Ghosts of war in Vietnam [Reprint ed.] 9781107659421, 9780521880619, 9780511381492

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Introduction (page 1)
1 Ghosts of war (page 10)
2 Mass excavation (page 28)
3 Missing in action (page 44)
4 The phantom leg (page 64)
5 Death in the street (page 83)
6 Transforming ghosts (page 103)
7 Money for ghosts (page 133)
Conclusion (page 156)
Notes (page 167)
References (page 197)
Index (page 214)

Citation preview

Ghosts of War in Vietnam

This is a fascinating and truly groundbreaking study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination, and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as the actions of those who hope to liberate these hidden but vital historical

presences from their uprooted social existence. Taking a unique approach to the cultural history of war, he introduces gripping stories about spirits claiming social justice and about his own efforts to wrestle

with the physical and spiritual presence of ghosts. Although these actions are fantastical, this book shows how examining their stories can illuminate critical issues of war and collective memory in Vietnam and the modern world more generally. HEONIK KWON is Reader in Social Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006).

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

General Editor

Jay Winter, Yale University Advisory Editors

Omer Bartov, Brown University Carol Gluck, Columbia University David M. Kennedy, Stanford University Paul Kennedy, Yale University Antoine Prost, Université de Paris-Sorbonne Emmanuel Sivan, Hebrew University of Ferusalem Robert Wohl, University of California, Los Angeles

In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration

of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day. For a list of titles in the series, please see end of book.

Ghosts of War in Vietnam Heonik Kwon

CAMBRIDGE «i UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org , Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521880619

© Heonik Kwon 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2008 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication 1s available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-521-88061-9 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites 1s, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Introduction ] | 1 Ghosts of war 10

Acknowledgments page Vil The ghosts of the American War 13

Dealing with the strangers 19 Ghosts and state 24 2 The Mass excavation. 28 exodus of dead 32 Apparitions in the Cam Re 36 The ghost of an American officer 39 Vietnam—American joint venture 40

3 Politics Missing in action 44 of home burial A5 New MIA program 51 Brotherly Two ways to endconflict the cold war57 62 4 The ‘Thenetwork phantom leg 64 of war The infrastructure of revolution67 69 Tiger Temple 71 Same, same 75 Lap the amputee 77. The hidden history of the missing leg 80 5 Intimacy Death with in the street 83 displaced souls 85

Homesickness Distant reciprocity92 96

Mother of the home-place 90

One man’s ghost is another man’s ancestor 99

6 Transforming ghosts The taste of phantom salt103 104

Lien Hoa 109

y.

v1 List of contents

Intrusive ghosts 113 Mobility 115

The network of spirits 117 The spirit of a born-and-bred communist 124 Letters from the prison 126

Liberation 128 Making kinship 130

7 Death Moneyand for wealth ghosts 133 136

Old moneyand and new money 139 Heads tails 144 Money’s two destinations 145

Money and liberty 152

Conclusion 156

Notes 167 References 197 Index 214

Acknowledgments

It took time to complete this book and I accumulated a considerable debt

to a number of people and institutions during that time. First among them are my interlocutors in Vietnam who tolerated my presence generously and engaged sympathetically with my inquiries into their past and

present. I cherish the moments we shared, sometimes sad and at other times light-spirited, when we talked and did things together around the ruins and remains of the Vietnam—American War. My research trips to the central region of Vietnam were made possible by the generous grant and fellowship from the British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council. In Vietnam, I benefited from the hospitality of the Da Nang Museum of Liberation War and the Historical

Society of Da Nang, and the assistance of personnel in several Departments of Culture and Information within Quang Nam province. Although some of the members of these institutions were not always happy with my interest in ghost stories and ghost-related cultural cus-

toms, I hope that I demonstrate in this book that the purpose of my research was not as unconventional as it might have appeared to them in the first place. None of the above institutions, however, is responsible for the particular analytical orientation to Vietnamese history and culture adopted here. My own way of thinking about the history of war through the plight of war ghosts comes from the fact that such a mode of thought is rooted in

Vietnamese cultural tradition and embedded in their everyday life. However, it is also influenced by some innovative historical literature, notably Jay Winter’s powerful work on the European experience of the First World War that approaches the then popular beliefs and artworks

about ghosts as a distinctive social form meaningful for the painful process of mass bereavement. In writing this book I am also indebted to ideas from Keith Hart, Caroline Humphrey, and Tim Ingold. I share with

Tim the commitment to understand the human practice of animism philosophically, and learned from Caroline the merit of studying religious norms and practices in the context of political history. Keith taught me vil

Vill Acknowledgments how to think of history in terms of both conditioning human existence and enabling extraordinary human actions and connections. This book is dedicated to these three extraordinary teachers of anthropology with whom I had the privilege to work. Throughout the long process of completing this book, I had the fortune of having Francoise close to me. I cannot imagine how I could have gone through the process without her everyday support and incessant criticism. Michael Watson and Helen Waterhouse of Cambridge University Press

have been brilliant, most sympathetic editors, and the suggestions and encouragement from the anonymous reviewer were absolutely crucial for

tightening the chapters into a more solid whole and broadening the references. Special thanks are also due to Jonathan Ingold and Allison Rae who offered valuable editorial advice in the early stage of writing. Jonathan Spencer of Edinburgh University read the whole manuscript and offered instructive comments on improving its structure. Many other colleagues commented on parts of the manuscript. I thank especially

Charles Jedrej, Tony Crook, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Stephen Hugh-Jones, Susan Bailey, Stephan Feuchtwang, Jonathan Perry, Christina ‘Toren, Alexander Ouroussoff, Beth Notar, Keith Hart, Bill Maurer, Annelis Riles, Allison Truitt, Mayfair Yang, Cho Hung-Yun, Aiko Ogoshi, Kim Seong Nae, Midori Igeta, and Park Jun-Hwan. Special

thanks to Marilyn Young and Mark Bradley from whom I learned the pleasure of reading and thinking about international history. Chapter 4 is an extended version of an essay published in Making sense of the Vietnam Wars, edited by Bradley and Young. An abbreviated version of chapter 7 appeared in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Introduction

The Vietnam—American War, although it ended a generation ago, continues to engender novel accounts and interpretations. Notable among them are the recent initiatives of some prominent Vietnamese writers, who no longer deliver their youth during war years according to the conventional, official paradigm of the heroic revolutionary struggle of a unified nation against the intervention by a foreign power. As Vietnam is opening up its doors to the economic and cultural influences from the formerly opposite side of the bipolar world order, the meaning of the country’s recent war, which was one of the most formative events and violent manifestations of this order, is also opening up to new interpretations.

In a remote place called the Jungle of Screaming Souls, Bao Ninh narrates in his celebrated The sorrow of war, two soldiers on a postwar body-finding mission are debating the ghosts of war: “If we found a way to tell them news of a victory would they be happier?” Kien asked. The driver of the body-collecting vehicle said, “Come on! Even if we could, what would be the point? People in hell don’t give a damn about wars. They don’t remember killing. Killing is a career for the living, not for the dead.” The young volunteer soldier Quan, in Duong Thu Huong’s Novel without a name, is disillusioned with the philosophy of the people’s war and makes a solitary journey home through the jungles of central highlands where he encounters the skeleton of a dead soldier. Believing that he was led to lose his way by the spirit of the dead man, he promises that he will take his diary back home to his mother: “I'll bring your belongings to your mother. If by some misfortune she has left us, [Il visit her tomb, light incense, and read your diary to her from beginning to end.” In Van Le’s

Neu anh con duoc song (If You Were Still Alive), the soul of a dead revolutionary soldier has to cross the river that divides the world of the dead from that of the living. Unable to continue the journey because he has no money to pay for the crossing, the soldier looks back upon the world he just left and traces back the footsteps of his life in it from the battlefields to his ancestral village. ]

2 ‘The Ghosts of War in Vietnam These new historical accounts use fiction as their principal means of expression and they often employ episodes and discourses about ghosts as an important narrative element. The fictional aspect is a familiar theme in the intellectual landscape of former eastern-bloc societies. We know that intellectuals in eastern and central Europe have sought to empower the fictional narrative of personal experience as a resistance against the truthclaiming official histories. The novelist Milan Kundera crystallized this orientation in his widely debated statement that personal memory militates against inscribed history.’ However, the element of ghosts is not a familiar theme. Although various scholars today allude to the ghost of the past in trying to elicit the zeitgeist of the contemporary transition, the “specter of ideology,” “specter of Marx,” “specter of communism,” “ghost of Stalin,” and “ghost of the cold war” are mainly historical metaphors and not the same as the ghosts appearing in these Vietnamese stories.” The idea of specter or ghost can be a powerful means of historical narration, as demonstrated by Walter Benjamin in interwar Germany who described historical memory as a theatre of the living fragments of the past.” Recently, Istvan Rev introduced the idea in his gripping account of the “prehistory” of post-

communism, exploring how the moral fabric of contemporary Hungarian society is affected by unremembered victims of past injustices and their scattered, unmarked graves.* These specters of history are not the same as

the ghosts of war (ma chien tranh) to be introduced in this book. Even though I approach the latter as living evidence of historical injustice and therefore from an angle similar to that adopted by Rev, they are nevertheless

far from being merely an idea of history. Instead, ghosts in Vietnam are

primarily of concrete historical identities, whose existence, although belonging to a past era, is believed to continue to the present time in an empirical, rather than allegorical, way. In the narrative of post-socialism and

the broader history of the bipolar order in the process of decomposition, ghost stories from Vietnam make up a distinctive genre of ideas and values. The vitality of ghosts in Vietnam is not only a literary affair; nor 1s it, as

we shall see in the following chapters, oblivious to pressing issues in society. The phenomenon is founded upon the intense popularity of ghost-related stories across Vietnamese communities and the growing ritual intimacy with memories of tragic war death in their everyday life.

Ghosts are a preeminent popular cultural form in Vietnam and also a powerful, effective means of historical reflection and self-expression. As such, they constitute a legitimate field of sociological inquiry against the discipline’s received wisdom. In European literary tradition, the discourse of ghosts may be divided into three distinct genres. The first consists of the large corpus of medieval manuscripts, authored predominantly by the Roman Catholic clergy,

Introduction 3 whose objective was to assimilate popular ghost beliefs into a theological

conceptual order.” After the Reformation, the dominant learned discourse of apparition turned against these beliefs. This Protestant-led critical scholarship “rendered ghosts untrustworthy and unable to perform their traditional roles in society,”° and this tradition later extended

to the militant scholars of the Enlightenment who wrote against the persistent ghost beliefs as antagonistic to their vision of a secular and rational society. The third tradition developed partly in reaction to the critical scholarship and advanced philanthropic exposition of what historians call “popular mentality” or “popular religion.”’ This tradition influenced writers like Charles Dickens who, instead of dismissing pop-

ular tales of apparition as irrational, approached them as having the capacity to express poetically, through “a willing suspension of disbelief,” the prevailing socio-economic inequalities and other critical aspects of the

human condition.® In this literary tradition, according to a Dickens specialist, the uncanny actions of the dead (the magical “reality” of the story) are interwoven with the predicaments and contradictions in the

material culture and normative orientations of the living (social and

psychological “realism”).” :

This book approaches ghost stories in Vietnam partly in the light of the last tradition. It explores issues of social inequality as these are demonstrated in narrative and ritual engagement with the ghosts of tragic death. It aims to elicit how the social actors tell about their collective existence and personal aspirations through the actions of imaginary beings which are considered, in conventional social theory, conceptually outside the domain of social order and therefore outside the sphere of sociological inquiry. One of this book’s main objectives is to demonstrate that ghosts,

although they may be ideologically marginal to ancestors and other socially revered spiritual identities, are nevertheless constitutive of the order of social life and that ideas about them are instructive to understanding wider moral and political issues. Chapter 1 will outline this objective and suggest that the Durkheimian scheme of symbolic construction of social centrality should be reconsidered in a broad relational framework which is inclusive of vital social marginality. Related to this theoretical objective that belongs to sociology of religion, this book has also a specific historical interest. Ghosts are inseparable from particular social attitudes to death but also, by definition, from particular historical circumstances of death. I argue in this book that the recent war and postwar revolutionary politics constitute the immediate historical background to the social vitality of ghosts in contemporary Vietnam. The investigation of their vital social life will therefore have to engage with political history as well as sociological theory.

4 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Observers of former socialist societies tend to highlight changes in economic relations and political organizations, although there are some notable exceptions.'” Katherine Verdery, who is one of these exceptions, also emphasizes the importance of mortuary and commemorative politics in societies undergoing the epochal shift and radical transformation called post-socialist transition. Verdery concludes: [Post-socialist] politics is about much more than forming parties, having free elections, setting up independent banks, rewriting history books, or restoring property rights ... Rather, dead bodies have posthumous political life in the service of creating a newly meaningful universe. Their political work is to institute

ideas about morality by assessing accountability and punishment, to sanctify space anew, to redefine the temporalities of daily life, to line people up with alternative ancestors and thereby to reconfigure the communities people participate in, and to attend to ancestors properly so they will fructify the enterprise of their descendants. !!

The scholarship of cold war history, likewise, has not paid much serious attention to the reality of tragic mass death embedded in this history, nor the enduring legacy of the tragedy in the societies once seized by radical

and violent bipolarization of social and political forces. The reason for this lack of attention, in my opinion, relates to the persistent, mistaken notion that this bipolar global history as a whole can be explained by the paradigm of “cold war” or “imaginary war,” based on the idea of avoiding an actual war with competitive readiness for war.'* The cold war was a global conflict, but this does not mean it was an identical phenomenon worldwide. As observers note, the paradigm of imaginary war is narrowly based on the North-American and European experience of the second half of the twentieth century, which contradicts how the wider non-western postcolonial world experienced the same epoch with a series of vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of organized political violence.’? Walter LaFeber writes in this light that the question of whose cold war and which cold war is central to any debate about the origin and the aftermath of

the global conflict.'* Bruce Cumings takes issue with the idea of “long peace,” with which some historians characterize the international environment during the cold war conflicts, questioning how this primarily Europe-

centric historical idiom can extend to the bipolar politics and conflicts endured in other parts of the world, which resulted in millions of human casualties.'° The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez mentions that the nations of Latin America had “not had a moment’s rest” from mass death during the time called the cold war,’° and Greg Grandin describes, quoting Marquez, how the time is remembered in these nations primarily as the “unbridled reality” of vicious domestic conflicts often with prolific foreign interventions. *’

Introduction 5 The works of the above scholars show that the cold war is now remem-

bered through association with mass death or its relative absence, and also that careful consideration of this variation in collective memory 1s crucial, both for international studies and for discourses of historical transition today. Following this lead, I propose in this book that the history of mass death and the morality of death commemoration are important subject areas, just as much as diplomatic and economic history, for deepening our understanding of bipolar political history and for grasping some of the emergent social forms and political developments in the contemporary world. The stories of war death and postwar memory introduced in this book are intended to shed light on these broad issues of comparative history as well as on Vietnam’s modern political history. Some of the above questions about war and revolution are explored in my earlier work, After the massacre, which dealt specifically with the legacy of civilian massacres from the Vietnam conflict. After the massacre discussed how villagers of My Lai and Ha My have sought to assimilate their genealogical memory of violent mass tragic death to the existing public and domestic commemorative orders.'® The present work expands this

inquiry into the ritual memory of kinship to an important arena of war death which my earlier work failed to consider. ‘The village massacres brought crisis to traditional family-based commemorative practices,

partly because the incidents resulted in the enmeshment of human remains unrelated in kinship. The recent war in Vietnam turned the traditional villages inside out, transforming the secure space of communal

life into a fierce and confused battlefield; yet, it also resulted in the prolific, coerced mobility of civilians and combatants across locales. Against this background of generalized human displacement, the communities of southern and central Vietnam keep not only a large number of individual tombs of war-dead relatives and the mass graves of villagers but also equally numerous graves for unknown, non-native (mgoaz) human bodies. This material condition of displacement in death is closely associated with the perceived vitality of grievous ghosts of war. Therefore, this book explores ghosts in Vietnam mainly as a vital source of historical evidence (and a cultural witness) of war-caused violent death

and displacement of human lives, on the one hand, and in view of the active social engagement in today’s Vietnam with this particular form of historical testimony on the other. It is true that mass village death such as

that in My Lai also creates a form of displacement, for the scale and intensity of violence alienates the memory of victims from the established institutions of commemoration. However, the reverse is also true; as the

episodes in this book will demonstrate that the spirit of the displaced dead, unknown and originally foreign to a locale, may eventually invent

6 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam close ties akin to kinship relations with the place. This book is therefore about more than war-caused representational crisis in social memory and

genealogical history. Its primary focus is rather on a set of inventive wartime and postwar kinship practices, and it explores the horizon of kinship relations primarily in the proactive sense of making and generating them, partly according to how this issue is handled in some of recent anthropological studies of kinship.’? Chapter 6 will deal with this proactive aspect of human relatedness explicitly and discuss in this light how today some uprooted ghosts of war undergo a forceful symbolic transformation in non-native places to eventually turn into important genius loci there, although the wider horizon of the history of mass displacement developing into new histories in concrete places will be my central concern throughout the book. The research for this book was mainly based in the wider area of Da Nang, the main commercial center of central Vietnam. Although I use some of the data from my earlier fieldwork in the villages of Ha My (near

Da Nang) and My Lai (near the provincial capital of Quang Ngai) conducted between 1996 and 1998, the empirical material introduced in this book mostly comes from separate research conducted between 2001 and 2002, sponsored by the British Academy. The references to the global cold war that I introduce to the analysis were elaborated during my fellowship between 2003 and 2006 at the Economic and Social Research

Council. The research for this book somewhat departed from my previous village-focused study and incorporated extensive movement across places: the greater Da Nang, the town of Tam Ky, and the ancient city of Hoi An, which all have been the capital of Quang Nam province in recent history. Tam Ky is the current provincial capital. My travels were mostly to peripheral urban areas, and partly for visiting ghost shrines and collecting stories of apparition. Some of these movements were done informally,

meaning without giving detailed reports to the authorities about the identities of people I solicited, especially when they concerned having interviews with a local spirit medium who was rumored to have assimilated a ghost of war to his or her spirit shrine. These visits were often assisted by my close friends in the towns, whom I met regularly and conversed with on every aspect of life that friends normally talk about, and the interviews were conducted mostly during the quiet time of the day and in private homes. Partly as a way to preempt any repercussion from this informal fieldwork practice, I regularly called into the private homes of state officials and party cadres whom I knew, on my way back from an interview or at other times in the evening. Some of these people were well aware of the objective of my research and were at times willing to engage in a spirited debate about the ontology and social imaginings of ghosts.

Introduction 7 Of the various places I visited and investigated, the area that I call Cam Re in this book remains special. This crowded residential cluster of flower growers, tangerine farmers, and market women, not far from Da Nang, is seated on a vast old wartime cemetery. Virtually every household of Cam Re keeps no less than a dozen graves within its domain of garden plots. ‘This is where I experienced the coexistence of a history of death with the vitality of life activities, a material symbol of the duality of life, and learned profound normative attitudes to and creative social imaginings about the dead. This place is also the home of some of the most imaginative oral histories of transforming war ghosts that I have ever encountered in the Quang Nam — Da Nang region. I frequented this place, took on the task of compiling and classifying each household collection of graves, met the

residents through this extended tomb survey, which in time led to my introduction to two important informants whose complex encounters with ghosts of war are featured in chapter 6 and chapter 7. Ghosts are, in Vietnamese conception, the categorical opposite of ancestors, and as such they become strangers to the local community when this community enacts a ritual unity with its ancestral memory. Chapter 1 advances an analytical framework for the phenomenon of ghosts drawing upon Durkheim’s sociology of religion and Simmel’s essay on strangers as a distinctive sociological category. It argues that ghosts and ancestors are relational, mutually constitutive categories, and raises objections in this light to Durkheim’s conceptualization of the sacred that is narrowly focused on ancestral spirits, excluding ghosts from the domain of social structure and the spirituality of social imagination. Chapter 1 also outlines the general historical and social backgrounds to the contemporary ritual revival for ancestors and ghosts, and the meaning of the important native category, chet duong (“death in the street”). Chapter 2 and chapter 3 together deal with two inter-related aspects of displaced war death: the situation of having many improperly buried unknown dead in the locality on the one hand, and, on the other, the opposite condition of having the remains of many kinsmen missing from the locale. We will explore these war-caused ritual crises in the light of the recently increasing ritual interactions with the displaced spirits of the dead as well as the enduring public interest in the repatriation of dead bodies to their ancestral lands.

Examples of apparition and reburial introduced in chapter 2 and chapter 3 also have relevance for reviewing the grassroots communal experience of the Vietnam—American War. Chapter 4 explores the wartime history of a peripheral urban community seized under the forces of bipolar political and military confrontation. This chapter foregrounds

the popular experience of making networks of intimate interpersonal

8 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam relations with and amongst strangers in the midst of generalized mass human displacement from their traditional locales. As such, it serves as a

broad historical introduction to chapter 5, where I attempt to put together the historical background of mass displacement of human lives and the contemporary ritual revival for ancestors and ghosts in an integrated interpretative framework. Chapter 5 deals with the relationship between forms of historical experience and those of religious imagination, and it argues, among other things, that ritual interactions with ghosts can be seen as an alternative kinship practice rather than a conceptual opposite to ancestor worship. In pursuit of this argument, I introduce the twosided structure of Vietnamese commemorative ritual, consisting of placed gods and ancestors on the one side and displaced ghosts of tragic death on the other, and explore how their everyday ritual actions strive to reconcile the given order of genealogical memory with the history of displacement. One issue that connects all the chapters up to this point is a proactive notion of kinship as a web of relations in the making, contrasted to the genealogical ideology of predetermined, exclusive relatedness. In ritual

relationship with displaced spirits of the dead, this issue is expressed particularly prominently through the transformation of ghosts to community deities and other important tutelary spirits. Chapter 6 explores how this symbolic transition from animus loci to genius loci involves the practical actions to incorporate categorical outsiders into the domain of kinship. Chapter 7 continues this discussion and looks into the phenom-

enon in the light of one important instrument of contemporary ritual action, which is money. This chapter considers the act of offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts according to Simmel’s theory of money. It will review the empowerment of ghosts in terms of money’s instrumentality to destabilize prescriptive social hierarchy and to enable the pursuit

of personal liberty. Whereas chapter 6 and chapter 7 may appear to contradict each other in orientation — one dealing with the role of intimate adoptive kinship in religious transformation and the other focusing on the magical instrumentality of such powerful symbols of social anonymity as money — they actually address two sides of the same symbolic process. These two chapters, although they continue the main interest of this book which is the social consequence of mass death and displacement, some-

what depart from the rest of the book in terms of how I pursue this interest. In them, I shift from the relatively more distant and analytic gaze maintained in the earlier chapters to a descriptive strategy that I hope can do some justice to the extraordinary, sometimes incredible esthetics of life after life depicted in the social dramas about transforming ghosts. It is always a difficult decision for anthropologists to strike a balance in their descriptive project between the evocative power of extraordinary cultural

Introduction 9 symbols and the need to contain it within an intelligible interpretive or explanatory scheme. Although I hope to maintain this balance throughout the book, the reader may find that in the chapters about transforming ghosts this balance is slightly inclined in favor of the exposition of evocative power, partly along the orientation called radical empiricism in ethnographic tradition or perhaps that called magical realism in literary criticism.7°

The concluding chapter will bring the issues of the moral symbolic polarity of death to some of the critical questions in comparative political history of the global cold war mentioned earlier, particularly the importance of recognizing the traces of mass human death and suffering from

this history. ‘This chapter will review the ritual actions conducted on behalf of the ghosts of war as a creative cultural practice, which points to an ethical horizon of human solidarity beyond the wounds and pains of bipolar history.

] Ghosts of war

The Vietnamese call what we in the outside world call the Vietnam War “the American War,” and many of them believe that the ghosts of violent and tragic death from this war abound in their living environment. ‘Those who do so are likely to regularly offer incense, food, and votive money to these “invisible neighbors” and can tell stories about the actions of these hidden historical identities. The following is one of the commonplace stories of apparition from a rural settlement in the central region once known as My Lai. A man saw his late wife and children in the early morning on his way to the paddy field. This was in the spring of 1993, and by this time, some

villagers in this settlement had begun to remove the remains of their relatives from their shallow wartime graves to sumptuously prepared new family graveyards. The apparition was at the site of the man’s old house that had been burned down on the day of the village massacre in the beginning of 1968, which had destroyed his family. His wife was seated on a stone and greeted him somewhat scornfully. The three children were hidden behind her back, afraid that their parents might start arguing. The meaning of the apparition was immediately clear to the man: he must rebury the remains of his lost family without further delay. If he had no means to do so, according to the local interpretation of the apparition, the spirits would help him find a way. The man decided to spend the small sum of money that he had saved for the past years selling coconuts and was negotiating with a neighbor on the possibility of taking a loan from her. At that moment, a wealthy businesswoman who was a relative of his wife arrived from a distant city and told the man that she was willing to share the cost of reburial. On the day of the reburial, the woman told the visitors how the family of spirits had appeared in her dream and urged her to pay a visit to their home.

Whereas these apparitions are common in villages and towns of Vietnam, their stories seldom appear in the public media. Like any modern nation-state, the state apparatus of Vietnam looks down on them as remnants of old superstitions and a sign of cultural backwardness and moral 10

Ghosts of war 11 laxity. It took a further step to establish it as a code of law that citizens disengage with such negative traditions.’ John Law, the mid-nineteenth century English writer, compiled a large number of stories of haunted houses popular at the time in European cities and set out to debunk their credibility case by case. Law hoped to prove through this exercise that the stories resulted from the delusion of the uneducated mind, and advocated that the law and the government should exercise their power to eradicate this “madness of crowds.”” The postcolonial states of Vietnam have made enormous administrative and political efforts to battle against traditional religious beliefs and ritual customs; first in the northern half of the country by the revolutionary communist state after the August Revolution of 1945 and particularly after the 1946-54 Independence War against France,’ and

then across the regions after the reunification of the country in 1975.4 Perhaps we should include in this stream of aggressive modernization drive

the attitude of some of the political elite in the southern half, during the division of the country into two mutually hostile states between 1954 and 1975, who identified religious commitment to Catholicism as part of the anticommunist political struggle.”

The early revolutionary cultural campaigns in the northern region focused on substituting the commemoration of heroic war dead (from the armed struggle against French colonial occupation) for the traditional worship of ancestors and other community guardian spirits.° They aimed

to build a united ritual community of the nation, and this idea was extended to the liberated southern regions after 1975. The campaigns advocated eradicating the feudal, colonial, and bourgeois legacies from their society; yet some of their assumptions were influenced by the French colonial modernization discourses and the early Vietnamese nationalist ideas of cultural self-enlightenment.’ The revolutionary cultural policies particularly disapproved of any ideas and practices to do with ghosts. Until recently, making offerings to ghosts in public space was strongly discouraged and trading votive objects, such as replica money or the portraits of the sea spirits burned for ritual purposes, were considered against the law and indeed occasionally punished if discovered.® Even in

recent years when the earlier punitive policy has been moderated and popular ritual activities are becoming increasingly tolerated,” some ghost

stories still infuriate the Vietnamese state bureaucracy. Whereas other ghost stories are allowed in print, the literary works that introduce the ghosts of the American War are severely censored.'° A journalist working for the official news organ of a central province recently heard about a

rumor of an apparition and set out to investigate it. He was quickly reprimanded by his superiors. There was nothing extraordinary about the rumor, which was about a man encountering the ghost of his brother,

12 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam and such incidents can be widely heard across Vietnamese town neighborhoods. In this particular incident, the man was an acting official in the provincial Communist Party and the apparition happened to be of his elder brother who was killed in action as a soldier of the former South Vietnam. So it is rather in the Western public media than in the Vietnamese that we hear about “the Vietnam ghost.” At the closing phase of the Gulf War in 199], there rose a slogan in the US media that the American victory in this war had allegedly kicked away the ghost of the Vietnam War from American memory.*! Christian Appy introduces this hopeful aspiration of the era with the statement widely circulated at the time, “The specter of

Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”!* Colin Powell took part in both the Vietnam and the Iraq conflicts, and explains in his autobiography how the practice of war can be related to the memory of war. Citing the seventeenth-century military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, Powell notes that the war with Iraq was everything that the war in Vietnam had not been — it was conducted with a clear political objective and on the basis of the unity of the people with the political authority in achieving that objective.'? The Gulf War was “antiVietnam,” as other observers note, meaning that it was fought against the haunting memory of the Vietnam War as well as against the menacing regime of Saddam Hussein. ** Despite the above optimism in the aftermath of the Gulf War, however, the Vietnam ghost seems to be an enduring phenomenon. Several prom-

inent commentators noted a decade after the Gulf conflict that the Vietnam ghost was still haunting American society and politics,’? and I wrote this book amidst the heated debates in Western media regarding the alleged return of this ghost in the wake of a new military conflict in Iraq. News columns mention “the ghost of Vietnam in Iraq,” and a prominent scholar of international history writes of the persistent “ghost of Vietnam” in contemporary US security policies.'° This rhetorical trend makes one wonder how the course of contemporary history is influenced by the troubled memory of a past event, and why this relationship between history

and memory is expressed through the idiom of ghost that the early Enlightenment thinkers believed, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is contrary to all that is modern.*’ Jean-Claude Schmitt, concluding his investigation of the ghost beliefs in medieval Europe, states that the Vietnam War is one of the collective phantoms of modern times, “ready to surge forth each time history and, in particular, political reason attempt to push them from the memory of the people.”’® According to Appy, “For three decades American leaders have tried to bury memories of the Vietnam War only to have them pop

Ghosts of war 13 up again like indestructible poltergeists.”’? Michael Bibby, a specialist in American cultural history, believes that “the [Vietnam] war’s dismembered ghosts continue to haunt American culture.””° If it is true that the

“collective phantom” of the Vietnam War is still troubling American culture, what about the ghost of the American War in Vietnamese culture? What are the actions of war ghosts in Vietnam and what troubles, if any, do they cause the society?

The ghosts of the American War ‘The Vietnamese call the Vietnam—America conflict the American War (1960-75) partly to distinguish it from the previous “French War,””' in a

similar way that the Vietnam War (1965-75) is referenced to the war before it in Korea (1950-53) in the history of the cold war. According to

Marilyn Young, Americans remember the Vietnam War mainly as a conflict that happened among Americans: “The Vietnam war, in short, was a civil war, but - and this may puzzle Vietnamese, who are currently discovering the extent to which it was a civil war for them - it was an American civil war.”?* The radical division of a nation as to the objective and the conduct of a war that it is drawn to fight, as Powell notes, has a lot

to do with how the memory of this war turns into a “collective phantom.””° Young states, More divisive than any conflict Americans have engaged in since the Civil War, the Vietnam war raised questions about the nation’s very identity. These questions have not been settled. The battle over interpreting the Vietnam war is a battle over interpreting America and it continues to the present day.?*

According to another observer, the war was waged “not only on a distant battlefield, but also ‘in the uncharted depths of the American psyche and in the obscurity of our nation’s soul’.”*? Young points out also that the Vietnamese, a generation after the war formally ended, are now discovering the hitherto unspoken dimension of what has been, in the official discourse, an unambiguous, uncontested struggle of the unified nation against foreign aggression. Following Young, we will see in the following chapters how the recovered civil war dimension of the American War generates an array of interpretative controversies at community level and how these controversies structure some of the ghost narratives told within the community.

The phenomenon of war ghosts is intimately connected, in both Vietnam and America, with the troubled memory of the war. On this matter, Young’s idea that the Vietnam War and the American War were both partly a civil war is worth careful consideration. One must not forget,

14 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam however, the fact that death in this doubly civil war took place mainly in

the land of Vietnam and that it is the Vietnamese who count the vast majority in the list of the war dead. This simple truth must have some relevance in the stories of war ghosts told in Vietnam and in their being distinct from the idiom of ghost mentioned in American public media. France experienced a proliferation of war ghost narratives in the aftermath of the First World War, according to the historian Jay Winter in his

moving work on the role of ghost beliefs in mass grieving,” but the nation’s foreign military ventures in Algeria or Indochina have never produced any remotely comparable corpus of stories in France. It is rather in Vietnam, not in France, that some of France’s ancients combattants are still half-alive today in the form of a giant, uniformed ghost or in

other less intimidating forms of spectral existence. Some of these old ghosts appear in company with those of other racial origins from the time of the French War, whom the locals identity as the colonial conscripts from Algeria or Morocco. This finding applies to American history too. Of the several wars America fought for self-defense or in defense of other nations, no history of war can compete with that of the American Civil War in terms of contribution to the American folkloric and literary tradition of ghost stories.*’ War in my home and war in their home seem to be two quite different historical grounds for this particular genre of cultural production.

Death in Vietnam was mainly the death of a soldier in American memory, as evidenced by the central material symbol of this collective memory — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Death in the American War was also mainly that of a combatant according to official Vietnamese memorial art. This is materialized 1n the numerous cemeteries and cenotaphs distributed widely throughout Vietnam that can be easily seen in any rural village or town district. In reality, however, death in the Vietnam—American War was virtually anyone’s death for the Vietnamese — young and old, male and female, combatant or noncombatant, partisan or non-partisan, or communist or anticommunist.

