In the spring of 2001, an international conference of scholars was invited to attend and lend a legitimizing aura to a northern Vietnamese festival marking the death anniversary of the goddess Liễu Hạnh. Olga Dror aptly describes this event as a surreal mingling of “communist-style officials and the carnival-like celebration of a religious cult,” including performances by spirit mediums (p. 192). During a séance staged for the scholars' benefit, Dror found herself in conversation with the director of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, who praised the event's aesthetic and theatrical content while claiming that a séance conducted “to attempt a cure for illness or to resolve some other personal issue should still be condemned as superstition” (p. 193). At what must have been almost the same moment, this reviewer, in acute pain from a torn shoulder muscle, found myself kneeling on the ritual platform and drinking a glass of water over which the medium had performed a healing mudra.
Such contradictions between stated policy and observable practice, between intellectual positioning and exuberant devotion, are familiar features of popular religion in Vietnam today and are commonly understood as part of a postrevolutionary landscape. In Cult, Culture, and Authority, Dror suggests a longer view, describing how the goddess Liễu Hạnh has for several centuries provoked tension between popular versus official views of religion and between literati versus vernacular expression. With a keen sense of the Viet literary tradition, Dror describes how, since at least the eighteenth century, elite men and women have projected agendas derived from their own lives and times as well as questions of regional and dynastic loyalty onto successive versions of Liễu Hạnh's story. At the same time, she unabashedly states that most of the goddess's devotees have little knowledge of or interest in these tales told in her name.
Dror begins with a workmanlike description of how Vietnamese deities come to be recognized in a manner familiar to scholars of East Asian religion. Cults form around figures that are memorable not so much for the virtue of their lived lives as for the havoc they wreak as aggrieved souls until they are placated and recognized as dispensers of efficacious power. As in China, the premodern Vietnamese state attempted to control and co-opt such developments by claiming the right to legitimize deities with official titles and statuses, placing them in a national pantheon and countenancing only these official deities as local tutelary gods, a practice only partially successful.
The goddess Liễu Hạnh appeared sometime in the sixteenth century, possibly as the wrathful spirit of a former singing girl. By the eighteenth century, she was the center of a popular cult, probably spread through the travels of market women; Liễu Hạnh's association with good business persists to the present. Liễu Hạnh had even gained sufficient respectability to be installed as a community tutelary god, a rare honor for a female deity. Dror finds herself engaged, perhaps to an unnecessary degree, in the question of whom the historical Liễu Hạnh actually was, relying overmuch on observations of the missionary priest Adiano di St. Thecla, not the most empathetic observer of popular religion in his description of the goddess as a former prostitute and demon.
Dror is at her very best in the third and fourth chapters, where she describes the different literary lenses through which Liễu Hạnh has been regarded. The most intriguing of these is the eighteenth-century woman of letters Đoàn Thị Điểm, who describes the goddess as a cultured and independent woman who contends with renowned scholars in a spirit of intellectual and social equality. In likely reaction to such a creation, and to account for the goddess's popularity inside Buddhist temples, texts produced by the esoteric School of Inner Religion tell a tale of Liễu Hạnh as vanquished and subordinated by Buddhist magicians of their own lineage. In the mid-nineteenth century, versions of Liễu Hạnh's story came to be rendered in vernacular Nôm, a form that enabled both the recording of folk idiom and the production of texts that, when read aloud, could be understood and committed to memory. In the early twentieth-century writing of Kiều Oánh Mậo, vernacular culture became a counterweight to foreign influence, and Liễu Hạnh assumed her modern nationalist gloss as “Mother of the Country,” an identity that has enabled her rehabilitation, after decades of antisuperstition policy, in more recent times. Dror rounds out her portrait with a discussion of policies and scholarship regarding popular religion in the twentieth century, describing a paradox evident in both colonial and postcolonial times between the celebration of traditional culture as a basis of national identity and a “modern” impulse to eliminate “superstition,” a familiar tension in the study of East Asian popular religion.
Dror's scope is ambitious, and sometimes she overreaches herself. Her references to gender relationships in Vietnam repeat common clichés regarding women's subordination, and by her own admission, she knows very little about the devotees' own feelings toward the goddess and the kinds of circumstances that prompt them to seek her aid. This sometimes leads her to unintended trivialization, such as the idea that spirit possession is the raison d'être of the cult (p. 76), an echo of a common critique that the followers are just girls who want to have fun. For the motivations and experiences of Liễu Hạnh's followers, one must turn to the work of Ngó Đức Thịnh, Nguyễn Thị Hiền, Phạm Quýnh Phương, Kirsten Endres, and Karen Fjelstad. Dror's work provides a beautiful complement to this growing corpus, a skilled and sensitive unwrapping of a long and diverse tradition of elite writers who have attempted to make the goddess tractable to their own visions of what she ought to be, a story that has implications in contemporary religious policies and practice. The dynamics that Dror describes have resonance well beyond Vietnam, and while Dror offers only a few explicit comparative asides, this reviewer encourages scholars with interests in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean popular religion to engage this work in a larger conversation.
