In surveying its pre-history, Vietnamese ancestries â in terms of culture .... some degree of "southernization" among some of the Chinese elite in the early history ..... master, national, or regional narrative that justifies the violence of dominance ...
SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Soatheost Asia Vol. 26. ¡Vo. 1 (2011), pp. 128-Í8 DOI: 10.1355/sj26-lg © 2011 ISEAS ISSN 0217-9520 print / ISSN 1793-2858 electronic
"Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Views of Vietnam's Pre-history LONG S. Le
Until recentiy, nortiiem Vietnam was beiieved to be a receiver or a ioan cuiture of a unidireotionai diffusion and migration trom the advanced Ciiinese oivilization. By the eariy 1980s, a new prehistory ot northern Vietnam was becoming increasingiy apparent. Yet, new discoveries by both Vietnamese and Western schoiars possess existing biases, interestingly, as a response to the above, today's Western schoiars are attempting to "resoue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. iHowever, it is not ciear whether this new schema would oniy carve out a topic of expertise for Western historians or oniy further marginalize particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that did not neoessariiy constrain "independent histories", Keywords: Chinese history, civilization, nationalist history, postcolonialism, Vietnam.
In surveying its pre-history, Vietnamese ancestries — in terms of culture, language, and genotype — is firmly grounded in the Southeast Asian region (Glover and Bellwood 2004). Yet having such ancestries has not always been positive, at least before the mid1960s. That is, scholars writing before the mid-1960s had regarded Southeast Asian civilization as having no roots — a prehistoric backwater stuck fast in the Stone Age (Heine-Geldren 1937; Karlgren 1942; Janse 1958; Chang 1964; Graham Clark 1961; Fisher 1964). These scholars, on the one hand, believe each civilization possessed its own genius. On the other hand, they believe the importance of studying Southeast Asian history is its "classical" period in which the region's transition to statehood was owed to Indian cultural and Chinese economic and political influences (Coedes 1968,
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pp. 252-53). In this view, Vietnam was fortunate. That because it was a meeting ground of both interior riverine and maritime trade links, Vietnam became a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional diffusion and migration from advanced civilizations. From such contact, state formations in what is now Vietnam were thought to have been established and flourished in the early Christian era, whereas the tribes in Southeast Asian prehistory did not know how to rule (Coedes 1966, p. 268; Coedes 1968, p. 403). So that areas of northern Vietnam were considered "Sinicized", "little China", or "the smaller dragon". Meanwhile, the early states in southern Vietnam, such as Champa and Funan, were depicted as Indianized states or colonies. At best, historians writing before the mid-1960s like John Cady and Joseph Buttinger held that Southeast Asian civilizations were imported but evolved as individual adaptations. In some cases the modifications illustrate local genius of the more advanced culture of China or India and of which is precisely what makes them Indochinese and why the territory may properly be called Indochina (Cady 1964, p. 4; Buttinger 1958, p. 19). However, such a prevailing view essentially kept at bay postulations that civilizations in Vietnam could have been a makers of history able to emplace or replace foreign influences that would be considered integral to their cultural core across time and space. By implication, colonialist study on prehistory or colonialist archaeology wherever practiced serves "to denigrate native societies and peoples by trying to demonstrate that they had been static in prehistoric times and lacked the initiative to develop on their own", as argued by historian archaeologist Bruce Trigger (1984, p. 363). To what degree is this true of colonialist studies on Vietnam's prehistory by the Chinese, French, and the Americans? To be sure, by the early 1980s, a new prehistory of northern Vietnam was becoming increasingly apparent. Northern Vietnam was shown to have cultivated rice by the late third or early second millennium BC, and its culture and identity began to converge into Vietnam's first prehistoric civilization (Bellwood, 1979, p. 96). The
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so-called Dong Son Culture starting about 800 BC represents a major technological achievement in which the proto-Viet race created more than 200 bronze kettledrums of Heger I type. Such a finding not only solidifies Vietnam's Bronze-Iron Age traditions but also suggests that the roots of the Dong Son Culture antedate any significant Chinese influence (Nguyen Khac Su et al., pp. 188 and 200). Meanwhile, Vietnam's pre-Dong Son cultures support internal evolution rather than a replacement of one culture by a new ctiltural group. Yet it is also undeniable that new discoveries in Vietnam conducted by state-run research institutions have existing biases. For example, after 1954 a new independent but resource-poor North Vietnam put forward a nationalist archaeological campaign to counter a colonial view of Vietnam history. In fact. North Vietnam surveyed, recorded, excavated, and published more than all the other newly independent countries of the region put together (Glover and Bellwood 2004, p. 340). The ends were not only to establish an unbroken chain of succession linking contemporary generations of Vietnamese to the Dong Son people, but also that succession was of evolutionary progression leading to Ho Chi Minh's revolution. At the time, some Western scholars utilized North Vietnam's findings to deconstruct the "Orientalist" framework, which had dominated the study of history in the region. Interestingly, as a response to the above, today's Western scholars are attempting to "rescue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. However, it is not clear whether this new schema would only carve out a topic of expertise for Western historians. Vietnamese History as a Branch of Chinese History