This was particularly the case in the southern and central regions of Vietnam where the frontiers of battlefield were abominably unclear.”® The war against America was theoretically a “people’s war.””” It aimed to consolidate the army with the people, the soldiers in combat uniforms with the patriotic citizens without uniform, and the combat units with the rural villages.°° The army was the fish, according to a powerful metaphor of the Vietnamese revolutionary war, and the people were the water where the fish would live.** In many villages of southern and central Vietnam, the unity of army and people was far more complex and turbulent than the idyllic image of fish swimming peacefully in the landscaped pond of a

Ghosts of war 15 middle-class Vietnamese town house. As the conflict escalated, the “water” was systematically pumped out to expose the “fish.” Often, no “fish” were found in the bottom of the pond, and this frequently led to tragic incidents of civilian killing.** The dislocated water of people could not survive away from their ancestral land and was also pushed back to their place of origin to harbor the fish of army. The agit-prop activity to encourage war refugees to return to their homeland was intense through-

out the refugee camps and strategic hamlets in southern and central Vietnam. As a former highlands tribal leader said, “We were between the hammer and anvil. The Communists tried to resettle us ... The Americans wanted to get free fire zones with the Montagnards.”°*° Moving hazardously between the rural homeland and the refugee camp or the urban slum, people in the people’s war left numerous traces of loss and trails of sorrow. Today, shallow graves and collective tombs remain in

the sand dune, along the village footpath, and in the household garden; unknown human remains are discovered underneath the mud floor of the house. Some of these improperly buried dead belonged to the revolutionary side, others to the opposite side, and many more to both-andneither sides. Some of them would belong to soldiers, but these are greatly

outnumbered by the remains of the dead who had no war-related professional backgrounds. It is in this historical landscape of generalized violence and mass displacement that people perceive today the presence of grievous ghosts of war.°* The destruction of war constitutes the backdrop or what archeologists call “the contemporary past” for the phenomenon of war ghosts.*” Against the background of a mass-mobilized total war with heavy foreign

intervention, war ghosts in Vietnam are highly diverse in origin and sometimes have a cosmopolitan outlook. In his short story “The billion dollar skeleton,” Phan Huy Dong lists, “men women children old people Viets Laos Khmers Thais Koreans Australians New Zealanders French

black white red yellow brown ... even a few Americans.”*° Many Vietnamese regularly burn incense and pray on behalf of these heterogeneous beings, and these people are from all walks of life; many with the biographical background of marching in “the trail of revolution” (duong cach mang). Those who refuse to acknowledge the existence of sorrowful war ghosts in the old fields of mass death are sometimes mocked and subtly criticized — subtly because many of these non-conformists tend to be in positions of power in the Communist Party and other key political organizations.

These heterogeneous ghosts of war do not constitute a “collective phantom.” They are not merely an allegorical device for historical analogy, invoked to deliver the meaning of a new historical event against the

16 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam similar or contrasting background of a familiar old one.*’ Nor do they

merely point to the paradox in modern historical consciousness, addressed by Schmitt, that a dead era appears to walk in the new era at a time of crisis and especially if the new era nurtures an ideology of radical

break with the old. This paradox 1s deeply engrained 1n the tradition of modern social thought. Karl Marx wrote bitterly in The eighteenth brumaire of the ghost of dead generations exercising its invisible hands in the social revolution and thereby distorting its course, whereas Max Weber

wrote The protestant ethic in terms of how the tradition of medieval monastic asceticism prowls the culture of modern capitalist economic order. Drawing upon this intellectual legacy, Mark Schneider argues that apparitions persist in the modern world despite the rise of science, and that their enduring existence is often unrecognized in modern societies

symbolic.*® :

because its domain of existence has changed from the natural to the Ghosts in Vietnam are not “modern” in the above sense and in that their existence is perceived to be a “natural” phenomenon rather than a cultural symbol. There are people in Vietnam who would view the existence of ghosts as a negative mental problem of ao tuong (“illusory thinking”) in a similar way to how John Law projected it, but these are greatly

outnumbered by those who instead consider it as part of the nature of being and becoming in the world, that is, as an ontological question. Ghosts are called various terms (ma, hon, hon ma, bong ma, linh hon, oan hon, bach linh), translated in literature typically as “lost souls” or “wandering souls,”°” but in popular ritual idiom, co bac. The term co bac is an

interpersonal reference meaning “aunts and uncles,” which, in ritual context, is contrasted to the term ong ba (“grandfathers and grandmothers”) that is used to address ancestors and gods worshiped in private

homes or inside a communal temple.*° These “aunts and uncles” are dead, but not really dead in the sense of being settled in the am (the world of the dead); they are not alive, but they still have not left the world of the living. They are neither really there in the world of the dead (am) nor here in this world (duong), and, at once, are in both.** The idea of “wandering” in terms of wandering spirits points to the imagined situation that these spirits are obliged to move between the periphery of this world and the fringe of another world. In short, ghosts are a kind of ontological refugees, close to the status of Ernest Bloch’s das unheimlich,*” who are uprooted from home, which is to them a place where their memory can be settled.

Someone’s real-life encounter with these uprooted, placeless beings does not necessarily raise a question of credulity among his neighbors and

instead would generate intense curiosity on the specific identity of the spirit and the practical implications of the apparition. Ghosts are believed

Ghosts of war 17 to have wishes and purposes of their own kind, and they partake in the community life with their own particular vitalities. The spirits of the dead desire, in the mind of the living, the goods and facilities that living people require for their living: food and money, clothing and shoes, and sometimes, a house and a bicycle or Honda. The goods offered to the spirits may include a traveler’s bag, if the spirit happens to have been an intercity retailer during her former life. Sharing wealth and worldly pleasures constitutes popular practice, the primary relationship between humans and spirits. ‘Transaction of goods and services between the dead and the living, in turn, contributes to making the spirits appear more familiar and human-like. This is the case irrespective of whether the recipients are ancestral identities worshiped at home or placeless anonymous ghosts imagined to wander in the outside. Ghosts in Vietnam are also very much public figures. Most private encounters with them inevitably develop into varying forms of social commemoration. Putting incense sticks on the site of the apparition is already a demonstratively public gesture, for as soon as this takes place, the place transforms into a site of consolation. The story of the apparition and its further historical background will also travel quickly in the area to become public knowledge. No one, except an outsider, will walk carelessly on this place. Each time villagers walk by the site, the incense sticks

and the lump of ash force them to recall the story and think about that particular apparition. This may last a few months, or a few years, until the story Is resigned to oblivion and the site reverts to being an uncharacteristic ditch. The acknowledgement can vary from incense burning to food and money offering, and at times to a full-scale spirit-consolation ceremony superceded by a ritual specialist. In proportion to the intensity of acknowledgement, the ghost becomes an increasingly integral part of the local history.

The residents in Cam Re occasionally strived to push away some excessively troublesome ghosts from their environment, and these included, during my stay, what people believed to be the ghost of an Algerian conscript from the time of the French War. The local ritual specialist thay phu thuy hired for this evacuation walked along the ditch reciting an incantation (cau chu) where the Algerian ghost was believed to frequent, and later there was a widely circulated rumor that the foreign ghost, which had the naughty habit of touching the shoulder of young women from behind their back, ran away in panic, in fear of the incantation.*’ The Cam Re people were also aware that ghosts of war, in the vicissitude of their existence, might occasionally intrude into the body of a living person and cause critical conditions. Some ghosts, however,

had recently transformed to become important communal deities of

18 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam considerable power and exercised their power to heal these spirit-caused illnesses or for other purposes. In between these two possibilities and realities, the Cam Re residents related to ghosts as part of the order of their everyday life. The living must not kick away ghosts at the door, the ritual specialist once told me, for it is this inhospitality that often triggers the ghost’s intrusive actions into the interior space. Yet, people did not

invite them into their domestic interior either, for this would confuse them with the ancestors and gods worshiped at home.** It appeared that ghosts 1n this place were entitled to the right to exist in the social world of the living, and that local ritual practices consisted of constant negotiations over social and ecological space with the ontologically given, socially distinct group of beings. The identity of ghosts within this “naturalist” milieu of existence, to quote Claude Lévi-Strauss,*? is not the same as that of their modern, symbolic counterpart - the menacing collective phantom of the past that makes the living feel conquered by it unless they are able to conquer it. However, this differentiation should not be taken to mean that ghost beliefs in Vietnam represent some kind of pre-conceptual magical thought, such as that imagined by Lucien Levy-Bruhl, dominated by the fear of death and unaware of the differences between the real and the imaginary.*° On the contrary, ghosts as a thing out there, unrelated and oblivious to what the living imagine for them, are as unfamiliar in Vietnam as elsewhere.*’

The Vietnamese discourses about spirits and ghosts are rich with critical historical meanings, and they gain currency precisely because they are able to relate to pressing moral and political issues in contemporary life.*® The phenomenon of war ghosts, in other words, is not outside

history but rather reflects on the historically constituted human condition, sometimes in close affinity with what may be described as Hegelian zeitgeist — the anticipatory spirit of the historical epoch (see chapter 2).

For example, the apparition of the party official’s brother mentioned above acted upon the absence of his memory in the domain of kinship, and this relates to the legacy of a civil war/cold war, concealed and unaccounted-for in the official paradigm of a unified “people’s war” against a common, foreign enemy. The episode of the spirit family was mainly a family affair, but this is also inseparable from the wider social issues such as the disparity between the huge sacrifice of unarmed civil-

lans to the war and the indifference of the structure of power to their memory. This group of mother and children spirits may appear to be closer to the category of ancestors than to that of ghosts, for their deaths are remembered by the surviving member of the family. For complex reasons I have explained elsewhere, however, the victims of an extreme event such as a village massacre and the dead whose death disrupts the

Ghosts of war 19 family’s genealogical order have many problems to overcome 1n order to be accepted as categorical ancestors.*” Moreover, the difficulties have been exacerbated by the state’s intrusive cultural policy that transformed the domestic ritual space into a memorial for heroic war death. In these

contexts, the individual apparitions of the dead are reflections on (and reminders of) the predicaments in the collective memory of the living. Ifthe living enact on the apparitions and proceed to change their social and ritual space to a more accountable form, which these incidents typically develop into, the fantastical actions of spectral identities become interwoven with the transformation in the material world, and the stories about them are no longer “just a story,” as Sherry Ortner points out with reference to Sherpa religious history in the Himalayas, but part of the social action and take on the structuring force of the patterns of social life.°°

The last is an important point for the orientation of the following chapters, one of whose consistent aims is to elicit how people assert their moral and political identities through the imaginary actions of war ghosts. In order to understand how ghosts and humans become partners 1n social

action, however, we need first to come to terms with the conceptual structure that separates the two in the first place. Ghosts in Vietnam are supposed to be attentive to the social affairs in the living world, just as the latter are fond of telling stories about their existence. ‘This relationship of reciprocal attention assumes not only an existential proximity between the two groups of beings but also certain formal distance between their hab-

itats. In this scheme, ghosts and humans are interested in each other because they are unlike (as well as like) each other.

Dealing with strangers Ghosts are near and remote at once. They are physically close but distant in relationship. If the spirits of the dead are close to their living neighbors in both physical and relational terms, they are not ghosts but ancestors. Ghosts in Vietnam can associate with the living in various forms such as economic partnership (see chapter 2) and adoptive kinship (chapter 5),

and some of them may transform into powerful communal deities or guardian spirits through these associations. In everyday ritual reality, nevertheless, the co bac (ghosts) are defined as beings other than the ong ba (ancestors and other intimate, placed supernatural identities). In sociological literature, the identity that is physically close but relationally far is called “the stranger” and this has been an important concept in the theory of objectivity. The rationale of fieldwork method in anthropology is in fact inseparable from this particular notion.°’ The ethnographer, too, typically takes the ambiguous position of being physically close

20 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam to a foreign cultural reality but relationally far from it, and he or she claims to draw an objective picture of the reality based on this particular “bifo-

cal” positioning.’ Even if the object of inquiry is a seemingly familiar native milieu, certain conceptual distancing towards it on the part of the inquirer’s self-positioning is commonly practiced.?’ The “stranger” is an important concept in the anthropological studies of identity and ethnic relations,°* and, more broadly, in the tradition of existential philosophy and critical thought.” More recently, the relevance of this concept has been strongly revived among the political theorists of citizenship.”° However, it is mainly with the early twentieth-century German social philosopher Georg Simmel that the concept of “stranger” originally took on its full sociological importance. Simmel argues that the main characteristics of the stranger are mobility and diversity, and that it, as a concept, consists of the constellation of being near and remote at the same time.”’

The social form of stranger generates positive relations, according to Simmel, because he is not bound by roots to the particular constituents and partisan dispositions of

the group, he confronts all of these with a distinctly “objective” attitude, an attitude that does not signify mere detachment and nonparticipation, but is a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement.?°®

In Vietnamese conception, ghosts are the nguoz ngoai — their term for strangers or outsiders — in the world of the dead. They are the products of

“bad death,” painful and violent death away from home that the Vietnamese call “death in the street” (chet duong).°” Ghosts are imagined to suffer from forced mobility, having to wander between the periphery of

the other world and the margins of this world without a site to anchor their memory on, just as the strangers in this world move from village to village without finding a place to settle their lives into. They constitute a composite group of individuals with various backgrounds of historical life, just as the strangers in the living world differ from the settlers with their characteristic lack of a homogenous background. These qualities of mobility and diversity distinguish the lives of ghosts from those of ancestors, whose memories of “good death” — the non-violent, ritually appropriated “death at home” (chet nha) — are permanently settled in the social world according to the genealogical and spatial order.

At the center of this concentric conceptual moral order consisting of settled ancestors and placeless ghosts, there is the dexterous body of the ritual actor. The structure of domestic commemorative ritual, in the tradition of the central region, situates the ritual actor in between two separate modes of afterlife and milieus of memory. On the one side lies

Ghosts of war 21 the household ancestral shrine, or the equivalent in the community ancestral temple, which keeps the vestiges of family ancestors and house-

hold deities. The other side orientates towards what Michael Taussig calls “the open space of death,” which is the imagined life-world of the tragic, non-ancestral, unsettled, and unrelated spirits of the dead.°° The beings imagined to populate this space include identities such as the party official’s brother, who should not, in ordinary circumstances, fall into the category of co bac. These identities have been uprooted from home and excluded from the sphere of ritual remembrance for political reasons. In this book, I will call them “political ghosts” as a way of distinguishing

their status from that of unrelated, anonymous spirits of the dead to which the concept of co bac traditionally refers. The ritual tradition in the central region represents this open space of

death and the dwelling environment of co bac in the form of a small external shrine, popularly called khom in Quang Nam province, which is usually placed at the boundary between the domestic garden and the street. This external shrine for ghosts is in opposition, conceptually as well as spatially, to the in-house shrine for ancestors. Within the dual concentric spatial organization consisting of these two separate sites of worship that represent distinct milieus of memory, the typical ritual action in this region engages with both the house side of ong ba and the external, street side of co bac through-a simple movement of the body. The

most habitual act of commemoration consists of making kowtows and offering incense to the house-side ancestors and then turning the body to

the opposite side to repeat the action towards the street-wandering ghosts. This two-directional commemorative act, when it takes place in a more formal setting such as during the annual opening ceremony of a community temple (see chapter 4), may be accompanied by a single beat of a gong followed by three or four beats of a drum.

Within this system of dual structure and two-way practice, there emerge two distinct ways to imagine social solidarity. On the house side, we can say that the ritual action affirms the existing solidary relations

between the living and the dead in the way that, in Durkheim’s words, “each individual is the double of an ancestor.”°’ The act of worshiping the sacred existence of the dead, in this scheme, is that of rendering sacred the profane entity that the former stands for in relation to the living — the genealogical unity. This symbolic construction of social unity, according

to Durkheim, is focused on what he calls “the true spirits” of the place which he contrasts to what the ghosts stand for:°” A ghost... is nota true spirit. First, its power is usually limited; second, it does not have definite functions. It is a vagabond being with no clear-cut responsibility,

22 ‘The Ghosts of War in Vietnam since the effect of death was to set it outside all the regular structures. In relation to the living, it is demoted, asit were. On the other hand, a spirit always has some sort of power, and indeed it is defined by that power. It has authority over some range of cosmic or social phenomena; it has a more or less precise function to perform in the world scheme.

For Durkheim, the categorical distinction between “the true spirit” and “the ghost” relates to the relative conceptual distance between the soul and the body. He writes, “A soul is not a spirit .. . it is the body’s prisoner.

It escapes for good only at death, and even so we have seen with what difficulty that separation is made final.”°° The spirit is the result of a successful separation of the soul from the prison of the body, whereas a failure in this work of mortal separation results in a ghost. The former develops into a “positive cult” through which the living associate with the memory of the dead in socially constructive and regenerative ways, whilst the latter falls to a “negative cult” accompanying a system of pollution taboos and abstinences.

This way of dividing death into two separate moral domains and focusing the analytical attention on the positive spirit of the society (genius

foct) has set a dominant trend in the subsequent study of religious sym-

bols. Most notably, Maurice Bloch discusses reburial practices in Madagascar in this light and describes their custom of separating ancestral bones from the decomposed bodies as a core symbolic gesture in the making of a social order.°* The bones cleaned from the flesh represent a sacred spirit removed from the profane body and their assembly in the collective ancestral tomb creates “the society of ancestors” — an ideal social form in the collective consciousness of the living.°°? Bloch later changes this idiom of symbolic removal to a stronger language of “symbolic conquest” as he tries to advance a general theory of human religious experience. He argues with reference to male initiation rituals that the logic of these rituals is to have the ancestral spirit conquer the body of the novice members of a social group.°° The initiates obtain the rights for full membership in the society by becoming the double of ancestors and this is achieved through the ritual enactment of them renouncing their profane

bodily substance in exchange for the reception of the transcendental ancestral spirit. It is important to note that the idiom of symbolic conquest works in two ways. It describes how the soul of the dead transforms into a true spirit on the one hand and how this pure spirit in turn makes a

new bondage with the living on the other. The idiom postulates that a social order is created on the basis of this war against profane substances imagined to take place on both sides of the cosmological threshold. Ghosts are an uninvited category to the paradigm of symbolic conquest. In the language of the rites of passage, they are perpetually liminal

Ghosts of war 23 beings that are neither entirely separated from the world of mortals nor yet incorporated into the socially defined world of true spirits.°’ They exist outside the social structure, according to Durkheim, and have no clearly defined social functions. With this background, it is not surprising to find that ghosts have played no significant part, in contrast to ancestors, in the advancement of a social theory. Bloch notes that the people in Madagascar fear dying away from home, which prevents the possibility of a post-mortem symbolic transformation, and that they are aware of the existence of such death in their living environment.°® These “bad deaths” and their symbolic traces are irrelevant to the analytical project, however,

because of the assumption that they are strangers to the social structure. | Shifting our analytical perspective closer to Simmel’s, however, we begin to question if the absence of ghosts can be justified in the composition of a social theory. Simmel’s strangers are ideologically outside a given social order but they are existentially close to the social process within the order. The identity is the peripheral background in which the symbols of social centrality come to the foreground. Like the interplay of figure and ground in the theory of metaphor,°” “the stranger” in Simmel’s sociological imagination is an integral element in the symbolic construction of social identity: ’° Life holds the boundary fast, stands on this side of it — and in the same act stands on the other side of it; the boundary is viewed simultaneously from within and

from without. The two aspects belong equally to its confirmation. Just as the boundary itself partakes both of “this side” and of “that side,” so the unified act of life includes both the state of being bounded and the transcending of the boundary, despite the fact that this seems to present a logical contradiction.

In this alternative scheme, alterity is in the making of identity, not outside of it, and all forms of exclusion are at once “inclusive exclusions,” mean-

ing that the definition of the outsider affects the constitution of the interior social order.’’ Regarding Bloch’s “society of ancestors,” we may say that the attempt to describe this society without an equivalent descriptive attention to the crowd of ghosts that surrounds it is like claiming the incomplete outline of a figure drawn on the raw background of a canvas as a finished portrait.’* The society of ancestors, as with other more secular societies, has foreign relations as well as domestic politics. We may not ignore these external relations in painting a social order, or justify doing so with the convenient idiom of conquest.

The absence of ghosts in a social theory is a product of the theory’s preoccupation with functional values and structural order. ’° In addition, the exclusion of ghosts from the symbolic construction of sacred social order relates to a problematic definition of the sacred. The Latin term

24 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

sacer, as Giorgio Agamben explains it, has the double meaning of “sacred” and “accursed,” and it incorporates both the holy spirit of moral unity and the spirits excluded and banned from the unity. ’* Arnold van Gennep similarly notes, “For a great many peoples a stranger

is sacred, endowed with magico-religious powers, and supernaturally benevolent or malevolent.”’? In Edward Casey’s phenomenology of place, the genius loci (“the spirit of the place”; Durkeim’s “true spirits”) should be distinguished from the anima loci (“the soul of the place”) but the two, nevertheless, cannot be considered separately. In this conception of the sacred, the negative cult of ghosts is mutually constitutive of the positive cult of ancestors and we cannot imagine the symbolic values of ancestors without placing them in a wider relational structure with those of ghosts. ’°

Ghosts and the state However, there is one domain of sacred symbols where the absence of ghosts becomes empirically real. Ghosts in contemporary Vietnam do not have a coherent existence: they dwell in the traditional cultural habitat in the periphery of ancestors, but this habitat exists within a wider modern and secular political society that negates their naturalist existence altogether. In the latter, the ghosts of war face a strong disciplinary force that strives to efface their traces from the spirituality of social unity. Accordingly, the Vietnamese take on two distinctive behavioral patterns when they are engaged in the act of ritual commemoration. When

the act concerns the family and community ancestors, their bodies are mobile and their gestures are dexterous. They move between the place of ancestors and the space for ghosts and perform the act of worship on both

sides in a gracious, rhythmical manner. When the occasion 1s for the public commemoration of war heroes, on the contrary, the body of the ritual participant tends to be rigid and upright, as if he or she were a welldisciplined soldier standing in line for an inspection, eyes fixed singularly on the neo-gothic memorial tower throughout the proceeding. The participant may kowtow to the monument for war martyrs and offer a few

joss sticks on behalf of them, in the same way that he or she prays to ancestors at home. Yet, this ritual action, unlike its equivalent in the domestic setting, must not be replicated towards the opposite side of the public shrine. Ghosts of war are made truly invisible in this particular field of ritual actions. In this politicized, centrist landscape of memory,

the sacred spirit of the dead can exist alone without relating to the contrary background of vital ghosts and the human body is deprived of what Robert Hertz calls symbolic ambidexterity — the capacity to go

Ghosts of war 25 beyond the antithesis of right and left, inside and outside, and the moral hierarchy of “good death” and “bad death.””’

The state commemorative rituals boast a wealth of speeches by the officials, and flower bouquets and banners donated from different committees and organizations decorate these occasions with vibrant colors and a pleasant perfume. Traditional commemorative food offering is not allowed at these serious events, although nowadays this is changing in

some places. Bottled soft drinks tend to be permitted because these objects are recognized as clean and neat compared to homemade commemorative food and they are also perceived to represent a new future

rather than the old backward past. The officials offer flowers to the patriotic tower and shake hands with each other. These people turn around sometimes and face the opposite side of the monument. They do so, however, in order to give an instructive speech to the mass, not to

extend the gesture of remembrance to the world beyond the chosen memory of the dead. Iam aware that some Vietnamese officials can easily do both the single-sided and the two-way bilateral commemoration. They give a well-crafted speech at a hero monument and later in the evening watch, approvingly, their wives kowtowing to the errant spirits. ’® Despite

this growing penetration of popular ethos into the official habits, the absence of ghosts still defines the difference between the state and pop-

ular ritual patterns, and war death in the statecraft and that in social practice. This difference is conceived of a hierarchy of value from the perspective of the state. The mistrust and fear of unidentified and unclassified beings reinforces the state’s adherence to a particular class of war

death. The state worships selfless heroes and altruistic martyrs, and in order to perform this worship, the system has to select regenerative death from the mass of war death based on a scale of virtue. The death that has

done a meritorious service to the nation should be singled out and preserved for the future.’” Thus we may say that what James Scott calls “seeing like the state,” in the sphere of war commemoration, is equal to seeing no wandering ghosts of war in the field of mass war death.*° The state’s rejection of war ghosts is understandable, and Vietnam is far from alone in this forward-looking cult of the war dead.** Any modern

nation-state would require a hierarchy of value in war death for its legitimacy.®” The nature of the ghost world is such that it is difficult to introduce this hierarchy into it. The ghosts of war do not go along with any organized effort to classify war death to a system. Vietnamese ritual interactions with ghosts do not discriminate between foreign ghosts and the Vietnamese or between the heroic death and the tragic death. The difference between combatants and civilians, clear in the official media,

becomes marginal and sometimes almost irrelevant in popular ghost

26 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam narratives and beliefs. Heroes and villains mix together and demonstrate different identities from those imposed by the official discourse. Among the spirits of fallen combatants, the record of to which side of the war they sacrificed their life becomes a minor issue compared to the suffering of the

violent death that all experienced and experienced in different ways. Moreover, the popular ghost narratives do not even discriminate against

the enemy. Don Lam claims, “Our cult of deities is an open system marked by some democracy. It admits both female and male divinities, young and old, of aristocratic or plebeian origin, even the souls of beggars, thieves and enemy soldiers falling in battle in our country.”®° Indeed, I observed that the world of co bac adheres to a principle of openness: the ghost of a revolutionary militiaman and that of an unknown soldier who fought on the opposite side of the war shared the same village footpath as

their favorite site of apparition; when the My Lai villagers made their ritual prayers and offerings to ghosts, they did not discriminate between the recipients of their gift on the basis of nationality — whether they are the

ghosts of foreign combatants killed in action or those of Vietnamese civilian casualties of war. ‘The eminent Vietnamese poet Pham Duy wrote a song called Chin si vo danh (Unknown Soldiers) in 1958, dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the French War:** In the daylight, the sight of a troop appears in the distance The mountain trees are quiet to listen to the heroes The echo of their drum thunders the quiet hill in the dusk In a dreadful afternoon, go to the foggy front Numerous spirits of dead gather and talk in the voice of the wind These are the dead, unknown, Vietnamese soldiers who remember the enemy Leaving home, they promised to fight for the motherland Keeping the tradition of struggle against the foreign invaders Their courage bears victory, their anger frightens the invaders With the hallowed memory of their blood Their bodies are scattered everywhere, one on top of the other building a wall In the dusk, their ghosts come and go like swallows These are the chin si vo danh.®°

The idea that unknown fallen soldiers “wander between two worlds” is familiar to us as well as to the Vietnamese. It was popular in Europe in the aftermath of the Great War.®° Nor is the idea that dead soldiers remember

their enemy strange to us. In the midst of the trench warfare, Germany propagated the notion that, “the dead will rise again to inspire the living and the nation for which they sacrificed their lives is strong and immutable.”°®’

Ghosts of war 27 The rendering of national unity as a spiritual unity between the living and the dead,*® however, does not extend to the horizon of ghosts. Ghosts

in Vietnam constitute a highly heterogeneous society as a whole, and, related to this element of social diversity in the collective existence of war

ghosts, there is a pronounced notion in Vietnamese beliefs about the ghost’s individual “memory” (ky uc) — the idea that the transition to death, or another life, brings with it characteristic amnesia. A popular Vietnamese saying deciphers, “There is no enmity in the cemetery,” and the events described in this book will demonstrate how the ghosts of war “do not give a damn about wars,” as the body collector says in Bao Ninh’s story introduced earlier, and “forget” (quen) the political origins of the war that brought about their death. This idea that the dead forget war, or remember it differently from the living, gripped my attention throughout my research stays in Vietnam. Whereas the pain of violent death and the pain of separation from loved ones are not forgotten, according to this scheme, the cause and the intention of the war that brought about their death are left in oblivion. Later we will return to this theme and see how war death means, in this work of memory, the death of the very ideology of war (see chapter 7). The above overview of ghosts of war in Vietnam has raised a set of

issues. Among them are the conceptual moral hierarchy of death, the religious politics of modern statecraft, and ghosts as a cultural category or

a historical allegory. ‘These issues represent the wider context within which we shall assess the phenomenon of ghosts and ritual intimacy with these “invisible neighbors” in everyday life. In order to discuss them further, however, it is necessary first to come to terms with the historical material basis of the phenomenon, that is, the war-induced displacement of human lives. As mentioned earlier, ghosts in Vietnam are evidence (and, at the same time, witnesses) of violent death in displacement, and it follows that their perceived vitality in the social world is thus inseparable from the enduring materiality of displaced mass death in the living environment. The material culture of mass death and the moral symbolic hierarchy of death are inter-related fields of inquiry. Now we

will turn to the materiality of “death in the street” and explore the two ways that the tragic, ghost-engendering condition manifests in postwar Vietnamese reality: many unknown dead existing near home, on the one hand, and, on the other, many dead missing from home burial.

2 Mass excavation

Coffin making was a thriving business in the Quang Nam — Da Nang region. The owner of a funeral parlor in Da Nang recalled in 1998 that the current boom reminded him of thirty years earlier when the area suffered its most intense battles and extensive mass killing. Having inherited the small family business in the early 1960s, the man decided to industrialize

it in 1968 due to the escalating demand for coffins. He bought timber from the highlands through a middleman who he was sure was a Vietcong contact and hired war refugees. Business prospered; the labor was cheap

and dead bodies were plentiful. His only competitor at the time was a group of amateur artisans who assembled makeshift coffins from ammunition containers or the boxes of US PX supplies. Only the poor bought

these rude products, the owner recalled, made from foreign trees and which sometimes had “Made in USA” or “Property of US Army” printed on the side. The shop produced three distinct types of caskets whose prices varied

from one third of a schoolteacher’s monthly salary to three times this salary. The more expensive ones were lavishly decorated and emitted a pleasant perfume. In an ideal world, all dead people should have one of these sandalwood coffins, the owner argued. He had made many of them during the war, stopped producing them after the liberation, and resumed

making them recently. A simple, inexpensive product which he called “people’s coffin” was also on display. The shop owner said that he had no passion for this simple, dull coffin and kept only one sample model on the shop floor. The dead in this coffin are never entirely happy, according to him, and are naturally not particularly interested in blessing descendants with luck and health. In the dark and dusty room separate from the main shop floor, the shop kept a stock of mini coffins, a quarter of the size of an ordinary coffin and painted in scarlet red. These were used for reburying

old and decomposed remains. The shop has been supplying a large number of them to the local government and builders 1n recent years. ‘The change in the funeral business reflected a wider social transformation in the 1990s. By all accounts, this decade was a time of formidable 28

Mass excavation 29 change for Vietnam. The country had transformed during this relatively short period of time, in the view of the outside world, from a poor and isolated country ravaged by successive wars to a politically stable, vibrant economy.’ Against the background of a deep economic crisis of high inflation and low productivity in the 1980s, which some observers associate, among other factors, with the population’s everyday resistance to the centrally planned economy of bureaucratic socialism,” Vietnam’s political leaders embraced a program of general economic renovation (dot mot) in the late 1980s, swinging towards a regulated market economy. The shift in economic ideology involved a growing political tolerance for communal and associational activities including religious worship. As a

result, it has been noted that one of the most significant changes in Vietnamese society during the 1990s was “a nationwide resurgence of religion and ritual.”° This concurrence of economic growth and ritual revival has encouraged a number of observers to investigate the status of religious groupings

in the context of the changing relationship between state and society, focusing on the role of religious activities in dealing with uncertainties resulting from the society’s exposure to the versatile global market. Philip Taylor’s study of a rising cult movement in the southern delta region is an excellent example of this development.* Taylor’s rich ethnography relates the popularity of religious pilgrimage in the border region with Cambodia

to the economic transition to a regulated market model and an array of social anxieties caused by this radical structural change. Studies of this orientation are in line with a recent development in the anthropology of religion, which attempts to situate local magical practices in critical dialogue with edgy contemporary issues such as economic globalization and consumerism.” These studies also follow a noticeable trend in the scholarship of post-socialism, which comes under the general rubric of culture and economy or economy and morality.° Scholars pursuing this thematic con-

cern tend to be critical of conventional modernization theories. These theories are based on assumptions which were formulated for economically underdeveloped “traditional states” on the side of “the free world” as part

of the global containment of communism.’ Therefore, it is believed that they are not easily applied to the contemporary transition of formerly socialist societies into market-driven socio-economic conditions. The above concerns about morality and economy, seen in a broader context, are in response to the prevailing sense of a new global order “after 1989,” which the sociologist Anthony Giddens characterizes as capital-

ism’s “quantum leap” to a new, borderless formation dominated by financial markets.® Giddens notes that capitalism after 1989, facing no rival mode of economic development, has become the single option for

30 The Ghosts of War 1n Vietnam the entire human race. According to him, this generates a profound sense

of encompassment and inevitability, and money, in this triumphant march of capitalism after its bloodless victory over communism, becomes

sure of itself and more ruthless in pursuit of an absolute freedom of mobility. ‘The scholarship that focuses on the economy and morality in the changing former socialist societies aims to record the variety of ways in which local communities of these societies, following the end of the cold war, respond to the wave of encompassment and sense of inevitability mentioned by Giddens.” The radical social upheavals that have

swept through the East (in the geography of cold war) since the late 1980s have many similarities across the societies affected. The tide of change was on a global scale, and it is indisputable that it was in the main about reconfiguring the gravity of economic and political power within

and between nation-states. The idioms of financial globalization and “liquid capital” were at the heart of the dominant discourse about the reconfiguration of the balance of global power.’° It is understandable in

this general context that specialists of former eastern-bloc societies should explore how the local actors negotiate their past experience of relative economic security with the new ideology of private property, personal liability, and the liberal market.’’ Extending this analytical orientation to places like Vietnam, however, requires caution. We can call these post-socialist (or late-socialist) social changes a transition from the grid of the cold war. Yet these two references to the same contemporaneous phenomenon have different implications. According to Katherine Verdery, The cold war organized the world around a dichotomy different from that of postcoloniality — not colonies and metropole, “the West” and “the Rest”, but East

and West, communism and capitalism. And it organized knowledge both by underscoring other aspects of capitalism than colonial relations and by grouping places and states differently from the center-colony groupings of European imperialism.”

