The ghosts of Vietnam, Hoenik Kwon informs readers in his historical-anthropological examination of mass death and memory, continue to haunt both the Vietnamese and the U.S. political and social landscapes, but they do so in very different ways. The looming specter of war and its violence, a condition to be kicked, buried, and defeated in the United States, signifies in Vietnam a profound moral state of historical displacement that necessitates not reprisal and rejection of the specter, but its social recognition and reintegration into the larger social order and moral hierarchy of memory. Modern phantoms of war in Vietnam are lingering reminders of historical injustice, social inequality, and Cold War division. They exist, Kwon argues, as a reflection of the historical self, and the ritual care they receive demonstrates the transcendence of political and ideological bifurcations that led to mass devastation and suffering.
Through richly detailed narratives that are sensitive to the enduring histories of collective trauma and suffering, Kwon journeys down two intersecting pathways, tacking back and forth between the social world of the living and the afterworld of the dead. In his conversations with Vietnamese respondents, we learn of the importance of cohabitation and social intimacy with ghosts, including proper ritual acts and votive offerings to liberate their grievous, wandering souls and transform them from “strangers” into adoptive, ancestral kin. Through his conversations with spirits, we glean deep insights into the world of the dead, which—perhaps not surprisingly—looks much like our own: they travel, eat, study, commit crimes, go to jail, write poetry, compose letters, seek wealth, and aspire to move up the ladder of (deity) hierarchy. However, unlike the living, ghosts differ in one notable respect: they suffer from historical amnesia. Although they continue to feel the pain of violent and premature death, they are oblivious to the root causes of their suffering. Contrary to the living, they no longer recollect the ideologies, hostilities, and “enemy” categories that led to mass death. “There is no enmity in the cemetery,” Kwon quotes a popular Vietnamese proverb (p. 27). Thus, Kwon finds in a village in central Vietnam where he conducted his fieldwork an assemblage of wandering spirits who coexist in the afterworld without acrimony and who also cohabit with, and likewise seek ritual observance from, the living—including a U.S. officer, an Algerian conscript from the French War, a southern Vietnamese soldier, and troops from the People's Army.
The theme of transcendence—of transgressing oppositional social categories, morally and spatially delineated ritual practices, and Cold War binaries—weaves the book's seven chapters into an innovative work of historical ethnography that draws on diverse theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Kwon is concerned with the lack of attention paid to ghosts in social and cultural theory and, in chapter 1, challenges their exclusion from Durkheimian understandings of sacredness and spirituality. He demonstrates through careful ethnographic observation and performative interactions with the dead that the ritual domains of ancestors and ghosts are mutually constitutive of the spiritual order, rather than rigidly oppositional. Vietnamese commemorative practices reveal that ghosts are not always malevolent and feared spirits to be kept at a social distance (“outsiders” in a Simmelian sense), but frequently travel across zones of ritual intimacy into the world of familiar and settled ancestors. Herein lies one of the key ethnographic contributions of the text, which is most clearly demonstrated in chapter 6: the commingling of ghosts and ancestors, and the transformation of the former into the latter reveals, more broadly, a shifting and flexible kinship order and ritual hierarchy.
The moral desire to properly attend to wandering souls and make venerated ancestors out of socially distant ghosts is evident in the tremendous efforts that have taken place in recent years to locate, excavate, and repatriate the missing remains of the war dead, work that often requires the assistance of local mediums who are able to communicate with spirits. Mass excavations and reburials of the dead in new aesthetic and commemorative spaces, Kwon argues in chapters 2 and 3, point to the pluralization of war memory and ritual practices, beyond state heroic categories, to recognize and inscribe in historical memory the lives of all ghosts, regardless of political persuasions and sides. Through a moral economy of remembrance that unsettles enemy/ally distinctions, Vietnamese actors engage in ritual acts of gift giving that, in attending to the voracious needs of wandering souls, establish reciprocal relations: commemoration in exchange for prosperity.
During the war, Kwon shows in chapters 4 and 5, which trace personal wartime biographies, everyday practices of network building and maintenance similarly challenged Cold War binaries that divided families and neighborhoods. Despite contending alliances that commonly existed within closely networked groups of people, moral acts carried out by individuals across ideological divides facilitated survival and reinforced networks of reciprocal relationships. Such stories provide a fascinating angle on the history of the war, which Kwon rightly argues has received scant attention. Moreover, historical accounts of wartime sociality reveal other significant, though little discussed, network-building acts: adoptive kinship practices, primarily by mother surrogates who assumed care and responsibility for the well-being of soldiers on the “other” side (often with the intent to encourage desertion). Contemporary relations with ghosts thus index much longer histories and moral practices of networked sociality that unsettled ideological binaries and their impact on kinship and social organization.
The multiple forms of displacement experienced in Kwon's text—displaced lives, remains, and souls—contribute to a deeply felt sense of solidarity between people and ghosts; existence in the afterlife mirrors existence of the living. The manifold ritual acts performed by individuals to maintain and reaffirm these bonds, and corresponding desires and demands of ghosts, form the backbone of chapters 6 and 7—arguably the most ethnographically rich and detailed of the book. Expressed through the voices of wandering souls, Kwon documents how upwardly mobile sprits—ghosts turned ancestors—long for recognition, respect, as well as commodity and monetary offerings (which are increasingly removed from the sphere of instrumentality as ghosts rise in the deity hierarchy). Such ritual transformations of ghosts, again across “winning” and “losing” sides, Kwon argues, challenge Hegelian dialectical laws and ethical divisions between kinship and state that proscribe who should and should not be remembered. Rather, ritual acts that make emplaced ancestors out of mobile ghosts are moral engagements with memory that unsettle state ideological apparatuses and binaries and, in the process, reinvigorate kin-based commemorative activity.
Ghosts of War in Vietnam makes a strong and unique contribution to a growing body of anthropological and historical literature on war memory in late socialist Vietnam, though it simultaneously transcends disciplinary boundaries in content, theory, and methodology. While several of the ideas presented here were first developed in Kwon's 2006 book After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), he demonstrates more clearly in this work how shifting practices of remembrance of mass death and violence are linked to broader socioeconomic and political changes currently taking place in the country. However, for as much as the book complicates the bipolar world order and its ideological legacies, one binary is left firmly in place: that of the people and the state (e.g., Kwon might explore how ghosts have also been useful to, and not only rejected by state projects). This small point aside, as citizens in central Vietnam reconcile history as well as their place in a globalizing economy, Kwon ultimately and most notably argues for the universal right to be remembered and commemorated across cold war divisions and symbolic moral orders of death.