Until recently, according to Chinese historians and Western Sinologists, Vietnam was believed to originate from the refugee population of Yueh (pronounced as Viet in Vietnamese), located along the coast where the Yangtze River enters the sea, and infused with Chinese culture. In 333 BC, the state of Yueh was conquered by the state of Chu'u that was supposedly dispatched by the Chou
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court based in central China (1027-256 BC) in order to "colonize" the "southern barbarians" (Blakeley 1999, p. 10). Consequently, the Yueh rtiling class migrated southward, including the area of northern Vietnam, and established small kingdoms and principalities. This is referred to by Chinese historians as "Hundred Yueh", where Nan Yueh (pronounced as Nam Viet in Vietnamese) was at its centre and was flanked by Eastern and Western Ou (pronounced as "Au" in Vietnamese), which represented the frontier. Such is the basis that the origin of Vietnamese people lay in the arrival of migrating Yueh people (Taylor 1983, pp. 14-16). According to Chinese traditional views. An Duong, a descendent of the Ou Yueh (Au Viet) population, conquered northern Vietnam and built a kingdom {257-207 BC) near modern day Hanoi. An Duong is the first figure to be recorded in Vietnamese history by reliable sources, when his kingdom was conquered by the Ch'in state. That is, when the state of Chu'u was conquered by Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the builder of the Great Wall and first emperor of Ch'in (221-206 BC), half a million Ch'in soldiers were ordered to invade the Yueh southern lands. By 207 BC. Chao T'o, a Ch'in general, was able to establish a Chinese southern state that commanded the Kwantung and Kwangsi Provinces, and the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. As the state of Ch'in was being conquered by the advancing Han dynasty. Chao T'o proclaimed himself King of Nan Yueh or Nam Viet (207-111 BC) and established his capital near modern Canton. Eventually, the order of Nam Viet was reversed to Viet Nam in 1802 when northern Vietnam was reunified with central and southern Vietnam. However, before and after the order of Viet Nam, there has been a Vietnamese view that Nam Viet, in terms of etymology (or the history of the word), symbolizes the physical, psychological, cultural, and intellectual displacement of an indigenous civilization; that the earliest references to the people of northern Vietnam were of Lac not Yueh, though the knowledge of the Lac civilization is mostly from legend and oral history. From this view. An Duong was from the north and founded a kingdom known as Au Lac. In fact, recent
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Studies suggest that An Duong's rtUe had subdued the Lac ruling elite but did not disinherit them (Taylor 1983). There is also no evidence An Duong's arrival left any mark on the Vietnamese language or caused any demographic change. Meanwhile, during Chao T'o's reign, the priority was overseeing trade routes and presiding over commercial centres. Therefore administrative control did not have a wide application "for the Lac lords largely remained in control of the land and people during this time", and when Lac lords submitted to Western Han rulers who invaded northern Vietnam in 111 BC, "the Lac lords ruled the people as before", according to historian Keith Taylor (1983, p. 29). And until Western Han rule was replaced by Eastern Han in 24 BC, the traditional Dong Son Culture appears to have continued below the prefecture level (Nguyen Khac Su 2004, p. 202). When Eastern Han implemented a policy of reorganizing the agrarian economy as a stable source of tax revenue along with establishing a patriarchal society that would respond to Han-style government, two local daughters of a Lac lord, known as the Trung Sisters, led an uprising. In AD 40, the Chinese settlements were overrun, and the elder sister Trung Trac had "established a royal court at Me Linh [the original area of Dong Son Ctilture] and was recognized as queen by sixty-five strongholds [fiefs]", and "it is recorded that for two years she adjusted the taxes" (Taylor 1983, p. 39). Moreover, Trung Trac's reign may have taken place while her husband was still alive. However, by AD 43 the matriarchic reign was quelled, the system of the Lac lord was revoked, and direct Han rule imposed. Consequently, key remnants of the Lac society (e.g., greater role of women in social fields, individualistic tendencies, and bilateral family system) were displaced, at least among the elite. Moreover, the local population began to shift their identity from Lac to Viet. That is, for the local population, their name Lac was no longer of account, whereas the Viet identity was forced but also carried some social status with it. From the Chinese traditional view, Yueh was to express the conquered people's place within the "middle kingdom", but it was
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to be temporary since these people would eventually be civilized and become Chinese, as was the case for other Viet cultures in southern China. Even by the mid 1980s, well-known Chinese scholars still regarded the Yueh peoples, including those occupying northern Vietnam, as branches or "brotherly ethnic groups" of the Chinese race who were civilized solely by the expansion of Ch'in Shih-Huang-Ti and his Han successors (see Xiaorong Han 2004, pp. 24-25; Chang 1981; Watson 1981; Chang 1977). However, according to renowned archaeologist Kwang-Chih Chang, after the Cultural Revolution when the central control of archaeology was short-circuited, "local archaeology revealed some very rich cultures" which "yielded radiocarbon dates earlier than those of the cultures in the so-called nuclear area" (Kwang-Chih Chang 2002, p. 9). Yet Chang himself did not include these southern regions and their rich cultures until his fourth edition of The Archaeology ofAncient China in 1986. In retrospect, he stated that, "I was certainly aware of the danger of my own nationality and nationalist tendencies ... caused