Verdery points out that the East versus West dichotomous grouping blurred the variance in the historical experience of socialism (or capitalism) across territories, and argues that a comparative understanding of the contemporary global transition should consider the regional variance and the related junctures between postcolonial history and bipolar history. Verdery makes a critical note in this light against the current ori-

entation in post-socialist studies that tends to approach the transition away from the bipolar era from a predominantly Europe-centric perspective, oblivious to the historical horizon where “decolonization and the cold war ordering are temporally and thematically inseparable.”!*

Mass excavation 31 Verdery’s proposition resonates closely with the innovative trend in the scholarship of international history, outlined earlier (see the introduction

to this volume), which aims to pluralize the origins and realities of the cold war.'* The cold war was a global conflict, but this does not mean that

it was experienced in an identical way globally.'? Although they were closely interrelated in the geopolitical imaginations of the superpowers, the bipolar conflict in European theatre and that in the theatre of a nonwestern postcolonial region had aspects of radical diversion. The cold war in Europe was primarily an “imaginary war,” consisting of competition in economic development and in readiness for war in the hope of thwarting

the possibility of an actual war;'° the equivalent in many postcolonial nations consisted of vicious domestic armed conflicts and other exceptional forms of organized political violence often with heavy international intervention. For Vietnam, according to Mark Bradley, the political history of socialist revolution is not to be considered separately from the experience of a devastating war as part of a postcolonial transition. Bradley defines the Vietnamese revolution as the pursuit of a prevailing postcolonial vision for a fully independent nation-state in the era of the cold war.*’ It follows that the nation’s contemporary social transition is much more than a shift from one to another economic form, just as its past historical struggle was not merely about realizing a particular political-economical order. The

contemporary debates on post-socialism, which focus on changes in economic ideology and related questions of economic morality, may make sense in the context of Russia and eastern and central Europe. One may think of the recent history of Europe as an “imaginary war” or a “struggle between socialism and capitalism.”'*® However, it will be absurd to extend this innocent definition, without some serious reconsid-

eration, to other parts of the world (including some parts of Europe) where the political history in the second half of the twentieth century meant violent bifurcation of social forces with millions of human casualties. ‘The same argument applies to the related, equally Europe-centric definition of post-socialism, which does not take into consideration the destructive aspects of political bipolarity and their enduring effects on contemporary life. Steve Stern describes how the decade of 1990s, for Chile, was the time of opening “the memory box of Pinochet” — the legacy of his regime’s

brutal, rhetorically anticommunist violence against the society.'? In Indonesia, the end of the cold war meant the opening of the possibility to remember the victims of the 1965 anticommunist terror campaigns, waged by right-wing army groups and radical Islamic forces with support from the United States administration.*° In the same period, forceful

32 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam public concerns also erupted in South Korea about its history of state terror and mass death.”! For Vietnam, recent studies show how the onset of market economic reform provoked a “commemorative fever” across local communities,?* and similar observations are made in Taiwan and

parts of China.”? In the European theatre too, historians of modern Greece have recently begun to describe how the country’s divisive civil

war between 1946 and 1949 continues to influence the contours of communal relations and individual identity in the peripheral areas.7* Verdery and other specialists of central Europe have written about “the politics of the dead bodies” and how the unresolved issues of mass war death (mainly from World War IT) and related social grievances continue ~ to shape the political map of the region.*? The decomposition of the bipolar political order, across these diverse places and across the bipolar geopolitical border, shows one common development — the resurgence of memory of mass tragic death. The above discussion is intended to highlight the importance of reviewing the history of mass death for grasping the horizon of contemporary societal development in Vietnam. Throughout the 1990s, the state of Vietnam consistently pursued a conciliatory gesture to formerly hostile states including the United States, giving prominence to open, multilateral, and diversified external relations rather than the settlement of past grievances, and domestically advancing economic growth as the prevailing idiom of the time.7° Within communities, however, the scars of war were still very much alive and some of them, in fact, just began to emerge in the public sphere following the market reform. ‘The thaw in Vietnam, at

community level, was not merely about “using market mechanisms to socialism’s advantage””’; it was equally about taking advantage of these mechanisms to unearth the hidden remains of the war dead.

The exodus of the dead Since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been a steady increase in the amount of bodies unearthed throughout Vietnam. This has had much to

do with the increasing construction activity building roads, private houses, public buildings and joint-venture factories since the launching of the government’s market-reform program in the late 1980s. In the suburb of Da Nang, rarely two or three days pass without some news about a burial. Some of them are for the newly dead. Road accidents are common along the chaotic Route 1, the practically single-lane road that connects Hanoi to Hue, and Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City. The number of scooters has doubled in the towns over the past few years; the postwar youth generation throttling on Honda Dreams to a suicidal speed is now a

Mass excavation 33 familiar sight in the dusk. The funeral of the aged Heroic Mother of Vietnam, an official title awarded to the mothers who sacrificed three or more of their children to the American War,”® attracted a large crowd. Apart from these occasions, most of the burials are actually reburials. The unearthed bodies undergo a process of political classification and historical emplacement. If the bones are identified as belonging to the

officers or soldiers of the revolutionary war, they are carefully reassembled and brought to the state cemetery for war martyrs according to the appropriate ceremonial order. In parallel with the rising quantity of bodies to be resettled, however, a qualitative reorientation in the reburial

practice has also become noticeable. Before the 1990s, most public reburials were for the repatriation of war heroes to their home villages. All other types of reburial or secondary burial faced strict bureaucratic controls and were kept in private if they took place at all. The market reform has changed this discrepancy, and, nowadays, all kinds of human bones are moving in the public space, and in all directions. Some have already been moved from the shallow graves scattered in the sand dunes, paddy fields, and private gardens to sumptuously prepared new family graveyards. And many more are still waiting impatiently for such relocation in the minds of their living relatives, who cannot yet afford the cost of reburial. ‘The preparation of the family graveyard often involves removing

a score of nameless graves (nam mo vo danh) from the site, and a large

construction project is usually expected to unearth a whole array of unknown human remains. The remains of forgotten war heroes keep | arriving at the state cemetery, whereas some existing heroes have left the parameter of heroic death to join the domain of kinship at the family graveyard. This mass exodus of human remains began in the mid-1990s in the communities of the central region. A movement of this magnitude was unheard of before the market reform. In 1992, Vietnam’s economy made a sharp turn from the trade and fiscal crisis of the previous years which had been exacerbated by the arrest of aid and trade concessions from the then defunct Soviet Union. Exports rose by a quarter from 1991, grain production reached a record output of 24 million tons, and inflation fell

sharply. Ownership was increasingly privatized, and the workforce migrated rapidly from the inefficient state and collective sectors to the private sector. he private sector accounted for roughly three quarters of the country’s GDP by 1992.” The place of the dead was affected by this wave of economic upturn and reorientation as swiftly as the place of the living. ‘he renovation of ancestral tombs and family ancestral temples (nha tho toc) has been a central element in economic development at the

local level.°° Throughout the 1990s, Vietnamese communities were

34 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam preoccupied with rebuilding these places, destroyed by the war and neglected after the war, and lineage groups were measuring mutual values on the basis of the progress of this activity of viec ho, “the work of the family (ancestor worship).”~? The renovation of ancestral homes, in the communities of Quang Nam province, accompanied an equivalent process in the conceptually opposite space meant for street-wandering ghosts. In the vernacular language of the region, the places where people worship ghosts have the general reference of khom. The khom are extremely variable in form. They can vary from a simple wooden stick inserted into ground, with a bowl of sand

attached on the top to hold incense sticks, or even an empty Pepsi can hanging on a tree where people regularly give prayers, to a sumptuously decorated installation consisting of a large glass sachet standing on a stone-made pillar. ‘The sachet is permanently lit and contains a dazzling collection of votive objects. You can often see these sites of ghost worship

in a central Vietnamese village: in the garden of a private house, in the premises of a family ancestral temple, around the ruins of an old village communal house, along the road, on the beach, at the old wartime bomb shelters, or near the old American or South Korean military outposts. Some are visible from a distance; others are carefully hidden from public view. Along with the renovation of ancestral shrines and temples, many old village ghost shrines were rebuilt in the 1990s. Lavishly decorated in diverse forms, they rapidly grew in size and number, and by the end of the decade, they had become the most numerous, esthetically audacious built places in some coastal villages of Quang Nam province. A variety of votive

objects are offered at these places, and lots of money, printed for this particular purpose, 1s regularly burned as part of the offering. ‘This growth in the demonstrative economic life of ghosts continues today.

The ritual revival in recent years is a “new” phenomenon, unprecedented in the region’s remembered history, in terms of both its scale and its intensity. For those who proceeded to improve the demonstrative living standard of their dead relatives along with the improvement in their own, however, the coactive social development was also a restoration of traditional norms and the realization of long-held aspirations. A key to the mass reburial movement was indicated in the widely recited traditional saying, “Ancestors ate too much salt, so their descendants desire water.”°* This historical metaphor is powerful because it applies, as do all good metaphors, to a wide range of mundane situations. If a woman keeps her shop open for absurdly long hours a day, her friends may invoke the proverb before they leave the marketplace. This merchant’s thirst for money is traced back to the woman’s usurious ancestors. ‘The work of historical desire may take a straight line of descent, or it can

Mass excavation 35 invoke a hidden transcript in her genealogical history and relate to the grievances of the victims of her ancestry’s usury rather than the greed of her usurious ancestors. This metaphor of thirst applies also to the more public relationships between the dead and the surviving generations. Commemoration of fallen patriotic soldiers, in the official Vietnamese code of civic morality, is more than a mere moral obligation. According to this scheme, there is a deep desire in each citizen to honor the memory of the nation’s heroes. The certificates of heroic death which the state issues to the families of revolutionary martyrs include the inscription, “Eternally remember the moral debt to the revolutionary martyrs who have sacrificed their lives for a bright future for the people.”** A similar logic applies to the revitalized ancestor worship. The desire to erect a proper house of ancestors, for the

enthusiasts of such communal projects, relates to the desire of dead generations to be suitably remembered as well as the desire of their descendants to enshrine their memory.** According to the opening speech of a village elder in a village communal house in the south of Da Nang, “The happiness of our ancestors has been suppressed for many years. We gather here today to fulfill the common, deep-felt desire of the whole family.”*° One of the Vietnamese words for body refers to this amalgam of the body past and the body present, and the living presence of a history’s buried aspirations in reality’s conscious pursuit of desirability. This con-

cept of xac usually means the lifeless and immobile condition of the corpse, but it can also refer to the particular condition of the living body, possessed by the spirit of the dead and showing somatic symptoms according to the condition of the body of the dead.*° In certain contexts, the condition of xac in the second sense becomes a radical demonstration of a particular communicative system, such as that implied in the genealogical metaphor about the descendant’s thirsty body indicating the ancestor’s ingestion of salt, in which human desires and actions appear to have a deep historical origin and inter-subjective quality.*’ If the desire to remember 1s not singularly subjective but can unify forms of subjectivity in the action, so can the desire for material progress. As will be shown shortly, the post-reform material culture of the dead crystallized the coexistence of these two kinds of desire, pointing to the opposite temporal orientations but collapsing into a single action. The economic development and the

morality of remembrance were interwoven in the theatrics of the new Vietnamese modernity,’® and the former became real, in local reality, to the extent that it was demonstratively materialized in the life of the dead. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the dead have no market value in modern society, and the ghost especially runs contrary to all feelings of

36 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam the modern being.*’ The modern world is distinguished from the old by the Hegelian zeitgeist, which characterizes “the present as a transition that is consumed in the consciousness of a speeding up and in the expectation of the differences of the future.”*° If the modernization of afterlife is esthetically integral to materializing the modernity, however, it is possible that even the powerful modern market cannot completely obliterate the traditional cult of the dead. In this milieu, moreover, the modern market may contribute to unearthing and empowering hidden stories of the dead rather than obliterating their traces to cause what Philippe Aries calls “the death of the other.”*’

Apparitions in Cam Re ‘The seaside community of Cam Re, south of Da Nang, was expecting a mass excavation, and the Da Nang funeral shop was building up a handsome stock of mini coffins for this occasion.* In 1998, the district authority passed the decision to build an access road to the sea through this settlement and to pave the existing dirt road leading to Da Nang. Cam Re was built by

war refugees in the 1960s and it practically sits on a massive cemetery. Virtually every house in this hamlet has at least a dozen tombs in its garden,

and many keep a few dozen. Some of the graves are majestic, oval stone pieces from the pre-Viet Champa civilization*’ or Sino—Vietnamese feudal circular sites. ‘These imposing pieces are surrounded by the shallow graves of the wartime civilian victims whose histories of death stretch back from the time of American War to the very early French colonial period. Untrained

eyes cannot identify many of these “people’s graves,” as the chief of the hamlet called them, which have neither a stone marker nor a border. But they are there: on every corner of the footpaths; at the edge of the rose garden; in the middle of a lemon tree farm; or in the children’s playground. While the desire for land was great among the villagers, they rarely attempted to convert an old gravesite for cultivation. On the contrary, people often held debates about how near to a grave one could plant a particular tree, and they were particularly concerned about the possibility that tree roots might intrude on the tranquility of someone’s afterlife. The

residents of Cam Re took great care not to bypass any grave on the fifteenth day of the month in the lunar calendar, when they offered incense to the errant spirits according to the custom of cung ram. On these and other ritual commemoration days, all the graves of the village — old or new, majestic or humble — benefited from the customary gestures of remembering from their living neighbors. According to the residents, Cam Re abounds with ghosts and they are of a variety of kinds. One evening, children returned from playing in the

Mass excavation 37 street, shivering from their encounter with the ghost of a one-legged mine victim. Younger boys emulated the ghost’s hopping along the ditch with-

out crutches; older ones estimated whether the ghost’s mobility was improving as seasons passed. This one-legged soldier was normally alone. Occasionally, he was spotted with an old scholar ghost in full mandarin attire. The soldier would trail the scholar. ‘The scholar walked like a mandarin, that is, too slowly for the soldier to avoid overtaking him. The soldier had to be rhythmical on his single leg, like the village boys during their mock one-legged fights. He kept running past the scholar, and when this happened, the scholar stopped and commanded the soldier to stay behind him.

Two American ghosts used to appear under the areca palm tree, whispering in their unintelligible tongue to each other and making the unpleasant noise of what appeared to be a spoon clinking in an empty can for some villagers or a few bullet shells rattling in an empty munitions box

for others. These two huge men were always together. They were shy, reserved, and slightly nervous. They were prudent and not at all intrusive to the villagers, but very talkative with each other. The wife of an invalid gardener, one of Cam Re’s veteran peasant guerrilla fighters, regularly burned two incense sticks under the areca tree. Occasionally, she burned a few notes of paper votive money, in US dollars, for their sake. Another ghost, who people believed was an Algerian conscript during the French

War, used to frighten young women by touching their shoulders from behind. Several women claimed that they had seen his hairy arms. The neighbors hired a ritual specialist to chase away this troublesome being. A Vietcong ghost, sitting cross-legged on his own grave, greeted women returning from the market. People considered that this skinny man suffered from a form of incurable, perpetual hunger. A few local men of valor approached this communist ghost with the intention of using his wisdom to win the lottery. They brought their necromantic instrument of con co and pleaded to the ghost to help the poor. The ghost refused to have anything to do with their wishes, which he believed were not moral. Via the heart-shaped pointer moving on the wooden board of the Vietnamese alphabet, the communist ghost allegedly said, “If I help you win, someone else will have to lose. This is not just.”

The old keeper of a ruined Buddhist pagoda was aware of an entire platoon of soldier ghosts who gathered and marched at midnight. They gathered together in two lines and stood at attention at the silent words of command. The old keeper was also acquainted with an American officer. This refined and educated ghost, solitary and melancholic, used to visit the temple to enjoy the prayers and the percussion music, but he had not attended the evening prayers for some time. The keeper wondered what

38 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam was keeping him so busy that he could not visit the temple. “Do you miss him?” I asked the keeper. “Yes, I do. It’s been some thirty years since we got acquainted,” he said, “But it must be a good sign that he’s not around. ‘The American must have gone to a good place.” People who had heard about the departure of the officer considered that the ghost had benefited from the keeper’s daily prayers and compared his wise act of frequenting the pagoda to the ill-advised actions of the platoon of Vietnamese soldier

ghosts who, perpetually preoccupied with military morale, missed the opportunities for individual transformation. Some villagers heard the heartbreaking voice of a boy ghost who, year after year, came back on cold, rainy nights and cried peevishly for his mother. Although villagers found it troublesome, nobody ever dared to chase away this small, unknown ghost. In the past, the boy’s crying was heard mixed with the cries of a buffalo. A local ritual specialist explained that the buffalo’s proper death was to die beheaded: since the animal was bombed to death with its head intact, it was lamenting its sorrowful fate.

Towards the end of 1998, a huge ancient Champa-period tomb became the first of many tombs to be removed from Cam Re for the roadworks.** Several dozen wartime graves were also earmarked for removal. The roadwork contractor announced the removal plan in the local newspaper. In case there was no response from families and relatives, the builders would decide the destination of the remains — hopefully the public cemetery but perhaps somewhere cheaper. The villagers knew about the kinship background of a few tombs, whose families had moved to other provinces and cities. Word spread, and a man in a suit promptly

arrived from a city to organize the removal of his sister’s remains. The known relatives of a few other graves never appeared. There were also tombs that the villagers were sure no one would claim. People related to these tombs were either unknown to the villagers or were believed to have perished during the war or to have fled the country after the war. The contractor was assigned to deal with these lonely graves and the villagers were concerned that these unknown and unwanted remains would not be treated properly and respectfully. At the time of reburial, when the skeleton moved to a mini coffin, the old coffin, by then thoroughly scented with the body fluid of the dead, occasionally transformed to a powerful magical instrument. A small number of villagers liked to Keep a used empty coffin in the rear of their bamboo houses, believing that this would bring luck to the family. The local gravediggers were eager to do them a favor in return for a small fee. Some coffin devotees defied the government’s stern directives against this particular superstitious practice and carved the magical device of con co out of a used coffin. Until recently, the con co used to be the most popular

Mass excavation 39 magical instrument and it has been used for various purposes, from winning the informal lottery and presaging exam questions by students to finding MIA bodies or simply measuring each other’s audacity among friends. A good heart-shaped con co pointer should be made, ideally, from a sandalwood coffin aged twenty-five to thirty years. The wartime graves were thus particularly attractive to the enthusiasts of this kind of magic.

The Cam Re residents also told many stories of spirit attack. ‘These stories were typically related to various forms of disrespect for the dead. Some concerned the mishandling of the remains of the dead in unmarked graves near home, whereas others involved, as will be shown in the next

chapter, the remains and the memory of the dead missing from home burial and unaccounted-for at home. One of my close informants suffered from a severe headache for a while and believed that it had to do with the

orange tree he had planted next to an unknown tomb. The tree roots penetrated the skull and the discomfort it caused to the dead was revealed through his physical problem. In the confused situation of imminent mass excavation, another ghost story circulated in the hamlet. People told me that this story was new, unlike any stories they had told me before, and so

I set out to investigate it and met the man who had experienced the apparition.

The ghost of an American officer The man was a retired army officer, and when I met him, he complained that he had not yet fully recovered from his recent trouble with the ghost of an American officer. When the incident took place, the former lieutenant was in charge of the small army unit camped along the route from Cam Re to Da Nang. There was an air of panic among his men when the lieutenant heard another report concerning the apparition of a foreign soldier. This time, his men reported that they had seen the ghost on their night shift, under the rain. The following morning, the soldiers kindled incense sticks on the

alleged spot of the apparition. The lieutenant ordered to have them removed and also to increase the morning run, believing that the delusion was a sign of laxity in discipline. A few days later, one of his junior officers reported that he had now spotted the ghost — a tall unarmed man whose torn uniform was soaked in mud. The junior officer suggested inviting a ritual specialist, and this infuriated the lieutenant. The following morning, he assembled all his men and delivered a passionate speech about the need for spiritual vigilance. Then, he walked to the spot where the junior

officer had seen the foreign ghost. Ordering his men to watch him, the officer urinated on the spot.

40 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam The lieutenant’s dramatic gesture of defiance took effect. The ghost of the foreign soldier disappeared. The rumor subsided, and the soldiers no longer feared their turn on night shift. A few months later, however, the officer began to suffer from severe headaches and even to stutter. His condition deteriorated swiftly. By the time his colleagues and his family managed to persuade him to see a psycho-pathologist in the town hospital, he was in such a distressed condition that the hospital staff recommended immediate entry into the psychiatric ward. Threatened by this terrible prospect, he came to consult with a ritual specialist through the introduction of a distant relative. It turned out that the foreign ghost had been outraged with the officer’s behavior. When the officer exhumed the corpse following the advice from

the ritual specialist, he found a skull with a bullet hole in it and the identification of an American officer. After long and complex negotiations with the authorities, the remains of the American MIA were returned to his

homeland. The officer’s recovery from a near mental breakdown was dramatic. After the exhumation, he regained his appetite and stopped stuttering. A full recovery, however, came when he made a clean break from his long army career and decided to start up a private business. He said that he was divided between belief and disbelief about what he was undergoing, and that he could no longer face his duty with a focused mind.

During our visit to the ritual specialist, the officer said, “Vietnam defeated America. But that American officer nearly defeated me, an officer in the Vietnamese Army, long after the war’s end. The bullet we shot through his head almost drove me insane.” The man’s relative, an elderly veteran, was not pleased to hear this remark. Studying his face with penetrating eyes, the elder said, “Nephew, one does not fight with the dead. American or Vietnamese, the dead should be respected. No one should deliberately urinate on their resting places.” And the ritual specialist intervened: Dead people don’t fight. They are not really even angry. They simply want to be remembered. They want someone to know what they went through. I can’t tell you the sorrow of that handsome young American. He was so handsome and tall. The man said, “Aunt, thank you, thank you. Forgive me, forgive me.” I heard it all, all in his language. It was all too confusing. I told him, “It’s all fine now. Go and rest.”*°

Vietnam—American joint venture

The story from the army base intrigued the Cam Re residents, not necessarily because it involved a foreign ghost but because they under-

stood it as a prologue to a success story by a familiar man of poor

Mass excavation 41 neighborhood. After leaving the army, the officer has opened a successful repair shop attached to a petrol station along the route from Cam Re to Da Nang. It was rumored that his success in the business initiative owed a lot to the American ghost. This rumor originated from the officer’s old circle of friends, who called his commercial outlet “Vietnamese—American joint venture.” In their rhetoric, the American officer, in return for his liberation from the condition of an unknown and unremembered soldier, tailed the Vietnamese officer and acted jointly with him for his partner’s liberation from poverty. Otherwise, one of them told me, it was not intelligible why the motor-cyclists were drawn to this particular repair shop rather than others existing on the same road, nor why their machines so often suffered problems on that particular route, not others. The apparition in the army base was not a simple ghost story for the Cam Re residents, nor was the

petrol station an ordinary place for some commuters on the road. The event was about an American MIA turning into a private benefactor, and its attraction as a story lay in the power of a common encounter with a ghost of war to develop into an extraordinary transformation in a person’s material conditions of life. We may say that the story of partnership provided a possibility in the popular imagination of making a synthesis of war and market, between the violent legacy of the past and the impatient aspirations for a prosperous future. This possibility, however, was based on a much wider context of shared normative attitudes to death and memory. The idea that proper respect for the dead is a primary condition for the prosperity of the living

was strong for the locals, and this idea constitutes the drama of the American ghost as well as the feverish mass renovation of ancestral vestiges.

Early Vietnamese and French scholars emphasized, concerning the religious culture of the region, the idea of reciprocal relations between the

living and the dead, and recent revivalist writers in Vietnam reiterate the point and argue that the idea constitutes the core of Vietnamese cultural identity.*° Scholars who study the recent revival of ritual activity in Vietnam tend to take a different angle, associating religious revival with the empowerment of market-based economic practices on the one hand and with the loosening of state controls over civic religious affairs on the other.*’ Taylor writes in this light that “the current penchant for magic is no archaic survival but diagnoses the postsocialist moment, addressing the unpredictable and iniquitous social relations attending the abandonment of the socialist economic alternative.”*® Studies of this orientation

tend to be critical of the Weberian notion of disenchantment which equates the rise of commodity relations in economy with the decline of magical notions in religion and also self-critical of the past tradition of anthropological research that tended to identify such notions as archaic

42 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam or traditional social forms in the lower stage of social evolution.*? With reference to the set of practices glossed as witchcraft in Africa, Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders call the evolutionary perspective “anthropology’s ghosts” that should be exorcized by an alternative descriptive strategy so that the practices can be rescued from the convenient folder of traditional African customs and instead opened to the full spectrum of uncertainties and anxieties of late modernity.”

When the issue is about an actually existing social form of ghosts (rather than anthropology’s ghosts), however, we need to think of “the

postsocialist moment” in a less unidirectional notion than ‘Taylor presents it, or less of a “one-way street” according to Walter Benjamin’s

philosophy of history and with a perspective that is attentive to “the dialectical relationship between old and new.”°' This way, we can include in the transitory moment not only the economic anxieties about the prospective horizon beyond socialism but also the moral concerns about the troubled remains of destruction from the past history of socialist revolution and related global/civil war of ideologies. The ghost of the American MIA was a newcomer in Cam Re, and its story captured a spirit of the transitory moment of the doit moi program. The program emphasizes, among other things, the role of “private capitalism” in economic growth and the importance of partnership with foreign resources and know-how.’ It is unlikely that the discovery of the foreign MIA soldier, had it happened a decade before the actual event, would have developed into such a story of economic partnership in Cam Re. Although the story of the MIA ghost captured the spirit of the contemporary moment in this way and the ghost is a special one in Cam Re in this sense, it is nevertheless not possible to take the apparition out of the milieu of moral and cultural practices of commemoration and out of the historical material reality of mass death which these practices interact with. The magical economic power of the MIA ghost relates to the transitory moment of economic renovation, but the source for this power lies in the domain of concrete everyday actions of Cam Re residents, not in the obscure horizon of a new form of modernity. For it is ultimately these narrative and ritual actions that have kept the ghosts of tragic death in Cam Re existing and thriving in the community. The army officer’s change from a man of arms to a “joint-venture” businessman fascinated people in Cam Re, because this transformation allowed a synthesis of the old and the new social formations in ways available only to their popular imagination. While the political elite debated how to balance between what Neil Sheehan calls “Hanoi’s ideology” and “Saigon’s entrepreneurship,” ordinary people were to find ways to relate to

both.°* In the officer’s “joint venture,” the economic partnership is

Mass excavation 43 rooted in the history of confrontations between the partners rather than transcending it, and the moral identity of the economic agent flourishes through partnership rather than withering away.’* Moral identity, in this context, partly refers to the shared normative principle embedded in the everyday practices — the idea that the dead, friends or enemies, deserve respect and that prosperity breeds from this generous remembering. This ethical universalism is prominent in the Vietnamese ritual interactions with ghosts of war (see chapter 4), and it can be manifested not only for an unrelated foreigner ghost but also, as we will see in the next chapter, for the purpose of claiming rights for the politically excluded memory of kinship. Either way, ghosts in Vietnam, whether they are of a foreign or native origin, are not free from the principle of reciprocity that obliges them to act on behalf of the living actors who happen to help free them from their grievous history of death. The economic implication of

this reciprocal relationship is not to be considered separate from the normative principle of the relationship that makes the prosperity of the

living partly conditional on the plight of the dead. Nor is this moral economy of remembrance from the particular history of war and revolu-

tion, through which death in displacement became such an intimate reality in the living world. A lot of human bones were exhumed in the 1990s. Most of them were

of the Vietnamese, but there were also some forensic efforts involving foreign remains. ‘The MIA soldier discovered in Cam Re was not the only foreigner, nor was he the only man excavated in a magical way. Moreover,

the exodus of dead bodies was not merely an epiphenomenon of economic growth or religious revival. Dead bodies have been one of the

major sites of the cold war conflicts, and there was some serious diplomatic interest in the forensic events taking place in Vietnam. The war in Vietnam was at once a civil and an international war; the human remains of this war can tell episodes of geopolitical history as well as problems in family history.

3 Missing in action

When Bill Clinton came to Vietnam in November 2000 as the first US president to visit the country since Richard Nixon, the most memorable event of this historic visit, Clinton says in his autobiography, was the trip

to a mud field in the west of Hanoi.’ That place was believed to be the crash site of an F-105 fighter-bomber in November 1967, and it was where a team of American forensic anthropologists was in search of the remains of the pilot Captain Evert, one of the US servicemen listed

“missing in action” from the Vietnam War. At the excavation site, Clinton thanked the large group of local Vietnamese villagers hired for digging, “Once we met here as adversaries. ‘Today we work as partners.” Evert’s two sons, standing on each side of the president, told him how in their childhood they dreamt about rescuing their father from Vietnam,

where they imagined he was kept as a prisoner of war. Later it was reported that Clinton’s visit was “to bury the Vietnam War” in preparation for a new diplomatic relationship with Vietnam.” The exhumation of the missing soldier was an important symbolic gesture for this important political burial. Clinton was not the only American state official interested in MIA affairs. A tour of the MIA excavation sites became an essential part of the itinerary for most official American delegations to Vietnam in the 1990s, and MIA issues were at the center of the congressional debates about the normalization of diplomatic ties with Vietnam. The news media in the USA followed the army’s forensic expeditions to Vietnam closely, and so did their Vietnamese counterparts. ‘he discovery of the American MIA in Indochina attracted wide public attention in both countries, and the progress in both forensic activity and in diplomatic affairs appeared to

be closely interconnected. In Da Nang and Quang Nam province, Communist Party officials had keen interests in American MIA affairs and were looking into ways to contribute to the important body-related political process. The officials who were most concerned with the MIA issue were those in the administrative sector responsible for the welfare of

war veterans and the army officers assigned to the work of military 44,

Missing in action 45 ceremonies and funerals. I came to know some of these officials while I was following the episode of MIA excavation introduced in chapter 2.

Through this acquaintance, I learned about the strong concerns about dead bodies in Vietnamese statecraft and came to appreciate the practical difficulties these mortuary concerns had to overcome. I also appreciated the fact that the official funerary art, at a practical level, was in many ways in touch with popular mortuary and commemorative practices.

The work of these welfare-sector officials was fascinating to me. Looking back, I see their work as a vocation, bringing the fruit of anthro-

pological knowledge to a practical purpose. These people turned into archeological experts at the construction site for a joint-venture factory, where the builders reported the discovery of bone fragments mixed with

fragments of weaponry. They turned into forensic experts when the excavation was in process and the time came to decide if the bones belonged to revolutionary combatants or their opponents. The transition between these two forms of expertise required good knowledge of the

local history of the war. After the identification, some of the officials continued to work as specialists in funerary processions and other ceremonial matters. These people were specialists in material and political culture, and they had expertise in social classification and ritual procession. Their work often took them to remote places in search of the missing

heroes of war, and sometimes involved, as we will see shortly, highly inventive methods. Earlier we saw the mass exodus of human remains of war during the reform era and how this was experienced at the local level. In this chapter we extend the scope of this inquiry and will explore the wider political

dimensions of moving corpses in post-reform Vietnam. The war in Vietnam was at once a local, national and geopolitical conflict; unearthing the human remains from this history, likewise, had implications of multiple dimensions.

Politics of home burial The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is one of the principal focal points in the material culture of modern nationalism. This tomb is often an empty one, with no body buried in it, and it attracts public reverence, according to Benedict Anderson, precisely because of its emptiness.* The Cenotaph in London, erected in 1919 near the Houses of Parliament, is an empty tomb, and so is the memorial in Hanoi dedicated to the vo danh (“name-

less”) soldiers which overlooks the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh. According to Jay Winter, the idea is that the empty tomb, being the tomb of no one, could be a tomb for anyone who had died in the war.”

