CHAPTER II

CULTURE AND CHARACTER IN TRADITIONAL VIETNAM

by Hugh M. Lewis

For their part, the Vietnamese retained their own language and with it, memories of their pre-Chinese civilization....The Vietnamese never lost their taste for local heroes, such as the Trung sisters, Lady Trieu, Trieu Quang Phuc and Phung Hung. What China had to say to them was bent through the prism of their own language and culture. (Taylor 1893:301)

Ethnoculture is a notion of the distinctive symbolic identity shared and elaborated by a particular cultural grouping of people. Both ethnoculture and ethnohistory share a common conceptual ground in the notion of a cultural base-line. A base-line is a hypothetically ideal paradigm, or exemplary model, serving as a point of departure and final reference in our conceptualization of the group identity and symbolism of a people, and forming the mythological boundaries of our ethnological comprehension, beyond which we are not supposed to stray. It is the groundwork and floor plan, the blueprint upon which we are supposed to reconstruct the structure of a cultural-grouping.

For the student of ethnohistory, this base-line is the ideal Past as the source, point of origin, and fossilized remnant, from which the cultural-grouping has subsequently drifted in the course of time. For the student of ethnoculture this hypothetical base-line is found within the ideal Eternal Present—as that theoretical core of cultural continuity that has supposedly remained unchanged time immemorial, and remains unalterable within the fundamental patterning of socio-cultural patterning. The model of the base line is presupposed and largely implicit as an ideal rational horizon upon which we project our ethnological comprehension, and from which we are supposed to infer the meaning of ethnological experience.

The ideal metaphor of the base line is the myth of the ethnologist--a meta-logical myth which determined the parameters of ethnological consciousness. Ultimately, it is derived from the sense of being traditional or a traditional sense of being. It is part of the myth of our personal consciousness, our apperceptive awareness of ourselves as of a particular cultural character, or characteristic culture.

Much lip service has been paid to the notion of traditional Vietnamese culture in the literature, though it has never clearly or conclusively explained. What this hypothetical model is supposed to be like is largely taken for granted and only tacitly presupposed to be realistic or true or to have some actual existence somewhere in reality. Then we refer to equally presumptuous preconceptions like stereotypes of the Vietnamese peasant or the Vietnamese village as at least implicit embodiments of Vietnamese cultural tradition and traditional character.

The motivation underlying the writing of this chapter is the systematic description of a formal model of traditional Vietnamese culture, of an ideal base-line of ethnocultural Vietnamese identity, in order to provide ethnological comprehension of the symbolic reality of the characteristic sense of being Vietnamese.

An ethnohistorical base-line demonstrates remarkable continuity of Vietnamese traditional culture from time immemorial—a direct developmental cultural sequence of Vietnamese civilization centered in Northern Vietnam from the remotest prehistoric period all the way to the present, without having been transplanted to another region or supplanted by another culture. There is a remarkable degree of corresponding cultural contiguity within a similar environmental context of its North Vietnamese heartland, as when it originally came into being. Thus the sense of its cultural relationships being deeply rooted, and its symbolic embeddedness to the natural environment, is very deep. The roots of a Vietnamese cultural synergism remain deeply implanted in the physical setting of North Vietnam. This deep rootedness has strong implications for the character of traditional Vietnamese culture.

Cultural "focus" refers to the heart of a culture, a sense of center that in the attention it receives becomes highly elaborated, and in its elaboration, receives a wide latitude and variability for its symbolic expression. Herskovits defined cultural focus as "the tendency of every culture to exhibit greater complexity, greater variation in the institutions of some of its aspects than in others. So striking is this tendency to develop certain phases of life….these focal aspects are often used to characterize whole cultures." (1947:542)

Greater variation of aspects of culture focal to the interests of a people suggests these aspects undergo greater development and change than other aspects of culture—what Herskovits referred to as cultural drift. To the extent that a culture is well-rooted, then the extent of cultural drift will be confined by context and characterized by conservatism—what Herskovits called "resistance to change"—and referred instead to cultural involution or an extreme symbolic intensification of cultural life. To the extent that a culture is well-anchored to a particular environmental context, then a fairly coherent and consistent base-line can be inferred which is both strongly conservative and extremely elaborate and flexible in its accommodation of external pressures for change, manifesting strong, fairly well defined and articulated cultural focus.

Focus gives a culture its particular flavor and refers to the symbolic integration of culture forming the basis for our conceptualization of the meaning of culture—allowing us to refer to a theoretical unity of culture from which interrelated aspects may be inferred. Cultural aspects comprise variable cultural forms which different cultural groupings may assume under varying conditions and circumstances. Together, within their appropriate context, these aspects for collectivities around which a culture is patterned—achieving an identifiable characteristic cultural orientation. Cultural orientation about focal aspects describes distinctive patternings that Herskovits defined as "the designs taken by the elements of a culture, which, as consensus of the individual behavior patterns manifest by members of a society, give to this way of life coherence, continuity and distinctive form." (1947:202) "Regularized form" refers to "describable limits" of recognizable behavior patterns and social sanctions. Cultural patterning constitutes a "model" for behavior with "its outline and contours flexible and alterable, permitting experience to fall into meaningful forms despite the changes that continuously mark its expression." (Herskovits 1947:207)

