CHAPTER 1

VIETNAMIZATION ETHNO-HISTORICALLY

Much has gone into the making of the people now known as the Vietnamese, though the name itself is of fairly recent origin, the memory of the Vietnamese as a distinct people, both as it is written by them and about them, stretches back many millennium to the remotest traces of primordial times.

The correct metaphor to name this idiom of conceptualization of Vietnamese ethnohistory is Vietnamization, the ethnohistorical process of identification, reinforcement and reinterpretation and reorientation of cultural group identity through the mythological and ideological creation, manipulation and recreation of cultural/historical symbolism.

The objective of ethnohistory is to penetrate and explore the separate reality of being Vietnamese—Vietnameseness. It is to search for a synthetic comprehension of how and why and reasons behind such a synthesizing cultural complex, the meaning systems of various kinds of symbolism as they are employed indigenously in many different ways at many different times upon many different levels of articulation and expression. It is to find these in terms analogous to the kind of idiomatic rationality or ethos that originally conceived and created (and in turn was conceived by and created within them) and brought this system into being in the first place, and that continually reconstructs and recreates its own symbolic reality, everyday and every year of its on-going emergence.

The ethnology of the developmental processes underlying the making of Vietnamese Civilization, or Vietnamization, by implication refers to the notion of a peculiar and unique form of cultural synergism that cannot be comprehended from an analytical, anatomical dissection of the many diverse aspects or organic social functioning of Vietnamese culture. This particular cultural synergism occurs in Vietnamese cultural interactions within an environmental and historical setting, or structural context, and it is a living, changing, developing, and even evolving phenomena of the combined processes of Vietnamization, or the development of Vietnamese Civilization. This peculiar synergism has a vast multitude of alternative facets of interpretation and expression, all of which more-or-less organize themselves into a loosely structured, cyclical kind of coherent order or systemic organization, providing a meaningfulness inherent and intrinsic to the Culture itself, and inseparable from it.

The subjective structure of the reality of Vietnamese ethnoculture is symbolic. Mythology is both the beginning and end of Vietnamese ethnohistory, not only because the origin myths of Au Co and Lac Long Quan, or the heroic court legends of the T’rung Sisters, King An Duong, Ong Giong or Nhat La Trach "were remembered by the Vietnamese because they expressed their earliest identity as a people" (Taylor, 1983) but also because ethno-history itself is a brand of mythology which has been literally turned inside-out and straight jacketed by the imperative of chronology. All of history is mythological (as is all of culture)—ethno is merely an appendage delineating the cultural boundaries, and hence symbolic content, of this form of mythology.

Ethnohistory is a kind of mirror of mythology—a mythical reflection of the present—but more importantly and paradoxically, it is a mythology about a mythology, with only an ever-receding appearance of objective reality. Once engaged within the never ending historical dialectic, there is no longer any distinguishing clearly between the historical study of myth and the mythological study of history. History and mythology merge, compound and confound one another until there can only be confusion between subject and object, past and present.

Symbols, in their analogical form and metaphorical function, in their contextual significance, meaningful content and social structure, is the atom of mythological reality. Mythology might be called a kind of synergism of the human mind. Culture and history are the mythological synergism of the symbolism of humankind. By mentioning a unique kind of synergism of history and culture, I am not merely referring to the super-organic analogy that is a logic of misplaced concretization, the reification of the organic analogy. It is a relatively easy matter to review history and to see the rise and fall of empires and the evolution of civilization and to imagine the growth and climax of biotic cultures in the agar of a petri dish.

The synergism of history find its expression in terms of a thematic continuity of events between past and present, a continuity expressed in dialectical forms—mythological antonyms which arrange themselves in a contrapuntal fashion of question and answer, thesis and antithesis, and finally into a mythological synthesis. The chronology of history serves to express in dialectical terminology the driving mechanism of this historical synergism, its pivotal dynamo by which history turns upon its self in thematic repetition. The chronology of history provides our comprehension of ethno-Vietnamese identity with the provenience of period and place within the mythical realm of the past to determine a context, a structure, a rational range, a dynamic continuum, a developmental patterning, and a paradigmatic model, by which to render significant and relatively meaningful the events and epochs and episodes of history.