46 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia, is not exactly

an empty tomb, as the inscription on the stone reads “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” It contains a body brought home from Chalons, France in 1921, but in building this tomb the rule of anonymity was followed rigorously. The Quartermaster Corps, in carrying out the order of the Secretary of War to choose the unknown soldier, took care to ensure that there was absolutely no evidence of personal identification on the chosen body apart from the record of nationality.° Since the first interment of the Unknown Soldier from the First World War, there have been three graves added for unknowns from the Second World War, Korea, and the Vietnam War.’ These unknowns were chosen according to the rule of anonymity and laid to the west of the First World War tomb. With more histories of war added to it, the stone’s inscription has changed too: “American heroes known but to God.”

Although the Vietnam War unknown had been formally put to rest through this symbolic burial, the American memory of this war continued to be preoccupied with the question of their missing bodies. John Gillis observes, “The cold war contributed in its own way to shifts in the forms and location of memory. The blurring of the old distinction between war

and peace meant that it was very difficult to define the beginnings or endings that had previously been the focus of memory.”® I would argue that one of these shifts took place in the public approach to the Unknown Soldier. In the past, the burial of this abstract soldier was meant to mark the end of the war, help people to leave behind the tragic realities of mass death while remembering the sacred purpose of the sacrifice, and bless the nation thereafter with his pure spirit.” In the age of the cold war, the end of a military conflict did not mean the end of the political confronta-

tion, and the dead soldiers continued to be mobilized for further geopolitical objectives. The valuable unknown soldier in this new era was no longer the entombed metonymic body, but the thousands of actual bodies whose absence from home burial was partly instrumental for justifying a protracted ideological war.

It is observed that “Insistence on the recovery of their dead has long

been part of the code of the US Marines, and this creed has spread through the American armed forces to become a characteristic feature of the American way of war.”’° Bruce Franklin argues that this honorable creed was radically politicized during the Vietnam War and later by “the POW/MIA myth” of the Reagan administration, which pledged to keep fighting against obstacles until the last American soldier, alive or dead,

returned home from Indochina.'! He contends that the anxiety of the families of missing servicemen and their private denial of death had been

misguided by the administration for the political purpose to justify the

Missing in action 47 anticommunist propaganda and operations in Latin America and elsewhere. Cultural historians have analyzed popular imaginings of this period in the light of the cult of the Vietnam “Missing In Action.” In fictional reality, such as the film First Blood, the cult created a lone

postwar hero who thrust a guerrilla assault on the ethnic captors of American war heroes.’* Michael Allen’s careful review of this “politics of loss” presents a much more complex picture, in which the political administration in the USA appears to have had much less control over the MIA issues than how Franklin presents it. In his account, the voices of diverse actors — the family associations of the POW/MIA soldiers, the antiwar activist groups, and the diplomacy of the Vietnamese communist authority that associated the release of POWs with the evacuation of US combat troops from Vietnam — collided (and colluded) with the declared policy of the US administration to recover the missing or captured soldiers, thereby complicating it to the extent that the fate of POW/MIA soldiers became, in the late Nixon era, the central concern both for the proponents

of the war and their antagonists.’ Against this background of leaving “deep scars upon the American psyche,” the fate of the MIA soldiers

from the Vietnam War continued to affect public sentiment in the United States and it continued to be also the main official basis for justifying economic and political sanctions against Vietnam after the war.'*

The 1993 report of the US Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs recommends, “Accounting for missing Americans from the war 1n

Southeast Asia should continue to be treated as a matter of highest national priority.”’° In announcing the lifting of the economic embargo on Vietnam in the following year, Clinton stressed that the POW/MIA issue would remain a central focus of the US—Vietnam relationship and that before a normalization of diplomatic relations with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam happened, the United States would continue to require “more progress, more cooperation and more answers” on the issue.’° It was observed that the end to the trade embargo “came after many months of high-level US interaction with Vietnam in resolving

POW/MIA cases.”*’ In 1999, four years after the two sides opened embassies in each other’s capitals, Douglas Petersen, US Ambassador to Vietnam, told a reporter that the question of missing Americans was still his top priority, above those of trade and regional stability. Petersen, who is himself a former Vietnam POW, said, The commitment the United States has made to the MIA recovery effort is not just for families suffering from loss of closure but to acknowledge the commitment

that the United States government has given to each person wearing a uniform today that, should there be a loss, they can rest assured that we are committed to make a determination and return them to their families to the best of our ability.*®

48 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam On the Vietnamese side too, recovering the missing bodies of fallen heroes (nhung nguot mat tich) was one of the main priorities of the military

and political authorities after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Soldiers volunteered for body-finding missions; civilians were urged to report to the authority the sites of hastily buried combatants they were aware of. The war veteran Bao Ninh testifies to this and narrates war memory from the perspective of Kien, a body-collector on a postwar MIA mission. Kien felt that “for every unknown soldier, for every collection of MIA remains, there was a story.”’” After their postwar body-finding career, some veterans, like Kien, volunteered to continue to work in related sectors such as the collective units of war invalids and the cemeteries for war martyrs. Many families of Vietnamese MIA soldiers have continued to look for the missing remains of their children long after the end of the war,”° and some of them whom I knew contested the state’s intentions, believing that the army’s body-finding missions were far more rhetorical than they had been hoping for. Indeed, to this day, the government of Vietnam has more than

300,000 soldiers still unaccounted for. However, rhetorical or not, it 1s true that the postwar Vietnamese authorities have been serious about their war heroes, mobilizing their memory as a principal instrument for national integration and postwar reconstruction. The postwar Vietnamese state hierarchy put great emphasis on controlling commemorative practices and propagated a genealogy of heroic resistance wars, linking the death of a soldier in the American War to a

line stretching back from the French War to the legendary heroes of ancient victories.*’ Every local administrative unit in Vietnam has a war martyrs’ cemetery built at the center of the community’s public space,

and the reminder, “Our Ancestral Land Remembers Your Merit,” is inscribed on the gothic memorial placed at the center of this place.** The Communist Party circulates a five-page flyer on the citizen’s duty to remember war heroes to schools, hospitals, and all other public institutions, in preparation for the local and national liberation days.

This construction of national memory, according to Patricia Pelly, shifted the focus of commemoration from the traditional social units of family and village and towards the state.** As Malarney notes, however, the process was equally about bringing the state into the living space of the family and the community, ensuring that people felt and experienced a common national memory and revolutionary sentiment, even within the most intimate domains of life.7* Thus, the memorabilia of war heroes and revolutionary leaders replaced the ancestral tablets in the domestic space, and the communal temples were taken down and gave way to the people’s assembly halls. In the latter, ordinary citizens and their administrative leaders discussed community affairs and production quotas surrounded

Missing in action 49 by the vestiges of the American War, in a structurally similar way to the prerevolutionary time, when villagers and notables talked about rents for tenancy and the ritual calendar in the village’s communal house, surrounded by

the relics of their founding ancestors.*? The search for missing soldiers and the ensuing rituals of home reburial were important elements in this postwar politics of war dead. The reburial events mobilized nearly the entire village and turned the population into a long file of marchers behind the state

officials and the representatives of public organizations.*° These events demonstrated the centrality of heroic sacrifice in the regeneration of life after destruction and dramatized the agency of the state as the sole legitimate undertaker to orchestrate the vital transformation of mass war death.

The fate of the MIA was central to the legacy of the American War, therefore, just as it was to that of the Vietnam War. Their bodies became an object of great importance across the frontier, in the cultural politics of

nationalism on one side and in the geopolitics of cold war (and related domestic cultural politics of anticommunism) on the other.”’ At the time of the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, more than 2,000 Americans

remained unaccounted for. In the 1990s, the accountability for these soldiers missing in action once again became a central issue between Vietnam and America, as the given bipolar geopolitical structure was disintegrating and the two governments were negotiating over the normalization of their relations. The MIA programs were revitalized on both sides and new, sometimes collaborative, body-finding missions across the regions in Vietnam were initiated. ‘The main part of the US MIA missions to Vietnam, or more recently to

North Korea and elsewhere, consisted of field expeditions, although it also involved preparatory archival research in choosing the locations as well as testing DNA and other related medical tests when bones were discovered. ‘These expeditions were based on the premise that the excavations, even if they did not come up with material evidences for personal identification, would at least permit a biological classification. Eurasian

bodies have distinctive skull and dental structures compared to Vietnamese bodies, and the mission proceeded from this elementary racial classification towards the hopeful, full individual identification of the unearthed bones by adding other material and circumstantial evidences. The biological—anthropological classification that allows this process

was not a practical option in the Vietnamese field expeditions. These missions focused on identifying the bodies of heroic soldiers, just as their American counterparts did, but they did so from the mass of other bodies, which were not distinguishable from the former in anatomical terms. In

this case all the bodies, heroic or otherwise, turned out to be similar Asiatic, Vietnamese bones.

50 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

‘The above has become an increasingly serious problem in recent Vietnamese MIA missions, as other crucial evidences such as clothing and personal belongings become harder to find as they decompose over

time. If the expedition is led to the zone of confused combats and discovers a mass grave of enmeshed remains, it 1s practically impossible to classify which pelvis and upper thigh bones belong to “our side” (bent ta), as against “that side” (ben kia, “the American side” including the army of former South Vietnam). Complete skeletons found in possession

of material objects from across the cold war’s frontier were also not uncommon. These cases provoked heated debates among the members of the mission, for example, on how the person had come to possess both

a pair of US-supplied army boots on his feet and a Soviet-made AK

automatic rifle in his arms.

There were also problems of classification within the category of “our

side.” Many militiamen from southern and central regions abstained from carrying any personal identification or kept false identities when they joined the North Vietnamese regular forces. ‘They did so partly to avoid repercussions on their families in case they were captured, alive or dead, by the enemy forces. The peasant guerrillas normally possessed no solid material evidence for their military activity. A local partisan fighter

may be identified as such because of her bamboo comb of a specific shape; whereas the skeleton with unused AK bullets in his civilian cloth-

ing may be dismissed as anonymous due to the possibility that the skeleton’s owner could have simply collected the bullets from a street corner. Moreover, the remains of the co so cach mang men and women, meaning literally “the foundation (or infrastructure) of revolution” and referring to the covert civilian activists in the ally-occupied zones, usually have absolutely no trace of their political or paramilitary works.*® That very absence of a connection was central to their activity. Consequently, many of those who operated in the “hidden army” (ky binh) — the underground civil guerrilla support network — remain a “phantom army” (nghi binh), one that everyone believes existed but that has left no visible trace to prove their existence. Partly as a way of circumventing this classificatory complexity, the contemporary MIA missions in Vietnam have taken on an unusual tech-

nical orientation. Recently, parts of the American MIA missions to Vietnam have been delegated to the Vietnamese efforts and they also have fallen victim to this particular technical regime. In this system, the mission usually begins with a communication with the missing dead to ask for the location of their bodies before the costly field trip to the site is initiated. Ihe communication is done by traditional magical means and requires mediation by certain ritual specialists. This system derives from

Missing 1n action 51 traditional practices and the premise rooted in them is that the dead are intentionally communicative subjects just like the living. The successful implementation of this body-finding regime depends partly on the relevant actions taken on the part of the missing dead to assert their existence. When the missing war dead are not merely passive objects but are vital partners in the social actions concerning their future, the Vietnamese body-finding dramas show that the homecoming dead can also have a say in making a political future beyond the existing politics of war death.

New MIA program One of the most celebrated events in the history of the war martyr cemetery in Hoi An, the historic town 50 kilometers south of Da Nang and the wartime provincial capital of Quang Nam, was the reburial of

Huynh Phung. In July 1992, this eminent hero of the French War returned to his home district, ending his long absence. This man was one of the principal organizers of the region’s communist network in the

latter half of the 1940s. In 1949, he was transferred to the southerncentral highland region near Ban Me Thuot as the political officer for the region’s growing partisan forces. He was captured by the French shortly after his transfer and subsequently died in prison in 1952. It is known that the French authorities in Ban Me Thuot region had Phung’s corpse tour the town as a demonstrative warning to the local population before they

had other prisoners bury it.*? The Communist Party of Quang Nam province had long been eager to find the body of this founding hero of their organization. Their counterparts in Ban Me Thuot collaborated with their mission, searching the archives and interviewing the prison survivors. It was believed that Phung’s body had been buried in the town’s old public cemetery. The exact location of his grave, however, remained untraceable. It had no marker and the continuing chaos of war reduced the cemetery to ruins. Following the government’s initiation of market economic reform in

the late 1980s, the Quang Nam Communist Party authority, like their counterparts in other regions, decided to strengthen the region’s revolutionary political heritage in face of what they considered to be the increasing traffic of foreign ideas and the revival of feudal customs.°” They have printed a new series of books on the general history of the revolutionary war and mobilized local historians to collect oral histories and produce site-specific histories of war heroism.*’ They also renewed attention to the hitherto unresolved cases of patriotic contribution. ‘The former prisoners of the infamous Con Son penal island were reinstated and awarded material assistance. The National Assembly passed a resolution in 1994

52 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam to award certificates of honor to the Heroic Mothers of Vietnam, the mothers of war martyrs.°~ In the subsequent years, public offices were seized with preparations for banquets for their ageing mother heroes and, soon afterwards, for their funerals. Provincial fairs for war veterans have grown in scale and festivity, and the new initiative to celebrate wartime

inter-provincial friendship has led to the launch of social events on an even bigger scale. In general, the revival of old history was becoming increasingly vigorous in proportion to the vigor of the new economy. The decision to reopen Huynh Phung’s case rose out of this background of renewed war commemoration, which was instituted as part of the doi moi reform and in response to the perceived social threats of the economic reform to the established political order.*’ Having failed for years via the conventional means of searching, the authority decided to try an alternative method and sent a delegate to Hanoi to consult with a university professor, who was known to have found a number of high-ranking war heroes through an unorthodox means.” * The delegate presented to the academic Phung’s date and place of birth, and the circum-

stances of his death. The night after his visit, I was told by the delegate that the Hanoi professor had this dream: A group of soldiers were marching in a single file. There were many of them, drenched in rain, walking down a hill with no trees and bushes. Some of them were singing, and some were on crutches. Then, one of them raised his hand and cried, “I’m here! Here, here, right here!” He looked tired and expressionless, older

than the other soldiers. Then, he said, “I?ll come with you,” and dropped his belongings.

Encouraged by this auspicious dream,”’ the Quang Nam authority organized an expedition to Ban Me Thuot and invited the Hanoi professor to join it. It is reported that the group was led to a corner of the colonial-time graveyard and that they succeeded in uncovering Phung’s body although

it was buried in a grave underneath other graves. In a tomb erected in 1985, a member of the mission told me, the relatively new coffin was laid

on top of an unidentified casket and they found Phung’s coffin buried underneath the second layer. He also told me how the gravediggers, opening Phung’s coffin, marveled at the immaculately preserved condition of his corpse and later tried to convince the mission that the hero of the French War had transformed into a saint (thanh). Back in Quang Nam, the provincial authority organized a grand reburial ceremony. The rumor that the successful mission was a product of intimate cooperation between a formal political body and an informal religious practitioner traveled wide across streets and communes. The large crowd that the reburial brought to the cemetery had an interest in

Missing in action 53 the event other than that officially stated. This somewhat dramatic col-

laboration between agencies that are theoretically incompatible still attracts people’s interested commentary. Listening to their comments, It was evident to me that the event had not weakened at all the moral strength of the political authorities. On the contrary, this was one of those precious moments, rare anywhere in the world, when the mass and their governing elite became “same-same” in the public eye. Aman in ‘Tam Ky, the current provincial capital of Quang Nam, owes a

great deal of his fame and wealth to the episode concerning Phung. People in this town call him Chien Xem Ma — Chien who “sees ghosts,” xem ma — and they like to talk about the collaboration between this hawkeyed medium and a foreign MIA mission. After the successful repatriation

of Huynh Phung, the provincial cadres intensified their MIA missions and recruited the more accessible local specialist Chien Xem Ma. At that time, Chien was little known beyond his narrow circle of friends and clients in Tam Ky. He was subsequently invited on a number of body-finding missions and soon became a famous figure in certain political circles. He not only assisted the official search missions for missing war heroes and party activists but also helped some party officials find their own missing relatives. By 1998, Chien took part in a number of official trips that took him to Plei Ku, Kon Tum, and other remote places in the central highlands. Having contacted his tutelary spirit only in 1991 without any family background in the profession (after suffering from an

illness caused by the intrusion of war ghosts into his body, according to him), Chien Xem Ma became the best-known medium in Quang Nam by the end of the 1990s. Unlike most other people with similar skills, Chien could practice his esoteric knowledge openly, and even with tacit support from the official circles, which maintained, officially, a strongly disapproving attitude towards such practices.°° When a case was introduced, Chien conferred the missing person’s identity to his guardian spirit whom he called Dai Tien Su (Great Spirit Master). In two to three days, he told me, his tutelary spirit would come up with a map for the missing person. Based on this mental map, Chien guided the search party. He told me that his mental map usually consisted of the name of the area, the shape of the landscape, and notable landmarks. He claimed that in most of the cases he has dealt with, the maps were fairly detailed and proved to be accurate. Approaching the site of the

remains, he would also feel something akin to a magnetic attraction towards the site of burial. Failures could occur, however, if there happened to be a strong local deity in the area. Such a deity would not allow Chien’s guardian spirit to intervene in the affairs that the local goddess or god considered her own business. Because of this, it is believed

54. ‘The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

that the search missions were proportionally more successful in the remote mountain areas than in the populated coastal region. When the field expedition failed (and especially if the mission was about an important war hero or a relative of an important family), Chien brought home a handful of soil from the area and placed it on the altar for Dai Tien Su, hoping that it would help the deity produce some clues. Those who took part in Chien Xem Ma’s sojourns also suggested that false identification was the greatest obstacle to a successful mission. I never understood how, but the false identity, an integral element of guerrilla warfare, confused the religious deities as well as the army. The MIA missions that Chien took part 1n usually involved the partic-

ipation of the family in the field trip, for the alleged reason that the missing bodies generated vital indicators or signals (dau hieu) in response to the approach of the bodies of their kinsmen. In the early stages of the

MIA program, Chien Xem Ma maintained intimate contact with the families, as most other unofficial Vietnamese mediums would do.*’ He followed through the long process of search and reburial that was often emotionally troubling and physically exhausting. T’o discover the body of the beloved in an alien place, often in the middle of other bone fragments, was a shattering experience for the family. Most Vietnamese mediums participated actively in this difficult repatriation and reconciliation process, and they played an important role in easing the tension and trauma It caused. Their pastoral role in the post-search burial work was as important as their magical participation in the search-and-find mission. While the family wept and wailed, the mediums encouraged communication instead of privatized agony. Skilled mediums could make people laugh with tearful eyes in critical situations. Trying to enliven the grieving woman in the face of the remains of her husband,’® Chien told her a story of her husband’s homecoming. This was during a week-long expedition to Ple1 Ku in the central highlands in the dry season of 1997, and I cite from my recording of the conversation: Your husband is telling me something. He is doing it to tell you the truth about his death and his love for you. Stop weeping, please. Let us hear what your husband has to say. He has not been fed for a long time, he has been unclothed for countless years, so his voice 1s very weak. Gather yourself for his sake and listen to his story. He says he was going home to see you. Please, Elder Sister, hold yourself.

‘The woman straightened her back, wiped her eyes, and clutched her daughter’s hand. Her daughter, using her five fingers as a comb, removed the dust and the weeds that clung to her mother’s hair. ‘The two women were ready; tense and unsettled, but holding each other. Chien took his seat in mandarin fashion, and began to turn his head, his eyes closed. He

Missing in action 55 clutched his legs and began to sway back and forth. He shivered and uttered a high-pitch shriek. In someone else’s voice, he spoke: I went home to see you. I was given leave from duty, for I had been fighting very hard. I was scared to go home, but I missed you too much. But there was no one in the house. I waited and waited; no one returned. You must have gone to a friend to avoid the fighting. On my way back to the base, I was hungry and miserable. At 3 a.m., I was ambushed, way out from the village. The Americans and the Saigon troops were on both sides of the road, waiting for me. There was no way to escape

their fire ... I died young and failed to fulfill my paternal obligation to raise my children. I am very sorry. Forgive me, my dear wife. My parents died early when I

was little. I died young when my children were little. And my children who became partisans also died young. But they rest peacefully near you; I know this even though they died after me. My daughter is married and she has children, all healthy and exceeding others at school. This makes me happy. But you, my dear wife, you must forgive me. I was not there to help you to raise the children. Forgive me. I died too young ... There was no one in the house. I waited and waited.

Chien fell into a brief spell of fainting after telling the story. When he woke up and was rubbing his sleepy eyes, it was assumed that he did not remember what he had just said. He was not usually interested in knowing what he had said in trance, but people were usually keen to fill the gaps in his memory by reiterating the story. After hearing the story, the woman

eventually recalled the night of the failed reunion. Her daughter, then aged two, was shaking from high fever, and she ran to the midwife in the

village across the road. When her baby daughter settled down and fell asleep, it was very dark and the midwife insisted on them spending the night in her hut. The wife went on to recall how she spent that night sleepless, trying to warm her daughter in her arms and to protect her from the restless body of the midwife who was sharing the single bed. She also remembered how her heart had stopped when she heard a faint resonance of machine gunfire. Her daughter wept and buried her shaking body in her old mother’s lap: “If I had been a healthy girl, you would have met father. He would have had a warm meal and he would have been happy to

hug and kiss me. It’s my fault. If 1 had been a healthy girl ...” An old peasant, a relative and close friend of her husband, reminded the daughter of the village’s cruel wartime reality: You were too small to know. At the time, there were informers in the village. They

could have seen your father and reported him to the police. This happened to other families. Then, your mother would be in the coffin now as well as your father. Believe that your sickly body saved your mother by dragging her away from home.

Chien Xem Ma played an important role in this turbulent homecoming of the old war dead. In his fantastical performances, the fallen soldiers rose

56 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam from their anonymous graves and recovered their individuality briefly before they turned again into the nation’s heroes or the family’s ancestors.

The brief but critical moments of individuation created powerful memories for the living relatives, and particularly because it was believed that the dead, through these occasions, expressed grievances and wishes that mattered to them.

Meanwhile, the Quang Nam provincial authority began to face a critical civic relations problem as their somewhat unconventional body-

searching activities became known to the public. There were many appeals from the town population to expand the scope of the official mission to include their missing relatives. Public demand was forceful, involving practically every neighborhood and extended family in the town, and it eventually forced the authority to review its body-search program. Somewhat tortuous discussions followed in the official circles, for the Vietnamese state bureaucracy insists upon a strictly rationalist mindset and atheist morality in its employees.°” Since the public reaction was partly about the honorable cause of recovering the remains of war heroes, however, it would have meant a self-contradiction if the party authority ignored the appeals. Eventually, the ‘Tam Ky town authority came up with an idea that may be marked as one of the most daring policy initiatives in the history of modern nations. They printed an official form

with which the citizens could formally request the government to give permission to consult with a religious medium on the question of their missing relatives. For example: Since November 1966, Nguyen Thi Mai has been missing. ‘The family has not succeeded in recovering this person’s remains. We present, in gratitude to Tien Lien Dai Tien Su, a request for assistance from Dai Tien Su to Tam Ky town authority.

The application form had sections for the missing person’s place of birth, his date of birth in the lunar calendar, his rank and position in the army, and the army unit in which he last served. It was similar to the form that

Vietnamese families filled out immediately after the liberation to the office in the local People’s Committee which dealt with the unidentified remains of revolutionary combatants (hai cot het s1). The new application

form became immensely popular in the region. As this controversial activity went on, search applications for the recovery of those who did not fit the conventional official category of war martyr began to appear.

Requests for finding the missing bodies of civilian “infrastructure of revolution” became abundant, and so did applications concerning those of more ordinary civilians who covertly supported the army or covert wartime civilian revolutionary activism. The reinstatement of the civil

Missing in action 57 contribution to the people’s war had not been the authority’s priority. The official war commemoration narrowly focused on the bodies and memory of patriotic combatants, disregarding the much more complex reality of total war experienced by the communities in the southern and central region.*° Seen against this background, the demand for broadening the body-search program to include the non-combatant civilian dead was an explosive issue. Soon, Chien’s domestic shrine room for his guardian spirit was packed with several dozens of cardboard boxes containing body-search applications from the townspeople. At the same time, with the mounting appeals from the local population, the provincial authority had requests for cooperation from another direction. In the process of rapprochement between Vietnam and the United

States in the 1990s, the US administration was impatient to see some progress in the MIA matters partly in order to self-justify the lifting of economic sanctions against their former enemy. The Vietnamese govern-

ment had high stakes in ending the sanctions and was as eager as its American counterpart to see tangible progress in the number of the discovered American bodies. Sixty-seven US MIA remains were discovered and repatriated to their homeland between 1993 and the end of the

decade, but the result was far from satisfactory in the view of the US administration. The provincial authorities in the central region were committed to contributing to this important political process with more American bodies delivered from the province’s territory. For them, a higher efficacy in body searches was necessary for facilitating the interna-

tional relations on the one hand and, on the other, for the domestic purpose of strengthening the Party’s moral basis in face of the uncertain-

ties resulting from the market reform. In this atmosphere, Chien was brought into contact with the US MIA missions to Indochina in 1995 and, when I met him in the following year, was preparing for expeditions to an area bordering with Laos to search for three missing American biet Rich, the Vietnamese term for members of special military task forces. The provincial political leaders had a keen interest in the result of his expedi-

tions, and Chien, knowing this, was engaged in an intensive prayer activity to his spirit master for a successful Vietnamese—American joint MIA mission.

Brotherly conflict The mobilization of popular religious means for political purposes had other unexpected consequences. While Chien was actively collaborating with the official MIA missions, he was also involved in the family affairs of some of the party officials. When a high-ranking provincial official took to

58 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam his sick bed, for instance, he joined the family on a trip to find the remains of the patient’s elder brother on the basis of the judgment that his physical illness was related to the grievances of the missing dead, killed in action as a soldier of the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (former South

Vietnam). In the seance before the trip, the spirit of the missing soldier demanded a formal apology from his younger brother to the entire family. His accusations were furious and pointed to the fact that the cadre was unsympathetic to their mother’s wishes. For years after the liberation, the official’s mother was preoccupied with finding her missing son, and this provoked a series of conflicts within the family. (It is known that the younger brother, preoccupied with the postwar economic reconstruction, argued to his mother that the family, like the nation, should look forward rather than back.) His mother continued her search privately, against the wishes of her children. She also wished to build a family altar so that she could lay the photograph of her dead son on it and clashed with her son

who disapproved of this. (In the house of an acting official of the Communist Party, this wish was unacceptable, particularly so when it concerned a politically impure death.) Against this public accusation

from his elder brother, the official had to admit his misdeed in the presence of his younger siblings to whom he had played the role of eldest brother. ‘These moments, which people in this region call “the spirit enters the

body” (nhap xac), contributed to breaking the social and _ political obstacles to the memory of the dead. When people experienced what they understood as a face-to-face encounter with the spirit of the missing dead, it was practically impossible to ignore the identity, even if 1t was an uninvited one to the public arena. The intrusion of ghosts (in the form of apparition, dream, spirit possession, or spirit-related illness) was typically interpreted as their claims for rights to be properly remembered. In this situation, people were justified in reorganizing their domestic ritual space contrary to the political convention if necessary, for the initiatives to do so, in shared cultural understanding, were not necessarily their own but originated from the grievous missing dead. The dramas involving the intrusive ghosts of war usually developed with the efforts to repatriate their physical remains and subsequently the

change in the domestic ritual space. It 1s suggested that the domestic ancestral shrine and the ancestral tombs are two important, inter-related

objects in the Vietnamese mortuary and commemorative tradition.*’ Conceptually, it is only when the deceased’s body is properly entombed

in the socially recognized domain and his memory inscribed in the domestic space that the dead is understood to be genuinely dead, that is, settled in the other world.

Missing in action 59 The domestic space, for the Vietnamese, is at once the arena for private

life and a gallery for their public identity. It is part of the Vietnamese tradition of house visits that the guest, invited into the sitting room, 1s expected to notice the wall-mounted objects and subsequently allow the hosts the opportunity to explain them. In the house of an invalid war veteran, it is a necessary step to comment on the certificate for an invalid soldier on the wall if the guest wishes to be free from the embarrassment of the accompanying children eyeing the missing parts of the host’s body.

The certificates for patriotic war dead are a particularly important medium of sociability. It is polite of the new visitor to remark upon the state-issued certificates of honor so that the host can take the opportunity to describe the missing parts of the family’s corporeal unity.

To a skilled visitor, the certificates provide a reasonably accurate account of the family’s political identity and their skeletal history. ‘There

are families who have more than one heroic death certificate. In some villages of the central region, it is almost unusual to find a household that has less than two or three certificates. Sometimes, three generations stand alongside, inscribed, in a file. In studying the certificates, it 1s also important to bear in mind that absence of certificates can speak as loud as their presence and abundance. Households unblessed by heroic death certificates are in general more challenging to the visitor’s intuitive historical reconstruction. The absence of a certificate can later trigger a story of an extraordinary blessing to the family by a Buddhist genie and her generous hand of protection from the war’s mechanical violence. The empty wall may equally be an installation for the unspoken, stigmatic history of the family’s wartime collaboration with the wrong side in the conflict. Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of urban households have

initiated audacious changes in interior decoration. In parallel with the wholesale privatization of formerly state and public property, the interior of a Vietnamese house has become increasingly private. This trend in the political economy of domestic space is contributing to the diversification of Vietnamese interior art. Buddhists display miniature statues of Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy, in their living rooms; Catholics are following this trend with their own Mother icons, although more cautiously. A few have taken a more radical step and filled an entire wall of their living room

with faded photographs. Some of the pictures clearly show the dress codes and leisure patterns of the South Vietnamese political elite before reunification. This rebellious reshuffling of domestic objects, however, 1s a choice made by only a very small portion of the town population.

Most other domestic spaces prefer less homogenous, more jubilant collage. The portrait of Ho Chi Minh hanging next to that of a Frencheducated landed ancestor, or the heroic death certificates sharing the

60 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam family’s honor with a copy of the graduation certificate of an overseas Vietnamese relative from a North American university; these are all becoming permissible on the domestic wall. This eclecticism gives an impression of vitality and creativity. Here, the artifacts of the old and the new era can coexist; the traditional with the revolutionary; the tradition of revolution with what comes after; and the patriotic with the cosmopolitan, without one dominating the other, thus making a precarious harmony of contrasts. Also notable is the coexistence of former political foes. It is increasingly common to see the hero death certificates share wall space with pictures of other young men. In the home of a stonemason near Da Nang, one man in the picture wore a military uniform and his name was inscribed in the death certificate hanging above the family’s ancestral altar. The other man, dressed in

his high school uniform, had also fought and died in the war, and his death certificate, issued by the former South Vietnamese authority, was carefully hidden in the closet. In 1996, the matron of this family decided to put the two soldiers together. Other mason families were to follow in her footsteps in a couple of years, but hers was one of the first among the

members of the stonemasons’ guild. She took down the hero death certificate from the wall and placed it on the newly refurbished ancestral altar. She laid him on the right-hand side of the altar usually reserved for seniors. She had enlarged a small photo of her younger son that she had kept in her bedroom. She invited some friends, her surviving children and their children for a meal. Before the meal, she held a modest ceremony, which she said she had dreamed about many times, to move the schoolboy from her room next to his elder brother. She addressed her grandchildren: Uncle Kan admired Uncle Tan. Uncle Tan adored the Little Kan. And the two were sick of the thought that they might meet in a battle. I prayed to the goddess of

. Marble Mountains that my two boys must not meet. The goddess listened. The boys never met. The goddess carried them away in different directions so that they could not meet. The gracious goddess carried them too far. She took my prayer and was worried. To be absolutely sure that the boys don’t meet in this world, the

goddess took them to her world, both of them. We can’t blame the goddess. Today, my two children have met, finally. I won’t be around with you for much longer. My children, you should look after your uncles. They don’t have children, but they have many nephews and nieces. Remember this, my children. Respect your uncles.