by the national education I had received.... But I was, when I wrote the first two editions [1963 and 1968], unconsciously trapped" (KwangChih Chang 2002, p. 8). To date, there appears to be a new view on "Chinese-ization". That is, contemporary Sinologists or East Asian scholars, on the one hand, are in agreement that there was undoubtedly a vibrant and independent local culture in prehistoric Vietnam, as well as some degree of "southernization" among some of the Chinese elite in the early history of northern Vietnam. On the other hand, scholars like Charles Holcome still see "Sinification" as "the force that gradually shaped the various emerging civilizations", including Vietnam, "out of what had been a mosaic of Stone Age tribes" in which their "final differences are, in part, the very product of their sustained interaction" (Holcombe 2001, p. 223). For Holcombe, "Sinification" did not mean becoming "Chinese" (except within the borders of the Chinese empire itself) > but it did help sire a new and uniquely "Sinified" Vietnamese state, which after its independence in AD 939 gradually absorbed Cham and Khmer and other populations
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and regions (Holcombe 2001, p. 219). At least on the surface, it appears that Holcombe's unapologetically Sinocentric sphere is more about representing an East Asia civilization that is "the single most important major alternative historical evolutionary track ... with a continuing history of success that can rival what we call the West" than about Vietnamese history as a branch of Chinese history (Holcombe 2001, p. 3). "Mission Civiliatrice" and the "American War"
French intellectual support for its "mission civiliatrice" in Vietnam (1883-1954) — before its association policies in the 1930s — seemingly drew on the observation that Vietnam was once relatively progressive and intelligent due to Chinese cultural influences, but of which had relapsed. Vietnam's "imitativeness" became nothing more than a somewhat eccentric and stunted extension of (but now a fallen) China. Interestingly, early Western religious missionaries in Vietnam during the seventeenth century, following the lead of French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, sought the origins of "Tonquinese" (northern Vietnamese) society no earlier than its separation from China in AD 939. Meanwhile, during the colonial period, French historians concluded that Vietnam made no progress after separating from China. For example, Adrien Launay suggested that "the complete absence of progress that the Annamites [Vietnamese] had on Chinese civilization and the neglible development in the arts and sciences, far inferior to that of the Chinese" illustrated that without Chinese domination "Giao-chi [northern Vietnam] of old times would have rested in savage tribal communities, just like the Muong who live on the frontiers of their country" (cited in Tran and Reid 2006, p. 6). By implication, Vietnamese, like other peoples, will "progress only when provided with the necessary stimulus: they require contact with people of a more refined culture" (cited in Lieberman 2003, p. 8). Even the uniqueness of the Vietnamese village and Vietnamese "march to the south" in colonizing the western and southern realms.
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were traced to the Chinese village and to the Annamites' adaptation of Chinese institutions, respectively (Tran and Reid, p. 6). However, this view was later redefined in which "mission civiliatrice" must also break Vietnam's links to China. That is, French colonial officials became "convinced that to achieve permanent colonial success required harsh curtailment of Chinese infiuences", including the writing system and the ritualized mandarin examination, in order "to isolate Vietnam from its heritage and to neutralize the traditional elite" (Marr 1981, pp. 145). Either because French scholars were usually Sinologists or Indologists, they generally interpret Dong Son archaeological materials as fundamentally Chinese, due to Chinese infiuences, or foreign imports. For example, Olov Janse, who was in charge of heading the Dong Son excavations (1934-38) under the auspices of the Government-General of Indochina and the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), argued that "Chinese pioneers", "sinicized Thais", or "sinicized Indonesians" brought "elements of a relatively high civilisation with them", as they migrated south to northern Vietnam (Janse 1958, p. 91). In southern Vietnam, fascinated by the Muslim Cham population, French archaeologists and art historians devoted much of their research on the major monumental sites of Champa civilization from 1900 to 1918; and thereafter their focus was increasingly given to the monuments at Angkor. In effect, Vietnam, overshadowed by the belief that the Dong Son culture was the result of cultural diffusion from China in the north and the fascination with the Hinduization process and the "Indonesian" world in the south, received "litde attention in her own rights" (Davidson 1979, p. 98). This is not to say that the above is simply an example of French racism or derogatory denial of Vietnamese identity. Yet clearly few French researchers looked at the long-term developmental processes that may have allowed French colonial scholarship to see indigenous continuities in settlement and in technology from the transition between prehistoric and historic periods, or studied Vietnam's early historiography through patient analysis of local vocabulary (Stark