The historical development of Vietnam’s past has not been written in a cultural/historical vacuum of isolation. It could not have been written outside of the larger context of culture-contact and culture change. Vietnamese ethnohistory is properly only defined in the historical relationship that the Vietnamese people have maintained with other cultural groupings. Vietnamization, the process of the development of Vietnamese Civilization, could not have been written outside of a broader continuum of the development of human civilization among the cultural groupings of other people. Instead, the "chapters" of Vietnamese ethnohistory are mainly defined within a context of contact and enduring relationships with differing cultures at different periods of time. The ethno-identity of any cultural-groupings is normally defined by and maintained within a larger frame of reference in the interrelationships of symbolic differences and similarities between other cultural-groupings.

Acculturation, defined as "the study of culture-transmission in process" (Herskovits 1947) is a primary metaphor of culture-contact and culture change phenomena. Acculturation, in its many guises and forms, as the ethno-historically defined processes of intercultural connections and structural interrelationships, destroys the myth of the static deterministic cultural boundary, or borderline, of cultural separation and isolation, and also destroys the myth that the internal functional dynamics of cultural processes of change in the eternal ethnographic present is independent of and unrelated to events within the larger, supra-cultural context of human civilization.

Acculturation forms the theoretical basis of ethno-history as the comprehension of the cultural and historical processes of how a cultural grouping arrives at, maintains and reinterprets its distinctive identity as a group. Acculturation and ethnohistory are inseparable in meaning and implication—two sides of the same coin—and the process of Vietnamization is only to be comprehended in relation to contraposed processes of acculturation. Vietnamization and the process of acculturation, is divided into chapters of Indianization, Westernization and Francoization and finally Americanization, form the mythological dialectic of Vietnamese ethnohistory. Acculturative processes, variously defined, labeled, identified, and the ethnohistorical process of Vietnamization, are mutually interdependent.

Whereas the various acculturative processes provide an overarching theme of often destructive diversity and disunity in culture-contact and intercultural contexts in Vietnamese ethnohistory, the contrapuntal theme of Vietnamization provides an underlying theme of symbolic, cultural unification—a typically Vietnamese sense of coherence and continuity of culture within changing contexts. Vietnamization is an ethnohistorical process that is the direct result of acculturation. The various and sundry processes were the direct antecedents and consequences in structural interrelation of the ethnohistorical process of Vietnamization.

In writing the following chapters upon Vietnamese ethno-history the concurrent and contrapuntal dialectics of acculturation and Vietnamization, with each chapter representing the particular phase of the process, the phases pile upon one another in a chain of events model—there are few definable boundaries or dates distinguishing when one phase begins and another ends. I wish to stress the overlapping and continuous character of the entire ethnohistorical process in dividing the phases into chapters of prehistory with a late phase of Hinduization, Sinization, Westernization, and Francoization and finally Americanization.

The understanding of Ethnohistory and the processes of acculturation and development of civilization underlying ethnohistory necessitates a study of the labels, and labeling, stereotypes and categorizations, symbolism and symbolization that people and their cultural groupings fashion in relation to one another, and that students of history fashion in relation to an ideal sense of the past. These are ethnohistorical metaphors that have as much significance in the present as meaning in the past. Through these formal labeling processes and mythological dialectics they belie, does Vietnamese ethnohistory merge into a single Vietnamized synthesis of the living present.

Vietnamese ethnohistory formally begins with the labeling process. "Ethno" means race and the earliest evidence of human occupation of the territory demarcated on maps today as Vietnam is in the paleoanthropological form of fossilized remains of races of early human beings. There is a paper-thin dividing line between talking in terms of race and racism. Once a label is created it is difficult to disprove but easy to prove and reinforce its deception of reality. Labeling has the human virtue of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Race and racism are quite interdependent in form and function, not only is racism the ideology of race but the theory of race is a mythology of racism. Each implies and necessitates the other in symbolic definition and realization. All the connotations of the definitions of race and racism have been applied in the literature in reference to the Vietnamese people, but let’s drop the name-calling and search the ground for evidence of just plan old human beings.