This was an esthetic revolution. I have argued elsewhere that the contemporary domestic commemorative art in southern and central Vietnam is a radical departure from the traditional, hierarchical compo-

sition of space.** In the latter, the representation of war death foregrounds the heroic sacrifice of armed combatants and relegates the

Missing 1n action 61 experience of the rest into the largely invisible negative space. Although the state encouraged the population to celebrate the memory of the war dead, this was exclusively limited to a chosen category of revolutionary martyrs. This changed in the 1990s in both the domestic and the public places of the dead. Just as the hero death certificate changed from being a singularly important object to one of several valuable domestic objects, the cemetery of war martyrs changed from being the exclusive symbolic center of the community to one of several valued places of the dead in communal ritual life. In the new esthetic composition of the place of the dead, the centrality of heroic revolutionary death gave way to the multiplicity of war death; its symbols became meaningful in their relatedness to other composite memory objects. In this context, honoring the memory of a Saigon soldier next to the death certificate of his revolutionary kinsmen was not a politically subversive act of remembering an enemy. Nor it was merely a regression to

traditional genealogical unity away from modern political unity. The material culture of the dead in the 1990s was rapidly incorporating the initiatives of families and local communities, as described in chapter 2, and the loosening of state control was changing the political structure of the cemeteries. The grave of the revolutionary hero, when it moved from the state war martyr cemetery to the family graveyard, shifted from the

milieu of what Thomas Laqueur calls “democracy of death” to the hierarchical, family genealogical order.**? No longer being surrounded by the fellow dead citizens and their identical graves irrespective of differ-

ences in rank and status, the grave followed the line of descent and principle of seniority. ‘This regression from modern democracy to traditional hierarchy, however, was accompanied by an opposite, progressive symbolic movement. Placed alongside his relatives according to the principle of seniority, in the organization of family graveyard, the memory of the war hero was allowed to coexist with that of his “counter-revolutionary”

(phan dong) kinsmen, killed in action on the opposite side of the bipolar

conflict. From this angle, the family reburial was a political action to depart from the towering moral hierarchy of death, concealed in the democracy of the war dead, rather than a mere return to old habits. The forceful ritual revival in the 1990s was a nationwide phenomenon

in Vietnam. In southern and central region, it was also, in significant measure, an expression of the hope to pluralize the memory of war and democratize commemorative practices. While they were alone at the center of the domestic space without sharing this space with other objects, the hero death certificates were instrumental in making domestic life transpire to state control. The certificates were intended to discipline the body of the family by making it commemorate the death chosen by

62 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam the state as the only meaningful object of family ancestor worship and thereby to appropriate the traditional culture of death remembrance for an instrument of national unity. The central aspect of this art of war heroism was uniformity. In this system, each domestic space was allowed

to differ from others mainly in terms of the number of certificates it possessed. In standing alongside other memory objects, however, the hero death certificates move from the sphere of political use value to that of exchange value. The certificate helped to bring the hidden political identity in the family history to the foreground of the domestic space by converting its positive patriotic merits to a compensation for the negative

political value of the latter. We shall discuss this question of shifting spheres of value later, with reference to one of the principal means of death commemoration in popular Vietnamese ritual practice, which is money (see chapter 7).

Two ways to end the cold war In the 1990s, the cold war was coming to an end in the domestic life of Vietnamese families as well as in the theatre of international politics, and

bringing home the bodies of the missing war dead was an important element of the process in both spheres. However, the decomposition of the cold war did not have the same results within the two spheres. The dead who were returned home by state actions were moved separately to their designated places, wrapped under the different national flags and guarded by armed soldiers wearing different uniforms. The recovered Vietnamese remains (hai cot let s1) and the American MIA remains (hai cot My) parted company and joined their separate national genealogy of war heroes. There, each group of fallen heroes made peace with the sublime spirit of the nation’s unity; they had sacrificed their lives

for it and were now having their remains brought to the place that represents it. Their new homes remember war but forget the political history of the war. Being such an exclusive site of sacred memory for the spirit of national unity and a powerful arena of modern body politics “for proving the individual’s subjection to the state, for asserting the state’s encompassment of the personal identities of citizens,”** the place permits no space in it for any traces of the polarized disunity in the community of the nation as to the purpose of the war. When the bodies and the memories of the missing dead returned home through popular practices, on the other hand, they came from across the frontier of the bipolar conflict and these former antagonists were reunited in the community of family ancestors. The place which they were brought to in this way was a home whose door was open to the individuals who

Missing in action 63 were hitherto excluded from and still unable to join the home of the nation. These “strangers” to the ritual community of the nation-state, whom I earlier called “political ghosts,” are now transforming in southern

and central Vietnam into natives in the spiritual community of kinship and thus into proper ancestors in the moral practice of family-based death commemoration. Their new home, through this transformation, is striv-

ing to go beyond the enduring legacy of the war imposed on it by the global politics of the cold war and the national politics of heroic death. This important process of political reconciliation at the domestic level

had to recall the civil, communal, and domestic aspects of the Vietnam—American War, shifting away from the dominant paradigm of the American War that propagates a unified, unitary national experience. The movement of corpses and their memories were at the heart of this important interpretative turn. The ending of the cold war took different forms between the states and within the family. In order to grasp fully this important difference, we need to come to terms with an as yet unwritten dimension of the history of the Vietnam—American War and investigate

how the violent global conflict was experienced at the domestic and communal level.

4 The phantom leg

The Vietnam War was not merely a war of the sixties’ generation, if considered within the spectrum of a global cold war history. Following the surrender of Japan in August 1945, the US Merchant Marine corps was assigned to carry home the troops from the Pacific theatre of World War II.

‘Twelve ships of their command were ordered to make a long detour to

transport thirteen thousand French combat troops from Europe to Vietnam. The sailors objected to the idea, according to Marilyn Young’s depiction of the event, of using American vessels “for carrying foreign combat troops to foreign soil for the purpose of engaging in hostilities to further the imperialist policies of foreign governments.”! Despite their protests, a new war began quietly in the South China Sea in October 1945. The global cold war historical perspective can modify the temporality of the war’s ending as well as its commencement.” In October 2001, the US Senate voted in favor of a bilateral trade agreement between Vietnam and the United States. This event, which took place unremarkably in the

midst of the first major international war of the new millennium in Afghanistan, was an extension of the February 1994 agreement when the United States formally lifted its trade embargo against its old enemy. The new bilateral trade agreement ended punitive tariffs on Vietnam’s exports to the US market and nominally completed the process of normalization between two nations that fought one of the longest modern wars. On the diplomatic frontiers, the wall of containment and punishment which had enveloped the South China Sea since the 1950s finally fell. The decision of the US Senate ended the long history of economic war against Vietnam, a war that lasted much longer than the military war. For this reason, October 3, 2001 is no less significant than April 30, 1975, when the communist expeditionary forces swarmed the presidential palace in Saigon. Liberation from war, for Vietnam, was a shockingly pro-

tracted process and took many forms. The end of the military war was only the beginning of the long ending of the real war.° The above observation entails that the cold war had multiple dimensions and temporalities. ‘The idea that the world “after 1989” (the fall of 64

The phantom leg 65 the Berlin Wall) is something that is substantively different from the world before that year is widely assumed in contemporary social science scholarship, ranging from the discussion on economic globalization and international security to the ethnography of post-socialist societies.* A number of observers associate the year with a radical, universal rupture 1n time and an

irrevocable momentum of change in global order, which accordingly require a change in analytical practice. Some scholars of international relations have called for a new methodology to account for the new multipolar (or unipolar) world order in place of the old strategies formulated for the former bipolar structure.” Those involved in area studies are seeking ways to analytically integrate local history and the global political process —

the two areas of inquiry that have been separated, according to Arjun Appadurai, in the artificial division of labor between area studies and international studies in the knowledge production of the cold war era.° Some social theorists advocate the need to rethink fundamental sociological categories such as individual, family, and the state in the new era beyond the left and right oppositions (see the conclusion to this volume). ’ This “new age” intellectual atmosphere is founded on the premise that the bipolar political history at large is now a thing of the past and the emergent world is qualitatively and structurally different from the old. I find this premise as misleading as it is revealing. ‘The problem with the hypothesis of chronological rupture lies 1n two inter-related issues. The first is the wrong assumption that the cold war was a unitary phenomenon worldwide. The bipolar conflict was a globally encompassing dynamics but this 1s different, as noted earlier, from thinking of it as an identical experience across locales (see the introduction to this volume). To do so will go against the body of literature in recent cold war international and social history, which amply shows how differently the bipolar politics was experienced between Western Europe and its former colonies in Asia and

Africa, and even between European nations depending on their geographical locations and socio-political conditions after the Second World War.® The radical political bipolarization of social forces was insep-

arable from the continuity of postcolonial struggles in many non-western parts of the world, and the “cold war” in these situations often took the form that betrays the very reference, resulting 1n a series of violent civil war

and other exceptional forms of organized violence.’ If bipolar political history is part of the enduring postcolonial history and if “colonial processes [continue to] underwrite contemporary politics [in the world after 1989]” as Appadurai claims, it will be logically absurd to remove its history from the analysis of contemporary political processes. *°

Related to the problem of being oblivious of this crucial regional variance, the premise of “after 1989” also suffers from reducing the

66 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam bipolar history merely to a diplomatic history. Only in this reductionist perspective, the ending of the cold war at the geopolitical level can be mistakenly equated with the terminus of the bipolar political history at large. Stephen Whitfield proposed in 1991 that we need to approach cold war history in two dimensions — as the question of geopolitical order and that of the social order — and he showed how these two orders can have different developmental cycles.’* Following his lead, a number of historians have recently explored the socio-cultural dimension of the cold war in American and European history.’* This instructive trend is developing in interaction with the continuing effort in the scholarship of cold war international history to examine further the origin of the cold war and diversify its regional actualities. In this intellectual context, “the end of the cold war” should be a gradually emerging global reality that calls for locally based empirical engagement with the process, not a given, universal chronological reality to be simply taken for granted. If we seek a genuine end to the cold war order, this requires us to come to terms with the ways in which the global conflict was transmuted into multiple local forms. The failure to place the conflict within the dimension of a social order and the spectrum of everyday life makes understanding of the historical transition to a new era critically incomplete. Most importantly, the cold war as a social order, in bearing the burden of political bifurcation, may also have created the art and technology of keeping the dismembered social body alive. If that is the case, we should be able to understand how the cold war is coming to an end, slowly and varyingly, in specific places and at once to assess the locally specific,

emerging strategies of conflict resolution. Whitfield has coined the expression, “the decomposition of the cold war,” to speak of the developmental process of a social order to emerge out of the bipolar political paradigm. The process of decomposition takes place in a liminal period. Marilyn Strathern tellingly illustrates this from a Melanesian context, to show when people take apart an image “to see/make visible what insides it contains; that this is a process that gives the elicitors of those insides, the decomposers, power as witnesses to their own efforts of elucidation; that the elicitor/witness is in a crucial sense the “creator” of the image.”!? In this understanding of decomposition, witnessing the process is a valuable and creative experience. It is through actively witnessing the process that

we may understand how the whole was in fact constituted by many separate parts and further that we may eventually be able to create a new image of the whole. The elicitation of the parts can change the image of the whole. Earlier we discussed aspects of contemporary social development in

Vietnam in the light of Whitfield’s “decomposition of the cold war,”

The phantom leg 67 focusing on changes taking place with the human remains and material culture of mass war death and thereby bringing his idea of “decomposition” closer to a literal meaning. This chapter adds to the discussion a

social historical background. Before we proceed to a history of the Vietnam—American war experienced within the milieu of intimate com-

munal lives, however, we need first to come to terms with the idea of “network,” a central notion for understanding the reality of a people’s war.

The network of war ‘The term network has wide application with varying connotations across disciplines, from science studies to economic sociology.'* In anthropological research, the term has been an important concept in the studies of tribal politics and tribal warfare.’? In so-called kinship-based societies,

the solidarity of the culturally prominent group is often based on the principle of descent and is crosscut with other less pronounced relationships such as ties through marriage. It is argued that the network of these

close affinal and other ties that exist in and across the descent-based groups, although ideologically less prominent compared to the ties of descent, may develop into an important political force in general social crisis such as a tribal war, which can contribute to countering the escalation of hostilities between the contending descent groups.’° After the collapse of the cold war geopolitical structure in the early 1990s, the term network has become an important concept among specialists in security studies. Since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in 2001, it has taken on added significance in this genre and the idea of “network war” has since been a subject of furious debate. In

the “new network war,” John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt of Rand Corporation argue that the means and the arena of strategic battle will no longer be limited by territorial states. The old, territorially based, limited war, they suggest, will be replaced by a transnational, network war. Hence, the old geopolitical perspective of global conflict should give way to a “network-centric” view of warfare and preparations in tune with the broader context of globalization and the advancement of information technology.’’ Arquilla and Ronfeldt believe that “power is migrating to non-state actors, because they are able to organize into sprawling multiorganizational networks more readily than can traditional, hierarchical,

state actors.”'® Major Ralph Peters, in the US War College Journal Parameters, agrees with this observation but adds that the strategist’s objective is specifically to combat this migration of power and have the

power remain in the hands of state actors.'” Peters accepts that the paradigm of network war, or what he calls “post-modern warfare,” is

68 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam relevant for the contemporary global security environment. Nevertheless, he insists that even in the war against organizational networks, the key

question for the strategist should be more about building a working hybrid of conventional war and network warfare than dismissing the efficacy of conventional military institutions. Whether we are facing a network war or a hybrid war in our immediate future, these elite strategic thinkers draw a common picture of the cutting edge between the old and the new forms of war. Arquilla and Ronfeldt

contend that the terrorist networks have advantages at the social and doctrinal levels, whereas the state actors of the free world are superior on the technological level. ‘The fight for the future depends, they conclude, on “building the right kinds of networks to carry off a swarming campaign against networked terrorists,” on all frontiers including organization, military doctrine, technology and social consolidation.”° Peters writes, in a more apocalyptic tone, “States and military establishments that restrict their preparations, initiatives, and responses to traditional patterns will pay for their fear of the future in blood, money, and quality of

life.”*! The “new war” which these scholars try to outline refers to a conflict between two bifurcated social forces that are considered morally and structurally incompatible, and, at a practical level, a contest between legitimate nation-states and illegitimate non-state networks. The “network war” is a program of modernization for the state actors of the cold war and a reform in how they think about war in the world after the cold war. According to the program, the states are meant to challenge their old habits of imagining a concrete territorial enemy and their new habit, after the cold war, of seeing no enemy in the absence of a place-bound enemy. For many people in southern and central Vietnam, the idea of “network” would be far from merely a technical concept of the hyper-modern information age. The youth, skilled in navigating the internet, call their

virtual network mang luo... Yet, their parents, who spent their youth during the war years, also used to call the prolific revolutionary network of covert actions mang luo1 or mang luot gian diep. The lucrative circles of

the informal economy during the postwar years, such as the popular lottery organizational network of so de, also call their operations mang luot or mang luot chu de. The Vietnamese idea of network is rooted in their historical experience of war and their everyday encounters with the infor-

mal economy. Most people of the war generation will find the idea of “network war” hardly an innovative concept or view it as merely selfevident. If the concept appears new to us, it is partly because we understand the “old” war primarily in a state-centric view as a contest of power

along clear borders, not considering the fact that the old war, at the grassroots level, was already very much a network-type experience.7”

The phantom leg 69 Moreover, this experience may not be reduced only to that of political organizational network but instead should be considered within the broader context of informal social networks mentioned earlier.

The infrastructure of revolution In the urban zones of southern and central Vietnam under the control of South Vietnamese and US military forces, a single wartime Vietcong revolutionary cell, called to (or to ba nguoi, meaning “three-member cell”), typically consisted of three to five men and women of “infrastructure of revolution,” or co so cach mang, which refered to the covert civilian

activists loyal to the revolutionary cause. Each cell was connected to a wider circle — a network of networks in today’s jargon — usually without any knowledge of the total expanse of the circle.*° Under the hostile conditions in towns, the cell itself often took the form of a network in which its infrastructure workers were largely unknown to one another. Each had contacts with the cell operator via various means

of communication. The workers met their superiors and network operators in the graveyard or the temple (unless they were already neighbors, kin or workmates); alternatively, they were sent coded messages via messengers. Workers sometimes mistook their messenger for their superior. Two neighbors could be doing similar activities without knowing each other’s identity or activity since they belonged to different niches of mang luot. The exposure of one worker rarely led to collateral damage in the network, for each worker was unaware of the terrain beyond his or her immediate chain of work. The relationship between the operator and the workers was both hierarchical and horizontal. The workers received orders and directives from the operator and in turn supplied information and practical support for the latter. ‘The work of an individual worker was conducted, nevertheless, largely in his or her own existing social network according to his or her own capacity and judgment. The operator’s influence on the worker’s technical operation remained marginal and fluctuated depending on the wider political situation. The network operator was more vulnerable to the failure or disloyalty of the worker than vice versa. Morally, however, both worker and superior maintained a horizontal relationship, calling and perceiving each other as dong chi, partners who shared the same purpose.

The nature of this cell organization was such that it could expand infinitely without losing its practical autonomy. This aspect of wartime Vietnamese political organizational network is best discussed using case studies to illustrate its actual operation. Among the cases I investigated is one that took place in 1969 in the municipal hospital of Da Nang.

70 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam In the hospital, a nurse had her long-established network. She gathered information from the wounded soldiers and smuggled out medicine, and she was connected to a network of covert action through the daughter of a

local pharmacist. The wounded ARVN (the Army of Republic of Vietnam, former South Vietnam) officer had his highly covert network with officers and soldiers. He was also connected to a small network of friends and relatives outside his army life. ‘This had been created by the

officer’s VC (Vietcong) brother and was run, after his death, by his childhood friend who managed a bicycle repair shop. ‘The patient beside the officer belonged to his own counter-insurgency network. He was an informant hired by the South Vietnamese military intelligence that was suspicious of the wounded officer’s loyalty. The children who sold toothbrushes and towels to the patients had their own extremely mobile and effective network. Their group belonged to the more complex network of street children that incorporated orphans, children of prison inmates, old gangs of playmates, and children of refugee families. All these networks, unknown to one another, were fused into the single event of the ARVN officer’s escape from the hospital in May 1969. ‘The nurse was instructed to make contact with the wounded officer. She took

his neighbor, the informant for the ARVN military intelligence, to the examination room at the appointed hour late one afternoon. The officer escaped to a Buddhist pagoda and met the children he had seen in the hospital there. The children showed him the underground tunnel dug underneath a tomb. In the early hours, one of the workers in the officer’s own network turned up and escorted him out to the riverside. There, he was handed over to an unknown revolutionary liaison, and both men swam to the opposite side of the river and disappeared in the direction of the mountains. This myriad of organizational networks existed in the wider milieu of social and civil networks. The officer’s elder brother was a known VC operative. Their mother’s house was under surveillance not only by the South Vietnamese police but also by a neighbor, a police informant. This neighbor was relatively new to the neighborhood, and the officer’s mother had had much wider and closer relationships with the other neighbors. In

one season, the woman’s aging husband contracted dysentery and was gravely ill. The VC son was brave enough to visit his dying father. On the day of his visit, a few women in the neighborhood organized an evening of gambling and invited the mother and the wife of the informant. wo boys took the dogs out of the neighborhood, and their elder sister brought all the street-playing children to the school playground. There was a lot of noise in the house across the street while the father and son were exchang-

ing farewells. What these women did in that evening and on other

The phantom leg 71 numerous occasions, however, had nothing to do with the son’s political network. None of these women, including the officer’s mother, was part of any organized network, and none of them prepared the evening based on a political commitment. The neighborhood simply took sides with a member it trusted and with whom it had a long relationship. The nurse became a co so (“infrastructure”) worker through her close childhood friend, the pharmacist’s daughter. The pharmacist found her the relatively secure and well-paid job in the hospital. Her two brothers

were in the combat units of the ARVN. Her parents knew about her clandestine work, as did the wife of her eldest brother. When the nurse was arrested, her sister-in-law put together her savings as well as her

mother-in-law’s gold and brought it to a colleague of her husband’s army superior. ‘he pharmacist, after her release, supported the nurse’s family with medication for the young woman’s multiple wounds from interrogation. The toothbrush-selling boys and girls had orphan friends who worked as domestic servants for the families of ARVN officers or had close friendship with foreign officers. They met regularly, traded toys for food, and exchanged gossip. When one of the street children was arrested, her act of playing “mad and stupid” failed. Relatively new to the group,

the group concluded later that she was overacting. The servant boy persuaded his patron-friend, an officer in the US Army, to intervene; the kind officer not only saved her but also found her a job. The man who was this houseboy in the late 1960s, believes today that he was never a co so. He was simply lonely and bored, he said, and liked playing with the co so boys and girls.

Tiger Temple The community of Tiger Temple is typical of the peripheral urban communities that were invented by the war. This area was one of the strongholds of the anti-colonial Viet Minh resistance and is now booming with tourist and other industrial activities. Tiger Temple is in a residential area, carefully hidden from the bustling town, at the end of a deceptive cul-de-sac that leads to a large wartime cemetery along a narrow bicycle

path. The temple faces a narrow strip of austere lower-middle-class houses to the west. These houses border either the old prison to the north or the army base to the south. From the army camp, one can hear the soldiers singing patriotic songs during their early morning runs. The

neighborhood’s children learn these songs and use some of them to accompany and co-ordinate their street play. The adults also benefit from the army camp. They listen to the army’s loud speakers that disseminate the nation’s current political and military affairs. To have the

72 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam People’s Army as an immediate neighbor has the additional benefit of helping the residents feel secure from criminals.

The prison building on the northern side of the neighborhood is abandoned now and waiting for demolition. This used to be the single most dreaded site for many locals during the war. ‘The South Vietnamese

police force used this site for interrogating prisoners and selectively executing them. Before they installed the prison in 1969, the site was the army barracks of the 3rd Infantry Division of the ARVN. Tiger Temple originally stood in the middle of the site before the ARVN soldiers relocated it to its current position in 1965. The elders of Tiger ‘Temple recalled that some of the ARVN soldiers, teenage peasants from the Mekong Delta, had been frightened by the idea of touching a sacred communal building. The elders compared these innocent ARVN soldiers to the triumphant officers of the People’s Army after the liberation, who, in their memory, were not lenient with communal shrines and Buddhist

pagodas. When they said this in my presence, their grown-up children looked uncomfortable and told me in whispers that their views on the issue were not the same as those of their parents. The residents of the houses that neighbor the prison wall used to keep their wooden shutters permanently closed to block out the prisoners’ screams. In stark contrast to the residents on the side of the army camp, some of these residents on the prison side still observed the custom of having their shutters firmly locked at night. They still felt unsafe despite this measure. There were no prisoners any more, yet some residents feared that their ghosts might crawl, as they had done many times in the neighborhood’s oral history, into their rear garden and kitchen. Local knowledge has it that there is nothing more frightening in life than an encounter with the ghost of a prisoner. The ghost has a mutilated body and an elongated tongue like the infamous Mau Ma — the longhaired, bare-breasted, female spirit of water that is believed to seduce people into

death. Three young women from the neighborhood experienced this horrible vision, and one of them never entirely recovered from the shock. The people in the Tiger Temple neighborhood are mostly urbanites of

shallow urban life history. ‘They were incorporated into this marginal urban space through the rapid spread of distorted urbanity during the time of war. Before the war, coconut trees and rice paddies surrounded the area, and people made their living primarily on the land. Like other urban peripheries in South Vietnam, this neighborhood was deeply, if invisibly, divided between the secret supporters of the revolutionary forces

and those who were incorporated into the South Vietnamese economy and administration. Because of its marginal status, there were no important officials of the South Vietnamese administration or officers of the ARVN

The phantom leg 73 living in the neighborhood. A few took employment as low-ranking administrators or laborers in a foreign military installation, and others managed market stalls or a small tailor shop. Several households had links, of varying strength, with the VC fighters. Some families supported

the revolutionary side in manpower, some with labor, and some with money, information, or simply in spirit. In historical terms, therefore, this neighborhood is a mixture of “collaborators” and “patriots.” During the war, this mixture often resulted in critical situations. ‘The South Vietnamese police ran an elaborate, if not particularly effective, network of neighborhood surveillance. Arrests of mobile VC activists and their residential patriotic supporters by a nextdoor neighbor’s complicity did occur, although much less often in reality than in rumor, and this strategy had some success in provoking mutual distrust and isolation in urban communities. The “collaborator” families

were rarely in a safe haven, either. Periodically, they received handdelivered letters of appeal or warning from the VC authorities. The first letter urged the recipient to make a material contribution to the revolutionary cause in polite language. If this failed to be answered, the subsequent letters would deliver vividly threatening messages about the consequences of failure to cooperate. The recipients of such communi-

ques were, officially, obliged to report the incident to the South Vietnamese authorities. Failure to do so was a crime, and such a crime could invite disproportionate punishment. However, people wisely rarely reported such incidents. The result of these divisive psychological strategies was, in people’s

recollection, constant fear and isolation. Rumors that a neighbor or friend had betrayed someone traveled widely throughout the town and reinforced secrecy and mutual distrust. This divide-and-rule strategy of the war administrators, ironically, contributed to the expansion of the covert revolutionary support network among civilians. Behind the political and moral motivations of the civilian activists, there was a strong realization that the cach mang (revolutionary) network was the only stable and trustworthy social organization in the wartime situation. Hopelessly

isolated, materially and psychologically, many desperate Vietnamese, particularly women, were drawn to the revolutionary circles to recover a sense of human solidarity. As a former co so activist recalled, “Life without

a husband was possible. Life without relatives was possible. But life without a neighbor was not. I had to find one.” In practical life, however, the rigid classification of “patriots” versus “collaborators” was unrealistic when applied to ordinary people. Even in the worst situation between 1968 and 1969, when the region suffered its fiercest battles at every corner, enough evidence suggests that neighborhood

74 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam played a vital role in survival. A co so woman could not complete her nightly obligation of delivering food and money to the VC contacts if she did not have the support of her unquestioning neighbor who took care of

her children. In return, the woman saved her neighbor’s daughter who was working as a secretarial clerk in a foreign army base. One day, the woman persuaded her neighbor’s daughter to help her bring goods from the Da Nang central market. ‘The daughter was unwilling, so, she promised a handsome pair of shoes for the young woman. That afternoon, a VC platoon launched a surprise attack against the daughter’s workplace, which caused many casualties. In this artful exchange for survival, usually

no question was posed and no information extracted. To do so would jeopardize both parties. People simply found ways of saving each others’ lives by acting on and in the others’ lives. The daughter’s mother told me

that she had known that her neighbor was a VC contact. She had prepared a letter to denounce her. In case her neighbor was arrested, she meant to show this letter to the police. In the letter, which she still kept, she informed the neighbor’s absent husband of her suspicion that his wife

must have taken a lover since she was going out often in the dark. She prepared this letter, hoping that it might help to save her neighbor’s life in

case the police found her. In this complex, artful, mutual support, the patriots and the “collaborators” were inter-penetrative. In the end, they had to collaborate to survive. Each administration of war discouraged its people from collaborating with the opposite side. However, in the streets of a violent bipolar conflict under crossfire, only those who collaborated well across the drawn boundary of political loyalty survived, both physically and morally. The classification system of “patriots” versus “collaborators” is still a formative element in the contemporary social life of many Vietnamese. Of many instruments of political control, the family record system of ho so has been one of the most explicit and routine sources of shame and agony for former collaborators. A hand-written summary of personal biography

and family history must be handed to the administration before the ’ bureaucracy can initiate any administrative procedures for civil affairs.

Whether the procedures concern purchasing a plot of land from the government, marriage or divorce, registration of death, entry into school, or a job application, a detailed and comprehensive ho so report 1s mandatory. The ho so report includes the individual’s profession, religion and educational history, as well as his dates and places of birth and residence.

Most notably, the report requires a detailed description of the “work history” of the individual’s kinsmen. The boundary of the kinship varies, depending on the purpose of the record. It can be the immediate family

of three patrilineal generations or a wider relationship that includes

The phantom leg 75 collateral kin. In the past, the official ho so form contained specific sections on the individual’s wartime activity; namely, whether the person worked for “our side” or “their side.” The applicant was also obliged to classify his or her parents and grandparents, siblings, and sometimes more distant relatives such as father’s brothers. Nowadays, there are no such explicit entries to fill in. All applicants know, however, that they must introduce clear indications of their family’s political identification if they want the report to be accepted by the administration. ‘The history of wartime military service makes the identification straightforward, the record of a revolutionary honor or re-education camp has the same effect, and the entry of overseas relatives used to make the family look impure. The trajectory of previous residence and the graduation record from a particular school in a particular area during a particular period can also determine, although much more subtly, the general picture of the individual’s place in the political spectrum. The net result of the use, and the abuse, of the family record system 1s that an individual’s wartime collaboration goes far beyond a biographical

episode but becomes an organizing element of collective identity. Grandfather’s wartime service to the ARVN shapes the identity of his school-attending descendants in the view of the school administration. These children are less likely to be acknowledged as “model students” than their peers whose family background demonstrates an untainted history of revolutionary activity. In order to be a model student, school children must obtain proof of good behavior as well as good academic performance; yet, the genealogical factor of healthy origins can count as an equally important source for judgment. Most children are acutely aware of the implications, if not the details, of their family record. In the Tiger Temple community, there are as many former collaborator families as families with a history of revolutionary struggle. The difference

between the two groups is evidenced through the household ancestral altar that demonstrates not only the ancestors’ paraphernalia but also the certificate, if any, of their revolutionary activity offered by the government such as the Heroic Death certificates from the time of the American War. Looking more closely at the informal economy of war memory, however,

most families turn out to have had a much more complex, ambiguous genealogy.

Same, same Everyone in the environs of the Tiger Temple knows Lap. The man 1s a long-time resident of the small neighborhood that surrounds the animist temple and the oldest amongst the community’s several amputees. Lap 1s

76 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam unemployed and earns pocket money by doing all sorts of odd jobs within

the community. He is in charge of Tiger Temple’s prayer gongs and earned the status of a member of the informal council that manages the communal temple. I met Lap many times, including at his favorite hideout from the heat, the old underground military bunker near his home. One evening during the annual opening ceremony days of the temple, when he kept vigil for the shrine, I saw him at a house adjacent to the temple where he took his rest from time to time. Two other familiar faces in the neighborhood of Tiger ‘Temple followed the sixty-year-old amputee. One of them was the

host’s next-door neighbor, the driver of the commuter bus to central Da Nang, whom I had the privilege to know was at one time a first-class sergeant in the ARVN. The other man was from the neighborhood at the back of the temple. Everyone in the area knew that he had been awarded a certificate of honor for his wartime work as a local partisan. While Lap was settling into the chair, there was an anticipatory, light-

hearted atmosphere. He was seriously studying the host’s incomplete ancestor altar, and the little girl had already succumbed to stomach

cramps because of her excessive laughing. Encouraged, Lap said, “America boom-boom, Vietcong boom-boom,” pointing to his amputated leg with his index finger. Then, the familiar feast of laughter started: vc (the former partisan fighter): “Did the Americans do this to your leg?” LAP: “Yes, yes, Americans. They shot me because I was bad.” ARVN (the former first-class sergeant): “Who shot your leg? Were they VC?” LAP: “Yes, yes, the VC. They fired my leg because I was bad.”

Everyone was in fits of laughter. At his turn, the host asked, touching Lap’s leg, “Uncle, who did this terrible thing to you? Americans or VC?” Lap said, looking confused, “Yes, yes, you’re right. Yes, Americans. Yes, the VC. Yes, yes, America boom-boom, Vietcong boom-boom.” Then, the interrogation started again. vc: “You told me the Americans shot your leg. Now you say it’s the VC who did this to you. You lied to me. Tell me, did the VC shoot you?” LAP: “Yes, yes, the VC. You’re right. It’s the VC who shot my leg. VC boom-

boom, America boom-boom.” }

ARVN: “You said the VC shot your leg. Now you say it’s the Americans who fired

at you. You don’t make sense. You lie to me. Tell me, did the Americans shoot you?”

LAP: “Yes, yes, the Americans. You’re right, of course. America boom-boom, Vietcong boom-boom.”

The host took a deep breath and pointed at Lap’s leg with his index finger, “Uncle, I’m shooting this bullet at your leg right now. Tell me, am I VC or

The phantom leg 77 American?” Then, Lap folded back his trouser to finally show his artificial leg and said, “You’re right of course. America and Vietnam, same same.

You are right. America boom-boom, Vietcong boom-boom. Same same.”

Lap the amputee Lap was born in 1945 in Chu Lai, the place that later held one of the largest US military installations in central Vietnam. He grew up as an orphan, having been handed over to a distant relative by the will of his late parents. He attended primary school and worked as a village buffalo boy. At the age of 17, Lap was recruited into the revolutionary mang luoi by an

absent village elder called Le Tan Cuong. His main work was to gather information about the villagers’ social lives and political opinions and to report them to the cell operator. He was also asked occasionally to lay mines. At the time, his village area was transforming into a major fortification for the South Vietnamese armed forces, and this resulted in an intense invigoration of the local revolutionary organizational network. The South Vietnamese counter-insurgency activity also became intensive, introducing more villagers to their village and neighborhood surveillance web. This web of watchful eyes and sharp ears caught Lap only three months into his work. He was sent to the Da Nang prison in 1963 and released in 1970. He survived the prison, unlike many other young and old prisoners, partly thanks to the art of survival that a sympathetic inmate had taught him: If the interrogators are all Vietnamese, rub your hands fast and pray for mercy, scream hard if they kick you, cry and defecate as much as you like if they put electrical wires on you, and say you know nothing and be yourself who knows nothing. They will think you are just a simple, silly peasant boy, which you are. If you see an American adviser in the room, grab his leg, if you can, and remember to

repeat one word in his language — same same. Point your finger to the other Vietnamese and yourself and say, “Same same”; point to the American and yourself and say, “Same same.” Hopefully, the American will think you are mad, not recognizing the most fundamental differences in the reality he knows.

On his release, Lap immediately returned to Chu Lai. By this time, his village area had become a gigantic military base. His old revolutionary network contact was dead, and he could not enter another network easily with his credentials as a former inmate in the South Vietnamese prison. He could not disprove the invisible tag on his body that made him a possible agent of the South Vietnamese intelligence. Starving, dispirited and suffering from his prison experiences, he took up manual work 1n the American

base like the other villagers. The base was the only place where people, especially landless agricultural laborers, could earn a living at this time.