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and Allen 1998). Moreover, most of the prehistoric excavations were executed by "amateurs". For instance, Emile Pajot, a former ship's cook and a circus artist who bought bronze articles from a local fisherman, began excavations at the Dong Son site in 1925 on behalf of EFEO (Cherry 2004). Noteworthy is that Olov Janse, a Swedish archaeologist, was hired in 1934 apparently to quell criticisms that French archaeology investigations were to hunt for treasures and to improve the management of what was referred to at the time as amateur archaeology undertaken with no specific pretensions at all. In general, excavations were executed by "amateur" pre-historians who naturally found what they expected to find, as noted by Donn Bayard (1980). As such, this contributed to the French "unashamedly colonialist slant" in the interpretation of historical sources and cultural materials of Vietnam's past. By contrast, Vietnamese Studies in the United States from 1954 to 1975 was to frame Vietnam in the context of the rapid post-war decolonization, as well as a stistained American attempt to replace the Japanese as the single regional hegemon in order to save the whole postcolonial region from the "communist spectre" (Anderson 2000, p. 7). While under French colonial rtile the name Viet Nam had virtually disappeared, America's creation of SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) in 1954 to contain communism in the region had suddenly put Vietnam in the forefront of the world scene. Just as the French produced substantial bodies of scholarship framed for its "mission civiliatrice", the basis of Vietnamese studies was to advance the American anticommunist hegemony. As such, the concentrated disciplinary fields were quite different than those of their colonial-era predecessors; great emphasis was placed on political science but also on modern history and anthropology, as opposed to archaeology, ancient history, and classical literatures. A representative of this work was a 1967 Rand Corporation study by Gerald Hickey, "Accommodation in South Vietnam: The Key to Sociopolitical Solidarity". Synthesizing the current conflicts as a result of historical conflicts from regionalism and the "march to the south", Hickey argued the need to accommodate different
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socio-political groups/parties (including the "Viet Cong") through honest elections and meaningful representation in the central government, which would do much to bridge between the city and the countryside as well as the opportunity to build the Vietnamese in a peaceful setting. Another noted study of the same emphasis is Alexander Woodside's Vietnam and Chinese Model, which placed modern Vietnam at the crossroads between East and Southeast Asia without needing to reify any of Vietnam's varied heritages. For Woodside, "Sino-Vietnamese culture and politics constituted something of a mosaic of adjustments and surprises" (Woodside 1971, p. 281). As such, this would better explain why, on the one hand, the Vietnamese court of the 1830s was much more receptive than the Chinese to the idea of borrowing technological and military innovations from Western civilization. Yet, because the court's scholars were inclined to imitate the products of Western science in the same way that they imitated Chinese institutions, the court was not able to find a suitable response to Western pressures or attain "true modernization" at the time. According to Woodside, such inquiry "is a crucial one" because "even today [1971], in Vietnamese thought and politics. East Asian conceptual categories, new and old, are vastly more dominant than French ones" (Woodside 1971, pp. 1-2). As noted by Terry Rambo, millions of U.S. dollars during the Vietnam War were spent on "surveys, interviews, field studies, and documentary translations, all designed to inform the higher government echelons about the Vietnamese enemy and the immediate sociopolitical context in which the conflict was being waged" (Rambo 2005, p. 266). As a result, there has been little archaeological digging in southern Vietnam since 1954. Though there were a few American scholars whose focus was on early Vietnamese history, such as geographer Paul Wheatley from University of Chicago. Wheatley's key argument was that "urban genesis" in northern Vietnam "took the form of urban imposition, the establishment of Chinese-style settlements in a colonial context" (Wheatley 1979, p. 288). That systems interaction emerged in which Chinese roots developed and
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survived in the local society, even after independence, which "was ultimately elaborated into the mature urban era of the Nguyen dynasty" (pp. 294). Consequently, it is implied that Vietnam under a colonial hegemony could not pursue a course of independent development, at least until after the Nguyen dynasty (p. 295). Though later when new discoveries challenged many of the previous findings by the early 1980s, Wheatley (1982) stated that "the more I have to do with ancient texts, the more convinced I become that, when we fail to reconcile the different bodies of evidence, only too often the fault is in ourselves, in our own technical expertise or, more likely, in our imagination" (p. 19). At least before 1970, the U.S. decision makers did not consider the study of Vietnam's early history relevant to achieving victory against commtmist forces. While U.S. officials rejected formal theories about a Western "mission civiliatrice", their policy was "not derived from any serious study of Asia, but from their own limited historical experience", according to British scholar Ralph Smith (1968, p. 171). For Smith, the Americans "fell into the trap of supposing that Asians, for all their apparent differences from Westerners, are at heart simply people who have not yet attained the level of progress as that achieved by the Americans themselves". Therefore, they were not equipped to understand the problems which tradition posed for their allies, the non-communist Vietnamese. Meanwhile, on U.S. college campuses, Vietnam in the context of the Cold War was more real in the 1950s and 1960s than a Vietnam as an ancient and evolving civilization. In a 1967 speech, John Fairbank lamented that it would take another ten years for the Englishspeaking world to understand Vietnamese society and culture, as already attained in the fields of China and Japan. Indeed, it was not until after the Vietnam War that Vietnamese studies began to flourish at particular institutions. One of the post-1975 Vietnam scholars who led this movement was Keith Taylor, who served in Vietnam and who after coming home wanted to know: where did Vietnamese come from?
