In the face of political differences, dwindling resources, and interpersonal and sometimes generational grudges, how do families stay together? Silence and Sacrifice investigates this question in an intimately observed yet sprawling ethnography of families in the central Vietnamese city of Đà Nẵng. In central Vietnam, the political allegiances of many families were split between the regimes to the north and south during the Second Indochinese War (more commonly referred to as the Vietnam War outside the country). Decades after the war, marketizing reforms set in motion an economic boom that tested the integrity of many families, as new opportunities did not fall on everyone equitably. In theory, the egalitarianism of the Communist Revolution and the individualism of neoliberal reforms should have frayed the Confucian-inflected hierarchies that structure Vietnamese families. However, cautioning against totalizing accounts that frame the postreform era as a rupture from previous political-economic systems, Merav Shohet demonstrates how people forge a sense of continuity even as they absorb new market conditions.
Throughout this family-centered ethnography, hard choices, negotiations, and resignations are rendered in vivid dimension. Bà Bảy's relatives scramble to maintain a semblance of normalcy after her stroke, Liên and Lộc share an open secret of lost love, and An and Bi mull over a neighbor's tragedy. With such ethnographically rich descriptions of family life, it is difficult to reduce gender norms, kinship structures, and age hierarchies to essentialist traditions, false consciousness, or manifestations of political institutions. Indeed, Silence and Sacrifice resists easy categorization, as it draws from multiple analytic traditions to explore the ambivalences of everyday life.
The crosscurrents of family and political dynamics in Vietnam are expansive, overwhelming even, but Shohet focuses the reader's attention on a few themes, including various permutations of love and the gendered construction of moral personhood, that recur throughout the book. Most important is the polyvalent notion of sacrifice (hy sinh). In Vietnam, nationalist renderings of sacrifice (e.g., soldiers fallen on the battlefield) garner the most public attention yet are dependent on mundane acts of self-denial in the private and domestic spheres (e.g., the soldiers’ relatives who support and tend to them even after death). Thus, an embodied orientation toward sacrifice is constructed not just in marked rituals such as funerals, but also in fleeting moments as when a toddler is taught to greet a visiting anthropologist. These ordinary interactions lay the pathway for moral personhood that can parallel or contravene public discourses about social evils, happy families, or modern love. Morality goes beyond the unwavering affirmation of right and wrong. How do people make moral decisions when there are no good choices?
Shohet centers kinship and gender in her analysis of ethics to extend the anthropological insight that personhood and ethical reasoning are relational processes. This is critical because sacrifice is governed by notions of asymmetrical reciprocity, where relationships and reciprocation are uneven but bidirectional. While asymmetrical reciprocity ideally benefits parties across status hierarchies, it requires significant effort and difficult coordination that often conceals its own failures. Focusing on the mundane yet wrenching moral binds of a wide variety of people in and around Đà Nẵng, especially across class divides, makes the reader feel as if they were a part of the conversations Shohet observed and participated in. Reading the book, I wondered alongside Shohet's interlocutors what I would do in their situations. In later chapters, those decisions become increasingly unclear.
Shohet zeroes in on moral ambiguities in the analysis of her interlocutors’ narratives, which reveal far more than a linear account of past events. Rather, narrators entertain multiple perspectives and alternative possibilities to either delay drawing a firm conclusion about the story or highlight the conflicts of differing versions of events. In contrast to the narrative techniques of foreshadowing and backshadowing, both of which imply teleological forces and a linear, logical progression of events, sideshadowing underscores the open-ended aspects of stories and moral and causal uncertainty. For example, Tan, a seventy-year-old retired military officer, often infused his recollections of the war with familiar propaganda about patriotic sacrifice and a glorious victory. However, attending to the structure of the story, the act of storytelling, and what is left unsaid reveals more unresolved matters, ethical doubt, and personal pain than is initially apparent. Listening to stories for the first time, we often edit out a narrator's irregular pacing, stuttering, and self-correcting, overlooking the degree to which stories are formulated in the process their own telling. Shohet carefully draws from detailed transcripts of audio, photographic, and video recordings to demonstrate how she comes to her conclusions. The voices of Tan, An, Hảo, and so many others come through distinctly as Shohet puts them into conversation with each other, even if they have never met. This stands in welcome contrast with many recent ethnographies that are prone to projecting their arguments onto their interlocutors.
Silence and Sacrifice's narrative insights challenge truisms about Vietnam, including ones that many Vietnamese themselves endorse. They also operate as a call for researchers to reexamine the stories we have been privy to. The book rewards a careful reading with ethnographic insights within and across families. It resists easy and flashy conclusions, but instead invites readers to sit with the ambiguity that many in Đà Nẵng are so familiar with.