78 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam For the first time in his life, Lap was not hungry, and he could offer food to others instead of begging for it. However, he was soon drafted into the South Vietnamese Army and sent to the Hoa Cam military base for six

months of training. In 1971, Lap came back to the area of the Tiger Temple community, not as a political prisoner but as an ARVN soldier. He was assigned to the security force of the prison. He married the same year and settled in the community. He built a small bamboo house next to the much taller brick prison guard tower. He worked and earned a small amount; his wife worked in the marketplace and brought food. While in prison, Lap participated in the Ong Cop (the spirit of the tiger worshiped in Tiger Temple, Mieu Ong Cop) ceremony from his cell. He

saved food and obtained incense from the prison guards. He held a private ceremony for every gate-opening ceremony of the temple. He prayed that if he survived the prison with the strength of Ong Cop, he would serve his shrine for the rest of his life. Lap is not the only one in the

community who believes that the people of Tiger Temple, having no traditional ties of place or blood, are nevertheless all fatefully connected. Several neighbors whose origins are in the central highlands claim different relationships with the tiger spirit. A man from Tra My, in his childhood, was a child of Ong Cop, whose parents “sold” him to the area’s tiger spirit, hoping that the spirit would protect the sickly and bookish boy

from the war’s greed for death. The Tra My Tiger Temple turned to ashes, leaving no opportunity for the boy to be bought back from the tiger spirit. The man, now in his late-forties, believes that he has been led to move to his current address in order to be with his fierce, protective foster parent.

These people of the Tiger Temple neighborhood have other more secular reasons for becoming part of the community. Most of them have multiple histories of displacement and loss of roots. War brought them together in this community. Some worked for the revolutionary network, and others were earning a living in the state institutions that fought the network. Some moved to the community as the families of prison inmates before the liberation, and others moved there after the liberation. The former began their postwar life as the families of patriots and the latter as those of collaborators. It is uplifting how this community, built on long years of violent and often lethal confrontation, has managed to keep its spirit.

The presence of the Tiger Temple has supported the community’s resilience. Virtually all the neighbors, whether they belong to a collabo-

rator or patriot family, participate in the maintenance and ceremonial calendar of the temple just as they did during wartime. Their contribution to temple activities, the yearly opening ceremony in the first lunar month

The phantom leg 79 in particular, has been a way of making a community out of people who share few regional or blood ties. People like the amputee Lap have also contributed to the strength of the community. He is sympathetic to the demonstrative pride of the patriot families and attentive to the hidden stigma of the collaborator families. People like Lap are aware that there

are often untold histories of uncertainty underneath the pride or the stigma and that the wartime biography of ordinary people is rarely a clear-cut trajectory.

Lap’s biography includes radical displacement from one political sphere of war to another. His performance of “same same” fuses his two bipolarized identities into a single missing whole. He had fought a revolutionary network war; he also fought the opposite war on the side of state hierarchy. Lap’s performance crystallizes in his amputated leg the dual structure of bipolar politics that he experienced as a humble actor, and the leg, missing from the body, obviates the structure within the specter of his performed feast of laughter. In the end, Lap’s amputated

leg works magically. His phantom leg inscribes the bipolar political structure and leaves the rest of the body surviving without it.

If I understand this man’s one-legged body as an anti-structure of bipolar history or perhaps as a symbolic weapon against its forceful dualism,~* the political identity of his body is perhaps extendable to the entire community of Tiger Temple. In Phenomenology of perception, Merleau-

Ponty investigates how “a man wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters that lacerated his real one,” and how,

therefore, the phantom limb becomes a memory.” According to Merleau-Ponty, the amputated limb illustrates a fundamental ambivalence on the part of the subject: the amputee avows two contradictory realities simultaneously; that is, the historical reality of a living limb and the given reality of its absence. These two “limbs” occupy the same space and time in the lived reality of the amputated body, and the absent limb is

therefore quasi-present and existent, refusing to enter the past and becoming a living, embodied memory. Extending this phenomenology of the human body, we may say that the amputated part of a social body maintains two contradictory realities at once; namely, the historical reality of a living whole and the given reality of missing parts. There is not a single family in the Tiger Temple community that has survived the war unharmed and intact. Every family has suffered wounds of amputation of varying depth as a social body. Moreover, the family’s multiple wounds of war are seldom attributable to a single side in the war. The individual loss of a family may be specific and structured. The entire loss of a family, on the contrary, is seldom reducible to either this or that side of the bipolar political structure. If we extend the idea of family to an extended kinship

80 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam or to an entity that is inclusive of friendship and neighborhood, the loss and the wounds become more politically unclassifiable. Political identity can fluctuate depending on how we define the width and breadth of the beholder of the identity.

The hidden history of the missing leg The history of sociality such as that discussed above is an important dimension of the lived history of the bipolar politics in Vietnam. It complements a traditionally dominant approach to the social history of the Vietnamese revolution which tends to privilege the political mobilization and moral solidarity of rural villages for nationalist and revolutionary causes, by showing how the politics of war, in the context ofa total

war, involved radical dislocation of population and continued in their displaced lives.”° It also shows the relevance of a network-centric perspective to social and political conflicts in grasping the grassroots experience in the urban zones of the Vietnam—American War. Furthermore, I write this chapter in the hope of demonstrating that the idea of network, which is becoming an overly bellicose concept in certain contemporary analytical trends, has the opposite relevance for thinking about the resolution of conflicts. Network is a double-edged concept when applied to a condition of war; it can be an instrument of war or it can turn out to be an

instrument against the politics of war. In my view, the analysis that privileges exclusively only one domain of instrumentality fails to appropriate the full theoretical potentiality of the concept.

The non-partisan subjectivity of the Tiger Temple community may resemble the mature tolerance of a liberal society. This subjectivity, however, is primarily a manifestation of maturity out of a long history of life under siege. The British historian E. P. Thompson, who is known for his anti-nuclear activism as well as his monumental studies of the moral economy of the English working class during its early formation, once described the cold war in the language of an industrial corporation. In line with his approach to history that emphasized the normative orientations

at the popular level, Thompson sought to distinguish the interests of “executives” in the cold war political structure from the labor and aspira-

tions of ordinary citizens whom these executives systematically exploited.’ We may say in a similar light that cold war history consists of two separate discourses. One is prominent in the literature and tells the global conflict in terms of balance of power, interstate alliance, containment and domino theory, or nuclear deterrence and game theory.*® The other is scarcely recorded, and it is mainly about split community and neighborhood, bifurcated family and kinship, and divided consciousness

The phantom leg 81 and identity. ‘he laborer’s experience of bipolar history was primarily about bearing the unbearable pain of dismemberment, and this is at odds with the very idea of “cold war” or “imaginary war” with which we are accustomed to grasp the political history of the second half of the past

century.” In this historical field, the doctrinal, ideological, hierarchical state institutions and organizational networks were inflated; yet, the antidoctrinal, non-ideological, collateral social networks also proliferated. People’s history of the violent bipolar conflict was, in significant measure,

about networking — pooling resources and sharing risks, and thereby connecting individuals and social units within and against the escalating hostilities of geopolitics. In this historical milieu, the network-centric war already coexisted and fought with the geopolitical war. In the battlefields

between these two forms of war, furthermore, people built extensive social networks to counter both the mechanized, geopolitical Vietnam War and the organizational, networked, “people’s” American War. Here, the ultimate winner of this particular war is neither the manufacturer of the Vietnam War nor necessarily the maker of the American War. Many

Vietnamese fought in the Vietnam War and many more fought in the American War, and all of them have been struggling to undo the violent legacy of these two wars. One of the popular ways to demobilize the legacy has been to build a concrete social relationship upon the hidden history of survival — the civil network of collaboration across the fronts. Winning the

war on the streets of the violent cold war is not the same as winning it in

the strategic administration of the war. The bipolar history, for the residents of Tiger Temple, consists of countless everyday actions required for survival. Their very ordinary actions of exchanging informa-

tion and sharing resources with neighbors turned out to be a powerful struggle against the geopolitics of the cold war. The most basic and mundane requirements of a neighborhood founded the technical and moral basis of what turned out to be extraordinary social networks of survival.

The history of sociality in communities such as the Tiger Temple neighborhood is important for rethinking the history of the Vietnam War, but it also can provide instructive insights to understanding contemporary issues such as the revival of rituals for ancestors and ghosts. In

the next chapter, we will return to the condition of displaced war dead discussed earlier, and will view the ritual actions conducted on behalf of unrelated spirits of the war dead in the light of the history of human displacement discussed in this chapter; that is, the social ties developing amongst displaced strangers. Before we end this chapter, however, something more has to be said about the history of Lap’s missing leg.

82 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam In 1974, Lap left his position as a prison guard. He became a driver of an army vehicle and was happy with his new job despite the risk of being behind the wheel during that turbulent time. At the end of that year, he had the opportunity to visit his hometown of Chu Lai with an officer on tour. He knew the way by heart and knew the names and stories of the important rocks and trees. After all, this was where he had worked for Le Tan Cuong before he joined the army. He parked the jeep and walked ahead of the others, proud of being in his homeland. It was just past noon when Lap stepped on an anti-personnel mine that was later found to be the work of a local VC network. He met the liberation of Da Nang on

March 29, 1975 in the city’s military hospital. Discharged from the hospital shortly thereafter, he eventually returned with his family to the Tiger Temple neighborhood, the only community that, he told me, he ever knew he could belong to.

5 Death in the street

‘The history of sociality which we discussed with reference to the Tiger ‘Temple community shows that the reality of war, even in the field of a total war, involves an extraordinary manifestation of human solidarity among traditionally unrelated people, not merely the consolidation of the existing boundary between friends and enemies. This history 1s an important dimension of the lived history of the American War in Vietnam; yet it

also can provide important insights to understanding contemporary issues such as the revival of commemorative rituals: for ancestors on the one hand and on behalf of the displaced spirits of the war dead on the other. To this end we will return to the material condition of war death discussed earlier. We will investigate what the two-sided ritual practice can tell us of the historical reality of mass displacement and the power of human action to counter it. In his seminal history of the First World War, Jay Winter highlights two important social developments in Western Europe relating to the catastrophic mass death between 1914 and 1918 and the consequent experience of universal bereavement. One was the revival of traditional religious icons and practices, including beliefs and narratives about the ghosts of fallen soldiers. Winter notes, “The period of the 1914—18 war was the apogee of spiritualism in Europe.” The other was the remarkable postwar development of voluntary informal networks in which broken fami-

lies and grieving individuals hoped to share their grief and assist one another in overcoming their hardship.” Winter refers to these networks as “fictive kinship,” emphasizing the fact that the strong affective ties that developed among these individuals and social units were akin to, in their subjective experience, intimate family relations.” These popular religious

practices and alternative kinship networks rose at that time in parallel with the state’s official art of commemoration that sought to glorify the meaning of mass war death, on the one hand, and, on the other, with the countermovement among the critical intellectuals and modernist artists, who advanced the surrealist representation of the death events and the futility of the mass sacrifice in opposition to the state politics of war 83

84 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam heroism. In this light, Winter takes issue with Paul Fussell’s idea of “modern memory” with reference to the experience of the First World War, questioning how this concept, which is mainly based on the views of the cultural elite, can apply to the grassroots experience.* He argues that

the human loss in the Great War was remembered and coped with, at popular level, primarily by strengthening traditional spiritual concepts and organizational means, rather than resulting in the breakdown of traditional moral and esthetic certainties as Fussell suggests. He writes: If the war created “modern memory” as Paul Fussell has claimed, it was a traditional, even archaic, kind of memory that came out of the conflict ... However “modern” the Great War was, its immediate repercussion was to deepen and not transform older languages of loss and consolation.”

Winter’s approach to history of war is attentive to the spheres of social and individual life which are affected by the violent history in most direct and intimate ways, and it maintains a critical distance to the approaches that ignore actions taken in these intimate spheres of life, relegating them to privacy and preferring instead the affairs happening in the spheres of national politics and public art. His account of “fictive kinship” shows not only how the destructive event of a war shatters the integrity of intimate human communal lives but also how the morality of kinship, striving to cope with the loss of loved ones in the environment of universal bereave-

ment, may extend to a wider normative horizon of civil solidarity and human kinship. The picture is in part about the postwar community of remembrance bringing together separate traditional communities (in ways different from those pursued by the political community of the nation-state), and the message is about the power of human solidarity to go beyond the realm of traditional kinship solidarity. I would not necessarily explain the “fictive kinship” of bereavement and new community of remembrance, as does Winter, as an extension of traditional morality and social organization, thereby advancing it as counterevidence against the idea of modern memory associated with the Great War. A similar debate exists in the historiography of the Vietnam War, although it is more about whether the representation of this war in Western literature and American films takes on modern or post-modern configuration.° The notion of the modern in this context (conceptualized as against post-modern) is equivalent to that of the traditional (as against modern) in the debate about the First World War’s cultural history. In my

opinion, it is possible to consider the post-First World War network of mourners also as a modern social form, distinct from the more dominant forms of modern memory such as the state politics of commemoration and the countercultural intellectual movement. Winter calls the network

Death in the street 85 fictive or “social” kinship and contrasts the notion of invented ties to that of traditional “biological” kinship. Between these two forms of kinship lie the reality of mechanical mass death and the consequent reality of universal and “democratic” experience of grief — the postwar extension of kinship feelings to a wider circle is therefore partly a “modern” phenom-

enon in the sense that it relates to the advanced destructive capacity of modern war. Additionally, I question whether the postwar popularity of ghost-related narratives can be considered merely a revival of traditional religious morality. In European cultural history, as noted in the introduction to this volume, beliefs in ghosts and apparitions were no longer part of the respectable and acceptable religious tradition by the nineteenth century. If the mass slaughter on the Western Front revitalized these beliefs, the phenomenon can be interpreted as a critical response to the failure of the dominant traditional religious institutional practices in

coming to terms with the general social and human crisis. The last point in fact constitutes a core element of Winter’s moving accounts of the commemoration of the First World War fallen.’ These small questions aside, I believe that Winter opens a powerful new perspective to the social history of modern war, in which the phenomenon of war appears not merely in terms of its destructive power to tear apart the fabric of social life but also in relation to the generative power of human creativity to confront its mechanism of destruction and embrace its ruins.

Intimacy with displaced souls The traces of war death are both near and remote for Vietnamese families and communities. Recovering their remains may be a common event in

the vicinity of everyday life, or it can take people on an extraordinary journey to faraway places. Earlier discussion on mass excavation (chapter 2) and that about MIA missions (chapter 3) dealt with these related legacies of war separately, focusing on how people relate to the local, unknown traces of war death on the one hand and how they strive to collect the scattered remains of their missing relatives back to their place of origin on the other. The missing dead and the unknown dead are both products of the war-caused human displacement. The counterinsurgency strategy of the Vietnam War resulted in the dislocation of a huge rural population from their subsistence basis and place of moral attach-

ment. The planners of the American War encouraged the population to

resist this forced relocation to urban slums or strategic hamlets and advocated, “Do not move a yard away, do not move an inch away [from your ancestral land].”° But this war also mobilized people of combat age to the distant battlefields and for highly mobile guerilla activities. Death

86 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam away from home was common for civilians as well as for the combatants in this reality of a total war, and so it was common to find many shallow graves of unknown dead when people returned home. The above condition of displaced afterlife, missing from one place and

unknown in another place, is what the Vietnamese refer to with the concept, “death in the street” (chet duong). ‘This concept coexists with the opposite concept of “death in the house” or “death at home” (chet nha), and they together constitute a house-centered moral worldview that is manifested in the structure of Vietnamese domestic commemorative ritual. As explained earlier (chapter 1), the conceptual scheme relates to

the contrast between “good death” and “bad death” presented in the sociological literature of death and death ritual. “T’o die a good death,” according to James Fox, is “to die in the house and home,” implying that the event of death takes place in the presence of kindred who will ritually appropriate the death to a benevolent ancestor.” By contrast, the “bad death” is a sudden, violent death in a distant and unknown place away from home, which collapses the possibility of ritual appropriation and

thus leads to “a condition of confusion and disorder but without the means for removing and resolving them.”'° This house-centered, concentric dual conception of death, in the tradition of central Vietnam, places the ritual practice of commemoration in between two different surfaces of memory. The actor kowtows to the ancestral shrine placed in the interior of the house, and then turns his body around and walks to the outside to repeat the act of worship towards the imagined world of streetwandering ghosts. This is how people in this region commonly conduct their regular domestic ancestral rites, and the two-sided commemorative

practice is also found in wider community affairs such as the annual opening of the Tiger Temple that we saw in the last chapter. The streetside worship is formally on behalf of the unknown and unrelated souls of

the dead who exist in the neighborhood or who are imagined to have gathered for the occasion from more distant parameters, and it is structurally similar to the act of distributing small offerings to the unknown graves found in the vicinity of the ancestral tombs after giving offering to the latter. The latter acknowledges the exclusive kinship ties between the

donor and the particular ancestral recipient to whom the offering is initially made on the one hand and, on the other hand, the inclusive ties of residence between the ancestral identities and the non-ancestral beings who are all entitled to receive the commemorative gift.

The two-way commemoration encompasses “the home” and “the street,” the domain of kinship and that of anonymity, and it distinguishes one side against another at the same time. Along the shifting position of the body, the act of commemoration thus also shifts in meaning. On the

Death in the street 87 side of ancestral memory, we may describe the act in the language of collective representation and argue that it is affirmative (and constitutive) of the given solidary relations between the dead and the living, whether

we call them a lineage paradigm or a genealogical unity. Towards the opposite side, it is argued that the act has an opposite, negative meaning —

to protect home from the errant spirits of the dead and “to avoid their wrath.”!? Gerald Hickey makes the last point with reference to pre-war village life in the southern delta region of Vietnam. Following his characterization, it appears that people would offer food and votive gifts to ghosts in the way that they would hand over food and valuables to vagabond bandits in the hope of avoiding their menace. This security-centered symbolic association between the two forms of external aggression is a plausible scenario

and may have been part of the isolated, vulnerable agrarian lives of villagers in parts of a pre-war Vietnam. This association is related to the

concentric scheme of social order that is a preeminent theme in the conventional sociology of religion. We have previously discussed how Durkheim extended the social exteriority of ghosts to their irrelevance in the symbolic construction of social order and identity. Arthur Wolf,

with reference to rural Taiwan, emphasizes “the extreme contrast” between attitudes to ghosts, on the one hand, and those to gods and ancestors on the other.’* Writing of Vietnamese religious ideas as these are implicated in their vernacular idioms and sayings, Léopold Cadiére highlights the contrast of génies bons et génies mauvais — the beneficiary spirits that protect the community versus the malignant spirits that allegedly “take pleasure in annoying and harming [it].”!° However, classical Vietnamese literature gives a very different picture of the meaning of the gift for ghosts. Nguyen Du, the eminent eighteenthcentury mandarin scholar, wrote the following verse, called “Calling all wandering souls” (in Vietnamese, Chieu hon, Chieu hon ca, Van chieu hon, —

or Van te thap loai chung sinh).'* This verse, in many modified and improvised forms, is recited widely today as a ritual incantation. I cite an abbreviated popular contemporary version printed recently:'° Those who died beheaded ‘Those who had many friends and relatives but died lonely Mandarins Those who died in the battlefield Those whose death nobody knew about Students who died on the way back from an exam ‘Those who were buried hurriedly with no coffin and no clothing Those who died at sea under a thunderstorm Merchants

88 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Those who died with a shoulder hardened by too many bamboo poles carried on it Innocent souls who died in prison

All spirits in the bush, in the stream, in the shadow, underneath the bridge, outside the pagoda, in the market, in empty rice field, on the sand dune You are cold and you are in fear You move together, young ones holding the old We offer you this rice porridge and fruit nectar’® Do not fear Come and receive our offering’’ We pray for you, we pray.

There is also a more simplified adaptation, called cau chu, which 1s popular among certain ritual specialists in northern Quang Nam region: Those who died while working away from home, Those who perished in distant battlefields, Your family knows not where you are, what you do. We call upon you to come to us. You are wandering in the dark. You are frightened by the cry of a rooster. We call upon you to come and receive our offering.

Nguyen Du’s poetic world introduces a multitude of displaced and wandering spirits of the dead, and these beings appear as close companions to the living in their arduous journey of life. This intimacy between

humans and ghosts speaks of a reciprocal relationship of sympathy between the displaced spirits of the dead and the living person in exile. Nguyen Du’s poetic rendering of this relationship reflected his own life history as a mandarin official who was alienated from the court (due to a dynastic change) and the tendency of classical scholars shifting their philosophical interests from Confucian texts to popular spirit beliefs when they were in exile.’® Nguyen Khac Vien suggests in this light that the poetic

power of Nguyen Du derives from its capacity to make “a remarkable synthesis between popular speech and classical literary language.”*”

We can draw from the above discussion that the moral identity of ghosts is a variable, relational phenomenon: they can move from one end of a moral symbolic spectrum to the other depending on our point of view. Wolf was perplexed by the shifting identity of ghosts: his informants in a Taiwanese village clearly separated ancestors and ghosts when

Wolf asked them about their religious beliefs, so the anthropologist writes, “The dead at one end of the continuum [of ritual obligation] are true ancestors; the dead at the other are almost ghosts.””” However, Wolf

Death in the street 89 noticed also that in the villagers’ daily life these two conceptually opposite categories of the dead were interchangeable statuses. As an example for the latter, he introduces the episode of an apparition. ‘The man who saw the apparition in the village field believed that the ghost was the spirit of the

ancestor for the family across the field. The day after the incident was the death-day anniversary for this ancestor, according to the villager, so the ghost was traveling to join the feast. Based on this incident and other related events, Wolf introduces his widely cited statement about a ghost’s

shifting identity: “One man’s ancestor is another man’s ghost.””’ The spirit was a ghost for the village man, whereas the same spirit would stand

as an ancestor when it reached the destination of the commemorative ritual. The social identity of the dead is not a fixed condition but varies according to the position of the observer. Wolf does not further engage with the above perspectivist question in the moral identity of the dead, but we can deduce from his finding the following conclusion.** When people are at home with the memory of their ancestors, ghosts appear as strangers to their perceived order of life. This is a version of the world from a particular vision. In this perspective, the place of ancestors confronts the world of displaced spirits of the dead

as its contrasting background, thereby creating the impression of an ordered social existence surrounded by and militating against the anarchy

of chaotic relations. Thus, it is argued that in Madagascar “there is no worse nightmare than that one’s body will be lost .. . ‘Bad’ death occurs at the wrong place, away from the ancestral shrines to which the deceased’s

soul cannot therefore easily return.””’ For these souls of “bad death” displaced from home, according to Robert Hertz, “death will be eternal, because society will always maintain towards these accursed individuals the attitude of exclusion.”** Displaced out of the domain of domestic security, however, people may make a different conceptual relationship with ghosts. When they are in exile or become themselves the subject of what the philosopher Edward Casey calls “dwelling-as-wandering” as

against “dwelling-as-residing,” furthermore, the moral imagination about displaced spirits of the dead can change accordingly.~ In this situation, which constitutes the background of Nguyen Du’s poetic world, ghosts are no longer strangers to the order of social life (ritually

in unity with ancestral spirits) but become a mirror for the worldly existence in exile. Life in displacement makes different association with

ghosts from life in settlement, and the distance between ghosts and humans may narrow as the history of displacement deepens. It follows from the last point that the social intimacy with ghosts in contemporary Vietnam may have its own historical background. Their

ritual familiarity with the displaced spirits of the dead may be an

90 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam expression of their own intimacy with a history of mass displacement. If this is the case, we can argue that ghosts, as a discursive phenomenon, are constitutive of the Vietnamese self-identity just as ancestors are. If the vital existence of ghosts is another expression of the historical self rather than merely an antithesis of the social self symbolically united with the “society of ancestors,” the ritual interactions with them may take on a completely different meaning.”°

Mother of the home-place Popular Vietnamese songs and poems abound with pieces that celebrate the love of the native land and those that lament life away from home.7’ Some of these songs present ba me que, “mother of the native place,” as the central icon in the poetic rendering of homesickness.** A song called “Long me” is immensely popular among the generation of Vietnamese who experienced the war as young adults. In today’s increasingly popular Karaoke practices, many Vietnamese consider that singing this song 1s almost an imperative. Mother’s feelings are as expansive as the Pacific Ocean. Her love is as passionate as a gentle stream. The poems she sings make children sleep Like the whispers of the rice plants When they ripen on a sunny afternoon. Full moon shines on Mother For her love is like a full moon. Her feelings are like the wind That blows gently on the surface of a pond. Rainy or sunny day, day and night Mother lives with her children’s cries.

Her skinny body and her white hairs had one purpose The purpose to see her children grow up peacefully Children never forget their mother They never forget mother’s work.

When I first heard this song in one of the after-work Karaoke gatherings among a group of factory workers, the screen of the monitor showed the sad face an old woman, exposed to the sunlight and surrounded by her bamboo hut and her countryside. The woman was motionless, her eyes

fixed to the road beyond the village gate, missing and waiting for her children who were away from her land. Her daughter was humming a song to the woman while she combed her white hair, but the mother’s empty eyes and anxious look did not respond to the pleasure of combing.

Death in the street 91 ‘The workers told me that they never missed singing this song at least once

during their regular gatherings and that they always sang it in company with another song called “Ba me que.” These two songs were inseparable, according to them, as if they were singing to each other. In the song “Ba me que,” the screen showed that children rather than mother were gazing desperately at the village gate. These children are, the song goes, as happy as a flock of healthy chicks set free in a lush green vegetable garden. Mother has gone to the market. She will be back soon. On the screen, her agile body was almost running with the desire to see her flock of children in her green garden. Perhaps she had spent a few coins to buy dry fruits for them, the song says. Unlike the image of mother in “Long me,” that in “Ba me que” was young and working diligently in her vegetable garden. Children were running, playing hide-and-seek, and mother in “Ba me que” looked proud as she watched them playing. She did not have the air of “Long me”’s sorrowful yearning. She laughed, beat the harvested rice, and sang the joy of life. “Long me” translates literally to “mother’s intestines,” and it points to the popular idea, according to the workers, that when you miss someone so dearly, you feel the pain of missing that person with the aching intestines. Some people believe that this song cannot be properly sung without the feeling of bao hieu or filial piety. “Long me” is also popular among the first generation of Vietnamese emigrants in Europe and North America. Emigrant Vietnamese communities in the West organize public festivals for the lunar New Year, and these important events rarely end without

song parties. Some Vietnamese emigrants send to their mothers in Vietnam as part of their New Year gift the recordings of these events in which songs, poems, and narratives praise the mother’s endurance and children’s loyalty. In this context, the maternal love, which is as big as the Pacific Ocean, takes on a near-literal meaning. The frightening sea journey that many Vietnamese emigrants endured on their escape from their

homeland affirms “Long me”’s timeless truth for them. In a taperecorded greeting from Montreal sent to a family in Da Nang, the message says, More than any song we know of, Mother, this song speaks our heart. We gather and sing this song. Then, we see you in our eyes. Your children greet you, kowtow to the shrine you Keep, and turn your nourishment to the strength for the family’s prosperity. Bodies away, our thoughts are with you.

Both “Long me” and “Ba me que” originated from the period of armed

anti-colonial resistance. During the French War, homecoming was a powerful motive for many young patriotic volunteers and songs were a powerful instrument for their solidarity.*” The home they longed for was

92 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam often an idealized domestic life of childhood. At the center of this fantastical domestic peace, depicted in the songs and poems of the Vietnamese

youth at war, there stood “mother of the home-place” (ba me que) as shown in the song with the same title. The soldiers sang their yearning for their native place, as shown in the song “Long me,” in terms of the place’s yearning for their return. In this reflexive undertaking of the mobilized mass, the native place, or the “home-place” as Markus Schlecker calls it,

! was typically personified by the confident, protective, hard-working mother in a rural home.””

Homesickness , In the continuing field of mass mobilization, however, there rose another motherhood that was as crucial as ba me que in the psychology of war.

Surrogate motherhood was a widespread phenomenon. During the American War, Hanoi’s war plan depended extensively on popular sup-

port which in turn relied on the success of the strategy, “children of people” or “combat mother.”°! Under this strategy, each southern rural village was to adopt a unit of young freedom fighters from the north. As their mothers in real life would, it was believed natural that this surrogate

mother village should feed and protect these adopted children. The revolutionary song, “Me dao ham” (Mothers dig tunnels), celebrates this wartime meta-kinship. In the song, village mothers are digging underground tunnels for their freedom-fighting children. Caring about the children’s lives more than hers, the tunnel-digging mother ignores the threat of carpet-bombing and forgets to rest at night. In another song, the old village mother lost her only son to the war. She prepares tea and boiled

potatoes every night, realizing each time she does this that she has no child who can enjoy her food. The song speaks of the sorrow of the mother seated next to the hearth, the smoke from which is like incense smoke that bemoans the dead son. Then it urges: “She misses her boy, but now she has a village-full of adopted sons to look after. Oh my friends, let us finish our cups of tea and go to visit the old mother.”°* These songs

do not express it, but the “Children of People” strategy frustrated and angered the enemy troops and germinated the seeds of massive, indiscriminate civilian killing. In return for this adoption that may cost the lives of the foster parents, Hanoi adopted a number of revolutionary “orphan”

children from central and southern Vietnam. The politically committed adolescents from this region became “students from the south” (hoc sinh mien nam), and they were bred and educated by the nurturing revolutionary motherland of North Vietnam.*’? When they returned after the war, they were expected to show an unchanging loyalty to the northern

Death in the street 93 political authority which fostered them by following its advice and chal-

lenging the idiosyncratic political structure back in their southern

homelands. |

At the time of the American War, the communist authority banned some of the songs from the earlier period of anti-colonial resistance among the rank-and-file, and this included “Long me.” It happened that the song’s author, having been a patriot during the anticolonial struggle, took an antiwar position and portrayed the war as a national tragedy. The same fate fell upon the composer’s other powerful piece, “Chin si vo danh” (Unknown soldiers), introduced earlier. During the Vietnam—American War, songs were a powerful political and military instrument for both sides of the conflict. Both the Vietnamese revolutionary authority and some American strategists of counterinsurgency warfare understood the importance of folksongs in disseminating political ideals and mobilizing popular support for them.** However, the commu-

nist fighters and their antagonists tended to be entertained by different musical genres. The former was encouraged to sing fast-tempo and highpitched songs about their daily struggles and hopes for the nation. Among the Saigon soldiers, by contrast, nostalgic songs about home and sorrowful, self-pitying songs about displacement were popular. Whereas these

soldiers had their own corpus of patriotic songs and military marching songs, they preferred in private the homesick songs about their mothers, water buffalo and the village trees they used to climb in childhood. These

soldiers were far removed from their home villages, in contrast to the guerrilla fighters on the other side, who were operating mostly in their home regions. A musician in Da Nang and former South Vietnamese soldier who worked jointly with American forces told me that he was very impressed by the depth of the Deep South Blues he heard from American comrades. According to him, some talented soldiers began adapting the

undulating melancholic blues and soul songs into their Vietnamese rhymes. A former guerrilla fighter told me about the unusual circumstances in which he heard “Long me.” In the spring of 1967, this man was living in a

solitary tunnel near an enemy base within the wider parameter of Da Nang. This sandy area had undergone a massive land clearance by herbicides in previous years. In this wasteland, the guerrilla built an underground shelter near a lone coconut tree. Frequently, this coconut tree had visitors in the early evening. Three Saigon soldiers gathered underneath the tree, where they shared a cigarette, dried fish, talked, and sang in turn. One of them had an exceptionally beautiful voice; he sang “Long me” in his southern accent. When he sang, the other two sometimes sobbed. The soldiers spoke about the destruction of

94 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam their home village, the death of their beloved, and their constant feeling of

homesickness. Sometimes, they fantasized and conspired to desert. When these young soldiers stopped visiting the tree, one day the guerrilla realized how much he had enjoyed their songs. He started to replicate the tune in his head in his perpetually dark subterranean residence. After a while, he also succumbed to homesickness, he said. He told me that if you were homesick there was no better cure for it than to sing the same song repeatedly, and that if you were carried away by homesickness, war and

struggle could suddenly become meaningless. For weeks, the guerrilla failed to perform properly his nightly reconnaissance duty. Instead, he sat

on his empty US Army ammunitions box, which he used for a toilet, singing the same song over and over again and sobbing in silence. Local co so mother activists, who operated within the complex covert revolutionary network organizations that we saw in the last chapter, capitalized on this homesickness of the Saigon soldiers. Many of these originally peasant boys adopted a local woman as a substitute mother. A woman from Cam Re was managing a makeshift noodle bar in the late 1960s. She smuggled out seventeen South Vietnamese soldiers in 1971 alone, back to their homelands in the My Tho and Can Tho areas of the Mekong Delta. Desertion of this type was more frequent between 1955 and 1965, accounting for more than 70 percent of the ARVN’s total manpower losses, which subsided during the following decade, hence becoming a relatively less critical problem for the administration.*’ According to Robert Brigham, the improvement was due to the fact that during the last ten years of the war (1965-75), the families of ARVN soldiers followed the army and lived

close to military base camp, due to the increasing chaos in their rural homeland.*° Part of the desertion was orchestrated by a tightly organized revolutionary activity based on the collaboration of various covert network organizations. Different niches of the network prepared railway tickets, civilian clothing, false identification cards, and food for the AWOL. Some of these young soldiers knew about the political identity of their adoptive mother, but the bond was often too strong to surrender to the pressure from the opposite political force against treason. For the co so mothers too, their adoptive kinship with the enemy soldiers often went beyond the strategic parameter of their covert activities. ‘They were keen on obtaining information from their adopted children about the enemy’s military movements. But they also knew how to censor part of this information before it reached the revolutionary headquarters in order not to jeopardize the safety of their adopted children. When the soldiers went to battle, the Cam Re mother activists prayed for the safety of their adopted children at the Tiger Temple or the coastal Whale Temple on the opposite side of the community.

