local residents.Footnote 41 Their experience of Tết in the home is thus connected in multiple ways with the ways in which Tết is made and lived in the city, on its streets, in its parks, its theatres and its places of commerce.
There are also unofficial social productions that transform the streets and the city, made possible by a degree of licence and tolerance associated with Tết. Here I refer to phenomena ranging from gambling on street corners and in markets that police turn a blind eye to during Tết, to the many unlicensed vendors who occupy sidewalks and parks, to the ways in which markets spill over into the streets around them, and to the occupation of sidewalks and open spaces by nearby retailers. Tết is a time for businesses and informal, occasional vendors, to make money, and the markets and streets reflect this. Here too are a multitude of different ways in which Tết becomes a lived experience, different in its own way for each participant — the moneylender in it for the high rate of interest, the short-term borrower hoping to make some quick money over the holiday period, the illegal purveyor of Tết items on a street corner, the shop-owner who temporarily occupies the pavement outside the shop, the gambling operator in the market, his clientele who lose (or, more rarely, make) money there, and the police and other officials who mostly ignore these activities. Each makes Tết for him or herself through their practices, adding to the overall experience of Tết that is different for each but which nevertheless expresses certain common themes and patterns without necessarily conforming completely to any formal model of what Tết is or should be. And for the majority of Saigonese who do not fall into these kinds of categories, it is by their actions in and movement through the streets, by their ‘dwelling’, that they experience these sights and sounds and out of which a large part of their experience of Tết is constituted.
The bánh tét festival
In recent years in HCMC the city's People's Committee, through its tourism operation, Saigontourist Holding Company, has sponsored a large ‘Bánh Tét Festival’ (Lễ Hội Bánh Tét),Footnote 42 incorporating a variety of free public concerts, an elaborate floral display in which Nguyễn Huệ Street in the city centre is transformed into a botanical theme park, as well as a spectacular annual street parade (in 2004–8), drawing both live and television audiences of many thousands.
In these events local (HCMC) and regional (southern) themes are prominent, along with national ones. When I witnessed the street parade in 2008 it was led by four floats depicting iconic HCMC buildings, some of them within sight of the audience as their doubles rolled by — Bến Thành Market, Thành Phố Theatre (also known as the Opera House), the Hồ Chí Minh Museum at Bến Nhà Rồng and the HCMC People's Committee building (formerly the Hotel de Ville). These buildings were all extremely familiar to the thousands watching the parade, so one might read this parade as the city depicting itself to itself, showing itself to its citizens for them to re-experience in the context of Tết, implying that their experience of Tết and their sense of belonging (encouraged by the choreographers if not universally felt) was an experience of the city as depicted by those in power.Footnote 43 Moreover, this leading and clearly local aspect of the parade does not feature at all as part of the national image or of the generally accepted symbolic structure of Tết. A city-wide and publicly funded series of festive activities is a relatively recently introduction, but one that people have quickly become habituated to. Hence people's experience of Tết cannot be thought of as synonymous with some kind of symbolic structure associated with it, but has to be assessed in terms of social practice and local realities.
Apart from the four iconic buildings, the predominant visual themes in the parade were the apricot blossom or mai flower, associated with Tết in the South, and the productive nature of the South's agricultural economy, depicted by means of enormous imitation fruit, largely of the same kinds found in the ‘five fruits bowl’ and thus symbolically linked to the altars in people's homes. The grand finale and highlight of the event made a similar link to home altars and kinship practices: announced by dramatic music that contrasted markedly with the popular Tết songs sung earlier by well-known performers, it was the arrival on flat-bed trucks of two giant renditions of bánh tét, the festive rice cakes associated with the South, weighing 3.5 tons each, and culminating with these being offered in solemn worship to the ancestors of the nation (this was made explicit by the master of ceremonies) by the local political leadership, before being cut up and distributed widely to all who wished to partake. Thus, it is hard to separate sacred from secular in the transformation and use of the city's streets for the Bánh Tét festival and the way in which this is experienced, and the metaphoric as well as sensual connection with other places of worship — the home, the pagoda — is obvious. But it is also evident again here, as it is in other public places, that the experience of Tết is not only the experience of a national festival, but of a local one and a regional one. This needs to be understood within the context of a history of North–South rivalry and implicit competition between HCMC and Hanoi. Both the street parade and the floral tableaux in Nguyễn Huệ Street expressed the economic importance of the South to the nation, and the dominant position of both the South and the city. Yet Nguyễn Huệ Street also combines (but does not conflate) national identity with a regional one. The pink peach blossom associated with Tết in the North is in evidence there each year; Nguyễn Huệ was a late eighteenth-century emperor and military commander who is credited with the unification of Vietnam prior to Western colonisation; and a statue of national hero and architect of the modern united Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh, stands at the head of the street looking down its length towards the Saigon River.