Julian Steward defined cultural core as "the constellation of features which are mostly closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements." (1955:37) We are thus put on the horns of a dilemma in our basic understanding of the meaning of culture. On one hand we have cultural focus defining patterning of focal aspects in terms of describable limits of forms of human behavior and social sanctions, and on the other hand we have cultural core defining those central primary aspects that are determined by human ecological adaptation to the physical environment. For Alfred Kroeber this constituted the basic aspects of culture that involved practical problems of subsistence—"reality culture" that faces the reality of cultural survival, as opposed to secondary value culture that faces values in the expression of creativity and playfulness. "Every society exists in a conditioning environment, and its members have basic psychological necessities to satisfy. It is only after this that free stylization of culture can begin." (Kroeber 1957:102)

Kroeber’s understanding of culture incorporates, but does not synthetically transcend, a basic dichotomy prevailing in the conceptualization of culture between a materialistic or realist definition of culture as an observable something describable in terms of manifest behavior patterning, trait lists, material life, organization of resources and the idealist definition of culture in terms of interpretations of the "culture bearer’s ideas of societal values and norms," from which culture is to be inferred. The idealist definition of culture is an inescapable conclusion of comprehending the conceptualization of culture itself as an ideal model that may or may not approximate human cultural reality. Idealist culture is an organization of conventional understandings and the man made part of the environment and the Human is preeminently a myth- maker.

A synthetic definition of culture transcends this rational dialectic and defines real and ideal dimensions as interrelated and interdependent in the comprehension of culture—the organization and utilization of symbols that have both primary real referents and functions and secondary ideal forms and associations. In the symbolic comprehension of culture everything real or ideal has metaphorical significance defined within a cultural context—even the food we eat or the air we breath takes on symbolic significance. Symbolization is culture in as much as symbols and culture both mediate the same mind/body dilemmas that it is the special lot of humankind to suffer. "The essential nature of culture must resolve a series of seeming paradoxes that are not to be ignored." In mediating the rational dichotomization of human reality, symbolization provides synthetic, coherent meaning, or a sense of symbolic reality to our culture. Culture is a universal human phenomenon—its universality is "an attribute of human existence." "The fact that man is often spoken of as a "culture building" animal is a recognition of the universality of culture; that it is an as attribute of living may be ordered…."(Herskovits 1947:19)

"A culture is a repertoire of symbols that has accumulated as human beings have tried to cope with their environment…."(Pandian 19982:1) "That class of things and events dependent upon symboling, products of symboling, considered in an extra-somatic context." (White 1959a:1) Cultural reality is social, a group reality in terms of shared symbol systems irreducible to psychological explanation. Symbolizing, on the other hand, "nter-integrates social and psychological reality, self and other, such that character becomes cultural and culture becomes character. A sphere of culture refers to the symbolic integration of human reality, with either a group or individual at its point of origin, emically, and that are composed of interwoven cultural chains of interconnected symbolism or groupings of particular kind of order which reflect a coherence upon a certain facet of human reality. A cultural complex is composed by one or more symbolic complexes which interconnect with one another and that is shared by a cultural grouping of people providing a paradigmatic ethos or a web of meaning for cultural reality.

The symbolic integration of a cultural complex confers a cultural synergism upon a cultural grouping, a life of its own, that can only be validly comprehended from within the focal origin of the meta-logical idiom of that particular cultural sphere itself, in how it confers a sense of comprehensive meaningfulness and order to those who share it. The fact that human beings are symbolic creatures and that symbolic culture is a human universal, means that the bound of our symbolic cultural complexes are only relative spheres of culture overlap, and it is possible to leave one sense of cultural order of symbolic reality and adopt another.

"….Perhaps the best thumbnail description of Vietnam is that of a Vietnamese intellectual, who likens his country to a surrealist painting 'with many different shapes and colors in it….'" (Tran Xuan Ly Culture itself is an extension of natural processes. The Vietnamese had never lost an essential sense of being rooted to nature, a deep sense of relatedness with the natural landscape characterizing and defining relationships which Vietnamese maintain with other people, with their context, and themselves. Strong bonds of spiritual and affective communion with Nature are not merely "animistic superstition" but are "invested with beauty and poetry. The Vietnamese are fond of flowers that are a symbol of beauty and femininity. This love for flowers is reflected in the custom of naming girls after the names of beautiful and fragrant flowers. "Nature in its manifold aspects has a great appeal to the heart, the mind and the senses of the Vietnamese….nature is viewed with love and sensitivity. This attitude seems to be the result of a successful adaptation of the Vietnamese to the natural environment." (Pham 1983:82-83)

Nature is the spring of aesthetic sensitivity and sensibility, in turn the deep affective spring of human meaning, values and goodness. A sense of relationship to nature that is characteristically Vietnamese provides a basic context for the comprehension of the diverse symbolism related to the meaning of being Vietnamese.

We can refer to a characteristic sense of harmony, of respect, and of cultural moderation and caution with which the Vietnamese characteristically relate themselves to others in the world around them and to the natural environment. Harmony is achieved by acceptance of life and the way it is, through moderation and caution in avoiding extremes. Modesty, moral probity and self control are values much esteemed by Vietnamese. "One of the most important features of Vietnamese culture is the expression of respect paid to other people in society….We may say without fear of error that respect is the cornerstone of interpersonal relationships in Vietnamese society…." (Pham 1983:43)

The many mountains, rivers, lowlands and the ocean, the monsoon seasons and the rains they bring, all provide a very elemental symbolic structure to the cultural ethos of traditional Vietnamese ethnoculture. The relationship of the Vietnamese to the land, aquatic and climatic environment as a whole is of direct consequence in structuring and conditioning cultural aspects, and of focusing customs and sanctions of behavior people will adopt. For Vietnamese culture, which can directly trace in its mythological memory autochthonous origins in the realm it yet occupies, the lineaments of the physiographic setting must be considered the main, deepest taproot of the development and elaboration of symbolic culture.