Death in the street 95 When they did so, their prayer offerings were often on behalf of their children fighting on “this side,” the revolutionary side, as well as their other children working on “that side,” the American side. It was common among these mothers to have their birth children fighting on both sides. The revolutionary side generally refrained from recruiting all the family’s male children in order to allow the family unit a minimal genealogical continuity; whereas the recruitment strategy of the US—Saigon administration did not have such a protective policy for the “family seeds.” As a result, like the mother of the stonemason family introduced earlier (chapter 3), many mothers in this region had their elder children martyred for the revolutionary war and their younger ones killed in action on the opposite side of the battlefield. ‘The co so mothers prayed to their ancestors for the

safe return of their birth children and went to the animist temples mentioned above, and sometimes to the Buddhist pagoda further away, to pray for the safety of all their children, including their adopted ones. As a result, the old record book kept in the Tiger Temple of Cam Re, which lists donations and the names for whom the donations were made, shows the names of young people killed on both sides of the war as well as the names of those who people remember were from distant places. An interesting aspect of the type of wartime desertion described above is that a much smaller number of Saigon soldiers deserted to the opposite side than deserted away from both sides. Desertions to the revolutionary side did take place, sometimes in a group, and with or without assistance from mother activists. Desertions by foreign soldiers especially, although many alleged cases remain very dubious, generated immense publicity along the frontier. In most cases, however, the desertions were made in

the hope of returning to the homeland. The adoptive co so mothers contributed to this process of exodus in psychological as well as practical terms. The idea of persuading their son-like young men to change sides and continue fighting was not pursued faithfully by these mother activists, although this was one of the main objectives of their activity and was a priority in the communiqués they received from the cadre leaders. Being loyal to each urban revolutionary cell that normally consisted of three to five activists, as discussed earlier (chapter 4), the co so mother activists

also created a loyalty of their own across the cells and beyond. If she pushed her “children” to the other side of the front too hard, the mother activist risked her own life by weakening the invisible, moral shield provided by other village women who otherwise would have ignored and concealed her identity. Their maternal feelings were a powerful weapon against the enemy forces; yet this weapon, being fundamentally constructive, not destructive, was not entirely under the control of the revolutionary forces either.*’ As the former mother activist mentioned

96 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam above put it, she lived through solitary wartime hardship with the singular joy of watching the young Saigon soldiers eating her noodles, imagining with every soup bowl they emptied that someone in the wide world was feeding her own hungry children. The joyous domestic life of “Ba me que” and the anxious emptiness of “Long me” could therefore coexist precariously within the brutal reality of war, and the adoptive wartime kinship crystallized the symbolic fusion of these two opposite modalities of motherhood. Being an odd relationship of formal enemies, the fictive ties remained as strong as a real blood

relationship throughout the war. The young soldier’s successful desertion, for these co so women, strengthened the hope that their own children in other distant lands might return home alive. It is understandable then why out of all the other political activities they anxiously performed, the mother activists ran the organization of adoption and desertion with the

greatest care and dedication. For these women, this activity not only weakened the enemy’s morale and strength; it also strengthened their belief that their love for the adopted soldiers would somehow keep their own children loved and protected by unknown mothers in an unknown battlefield. This belief in distant reciprocal actions very often turned out to be a false hope, but no amount of political violence and surveillance was powerful enough to break entirely the intensity of this hope.

Distant reciprocity “Mother of the home-place” is an important element in Vietnamese religious tradition as well as in their popular music. The communal ancestral temple in central Vietnam typically consists of two separate built structures. On one side, there is the house of worship within which people periodically gather to commemorate their ancestors and discuss community affairs. On the opposite side of this communal house (dinh) or family ancestral temple (ha tho toc), there is usually a small external shrine, which in some places may be nominally dedicated to “the spirit of the land” (tho than).°® People offer to this external shrine the first fruits of the harvest, thanking the spirit of the land for the land’s fertility, but today they also frequently use the place to make routine offerings to wandering spirits. Dong Vinh suggests that the tradition of worshiping the terrestrial deity of fertility, in the central region, was influenced by the pre-Viet indigenous cult of “the mother goddess of the land” (poh nagar of the Cham civilization), which he argues can in turn be traced to the goddess Siva of

Indic origin.*? It remains unclear how exactly the matriarchal social organization and arguably matrifocal worldview of the ancient Cham inhabitants influenced the predominantly patrilineal organization and

Death in the street 97 cult of ancestors elaborated by the incoming Viet settlers. According to Ngo Duc Thinh, the worship of mother goddesses (Dao Mau) is found among all the diverse ethnic populations of Vietnam and it should be traced to prehistoric animistic beliefs in nature spirits.*? However, it is interesting to note that Philip Taylor’s recent ethnography of a popular cult movement in a southern region highlights the efficacy of maternal iconicity in mobilizing large and diverse groups of followers.** It is also instructive that the scholars working on early Vietnamese history of cultural contacts tend to associate “the cult of Holy Mothers” (the locally diverse horizons of belief in female maternal deities) with the openness of popular Vietnamese beliefs to diverse, non-ancestral, and place-related

spiritual entities.** Don Lam argues in this regard, “[the Vietnamese] cult of deities is an open system marked by some democracy. It admits both female and male divinities, young and old, of aristocratic or plebeian origin, even the souls of beggars, thieves and enemy soldiers falling in battle in our country.”** Thien Do describes how the spiritual remains of violent death or chet oan (grievous death, or unjust death) from diverse

historical backgrounds, in the religious tradition of southern Vietnam, can take on great magical efficacy when they are enshrined and deified. He contrasts this pluralist composition of diffused popular religious tradition (dan phong) with the uniform composition of ancestor worship centered on the village dinh (communal house), and explains this concentric organization consisting of interior ancestor worship and exterior spirit worship as the “gendered poetics of space.”**

Most notably, Keith Taylor has written an engrossing analysis of Vietnamese historiography in a broadly similar light where he emphasizes the local horizons of intercultural fusion and related “fluid surface of mass culture” in contrast to the imagined genealogical depth and homogeneity of Confucian elite culture. Exploring what he calls “surface orientations in Vietnam,” Taylor supports the notion of “cosmopolitan vernacular” —

the idea that certain cosmopolitan ethos is embedded in the historical formation of a local traditional Vietnamese culture.*? Hy Van Luong advances a similar scheme of ideas with reference to Vietnamese kinship terminology. He proposes that Vietnamese kinship and worldview are based on an exclusive genealogical ideology based on patrilineal descent and, at

once, on a broad, open bilateral relatedness. Thus the notion of ho and toc (family or lineage) may mean the ancestral line of a patrilineage or/ and can refer to the wider web of relations that include the collateral and affinal relatives of both parents.*° Luong concludes that the coexistence and contrast of the spatially bound center and the spatially unbound periphery constitute the “fundamental parameters” of the Vietnamese worldview.*’ For our discussion, these observations are relevant for

98 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam bringing to light the dual structure of the commemorative architecture mentioned above, consisting of the house of ancestors inside and the external shrine for ghosts outside. When people gather in the communal house to commemorate the founding ancestors of their community, their collective rite is structurally identical to the domestic rite. ‘They listen to the recitation of the history of

the first settlement, kowtow to the ancestral shrine in a coordinated motion, and then later walk to the external shrine and make individual offerings on behalf of ghosts. On the house side, therefore, the commemorative action is most of all a tribute of gratitude to the original ancestors who have founded a place to settle and passed it down to their descendents. It acknowledges their ancestors’ courage to endure the long journey

from their northern origin many generations back, which relates to the southward exodus of the Viet population from the crowded northern delta region between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the army of Dai Viet (Great Viet) that conquered the central Cham and southern Khmer territories and making fortified villages along the coast of the South China Sea.*® The oratory about migration conducted in collective ancestor worship in southern and central region reinforces a sense

of linear temporal progression, which is also exploited in the official historiography with the idea of “March to the South” (Nam tien) and the related notion of the Vietnamese nation as a deep genealogical unity.*? In an opening speech of an ancestral temple in the environs of Cam Re, the presiding elder said, There are these old words, “The birds have a nest, the people have a place of origin”. By commemorating the first settlers and the ancestors who opened the land on the day of cung gio or tu tao phan mo [ancestral rites or tomb renewals], the descendants reveal the deep past and renew their relationship with the past; this is what our ancestors paid for with their blood and bone.°?

On the side of the external shrine, the equivalent act of worship has a different meaning and intention: it recognizes the presence of alien spirits of the dead in the land (and other forms of animus loci) and shares the produce from the land with these cosmological strangers, who in turn share the realm of the place deity with the settlers of the land. The annual opening ceremony of an ancestral temple in the central region sometimes involves the participation of a ritual specialist popularly called thay cung (“the master of ceremonies”) in the region.?’ On the occasion that the above elder spoke, the invited specialist read, facing the external shrine, his spirit-invitation and spirit-consolation chant, which was a longer version of Nguyen Du’s poem introduced earlier. The chant addressed the seventy-two categories of tragic, displaced death and called upon

Death in the street 99 these diverse, genealogically unrelated spirits of the dead to take part in the ritual event and to benefit from the villagers’ hospitality. Within this two-directional ritual reality, history of displacement 1s present on both sides of the worship. The house-side ancestral spirits

are not native spirits in a strict sense. The genealogical depth that is cumulated in the passage of time may make the distant history of their being strangers to the land irrelevant, but the ritual oratory reawakens the

distant history each time it celebrates the virtue of the original settlerancestors. Turning to the opposite side with this in mind, the places where people associate with displaced spirits appear differently to us. Rather than a site for the identities that are antithetical to the spirit of the place and irrelevant for the social structure as Durkheim suggests (see chapter 1), these places take on the appearance of being sites in which the

displaced spirits of the dead are merged with a truly indigenous, pregenealogical spirit of the land. ‘The shared being-in-place between the two

radically different identities demonstrates that a true local root is not incompatible with the uprooted existence and further that the latter 1s in fact constitutive of the former. Bearing in mind this situation that history of displacement is embedded in, not contrary and external to, the constitution of place,’” let us recon-

sider the notion of “death in the street.” As I said, the idea refers to a situation that the dead person’s identity is unknown in one place and his body is missing from another place. So we might say that the unknown and the missing are aspects of the same identity. However, this is the case only in abstract imagining, as Tim Ingold demonstrates in his forceful discussion of the centrality of place in human perception of the environment, when we reduce place to a mere location in abstract space.’ In place-bound social reality, the unknown and the missing are rarely the same identity. When people make incense offerings to the unknown graves or the sites of apparition by unknown identities as Vietnamese villagers regularly do, they do so as part of their ancestral ritual, which may include the commemoration for some of their missing relatives from the war. In this context, the missing and the unknown are included in the same ritual complex but nevertheless conceptually separate. When the MIA missions are led to a remote place and find the body of a missing hero in a shallow unknown grave, this ends the distance between the missing and the unknown. However this remains a remote possibility for most Vietnamese families.

One man’s ghost is another man’s ancestor There is one way to narrow the distance between the unknown and the missing, without the miraculous collapse of the distance in the form of a

100 ‘The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

successful MIA mission and within the very place-bound structure of worship that separates the two identities. In order to grasp it, however, we must move beyond both the Durkheimean scheme of social solidarity and Simmel’s theory of social mobility, and start imagining the possibility

of reuniting societal unity and human mobility and liberty from their bifurcated sociological theoretical traditions. Durkheim shows how society can create itself from within and how this requires inventing the sacred spirit of the place in collective consciousness; Simmel shows

how individuals can free themselves from the given social bondage and how mobility makes this possible (see chapter 7).?* However their schemes do not show how unity and mobility can coexist within a single social field, nor do they pay attention to the ways in which human

actors strive to reconcile the spirit of the place with the history of displacement. When Vietnamese villagers make prayers towards the milieu of wandering ghosts with their hands holding the fuming incense, they usually

do this alone. This is the case both in the domestic context and in the wider communal settings. In the domestic arena, relatives kowtow to the ancestral shrine together and they later walk to the outside shrine separately to repeat the action on behalf of ghosts. On some specific occasions the order of the ritual may be reversed so that individuals offer prayers to the ghost shrine before they assemble in the interior for the ancestral rite. Even if the prayers move in a group between the two sides of the ritual complex as in the opening ceremony of the communal house and their ritual performance for ghosts thus appears to be a collective action, these actions are in actuality separate individual actions that happen to take place simultaneously. Rituals for ancestors are performed according to the order of seniority and gender, whereas such prescribed social order is absent from ritual interactions with ghosts. ‘The lone commemorators on the street side are, however, not entirely alone either. People prepare a meal for ghosts and pray for them in tacit

knowledge that many others in near and remote places would do the same. At this moment, their multiplied, synchronous movement of wor-

ship is both an isolated individual practice and an act of unity. The individual practice is necessary to distinguish the ritual form from the collective worship of ancestors. The act of unity is necessary to relate one rite to many other like isolated events. Seen as an individual practice, the

ritual is for wandering ghosts, the stranger in the world of the dead. Imagined as part of an act of unity, the rite is not necessarily for ghosts but rather for someone else’s ancestors; that is, the memory of kinship that happens to have been displaced from their social basis. Within this multiplicity of individuated actions, the association with the stranger is

Death 1n the street 101 also a form of kinship practice (done in the hands of someone else) and it creates a form of social solidarity (beyond the given social boundary). The practice of dwelling in harmony with displaced strangers can be a way of making kinship practices go beyond the boundary of the bounded

place. Each place-bound human action of making association with strangers makes a reciprocal relationship with the equivalent actions taking place in distant places, and participates in making an imaginary trans-local network of practical kinship based on what Winter calls “the bond of bereavement.” This practice of making human kinship, whose scale is local and global at once, saved many displaced lives during the war, and after the war, it consoles many lives in displacement who did not survive the war. Raising the last point, however, I am not claiming that the ritual actors

in Vietnam, in making their customary interaction with the displaced spirits of the dead, are conscious of the aspect of reciprocal kinship practice embedded in their individuated actions, or the parallax in the category of death that Wolf describes as “one man’s ancestor is another man’s ghost.”°° Their actions take place within the given structure of values that contrasts the memory of kinship to the milieu of anonymous outsiders. When I presented an earlier version of this chapter to a group of specialists in comparative religion, one of their questions was if the distant reciprocal aspect of the ritual for ghosts should belong to an unconscious dimension of religious experience. Exploring the symbolism of homesick-

ness in the Cuna healing rituals of Panama, Michael Taussig indeed invokes Freud’s notion of place and home: The unhemlich [uncanny] place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning .. . In this case too, then, the unhezmlich is what was once heimlich, familiar; the prefix un is the token of repression.” 7

Rather, my argument is that two different senses of home emerge from the two-sided ritual action. Ghosts are outsiders to the familiar idealized home when people are identified with the side of their ancestral memory

that appropriates the place to an exclusive home for the genealogical unity,’° whereas they become insiders to deeper originality of the place once people move away from their genealogically instituted home toward the wider horizon of the dwelling place, of which the genealogical home is

only a part. Ghosts constitute das unheimlich in the former; they are constitutive of the spirit of the Hezm in the latter. If the Vietnamese cult of spirits constitutes an “open” and “democratic” system as Don Lam claims, I would argue that the parallel existence of the enclosed, genealogically cultivated native place, on the one hand, and, on

102 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

the other, the unbound, non-genealogical radical alternative and a broader, generative sense of home-place are at the heart of this democratic religiosity.°” The parallel existence is manifested most prominently in the two-way ritual practice that encompasses the morally separate milieus of inside and outside. Furthermore, the combination of the dual concentric structure and the two-way, ambidextrous practice not only indicates an open and inclusive normative horizon but also involves the capacity to transform the status of strangers. Referring to Simmel’s essay on strangers, Meyer Fortes writes of experiencing the passage of his changing statuses in relation to the Tallensi villagers in northern Ghana with whom he lived and worked in the 1930s: from the status of saan (stranger in Tallensi) to that of a guest in the first phase of residence and then from a guest to a status akin to mabi (kinsmen).°° This evolution of relational identity, according to Simmel, manifests a symbol of life — a particular kind of sociability that

unfolds not in a self-regulating form “but only in the vitality of real individuals, in their sensitivities and attractions, in the fullness of their impulses and convictions.”°’ Fortes’ experience and Simmel’s “symbol of life” can shed light on some of the social dramas in Vietnam arising from intimate interactions between humans and ghosts. In the next chapter, we

turn to how displaced spirits of the dead may transform into powerful kindred spirits of a place through vigorous, generative interactions with the living inhabitants. These dramas of symbolic transformation illustrate the power of human action and imagination to transform the tragic history of mass displacement into a new, vital history of the dwelling place.

6 ‘Transforming ghosts

Ghosts in Vietnam do not always remain as such. Our earlier discussion

dealt with two main social bases, the state and the family, on which displaced war dead may transcend the condition of “death in the street.” Each institution has strived to account for the missing bodies of the dead from home burial and has an established ritual system to account for their memories. Whereas their mortuary and commemorative systems commonly divide the identity of the dead into two collective units between those who are ideologically related to the institution and those who are

not, they nevertheless manifest different ideologies and mechanisms of exclusion, based on genealogical ideology for the family and political ideology for the state. The institution of kinship memory may therefore

accommodate identities excluded from the state institution of commemoration. Furthermore, we saw that there is a structural difference between the two ritual systems: the principle of concentric dualism in the ritual of kinship memory, consisting of the centrality of ancestors and the

periphery of ghosts, in contrast to the unilateral, centrist principle in political hero worship that negates the existence of peripheral memory altogether. The previous chapter explored another dimension of relatedness in the

structure and practice of kinship memory. There I argued that ritual interaction with ghosts takes on a different meaning if we consider it in relation to other like actions rather than in opposition to interaction with ancestors. In the scheme of symbolic opposition, the ritual actions for ghosts set the chaotic milieu of categorical strangers against the ordered community of kinship, whereas the same action, seen within the historical background of generalized mass displacement and the destruction of human lives, has a tacit dimension of being an alternative kinship practice. hat is, one group interacts with other people’s displaced memory of kinship in anticipation of the imaginary reciprocal relationship with someone else’s equivalent actions on behalf of their displaced kinship memory elsewhere. This aspect of ritual relationship with ghosts, which goes

beyond the given conceptual structure of opposition to ancestral 103

104 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

memory, emerges forcefully in the dramas about transforming ghosts, which we turn to in this chapter. The place of ancestors and that of heroes are not the only possible destinations for war ghosts in Vietnam. They can turn into than, obtain the referential status of tzen and become “auspiciously powerful” (inh) guardian spirits for a community or an individual with whom they have no given connections. In this particular trajectory of a categorical outsider transforming into a powerful kindred spirit, stories of which abound 1n Vietnamese communities, the ghost’s grievous experience in displacement develops into a radical devotion to its adoptive home. The “home” in this context no longer sets itself conceptually against the “street,” but rather

becomes a place whose spirituality is permeable with the history of displacement.

The taste of phantom salt If you have had the opportunity to talk to what people refer to as than in the Quang Nam — Da Nang region, you might remember that at the end of the conversation the spirit sometimes offers a glass of water to you. No one knows exactly why, but this water, ordinary water from an ordinary well, should taste moderately salty. In disbelief, you might serve yourself another glass of water from the same jug, only to find the water now tastes normal and fresh. This somewhat unsettling experience of salty water does not happen to everyone, or every time. If you have what is known to be “heavy soul” (mang via), it is less likely that you will taste salt in the

unsalted water. Should you have the opposite “light soul” (nghe via), however, it will be a shock and disappointment to the people who are gathered for the seance if the water tastes normal. I drank gallons of this spirit water in the backwaters of Vietnam and recognized sodium chloride only a few times. Hence, people who knew me began to subscribe to the view that I must have a very heavy soul that required some serious dieting. Heaviness of soul in institutional Buddhism signifies an excessive karmic

burden whose origin stretches back through several cycles of life. However, fortunately for me, in popular religious discourse heavy soul does not have this specifically negative meaning. More than anything

else, lightness of soul speaks of the soul’s communicability with other souls. My informants knew that I was doing research on ghosts, particularly the ghosts of the Vietnam—American War and especially the many

war ghosts who were vigorously transforming into trans-local deities rather than the nation’s heroes or family ancestors. Some of them found it incredible that a student of ghosts should be so incompetent in sensing the taste of spirits.

Transforming ghosts 105 The Vietnamese phantom salt raises some serious questions about senses and sensibility, and subjective experience and objective knowledge. How is it that the water from the village well can taste like diluted

seawater? For some and not for others? Is it my body or my soul that recognizes the salt? Why does it have to be salty rather than sweet or bitter, for instance? How is it that some people believe that the spiritsalted water can cure small physical pains and mental agonies? If I cannot sense the salty water when others can, who has the problem, them or me? I explored these questions during my research visits to central Vietnam. I do not have a reasonable answer for any of the questions yet; instead, the

experience of phantom salt led me to other events and stories, and my thirst for being able to taste like others opened a way of understanding these events and stories in a new light. Many of these events were related

to commemorating the past, facing up to the pressing problems of the present, and desiring a specific vision of the future to become real — all simultaneously and interactively. The phantom salt is an established idea in Vietnamese historical imag-

ination. One of their most enduring historical proverbs relates to the ingestion of salt. People say, “Ancestors ate too much salt, descendants desire water,” when they are impatient to explain an event within a familiar historical plot.’ True human desires, in this plot, are not those of an isolated individual. It is the individual who feels the desire, whereas the origin of the desire, like the spirit’s phantom salt, may be with someone else, for it is in the presence of this other that the water becomes salty. The desire to remember, likewise, can be a desire that rises somewhere between the past and the present and something that is shared between the remembering self and the remembered other. In Beyond good and evil,

Nietzsche wrote, “A thought comes when ‘it’? wants to and not when ‘I’ want; thus it is a falsification to say: the subject ‘I’ is the condition for the predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but there is ... no immediate certainty that this ‘it’ is just that famous old ‘I.’”” The self’s incomplete autonomy

and the other’s incomplete passivity are perhaps implicit in any form of commemoration and social exchange.* The experience of the phantom salt makes the intersubjective nature of remembering somatically clear.

The thirst of the dead is a material phenomenon. The human soul in traditional Vietnamese understanding consists of both the spiritual soul of hon and the material soul of via. Because of this duality, the spirit of the dead can feel cold or hungry through its material soul and transform this sensation to self-pity or anger through its spiritual counterpart. Likewise,

the experience of bodily pains, in the case of a violent war death, can remain in the material soul of the dead and its spiritual counterpart may

106 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam try to think of ways to relieve the pain. These pains are conceptually real,

irrespective of the spiritual soul’s awareness of whether the death the body experienced was for a good cause or not. The spiritual soul consists of three elements whereas the material soul is made up of seven elements for male and nine for female.* The idea of the spiritual soul is close to that

of “pure reason” in Platonic philosophical tradition; it can think and cognize independently from sentiments and bodily desires. Although it is coupled with the material counterpart, the spiritual soul is superior and leads its lower partner to sensible ways. For the living, the spiritual soul is universal and thus a facet of humanity rather than personality, whereas the material soul is specific through different combinations of its multiple elements and configures the moral person and his or her unique personality. It is the material soul that can feel hunger or thirst and anger or fear, and it is through this that the human soul can be favorable (wza lanh) or wicked (via du).? The reason why ghosts in Vietnam are human-like figures is precisely that the dead in their belief can feel and sense through their material soul as much as they can think and imagine through their spiritual one. The picture is not quite so simple, however, for it involves a kind of inversion of order, or what Roy Wagner calls figure-ground reversal, in the Vietnamese worldview of transition to death.° After death, in my understanding of popular Vietnamese conception, the spiritual soul 1s not necessarily a human universal but takes on traits of specific identity. Likewise, the material soul of the dead is not individually particular but takes on general and universal traits. Hence, it becomes possible that the tutelary spirit of Cam Re’s Whale Temple, allegedly being angry at the offense caused by the presence of a menstruating woman during the rite, can express his indignation in the form of drowning an innocent fishing family instead of the culpable outside visitor. In this incident, the whale’s spiritual soul does not think rationally, but thinks communally and mate, rially, that is, distinctly as we the living feel through our material soul. For the deity of whale in a fishing community, the community is its material

base. A soldier ghost who is on his magical journey home does not normally create problems for the elders and those of the older generation

within his surviving family; the body to which his spirit imports its material soul in the form of an illness is typically his younger sibling or from the younger generation. In this case, the spirit’s material soul can communicate with someone else’s equivalent and is thus as universal as our rationality is, with its cognitive and linguistic faculties, whereas the spiritual soul thinks particularly and culturally, that is, like a man who knows the Confucian ethics and order of seniority. So, we can tentatively

conclude that the living and the dead in the traditional Vietnamese

‘Transforming ghosts 107 worldview are alike on the question of what constitutes the soul and different on the question of how it is constituted. Léopold Cadiére calls hon and via the superior and the inferior principles of vitality.’ He describes how both vital life principles do not entirely

disappear on death in Vietnamese perception. Some vital forces are placed and settled; others are let loose without a place on which to anchor. Some are honored and well treated; others despised, unwanted and feared. How to relate to these multiple spirits that are recognized in various forms and modes of afterlife, according to Cadiére, is central to Vietnamese religious imagination and moral life.® The idea of xac is instructive for thinking about these forms of afterlife. Wagner writes with reference to the Daribi in New Guinea: Illness, whether mental or physical, is in other words a metaphor of life through death and death through life: to the degree that a person suffers loss of faculties, the person is “dead,” and to that same degree the person’s symptom is “alive.” Ghosts “live” through the persons they possess, and their victims, in the same measure, “die” through them.”

The Vietnamese concept of xac refers to a similar metaphoric fusion of

life and death. This word, pronounced “sak” in rapidly rising tone, literally means corpse. It can also refer to the same condition, but seen from the opposite perspective, in which the vital principles of life become free of their physical vessel and hence more unpredictable. The idea of xac

in this second sense can signify the condition of the human body in its fullest and most radical commemorative act. When the spirit enters someone’s body and starts speaking and making gestures via the body, the Vietnamese in the Quang Nam region call this particular state of affairs xac or nhap xac, which means in this context, “the spirit entering the body” or “lending the body to the spirit.” When the spirit ends the

conversation and leaves the body, the act is called xuat xac, to exit from the body. If the body belongs to a ritual specialist, who has regularly

had specified spirits imported to his or her body, this person can be named xac or nhap xac, meaning in this case “a person who lends his or her body to spirits.”

The condition and status of nhap xac take on other better known expressions such as len dong (the spirits “ride on the body of the medium”), and it is argued that the stated purpose of this particular practice is “to rescue the dead and to save the living.” ’° The condition of “body-lending” can also take many other less esoteric forms. When the spirit of an unknown war dead joins the body of a small boy and moves the pointer on the necromantic device of con co via the boy’s index finger, the

boy and the spirit together become xac. When the police officer in the My

108 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Lai area woke up from his siesta at Tien An, the Stamp of Heaven Hill, and shocked the Saigon tourists by speaking in the tongue of Huynh Thuc Khang, a famous patriot and agitator against the French, the officer was xac during that quarter of an hour.’* Even winning the lottery can make you xac. When a woman, who has been always unlucky with the lottery, wins a number, her friends may call her “Ba nhap!” to congratulate her that a spirit finally came to help her. In this and other similar situations, the visit of a spirit becomes a key metaphor for pleasant surprises and reception of luck. For the party official introduced earlier who fell ill because of the influence of the angry ghost of his elder brother missing from home burial and commemorative rite, this situation is close to xac albeit a problematic one that requires a work of intervention. If a woman has succumbed to mental problems and is believed to have these problems because of the excessively vital presence of the spirit of a war victim in her body, this woman is never called xac in the idiom of body-lending. In this case, the ghost and the woman have become too closely interwoven

to call their union xac. Entry without exit is not xac, and the spirit’s presence without mobility is alien to the concept.” In this sense, the idea of spirit possession, which the literature of comparative religion often employs to describe similar conditions,’* is everything but what the idea of xac signifies. There is no possession in the practice of body-lending in the sense of owning private property or possessing goods or slaves. This

particular economic notion may have been relevant for some militant proponents of the Enlightenment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe such as John Law, who understood the then widespread phenomenon of haunted houses as the ghosts of the past wrongly claiming their rights of property ownership.'* The body in Vietnamese body-lending is not such a private property. It is rather close to a public place, if we need

an alternative image, such as the English commons or the American public park. It is where various spirits are allowed to gather, but knowing

the rules that nobody owns the place as well as that they must exit the place at a certain moment.

When the spirits enter or ride on the body, the way they enter is indistinguishable for all spirits.’ When they exit from the body, however, they can either simply go out as in xuat or go upwards and ascend as in thang. The Vietnamese spirit beliefs project a hierarchical order among gods, in a moral hierarchy or in a way that reflects the imperial bureauc-

racy of the feudal state.*° Some are promoted along the bureaucratic order, others demoted; some become powerful and famous, others feeble and dispirited.!’ Some rise from an utter destitution of violent war death to turn into gracious mobile fairy-like figures, tzen. Some patriotic historical figures may transform to thanh, as was allegedly the case with Huynh

Transforming ghosts 109 Phung introduced earlier (chapter 3), which in this context may roughly translate to “saint.” Other spirits start from the miserable status of an evil

or monstrous spirit, called guy, to eventually reach the status of an important local deity or guardian spirit, zhan.'® Most of these upwardly

mobile spirits keep the traces of their origin. Hence, a deity with an allegedly monstrous background still eats the food offering with savage table manners, even after a series of promotions, and a goddess with no higher educational background in her historical life, unlike her counterparts from a higher social class background, rarely resorts to the ancient

texts of divination (in the bodily gestures of the medium) when she undertakes to presage the client’s yearly fortune. When they are engaged in ritual actions and make spirit-calling incan-

tations, the Vietnamese refer to ghosts with the relational referential terms of co bac (“aunts and uncles”). They do so in distinction to ong ba (“grandfathers and grandmothers”), which is the appellation for community ancestors and established deities.'? The ghost transforming into a deity may take on a combination of the traits of co bac with those of gods,

as with Co Tien, which will be introduced later. We may say that the personages such as Co Tien are conceptually in the domain of gods but not having entirely left that of ghosts, and their ambivalence in the dual ritual classificatory system of co bac and ong ba can take on particularly imaginative forms in Vietnamese ritual discourse.7°

Lien Hoa The day of full moon in the last lunar month of 1997 was a special day for Lien Hoa (Lotus Flower) and the people in Cam Re who knew about the

spirit of this originally ten-year-old girl from Hue. On that day, Lotus Flower was going to bid farewell to the villagers and leave for a distant place in order to begin her formal education. A few dozen people of Cam Re were invited to the gathering in a family home, where a modest feast had been prepared for the important event. ‘The family’s youngest daughter, Bien, had been in contact with Lotus Flower for the past six years, and this relationship of xac had affected her life considerably. Ever since their first encounter, Bien had periodically spoken in voices other than her own, including the strong Hue dialect of

Lotus Flower. In places she went to in Cam Re and beyond, different ghosts of war borrowed her body to express their personal grievances and histories. More than a dozen families in Cam Re and Its environs discovered their invisible neighbors through Bien, who demonstrated to them

that the duality of am and duong was not a mere abstraction but an immediate material reality between their hardened earthen floor and the

110 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

world just underneath it. Bien eventually became a kind of cognitive archaeologist who could excavate stories out of the sites of hidden death even before the evidence was unearthed, and her body-finding activity contributed to enriching the oral history of the village. Like the professional body-finder Chien Xem Ma of ‘I'am Ky in his earlier career (see chapter 3), Bien never took the initiative in finding a body. She would

simply go about her daily and weekly movements, hit the site of an unknown burial, start representing the dead in trance, and forget every-

thing she said on awakening. |

Bien’s communicative skills with the village ghosts began with her

turbulent friendship with Lotus Flower. She had been brought to a near-death illness because of it, and her family had undergone a great deal of trouble in dealing with the crisis. In that full moon evening, Lotus Flower was to leave her faithful friend for an indefinite period. Bien had

washed her hair in the late afternoon, changed into new clothes, and busied herself with preparations for the evening. Later she was seated on a small stool waiting for Lotus Flower, and her parents were trying to

make room in their modest riverside hut for the interested guests and neighbors.