When the Lễ Hội Bánh Tét street parade was discontinued due to the economic downturn of late 2008, it was replaced for Tết 2009 and again in 2010 with a city-wide bánh tét-making competition, with each of the city's districts participating, initially in heats and ultimately in the final round of the competition held at Đầm Sen Park, a large leisure and entertainment centre owned by the People's Committee. After the winners had been declared, the competition culminated in the winning bánh tét being publicly displayed and offered in worship by groups of high-level City officials at three important city sites — the temple of the Hùng Kings (founders of Vietnam in ancient times)Footnote 44 in the botanical gardens, the Hồ Chí Minh museum at Bến Nhà Rồng, and the museum of his successor, Tôn Đức Thắng. The Hùng Kings' temple is an obviously sacred site, but so are the two museums, each of which has a memorial hall with an altar at which these founding ancestors of modern Vietnam are worshipped. Once again, the city, the South, and the nation were blended together through this competition, and symbolically linked with the home, where bánh tét are traditionally made and consumed. Again, the distinction between sacred and secular, public and private, production and consumption, was blurred.
Home as heterotopia
It is in and in relation to the home and family, then, that Tết is experienced and lived. Even in the case of going out to enjoy the city centre with the family or a group of friends, it is from the home that one departs, and to the home that one returns, and in the home that one preserves, communicates and reconsumes the experience through photographs, artefacts and conversation. This is, of course, the case with festivals in many parts of the world. What I have tried to demonstrate in the case of Tết, however, is that each place is metonymically significant and that through metonymic connections these various Tết places are connected in and to the home. The connection between the sites is made by people in action, moving between them, linking them with each other materially and cosmologically, embodying them in various ways and making embodied connections between them. The bánh tét that is symbolic of both national and regional identity, paraded through the streets or manifested in competitive display, purchased in markets, or received from friends or kin as gifts, is placed as offering on altars in the home and consumed round the table during Tết meals by the resident kin group. Thus, places and the event, Tết, are contiguous with each other, enacted and embodied, made meaningful as part of a lived experience that unfolds as Tết progresses.
Although the home as an imagined site of harmony and ultimate satisfaction may be regarded as a utopia of sorts,Footnote 45 the analysis that I have presented suggests that in HCMC it can equally be regarded as a heterotopia, i.e. a place that connects to and condenses many other places — economic ones, leisure spaces, graveyards, places of worship, historic sites and so on.
Foucault's essay on heterotopia has been described as ‘frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent’, perhaps intentionally so in the opinion of Soja, since any attempt to give it a precise meaning is likely to fail.Footnote 46 Foucault has also been criticised by Arun Saldanha and others as overly structuralist. However, it is important to consider the notion of heterotopia as an analytical concept that can be applied to a space (or a situation, a performance, an event) rather than to regard it as a space or element within a larger total structure. Certainly, heterotopia is presented by Foucault as a spatial reality, in de Certeau's sense of the term, but it is constituted as such by the relationships that it mirrors or inverts, and my application of the concept here is in accordance with the notion of ‘dwelling’ as a form of social practice. Viewing the home as a heterotopia in a non-structuralist sense involves viewing it as a scene of practice and as a summary or condensation of the practices associated with Tết that its members are engaged in, as a focal point in their lived experience of Tết to which the practices at other sites in their experience of the city are connected and aggregated.
Utopia and heterotopia are not incompatible, since according to Foucault a heterotopia is ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ and ‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’.Footnote 47 I have shown how this is achieved, how the home becomes a heterotopian reality through social practice during Tết, by showing how it connects to other places through the activities of its inhabitants, and how this ‘dwelling’ mutually incorporates these places symbolically and materially. Home juxtaposes, contests and inverts the separation between living and dead through the ancestral altar and the rituals through which the dead are invited home for Tết, and sent on their way again afterwards. The division between private and public is inverted also, through the consumption of produce obtained in the markets by the family, the display on altars of gifts from business associates and friends, and the visits that are made by the latter to the home. The public is made private, the dead are brought back to life, the world outside becomes the world inside (e.g. through television and sightseeing). Both of these inversions reinforce a third juxtaposition and inversion, that between sacred and secular, between place of religious worship and centre of everyday, secular activities.