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The "Real" Vietnam: New Discoveries and Challenges
Vietnamese dynastic histories began in the first half of the twelfth century AD, although Vietnamese dynastic collection of antiquities such as the bronze drums started as early as the eleventh century (Taylor 1983, p. 354). To be sure, Vietnamese rulers — before, during, and after one thousand years' Chinese rule — have always claimed a Vietnamese identity, such as tracing their identity to a mythical hero Lac Long Quan (Lac Dragon Lord). The word Lac was the earliest recorded name for the Vietnamese people and it was also used to describe the paddy fields that were irrigated by taking advantage of the change in the level of the rivers in accordance with the tides, according to the oldest Chinese descriptions of the ancient Vietnamese economy and society (Taylor 1983, Appendix B). From a traditional Vietnamese view. Lac people are believed to be the inventors of the wet-rice cultivation technique and the bronze drums that gave rise to the Hung Vuong (Hung King) and its kingdom Van Lang during the Dong Son period. Hung as the title of a line of kings and the Van Lang kingdom are attested in Chinese (Ch'in and T'ang dynastic) sources (Taylor 1983, Appendix B and C). Using Chinese dynastic sources and employing their historical tradition of origin myths and genie worship, Vietnamese dynastic histories made the Hung kings the cornerstone of their national identity in defiance of, equal with, and/or superior to China.' Lac society also served as the link between the Hung kings and the early historical period down to the Trung sisters. As noted by Keith Taylor, while Vietnam's early history is indebted to Chinese scholarship, "we cannot deny that important aspects of Vietnamese history are not accounted by that tradition, else there would be no such thing as a Vietnamese nation today" (Taylor 1983, p. 307). By the second half of the twentieth century, new discoveries have decisively rejected many of the colonialist interpretations put on the archaeological data, and of which are further supported by recent literary, linguistic, and ethnographic studies (Bayard 1980; Bayard 1984; Mabbett 1977; Bentley 1986; Clover 1999, p. 597;
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Taylor 1983). For prehistoric northern Vietnam (about 13,000 years ago), it was a key site of the Hoabinhian ctiltures in which most of the cultural evolution was internal rather than a replacement of one ctilture by a new ctiltural group (see Higham 1989, p. 22). Evidence suggests that Hoabinhians were hunters. Bone materials from a wide range of mammal species were found, including pig, deer, dog, elephant, rhinoceros, and cattle. Perhaps with the exception of pigs and dogs, none of these species appear to have been domesticated. Late third or early second millennium BC (known as Phung Nguyen culture), there is more evidence for ctiltivation of rice, along with a broader range of cultural material, such as stone arrowheads and knives, baked clay spindle whorls and bow pellets, and pottery with incised and comb-stamped decoration (Bellwood 1979, p. 96). Pottery in this period has been considered to be directly ancestral to the pottery of the Dong-Son civilization of the first millennium BC, which gives further support to a cultural continuity throughout the prehistoric occupation of the Red River valley (Higham 1989, p. 193). During the second millennium BC, Vietnamese sites suggest a complex regional division of labour and the existence of loosely knit multi-ethnic confederations long before Chinese infiuence was felt in the region (Bayard 1984; Higham 1982; Davidson 1979). In regard to the Dong Son culture, its "roots" may well extend back to at least 1000 BC, antedating any significant Chou influence. Given the cultural materials "there is no doubt that the Chinese encountered a society controlled through paramount chiefs of high status", according to Charles Higham (1989, p. 193). Yet, at the same time, it is also undeniable that new discoveries from Southeast Asia, which continue to regtilarly occur, do have existing biases. One of the key problems, as noted by a number of scholars, is the tendency of particular scholars or state institutions oriented in looking for "firsts" or "oldests" in the region, or employing grand schemes of regional political evolution. An example of this is the replacement of a colonist archaeology model with a nationality archaeology type in which a government
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employs archaeology as a means of cultivating national dignity and confidence, either because it feels politically threatened by more powerful nations or feels it necessary to make appeals for national unity to counteract potential serious internal division (Trigger 1984, pp. 359-60). For the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, archaeological methods are utilized to correct the errors and fallacies of earlier colonial or non-Vietnamese histories in order to establish "correct" accounts of the past, to solve historical problems raised by the needs of building up the nation, and to help validate a new ideological line whenever one is promulgated (Hakari and Kaneko 1990; Nguyen The Anh 1995, p. 122). As a case in point, in the late 1970s when relations with China soured, Vietnamese historians under a government programme, and who had already pubHshed a massive volume on The Founding of the State by the Hung Kings in 1970, openly debated and attempted to prove that Dong Son bronze drum was the oldest and its origin lay with the ancient Viet people. Vietnamese archaeologists went as far as dating one bronze drum between the thirteenth and tenth centuries BC based on its style, whereas the earliest date for a bronze drum excavated in China by Chinese archaeologists was carbon dated to the seventh century BC (see Xiaorong Han 2004, p. 16). Under much criticism from Chinese scholars, Vietnamese historians have discarded this date and alternately maintained that the Dong Son drum can be dated to the seventh or the eighth century BC in their recent volume compilation on the Dong Son Drum. Another source of bias is the unspoken attempt by some Western scholars to deconstruct the "Orientalism" framework, which was invented by early Westerners to dominate or to have authority over the "Orient" (Said 1978, p. 3), Thus, there might have been an emotional investment by some historians in reclaiming a past overridden and devalued by Western imperialism (Reynolds 1995). Though such emotional investment can lead to accepting new discoveries without additional validation, and of which would essentially replace the traditional diffusionist model based on
