The ongoing disputes between China and several other Asian nations over ownership of natural resources in the South China Sea have turned the region into a hot spot for important scholarship. Often left out of these narratives, however, are the fishers and other migratory maritime laborers who work with these resources and whose livelihoods depend on this strategically valuable seascape. Edyta Roszko's book Fishers, Monks and Cadres is an ethnography of several small, interconnected fishing communities located around the island of Lý Sơn and the rural coastal settlements of Sa Huỳnh. Roszko examines the ways in which these fishers interact with state and religious authorities. Her main analysis uses three analytical concepts—semiotic ideology, purification, and indiscipline—to explain how state officials and village fishers “navigate secular and religious rationalities as well as diverging practical interests” (p. 17).
The first chapter is partly a history of the Central Coast region. Roszko focuses on the different ethnic groups who live along the coast and their interactions with state and religious authorities over the past few centuries. In chapter 2, Roszko explains the religious beliefs of Vietnam and how they are practiced along the Central Coast, as well as the ways in which the modern Vietnamese state has sanctioned, prohibited, or otherwise regulated these practices or rituals. The third chapter provides a brief history of interactions between farmers and fishers in the region, explaining why farmers have higher social status than fishers in both religious and state-sponsored cultural hierarchies.
Chapter 4 zeroes in on the story of a statue of the Bodhisattva Quan Âm and the ways in which fishers were able to keep it standing in the face of pressure from state officials. Roszko uses this story to illustrate how local fishers played the different goals of state and religion off each other to achieve an outcome satisfactory to the fishing community. Chapter 5 explores commemoration and how the modern Vietnamese state enlists religion in national projects to establish Vietnamese sovereignty over the disputed islands of the South China Sea.
In the final chapter, Roszko focuses on how gender plays into these relationships between fishers and religious or state actors, unpacking local women's resistance to male domination of the religious and political spheres. Roszko concludes by reaffirming “the centrality of the maritime periphery” at the intersection of the religious and secular worlds in Vietnam and the ways in which communities at that periphery have been drawn into the center of larger geopolitics in the South China Sea (p. 198).
This book is an interesting examination of how state officials and local fishers construct and use religious practices to navigate their identity in modern Vietnam. Roszko's main focus is religion and the ways in which people mobilize religious beliefs and practices to achieve both spiritual and secular goals. In many of her stories, religion is central to local fishers’ efforts to protect relationships to the state and state officials. Commemoration and memorialization are important to the argument. These processes of inscribing people and places with significant meaning bolster religious and secular claims in the region; state officials, in turn, use fishers and their religious practices to construct national narratives of patriotic struggle for sovereignty in the South China Sea.
One thing that is largely absent from the book is engagement with the ecological world that the fishers live in. Though Roszko describes fishing technologies and methods, she is silent on the actual quarry of the fishers. The book discusses sea life in the form of Cá Ông, the Whale Spirit, but only as a religious and cultural figure mostly divorced from connection with any real species of cetacean. Even the bones and relics of whales that occupy these religious spaces are simply identified as “whales.” The fishers depend on the habits and migrations of marine life, on currents and wind patterns, and on the movements seasonal storms to pursue their livelihoods. This absence is understandable, as religion and the state are Roszko's primary subjects and her attention is placed more squarely on the social and political worlds of fishers than the maritime environments they navigate. More attention to the marine world would have rounded out the study.
This book will be useful to anyone interested in how the larger politics of the South China Sea push and pull on people living in the region. Roszko's portrayal of Central Vietnam as an ethnic and religious patchwork challenges more orthodox distinctions between “religion” and “politics.” Her fishers, caught between these two forces, learn to engage with both in beneficial ways. At a broader level, Roszko's book is a clear analysis of the relationship between religion and the state. Outside of regional scholars, Roszko's work will interest social scientists and humanities scholars who study the ways in which religious and state officials interact. Roszko puts these fishers at the center of an ongoing dispute between the “modernity” of the state and the “tradition” of local religious practices, showing how these two example communities have navigated the often heterogenous natures of both the religious and state networks.
Roszko's adroit weaving of these stories makes Fishers, Monks and Cadres a vibrant new work of Vietnamese anthropology as well as an eminently readable maritime ethnography. As the South China Sea becomes even more important geopolitically, works like Roszko's Fishers, Monks and Cadres will help scholars understand the roles of local fisherfolk communities in determining their own lifestyles.