The heterotopoic nature of the home is not constant. It changes with the developmental cycle of the domestic group, with the seasons, and with the economic, social and political circumstances that provide part of its context. Thus, heterotopia is not an essential and unchanging characteristic, but a relative and contingent one. In this respect, regarding the home as heterotopia is also consistent with the idea that such spaces are ‘most often linked to slices in time’ and ‘function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time’.Footnote 48 Tết is a transitional time, a calendrical festival, situating the home betwixt and between ‘normal’ time of social life. Tết practices are geared toward securing a happy and prosperous New Year for the members of a family situated within a home, so the home is a utopia (an imagined reality) in this context of festival time as well as a heterotopia, since heterotopias ‘are spaces of deferral, spaces where ideas and practices that represent the good life can come into being, from nowhere, even if they never actually achieve what they set out to achieve’.Footnote 49
Conclusion
Drawing on practice approaches to the analysis of social life, one can view the extra-domestic aspects of Tết as parts of an urban landscape upon which people act and through which they constitute the meaning of Tết in relation to home. This is not quite the everyday urban landscape with which they are familiar, but one where certain of its constituent sites are transformed through the actions of a variety of agents that produce a landscape appropriate to Tết, calling on their experience of previous Tết festivals, their knowledge of the traditions of the past and acting in terms of contemporary needs and desires. For each individual, for each home, a practice approach indicates that the landscape becomes a locality and a series of linked spaces through their actions upon it during the Tết period, through their thoughtful, conscious and meaning-making ‘dwelling’, and this appropriation of the urban landscape and its material elements is what constitutes their experience of Tết, together with what takes place in the home — their private, domestic realm, which is intimately connected to the public one. In this sense the division between private and public becomes blurred and, partly because of this, the line between the sacred and the profane aspects of Tết, too, is at least opaque.
Through their practice of place-making during Tết in the city, people connect certain places to their home, aided by the exchange of objects between places and people, and make the city theirs, creating their sense of belonging.Footnote 50 Many originate from elsewhere, and they recall this memory via Tết rice cakes, visits to natal homes and other forms of symbolic action, but they also forge a new sense of belonging to the city through blending the home into the city in the way that they do. How they do so varies according to individual histories and circumstances, making the precise meaning of Tết contingent and variable. While certain sites such as the Hùng Kings' Temple or Nguyễn Huệ Street do indeed carry relatively constant meanings, in the sense of being dominant symbols and having specific values and ideas associated with them,Footnote 51 a fuller understanding of Tết is derived from the ways in which sites are used and from how they are linked to each other through use over the Tết period. This varies from person to person, though there are patterns and regularities that can be discerned within this. As Ingold has pointed out, the notion of ‘dwelling’ always needs to be contextualised, and in this case, practices are undertaken in the context of a framework of knowledge and ideas relating to Tết handed down from the past, including people's own experience of Tết. This knowledge framework is a complex amalgam of generally known aspects of Vietnamese myth, history and tradition, religious beliefs and values, local and regional practices, kinship ideology, and more privately held beliefs and notions of appropriateness operating at the level of individual kin groups and homes. This framework is not static but continuously developing, informed by the past and reflecting social memory as well as individual circumstances; a recent death in the family affects the ways in which the home participates in Tết; historical events such as the Tết Offensive in 1968 also change the ideological aspects of the framework in terms of which Tết is understood. So how people imagine Tết changes over time and according to individual and social circumstances, as well as containing certain relatively invariant elements, and the way in which they live and make Tết into an embodied reality reflects both these tendencies.
Here, too, we find clarification in de Certeau's approach and in his distinction between place and space. In this paper the ‘spatializing’ process described involves connecting places related to the Tết festival, to people's ideas and beliefs about Tết, and to their ability and determination to realise the potential that the city holds in their quest for a meaningful Tết experience. In doing so they ‘live’ the city in accordance with both a structure of ideas and beliefs about Tết and their social, economic and physical abilities to put these into practice. Place is an order, a structure, ‘an instantaneous configuration of positions’Footnote 52 while space is how that order is realised in practice, which varies according to a number of factors — time, season, social and political context and so on. Similarly, Tết as an ideal mental construct is an order, and how people realise it in their ‘dwelling’ depends on their abilities and their choices. Since Tết is deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture, associated with a pattern of activities and beliefs that are widely held, how Tết is practised has a discernible pattern that accords with this structure, but which nevertheless demonstrates variety. In this way the connections between places as ‘spatialized’ through practice constitute a Tết story or narrative, a ‘text’ that is ‘written’ through' the process of ‘walking’ the city and one constructed in relation to and connected with Tết ideals. To use another of de Certeau's metaphors, the one is a map, the other a tour; the former a concept, the latter a series of actions or movements. The map is an abstraction and thus a fiction; the tour is a lived reality.Footnote 53