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unidirectional influences from China and India to Southeast Asia with one based only on innovation in Southeast Asia. For example, Jeremy Davidson, who in his survey of archaeological activity in both northern and southern Vietnam from 1954 to 1970, may have pursued too enthusiastically the conclusion of North Vietnamese archaeological findings; that the Phung Nguyen culture not only provided the genesis for the Van Lang kingdom of the Dong Son period to have existed in 2800 BC, but also provided the framework that the Cham and Khmer cultures of southern Vietnam could have been receivers of Dong Son culture (Davidson 1979). Today, Western archaeologists are more likely to accept carbon 14 testing that the Dong Son culture began around the seven century BC, and the argument that the Cham or the Khmer civilization is a loan culture of the Dong Son culture is not taken seriously. Conclusion: Vietnam's Pre-history Still a Western, Postcolonial Project? Recently, Vietnamese archaeologists have corrected many of their earlier carbon tests and now see the roots of the Dong Son culture starting as late as 1100 BC, in which developments of political centralization and the establishment of the Van Lang kingdom had their beginnings (see Nguyen Khac Su et al. 2004, p. 292). To be sure, historical research in Vietnam is closely bound to politics. At the same time, however, politics in Vietnam is dynamic. So as party politics rejuvenates in order to sustain political authority and legitimacy, historical research has been in line whenever a new ideological line is promulgated. In fact, historical research has been affected by the doi moi reforms since 1987 in which research programmes have focused on the rural economy, trade, and even the economy of the former Republic of South Vietnam; however, the new emphasis of research has been to provide historical support for the regime to "indigenize" a commodity or market economy. Some believe that the consequence of doi moi for historical research in Vietnam will put Vietnamese historians in "a better position to revise by themselves the ideological representations that distort the reality.
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and finally to re-establish the country in its historical continuity" (Nguyen The Anh 1995, p. 132). Others, like Ian Glover, see Vietnam's archaeology being affected by the grov^ah of the country's heritage management industry in which the past is made into something that is "re-invented, sanitized, simplified and packaged for tourist consumption by both internal and foreign tourists" (Glover 2004, p. 599). For Glover, this is likely to have a greater efiect on the way the past is investigated and presented than any shifts in academic paradigms. Perhaps the most interesting perspective on Vietnam's modern historiography comes from v^merican scholars, specifically Keith Taylor and his former students. According to this perspective, "the authority of what is thought to have happened in the past" by a master, national, or regional narrative that justifies the violence of dominance and resistance should be explicitly avoided (see Tran and Reid 2006). It is argued that such a paradigm not only adheres to neutrality which does not constrain "independent histories" but also has the capacity to feature histories that go beyond nation and region that have been ignored or marginalized. Yet, it is not clear whether this narrative is supposed to be provocative rather than definitive. To be sure, the irony in this revisionist movement is that its principal leader, Keith Taylor, had been one of the pioneers in the 1980s that shaped "Vietnamese history as a nation building" in which Chinese colonial rule (however important in shaping Vietnamese state and society) was primarily a foreign phase; in addition, Taylor argued that northern Vietnam could have existed as a separate nation "even if they had never heard of China". By some accounts, Taylor's seminal work. The Birth of Vietnam (1983), represents an enterprise whose preoccupation with origin has "to do with the effort to authenticate Southeast Asia as a region and a field of study" (Reynolds 1995). Moreover, Taylor's proficiency in classical Chinese, Sino-Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese languages has enabled his works to be seen as definitive. That is, unless a scholar has proficiency in the above languages, it is difficult to challenge some of Taylor's assumptions. Taylor has also maintained that works by
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Joseph Buttinger or D.G.E. Hall on early Vietnam history should not be included in any modern Vietnamese historiography, since neither scholar is proficient in any of Vietnam's old languages. Like his earlier enterprise, Taylor's reaction against (though not of his works on) the grand narrative of the nation may also be assumed as another effort to carve out a topic of expertise that links the study of Southeast Asia to the current wave of globalization. That is, most of the lexicon in Taylor's new project — for example, borderless histories or histories beyond nation and region — seem to reflect Western perspectives on the current wave of globalization. Such a revisionist project would also appear to further marginalize particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that were necessarily political but yet did not necessarily constrain "independent histories". This is to note that the previously mentioned shifts in paradigm on early Vietnamese history both in Vietnam and in the United States have not spurred an interest in re-examining the works of Vietnamese historians associated with the former Republic of South Vietnam (RSV). Because the RSV (1954-75) has been considered either an illegitimate state or not to have been a state at all, historical research associated with the RSV is thought by the communist regime to have had colonialist, anti-national, and ahistorical perspectives (Pelley 2002, p. 37). Until recently. Western scholars rarely considered any work linked to the RSV to be that of a highly modern history of Vietnam. Perhaps as a result no works by these historians been translated into English, and works by the RSV historians that were in English have been rarely used as required or recommended texts in the college classroom. For southern Vietnamese intellectuals, there was a cutting-edge synthesis of the country's history — that of Tran Trong Kim's Summary of Vietnamese History — which was originally published in 1920. Kim's text in romanized script or quoc ngu was among the first to account, analyze, and interpret historical documents in Vietnamese, Chinese, and French. Unlike his Western and Vietnamese peers, Kim did not deploy a master, national, or regional narrative. Instead, his study was framed in the narrative of continuity and
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change, which in many ways allows for "more open ends, windows, and adjoining corridors" than previous works. This is the reason it became the single most authoritative source during the RSV period. Such a modern framework allows for the legitimacy of the RSV; a framework that did not need to conform to the theme of national unity or social cohesion necessary for building a socialist state. Although necessarily political, the works by RSV historians also appear to avoid an essentialized version of a unified Vietnam, a village Vietnam, a Confucian Vietnam, a revolutionary Viet Nam, or the idea of Vietnam composed of two rice baskets held together by a pole. For example, an English language historiography by the auspices of RSV's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1967 was quick to admit that the origins of the Vietnamese people are of a complex nature and involve an ongoing debate in which one has to take into account both the social scientific evidence at a given time and Vietnamese traditions that "foreigners" find hard to intimately relate to (MFA ROV 1967). For the RSV historians, Vietnam as "an ancient culture with its own rivers and mountains, ways and customs" was not at stake. What was at stake was the continuity in the longer trajectory of Vietnamese history, which at the time was a reality, a responsibility, and a political choice. In sum, there appears to be a consensus in the current study of Vietnam's prehistory that there was a Vietnamese civilization before the arrival of the Chinese, although when this originated and the degree of indigenous innovation and evolution are not known with certainty. In the United States there has been an academic paradigm shift in investigating Vietnam's past, led by Keith Taylor and his former students. This new paradigm implies the need for historians to "rescue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the current research of Vietnamese history under the supervision of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Vietnam has been shown to be closely linked to politics. However, party politics can be quite dynamic. For example, the country's current open-door policy has facilitated a considerable degree of international exchanges between Vietnamese historians and historians in various countries. Yet, neither
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of the above shifts have yet led to a serious re-evaluation of the contributions of works by historians associated with the RSV; whereas doing so would dislodge arguments of a contemporary Western, postcolonial project or a rigid Vietnamese nationalist narrative that still excludes any "independent history". NOTE
1. For example, in the thirteenth century, to ward off any wish of Yuan China to recapture its former colony, historian Le Van Huu sought to demonstrate the antiquity of the Vietnamese state as well as to illustrate that the current Vietnam's trihutary relationship with China was a fiction hy demarcating the starting point of Vietnamese history to Chao T'o's Nan Yueh in 207 BC. Although he would have known about the other Vietnamese leaders who ruled hefore Chao T'o, they would have appeared pale to Chao T'o's defiance of China. In contrast, Ngo Si Lien in the fifteenth century predated the origin of Vietnamese civilization (via the Hung kings) to 2879 BC, in order to construct an identity of Vietnam that was equal if not superior to the mythical emperors of China. This was done hy employing a royal genealogy with a northern (China) and a southern hranch (Vietnamese), tracing Lac Long Quan's heredity to the northern imperial hranch so as to claim a more ancient lineage for the Hung kings than that of China's first emperor, Huang Ti. REFERENCES
Anderson, Benedict, ¡manned Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: New York: Verso, 2000 (1983). Bayard, Donn. "Roots of Indochinese Civilisadon: Recent Development in the Prehistory of Southeast Asia". Paciflc Affairs 53, no. 1 (1980). . Bayard, Donn. "Agriculture, Metallurgy, and State Formation in Mainland Southeast Asia". Current Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1984): 103-106. Bellwood, Peter. Man's Conquest of the Paciflc: The Prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Bentley, Carter. "Indigenous States of Southeast Asia". Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 275-305. Blakeiey, Barry. "The Ceography of Chu". In Deflning Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, edited hy Constance A. Cook and John S. Major. Honolulu: Hawaii Press, 1999. Buttinger, Joseph. The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam. New York: Atlantic Books, 1958.
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Cady, John. Southeast Asia: Its Historical Development. New York: McCraw-Hill, 1964. Chang, Kwang-Chih. "Chinese Archaeology Since \9A9." Joumal ofAsian Studies 36, no. 4 (1977): 623-46. . The Archaeology ofAncient Ghina (4th ed). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986 (1964). . "Archaeology and Chinese Historiography". World Archaeology 13, 1981 -. "Reflections on Chinese Archaeology in the Second Half of the Twentieth Ctntaty". Joumal of East Asia Archaeology'i, no. 1-2 (2002). Cherry, Haydon. "Social Communication and Colonial Archaeology in Vietnam", Asia Research Institute, Working Papers Series, no. 21, 2004 . Coedes, C. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Edited by W.F. Vella. Translated by S.B. Cowing. Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1968. . The Making of South East Asia. Translated by H.M. Wright. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Davidson, Jeremy. "Archaeology in North Vietnam since 1954" and "Archaeology in Southern Vietnam". In South East: Essays in Archaeology, History and Historical Geography, edited by R.B. Smith and W. Watson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Fisher, Charles A. Southeast Asia: A Social, Economic and Political Geography. London: Methuen, 1964. Clover, Ian and Peter Bellwood. Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. Clover, Ian. "Letting the Past Serve the Present — Some Contemporary Uses of Archaeology in Vietnam". Antiquity 73 (1999). Hakari, Hriomitu and Erika Kaneko, eds. Dong Son Drums in Vietnam. Vietnamese Institute of Archaeology and the Department for International Cooperation of the Social Science Committee of Vietnam. Tokyo: Rocco Shuppan, 1990. Han, Xiaorong. "Who Invented the Bronze Drum? Nationalism, Politics, and a Sino-Vietnamese Archaeological Debate of the 1970s and 1980s". Asian Perspectives 43, no. 1 (2004): 7-33. Heine-Celdern, Robert. Gonceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia. New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1937. Higham, Charles. The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Holcombe, Charles. The Genesis of East Asia, 221 B.C.-A.D. 907. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. Janse, Olov. Archaeological Research in Indo-China, 3 vols. Cambridge, 1941 and 1947; Bruges, 1958.
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Karlgren, Bernhard. "The Date of the Early Dong-So'n Culture". The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 14, no. 20 (1942): 1-28. Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Mabbett, I.W. "The Indianization' of Southeast Asia: Reflections on Prehistoric Sonices'. Journal of Southeast Asia Studies 8, no. 1 (1977). Marr, David G. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial. Berkley: University of California Press, 1981. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Vietnam (MFA ROV). Vietnamese Realities: The Land, the People, A Glimpse of Vietnam's History, Written and Spoken Language, Literature, Arts. MFA ROV, 1967. Nguyen The Anh. "Historical Research in Vietnam: A Tentative Survey". Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995). Pelley, Patricia. Postcolonial Vietnam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Rambo, Terry. SearchingforVietnam. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2005. Reynolds, Charles. "New Look at Old Southeast Asia". Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995). Said, Edward. Orientalism. London, 1978. Smith, Steve. Viet-Nam and the West. New York: Cornell University Press, 1968. Stark, Miriam and S. Jane Allen. "The Transition to History in Southeast Asia: Introduction". International Journal of Historical Archaeology 2, no. 3 (1998): 165-66. Taylor, Keith. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Tran, Nhung Tuyet and Anthony Reid. Viet Nam: Borderless Histories. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. Trigger, Bruce. "Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist. Imperialist". Man 19 (1984): 363 Watson, W. "The progress of archaeology in China". In Antiquity and Man, edited by J.D. Evans et al. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981. Wheatley, Paul. "Urban Genesis in Mainland South East Asia". In Early Southeast Asia: Essays in Archaeology, History and Historical Geography, edited by R.B.
Smith and W. Watson. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979. . "Presidential Address: India Beyond the Ganges — Desultory Reflections on the Origins of Civilization in Southeast Asia". Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 1 (1982): 13-28. Woodside, Alexander. Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ch'ing Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. Long S. Le is a visiting scholar and director of intematicnal initiatives for Global Studies at the University of iHouston, where he is also a co-founder/lecturer of the Vietnamese Studies course.
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