Bien’s maternal aunt, Ba Huong, was among the visitors. Huong was well known in the village and especially in the marketplace. She had

been a wealthy merchant before the war and worked as a co so (covert civilian revolutionary activist) during the war. She had hidden food and medicines in coffins and smuggled them out to the Vietcong bases

through mock funeral proceedings. It is said that she did not say a word about her communist organizational network during the exceptionally violent interrogations she endured in the Da Nang prison. After the liberation, she tried to adopt some abandoned mixed-race children, fathered by US soldiers or the German medical staff, and clashed violently with the authorities when they took the children away to a special orphanage.” These stories are legendary among the market women, and Bien was very fond of telling her friends about her cop cai (tigress) aunt. That evening, Lotus Flower had conversations with a number of villagers, and handed out paper amulets and offered the phantom salt water to them. This went on for an hour. Then she said that it was time for her

to go, and she looked around and asked whether anyone else had a pressing problem. Ba Huong came forward at that moment and spoke to Lotus Flower: “I hear that you’re leaving us today to pursue your scholarship. I also hear that you write beautiful poetry. You have done enough for us. Now it’s your turn to speak about your heart. Will the young lady leave to us a poem that will remind us of her last day in Cam

Transforming ghosts 111 Re?” Hearing this, Lotus Flower held Huong’s hands in her hands, her eyes in tears, and began to recite the following verse:*” I remember my parents’ worries and their separation, Mother cleaning someone else’s clothes in Hue, Father sitting in the hut cursing his fate and singing his angry songs. I recall mother’s sweet lullabies, father’s trembling mandolin, The thundering explosion of canon that ruined their harmony, And the silent fear that we shared on a bowl of broken rice. In rainy season, I was shivering in cold, In dry season, I was gasping in thirst, The beautiful palm trees of Cam Re reminded me of my native land, The birds of Cam Re sang beautiful songs of the generous heart of its people. Life comes and goes, and comes again. Generous aunts and uncles of Cam Re offered this poor and humble girl the miracle of a new life.

To run after wealth and power, To love self too dearly and only, This way, prison is in us and we’re in that prison. To respect the poor even if we’re wealthy, To love all living beings as if they are myself, This way, the prison door closes behind us and we are free.

Bien turned sixteen in 1991 and worked on the family vegetable plot, selling the produce in the marketplace. In the summer of. this year, she began to suffer severe back pains. She was unable to work in the fields, and soon even routine domestic tasks were too hard for her. Just before her disability set in, Bien worried her parents by repeatedly losing her way

back home. She was caught several times in the early hours, cycling aimlessly around, carrying a brick on the pillote and singing songs the family had never heard of. Bien claimed that she was giving a lift to a young girl once and an old man another time. These troublesome episodes tailed one another until one day in the seventh lunar month of 1991. Immediately after the evening meal, Bien complained that she was feeling cold and her body started shaking violently. She fainted and, on her recovery, spoke in someone else’s voice with a strong Hue accent. Bien’s father, a respected farmer and former partisan fighter, confronted the strange voice. Below is his recollection of the day: FATHER: Who are you? LOTUS FLOWER: My name is Lotus Flower. My family is from Hue. I lived in the

land upstream of Cam Re. I, with my little brother, gathered firewood in the forest and driftwood from the river.

112 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam FATHER: Why are you here with my daughter? What is your intention? LOTUS FLOWER: I’m living in your vegetable plot. You planted onions on my body.

I don’t like their smell. FATHER: I[f that’s true, I apologize to you for our intrusion. But I believe we are unrelated. It is wrong to harm my daughter the way you do, no matter what grievance you might have personally. LOTUS FLOWER: Yes, Uncle, you’re right. I have a long story to tell, if you’d kindly

care to listen.

The ghost reappeared three days later. This time, Bien’s father had prepared an incense burner and sticks, and he lit them when he saw his daughter shivering. What Bien’s family heard that evening was a wellcrafted life history of a young girl from the 1960s. Lotus Flower was born in the suburb of Hue, as the eldest daughter of a poor family. Her mother was a peasant and her father a charcoal-maker and talented musician. After her mother’s death in child-birth, her father took to alcohol and became increasingly neglectful and abusive. From the age of six, she worked as the breadwinner for the family, collecting and selling firewood and begging in the village. This lifestyle continued after the family escaped the escalating violence of the war and settled in an

abandoned, isolated hut upstream from Cam Re. On November 24, 1967, Lotus Flower was carrying a large bundle of driftwood along the riverbank. Her back was aching under its weight, and she felt a piercing pain in her spine. She lost her balance and fell into the river. Her drowned corpse was carried away by the current of the flooded river and lodged in the mud of the Cam Re riverbank. Immediately after having told this story, Lotus Flower took the exit out of Bien’s body.

| When the ghost was back the following time, Bien’s father asked her whether she wanted him to find her remains and rebury them elsewhere.

Hearing this, his daughter stood up and dashed out towards the river. According to Bien’s father: I ran after her. I couldn’t keep up with her. She ran so fast, you see, so hysterically. Luckily, my son joined me on my bicycle. I pedaled hard, as fast as I could, to keep up with Bien. We arrived at our vegetable plot on the riverbank. Bien picked up a

stick and put it in the middle of the lettuce. And she collapsed. The following morning, with three neighbors, I returned to the spot ... We dug a huge hole in the middle of the plot. I didn’t care how many onions we destroyed. We found nothing, and the river water was coming into the hole. My son and Chiem kept pumping out the water. Then, suddenly, the sand collapsed, and there we were: we saw a skull, a small one, that of a child. We kept digging and put the bones into our bamboo basket. When it was too dark to continue the work, one thigh bone was still missing. We were desperate and drenched in sweat. Ong Chiem was too old to shovel all day, and I had practically ruined my entire vegetable plot. Then, the spirit came to my daughter. She said, “Stop, uncles, that’s enough. Please stop. You’ve done enough

Transforming ghosts 113 for me.” Ong Chiem asked her, “Does the little lady wish to return to her homeland? Or, does she wish to be buried with the family of the tiller of this land?” Lotus Flower said, “I have lived here with uncle’s family for many years. I have received food and clothing from this family.?° If I leave, I’ll be very sad. You are my family. Please, uncles, grant me the honor and happiness to be buried with your family.”

Three days later, Bien’s family organized a small reburial ceremony. ‘They prepared a mini coffin, and Ong Chiem and other neighbors offered homemade sweets and small sums of money. Following her request, the coffin was buried underneath an old fruit tree at the periphery of Bien’s

family burial ground. It is part of the neighborhood oral history that, throughout the burial, a large number of birds gathered on the tree and sang their songs of happiness. The story continues that three days after the burial, the girl ghost came back to Bien while her parents were away. Ong Chiem confronted the spirit: “This family has been generous to you.

They buried you as if you were their daughter. Why are you back?” According to him, Bien then walked to the community well in silence and, as if being pushed by someone, she fell to the ground flat. When she

woke up and stood up, the story goes that Bien had forgotten her back pain and has never felt it since. Lotus Flower sang the following poem on the day of her burial. I quote from the document entitled “So nhat ky cua Lien Hoa” (the diary of Lien

Hoa), a record of Lien Hoa’s poems kept by a neighbor of Bien and secondary-school student in Cam Re: Allow me to share with you a few broken memories. A giant willow tree along the road, the bustling school, The commuter boat that shipped school children back and forth, I envied them so much and my desire to learn became a flame in me. I love the palm trees in Cam Re, I love the songs your trees sing and your own songs from the paddy. A miracle took place this afternoon. You accepted an unknown soul as if she was your blood. You treated the poor soul as if she was a birth of high class. I have long been with your family, without your knowledge, and you gave me food and clothing. Now I’m so honored to be part of the honorable ancestors of this family. The comfort of belonging and the sensation of filial piety overwhelm my heart.

Intrusive ghosts Since her first contact with Lotus Flower in 1991, Bien has encountered a

number of war ghosts in Cam Re and its neighboring villages. Most of

114 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

these events were involuntary. She had no intention to make contact with them, nor did people expect her to do so. It is known that the hidden

war ghosts simply imported themselves into Bien’s body and asserted their presence. Some people were frightened of Bien’s uncontrolled sojourns but did not avoid her because of them. Most residents simply tried to resolve these crises in various improvised ways. Gradually, Bien came to earn the title of nguoi thuet xac, “the body-finder,” among the villagers.

When she was on a visit to her friend’s in a neighboring town, it was alleged that three ghosts took her simultaneously. Her friend’s house belonged to an officer of the South Vietnamese security forces before the liberation and was used occasionally as his private office, meaning in this context a place for interrogating prisoners of war. The house was one of the town properties requisitioned by the liberation authorities and given to the families with exceptional revolutionary credentials. A patriot since the French War era became the new owner of the house. The three ghosts turned out to be the victims of the violent interrogation that had taken place in the house’s underground shelter and they were all revolutionary operatives.from different provinces. They took turns to speak of their origins and the circumstances of their death. In fact, the three ghosts were struggling so ferociously with each other to speak first that the neighbors could not make out who was who. Under the influence of an aged highland tribe Ka Tu ghost, Bien pointed to a spot underneath the water tank. Several days later, Bien was invited back to the house. The family prepared a table of ceremonial food, following the instructions from the three ghosts for different types of food, and excavated three skeletons from underneath the water tank. Then the three ghosts had a

feast of their separate favorite food, in turn, on the ritual table. ‘The middle-aged male ghost from Binh Dinh province and the female ghost from Quang Ngai province sampled vegetable and rice gruel, whereas the

Ka Tu ghost from the western highlands devoured the steamed pork without salt or fish sauce. Held in strict secrecy, not necessarily in fear of the police but of rumors that might harm the value of the house, the

family told me that they marveled at the amount of food that Bien consumed during the ceremony, which was, according to them, enough to satisfy more than ten adults. During the New Year holidays in 1995, Bien came to greet her aunt Ba Huong. Huong’s old town house shared the rear wall with a primary school. “A soldier ghost climbed the wall and the window, and he shiv-

ered terribly. He had no cloth on him when he died”: this was how Huong began her recollection of the evening. Huong asked, angrily, “Who are you? Why do you bother my niece?” The spirit did not reply.

Transforming ghosts 115 Bewildered, Huong offered him a pen and a notebook. He could not write — he had never learned. She continued to interrogate the ghost: “Are you a student?” The spirit shook his head. “Man or woman? Man?” The spirit nodded. “Soldier?” He nodded. “Why can’t you speak to me?” The man pointed to his neck. “Were you shot in your throat?” “Yes.” “What do you need?” The man shook his body and gestured as if he were cold.

“You have no clothing?” “Yes.” .

Huong asked her daughter-in-law to run to the market to buy paper clothing. It was near midnight, so she suggested going straight to the house of her market friend who sold ritual money and votive clothing. When the paper objects were brought in, the soldier ghost jumped on the daughter-in-law to grab the bundle. Huong said: “Tonight is warm. Why do you do that? Why can’t you be polite?” No response from the soldier. “Are you afraid that other ghosts might steal your clothes?” The spirit nodded. “I give you this clothing. You are obliged to me. You must tell me who you are. Are you really unable to speak?”

The soldier nodded and bowed to signal that he was really obliged and

sorry. And he tried to climb back to the schoolyard through the open shutter. Huong grabbed his (Bien’s) leg and commanded, “If you go this way, the god of my garden will be angry at you. No visitor to my house can exit this house through the rear.” By this time, Huong’s daughter-in-law

had brought two young men from their neighborhood. The two men carried the soldier ghost’s new clothing and the two women held Bien’s arms on each side, and all marched to the school through the door. Arriving at the school, Bien attempted to climb the wall. Worried about the broken glass pieces cemented on the top of the school fence, Huong grabbed her leg again and refused to let it go. The soldier ghost sprinted away, xuat, leaving Bien to collapse to the ground. When Bien returned slowly to her normal self, she asked her aunt what they were doingin front __ of the school. Huong hugged her confused niece and said, “We’ve just been to see an old comrade of mine from the war times. We sat down here to get some rest.”

Mobility While involuntary encounters with various war ghosts were taking place

during her outings, Bien had regular visits from Lotus Flower at her

116 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam home. Lotus Flower had her own circuits of movement by this time. Both actors in the pair of xac were becoming increasingly mobile by the second half of 1990s, and I wondered whether their separate patterns of mobility were in any way related. The episodes of body-finding had given Bien a considerable reputation in the village and beyond. Some villagers began to call her em xac or co gai xac — the girl shaman. As for Lotus Flower, she was becoming more effective in the curing séances, in the view of the local

villagers, and her poems were becoming light-spirited. Notably, she began to introduce to the village a number of small wandering ghosts whom she had met along her expeditions and voyages — “new friends” as she put it during a séance. By this time, Bien’s parents began to treat Lotus Flower, in answer to her own request, as their daughter. This new relationship was not without

difficulties. Bien’s parents continued to call their adopted daughter with the honored title of Co Tien. Lotus Flower, however, shifted to calling

them mother and father. This new situation made all the wandering spirits she brought home, categorically, “friends of daughter.” In January 1993, Lotus Flower reported to Bien’s family that she had befriended two girls, who were later known to Cam Re as the Bui sisters and war ghosts from the time of the French War. Later in the year, she and the Bui sisters brought a group of six very small child ghosts. These children were all nameless (vo danh) and the three girls, according to Bien’s family, carried two children each in their arms, proudly. These visits by ghost friends went on, and the number of visitors grew in the subsequent visits since the spirits, once introduced, kept coming back while new ones were brought in. By 1996 Lotus Flower had introduced so

many ghost children to Cam Re that Ong Chiem was to joke that the entire community had turned into a gigantic ghost orphanage. Quite a few small ghosts, although not all, had origins in the wider vicinity of Cam

Re. A handful of these indigenous ghosts were introduced back to their original families. Bien’s parents informed these families in advance to solicit their opinions and wishes. Apart from one exceptional case, none of these families refused to reencounter their small, but old members. Most of the children introduced in this way had passed away at least a generation ago, and this made it theoretically possible to accept them into the domestic ancestral ritual space, which usually is exclusively for older generations and ancestors. The lapse of one or two generations made the child ghosts senior to the family’s younger members. That most of the small ghosts died in various circumstances of war-induced violence or war-related hardship also facilitated their rehabilitation, for their deaths were recognized to have taken place under unavoidable general circumstances of accidental death, although early death was usually a bad death

Transforming ghosts 117 that should in principle be excluded from established places of ancestor worship.

A few families went further than the usual pattern of homecoming small ghosts to ask Bien to search for the souls of their long-lost children.

These requests allegedly made Lotus Flower very happy and she was most willing to travel to distant places to find children. Many in Cam Re believed that this soul-searching activity was Lotus Flower’s particular passion and she became a globetrotter through her work. She traveled to many places, learned about these places, met many “people,” learned their customs and made many friends. ‘The ever imaginative Ong Chiem compared Lotus Flower at this time to the young foreign travelers he had seen in the town. Indeed Lotus Flower often delivered poems about her observations of the life and sentiments of other spirit people she had come across while traveling, much like her western counterparts who, ensconced in internet cafés, sent e-mails about their travels to friends and parents back home. When Lotus Flower brought her first male friend, this spirit, called Binh, was too emotional to conduct a conversation with his living family. Lotus Flower sang on his behalf: Grief is natural but foolish. Joy is scarce and painful to obtain. Where is the courage to liberate the hidden humanity? What happened to the intelligence that we must liberate them before we can liberate us? Pray for him and his like beings. Indifference is the most tragic of all tragedy.**

The network of spirits The ghost’s transformation to a fairy-like mobile deity is not an everyday

event but is nevertheless far from unusual in Vietnam.” I recorded six such cases in Cam Re alone within ten years. In a nearby fishing hamlet, the villagers recently built a small shrine for the spirit of a girl whose remains had been recovered next to the community’s animist temple that worships the spirit of the whale (Ca Ong), the guardian of fishermen. The circumstances of this reburial and subsequent transformation were similar to the history of Lotus Flower. In this case, too, the adoptive kinship

between the ghost and the host family played a key role in the ghost’s transformation to a goddess whose strength now is believed to be equal to that of the ancient spirit of the whale. Before this goddess obtained her present prestige and authority, she underwent a period of intense traveling, like Lotus Flower. These ascending spirits typically follow a trajectory of afterlife that consists of three distinct stages.

118 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Firstly, they emerge from the milieu of anonymous ghosts by means of a locality principle. Their apparitions point to the inhabitants of the place where their bodies happen to be buried or where their spirits happen to

dwell rather than their natal family and community from which their remains are dislocated. They are more of the kind that I described in chapter 2 (the unknown dead in the locality) rather than the kind discussed in chapter 3 in which the same situation is manifested as the missing dead in kinship perspective. In some cases the family root is non-existent and the ghost is practically an orphan. In other cases, the spirits have severed the given ties with their existing origin and intend to replace them with a new relationship between strangers. In the poem she sang in celebration of her reburial, Lotus Flower expressed her joy and honor in joining Bien’s family burial ground. She also indicated that she had been already part of the family without the family’s awareness of the relationship. The family’s regular ritual acts for wandering spirits were understood by the spirit of Lotus Flower with different significance. What was a generalized gift to the anonymous from the perspective of the donor was mistaken for domestic sharing (or ancestor worship) from the perspective of the anonymous recipient.~° This period of misunderstood, illicit attachment (from the human point of view) develops into the second phase of explicit assimilation. Bien’s family treated Lotus Flower as if she was part of their family during this phase, offering food and clothing for her death day and the day of her

reburial. The spirits involved in such fictive or adoptive kinship with humans rarely remain as members of the family or quasi-ancestors only. The imaginary kinship between ghosts and humans continues to influence the drama and becomes a driving force for the ghost’s further transformation. The ascending spirits such as Lotus Flower aspire to prove to the family and community that their membership in the social unit 1s a productive one. Lotus Flower’s search missions for abandoned child ghosts were part of this spirit’s self-conscious integration into the community and her act of theft and imprisonment in the spirit world, which will be introduced shortly, also exemplified this dynamic. Meanwhile the family and community treat the ascending spirit both as kin and as a deity. The deity’s physical vessel, her body-lender, expands her domain of relationship widely to the community and beyond, and becomes networked to the area’s other

diverse spiritual traces and their living neighbors alike. The deity also travels, meets and learns about other spirits, and networks them to her adoptive homeland. Expansion of relationship takes place in both social spheres across the cosmological threshold simultaneously and interactively.

Specialists of Asian popular religions call these ascending identities “intermediate spirits” in the sense of their being in between ghost and

‘Transforming ghosts 119 god.”’ I call them transformative spirits, emphasizing the dynamics of transgression across the classificatory boundary rather than the boundaries they cross. In my observation, the process of transformation does not

come to a complete closure, although it can subside eventually. Vietnamese gods and goddesses rarely transcend entirely their backgrounds in the historical world. ‘The deity called Dai Tien, who punished

Lotus Flower because of her offense of theft, is high in the hierarchy of gods but believed to be in origin guy, a threatening, malignant spirit. This deity’s temper and intimidating behavior are traced back to his pretranscendental social status as a dangerous spirit. The spirits of highland

minorities are popular in certain circles of Vietnamese mediums, and these are distinctive from other guardian spirits in food habits, language use, patterns of dance, and moral views. The culture of gods and goddesses can be as diverse as the culture of their followers. Lotus Flower is transforming vigorously at this very moment. How will she turn out to be in the future? One of the guardian spirits of a Cam Re established nhap xac, Ky, has a life history strikingly similar to that of Lotus Flower. This goddess’s full appellation 1s Co Chin Trung Thien, Lady Chin of Middle Heaven (or Impartial Heaven), and I will call her Impartial Heaven. ‘This goddess is the derivative spirit of a young girl and an historical person who is known to have lived her former life in the Ba

Den area near the city of Ho Chi Minh. In her historical life, this girl suffered the hardship of a broken family and died prematurely 1n tragic circumstances at the age of four due to an epidemic. Much like Lotus Flower, this spirit had lost her ties with her natal family after death — meaning that there had been no proper burial or periodic commemoration. These two young female spirits share a common meta-historical plot of tragic early death, improper burial, and absence of ritual commemoration, and further, separation from origin, reburial, and regeneration as a trans-local deity after a generation’s lapse of time since physical death. Unlike Lotus Flower, however, Impartial Heaven is an established deity, having completed her study in an otherworld academic institution and

subsequently gained a reputation. She has more than fifteen follower mediums from Hue to Quang Ngai and possibly more in the southern regions of Vietnam. Some of these followers gather annually in Hue, the capital of Vietnam’s old dynasty. It is not clear how long it took this goddess to build her relatively small but strong network of followers across the provinces. But her influence is felt strongly in a number of town peripheries as if this geographical distribution should represent her semi-urban place of origin. Her followers believe that Impartial Heaven 1s

devoted to her social work, particularly sympathetic to the poor and the dispossessed, and exceptionally open-minded. What they mean by the

120 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam deity’s open-mindedness has never been very clear to me. The commonly

held view, however, is that Impartial Heaven, coming from humble origins, understands the worries of the common people. Being very young, she is also Known to be curious about all types of human affairs irrespective of their moral implications. People believe that Impartial Heaven is also too restless to settle in as a local deity and that she likes hovering around different places to explore new experiences with human lives. The Cam Re body-lender who worships her has never attended the Hue gathering, but he claimed that he is

aware of the elaborate rituals held during the annual meeting and the identity of the attendants. This information, according to him, was relayed to him by the goddess herself, who likes gossiping about events that give pleasure to her. The multi-sited goddess connects locally anchored individual followers and thereby generates a sense of being in mang

luo1, the Vietnamese term for a network, for otherwise isolated local actors.”° In one interesting incident, Impartial Heaven recognized a stranger, married to a man from Cam Re, on her visit to her in-laws. This woman came to Ky’s house out of curiosity and sat for a session of

seance. The goddess asked the woman, seated at the far corner of the room, whether they had met before in Ba Den. The goddess cited the names of people she had known in the area, and the visitor explained her relationship to some of them. The Cam Re villagers were fascinated by the identity of people whom they never knew and the amount of knowledge the goddess had about the woman’s distant relatives. When Ky woke

up from his trance, rubbing his eyes and smiling shyly, a torrent of conversation took place about Ba Den Mountain that had just become part of the virtual network of Cam Re.

In my estimation, Impartial Heaven sketches the future of Lotus Flower. If Lotus Flower should succeed in her study and make something out of herself, she will probably operate in a similar pattern and environment. A few friends of Ky, who know both Impartial Heaven and Lotus Flower, agreed on this view and wished for it. It was rumored in Cam Re that Lotus Flower was under the tutelage of (“in the school of,” according to some villagers) Ba Chua Tien.*” This rumor strengthened the antici-

pation that Lotus Flower would soon return as a learned and effective goddess. Ba Chua Tien is known, in the local knowledge, to be sympathetic and benevolent, and a very powerful figure in the pantheon of mother goddesses (see chapter 5). Impartial Heaven underwent a similar process of education and affiliation. The spirit of an ancient scholar and mythical warrior called Nghe Chien Xa is one of Impartial Heaven’s teacher-masters, and in the case of Ky, these teacher and student spirits worked together 1n a loosely connected network. Impartial Heaven cited

Transforming ghosts 121 her teacher as a superior in terms of knowledge and power. When she faced difficult inquiries from her clients, she sometimes stated that she was incapable of handling them and referred them to her teacher. When a man from the village consulted Impartial Heaven about the opening date

of his family’s new ancestral temple, for instance, she declined to get involved. Her stated reason was that her status was a low-ranking deity and the client’s ancestors were on equal footing. It was improper, she said, to probe into the affairs of those who were on an equal level in the hierarchy of spirits.

Impartial Heaven has teacher spirits other than Nghe Chien Xa, and this teacher spirit has minor follower spirits other than Impartial Heaven.

These two figures collaborate in the practice of Ky, but each of them collaborates within a different set of tutelary spirits for other practitioners. Vietnamese mediums can worship different combinations of supernatural

agents, and they become distinctive to one another partly due to this specificity and variation of the network of spirits they relate to. Ky’s principal helper spirits were Nghe Chien Xa and Impartial Heaven, and these two spirits were supplemented by a number of other minor spirits. Their backgrounds can be mythical or historical, and their operational patterns locally bound or trans-local. In Ky’s case, Nghe Chien Xa was the most mythical figure, who entertains an origin myth of shooting down six supplementary suns in the seven-sun ancient solar system with his magical arrows. Quy Ba Chan, who is also called Than Do (or Quy Do, “Red Monster”), is a semi-mythical character and a local figure. This one has a vague historical background of committing a mass killing and his activity is confined within the coastal stretch near Cam Re. Mong Linh Cong Chua is a semi-historical character and a princess of old times. She and her servant Bo Thien Nga operate independently from other tutelary

spirits and are solicited individually, particularly with the purpose of curing specific mental illnesses. The princess is known to be rather reclusive and her servant highly capricious; people speculated whether their unsociability and high-headed arrogance were related to the princess’s upper-class background. On the contrary, Impartial Heaven and other contemporary characters such as the spirit of a communist soldier were traced to concrete places and historical events. In the theater of Ky’s

operations, the temporal distinction between myth and history and the spatial distinction of local versus mobile deity translated to roles, personality and specialty, and power.

This complex network of spirits and their human followers demonstrates a few distinctive features. Different spirits of varying strength and specialty form a unique alliance in a particular medium’s family of spirits.

Each spirit is distributed to a number of followers; each medium is

122 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

connected to multiple spirits. ‘There are layers of association and networks of network in this business between humans and spirits. The most elementary association is between an individual body-lender and a single

helper spirit such as the current relationship between Bien and Lotus Flower. This simple organization, if it works, gradually develops to a complex organization. The novice goddess enters a hierarchical relationship of apprenticeship with established superior figures. The goddess’s self-developmental process accompanies a lateral expansion of her connection in this world with those who choose to, or are chosen to, lend their body to her. Eventually the goddess may secure her reputation in multiple

sites, as Impartial Heaven has done, and operate across localities although remaining within each place’s specific configuration of spirit helpers. Meanwhile the individual novice medium continues to contact new spirits other than the original helper spirit, and his or her society of spirits grows through this process. These spirits can be originally simple wandering ghosts, threatening monsters, or an established deity or genie. It often happens that the original helper spirit introduces to the novice medium her new colleague, teacher, and friend spirits. It is not unusual either that the novice medium unexpectedly encounters a local or traveling spirit that eventually settles in his or her spirit network. This increasingly complex and prolific networking gets settled when the medium’s society of spirits starts forming a certain order and configuration that is congenial to his or her personality as well as the specificity of his or her client network. Since someone’s individual helper spirit also operates in a

different network with other actors and their locales, an individual medium, although locally bound, can connect to a vast social and virtual space through a handful of tutelary spirits. Within Ky’s circle, Impartial Heaven maintains intimate relationship mostly with Nghe Chien Xa (I will henceforth call him Sharpshooter).

Red Monster is known to be tenaciously independent and wildly disrespectful of authority and order, although it is alleged that he tends to

be docile with Impartial Heaven. The monster likes bullying other local spirits and contesting his strength with higher figures that happen

to intervene in his locality. In a neighboring community of Cam Re, there is a farmer whose body is frequently visited by this monster. When Red Monster was imported to this farmer, the young man broke a porcelain rice bowl, one of those used particularly for ceremonial purposes, and tried to swallow the pieces of glass. People of this hamlet spoke

disapprovingly of the arrogant and threatening laughter of the glasseating monster. It is known that Red Monster ambushed Bien several times on her way back from the market, although this did not cause her any physical harm. For Ky, however, his experience with Red

‘Transforming ghosts 123 Monster was much more violent, and it turned out to be a formative event in his career. Ky was born with six fingers on one hand and he was a very sickly boy in

childhood. His father was an enthusiast of the popular con co magic, which I will call “ghost heart” magic with reference to the heart-shaped pointer used in this necromantic device. At the age of eight Ky became known in his village as an exceptionally light-spirited boy (nghe via) and

was often recruited to the role of lending his body for spirit talk in the ghost heart magic sessions. His first serious spirit attack took place during the war while he was operating as a local partisan fighter. Ky frightened his comrades by speaking in the voice of a local deity whose shrine was

damaged during a chaotic combat that involved his guerilla unit. The peasant fighters organized a ceremony of apology in the ruined temple, taking precautions so that the unit’s political officer did not discover their

activity. The spirit visits continued throughout the period Ky’s unit operated in the area, and his former comrades now attribute the relatively high survival rate of the members of the combat unit to Ky’s connection to the local deity.

In one rainy season, one of Ky’s comrades was taken over by Red Monster. It is believed that the trouble was caused by this man having unwittingly relieved himself on one of the routine hiding places of Red Monster, and this drove the monster to succumb to his infamous fury. Red Monster’s anger was demonstrated by the fighter’s rude behavior: he

started running naked in the middle of the night. By doing so, the man was endangering his fighting unit’s reputation as well as its safety. Ky’s helper spirit from the ruined temple, who had by then become familiar with Ky through the identity of Sharpshooter, was called upon to rescue this man. Ky was urged by his comrades to initiate a struggle against the mischievous monster. For a while, Ky’s former comrades told me, his

guerilla unit was engaged in two different battles that were equally important to their survival. With an animated voice, one veteran emulated Red Monster and provoked laughter among his old mates: In one evening, Than Do took over our friend again. We captured his carbine as soon as we saw Than Do’s terrifying smile on his face and hid it underneath the hammock. Ky and I prepared our con co and gave the pointer to Than Do. The monster demanded uncooked pork, a whole pig for an offering. Where would you find a pig in no-man’s-land? ... Our friend started growling and hopping like a lame four-legged animal. I tried to calm him down, saying that this is a difficult time for everyone and that no one had the means to sacrifice a whole pig for him. All of us were frightened. We were very close and used to volunteer for dangerous tasks to save friends. Not with Than Do. He was screaming, and no one had the courage to restrain him. Ky was burning incense sticks and praying. We knew he

124 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam was calling Tien Ong (Sharpshooter). In a few minutes, Ky turned to xac and the man with Than Do lost consciousness. We had two xac in the trench. We did our best not to, but all of us had to abandon our position that night and we ran away in

fear ... At some point, we thought Than Do might be linked to the South Vietnamese army, since he was disturbing our work and making us vulnerable. Some comrades in other units suggested that we should eliminate Than Do with bullets or a hand grenade. How could we? Normal people don’t see Than Do, unless he is in someone else. Had we used a grenade, we would have been obliged today to go to the cemetery of martyrs to see this man here.

‘The magical battle between Sharpshooter and Red Monster lasted several

more years, even after the war. Meanwhile the monster attacked Ky himself, inducing him into periodic disorientation and rude behavior. One night, in the long and dramatic story of Ky’s initiation ordeal, the indignant Sharpshooter sent a group of am cong (the soldiers of the underworld) to ambush the monster. The soldiers were camouflaged and waiting along the route frequented by the monster, ropes ready in their hands. Relatively unfamiliar to the terrain and the habits of Red Monster, they were unaware of the monster’s night reconnaissance pattern of zigzag walking. In the end, it was the underworld soldiers, all of them, who were caught by surprise. The watchful monster took them one by one and made a long file of prisoners using his enemy’s rope. The five-

thousand-year-old Sharpshooter was furious at this failure, the story continues, and the veteran antihero Red Monster was gleeful about his triumph. Sharpshooter subsequently declared an all-out war against the cunning, arrogant Red Monster, but the ancient deity did not have a strategy until one day an equally cunning veteran of guerilla warfare volunteered for the job.

The spirit of a born-and-bred communist The hero in Sharpshooter’s war against Red Monster was a young soldier ghost, whom the villagers believed to be a hat giong do: someone who is exceptionally devoted to communism, or literally “red in seed,” that is, a human being who is naturally a communist. I will call him Red Seed. This spirit was known to be very agile, sympathetic but moralistic, very loyal to Sharpshooter but remaining independent. In fact, no one really knew this spirit’s pre-death origin, apart from the fact that he had been a machine gun operator in the regular communist army. He was a wandering ghost

like Impartial Heaven before, had met Sharpshooter by accident while simply wandering about, and is now settled in Ky’s spirit network. It was this soldier spirit who offered to capture Red Monster. Sharpshooter was skeptical but decided to give it a try. He had no concrete strategy against

‘Transforming ghosts 125 the gleeful monster and was obliged to do something to save face with his

pupils. Red Seed ambushed Red Monster along the monster’s evening trail. Unlike the underworld soldiers, he had studied the trail and its surrounding terrain carefully and on several occasions before he initiated the ambush. He took the monster by surprise from one side of the foot-

path, and Red Monster jumped to the opposite side, where the soldier ghost had already prepared a punji trap. It was known in Cam Re that Sharpshooter had refused to reward Red Seed for his simple but brilliant action. In fact, Sharpshooter was never really fond of this moralistic young man. The legend of Red Seed is brief but compelling. He defied Sharpshooter’s disapproval and stayed on, determined to learn knowledge from the renowned master. Sharpshooter attempted to chase him away by various means. Infuriated by his uncom-

promising tenacity, the old deity ordered Dai Tien to incarcerate Red Seed on several occasions. Like the unyielding anvil under the earpiercing strikes of the hammer, the story goes, Red Seed refused to give in and kept demanding justice, that is, to be taught how to help the poor and the powerless people of Vietnam in exchange for his service against Red

Monster. The legend has it that Red Seed, having unfulfilled wishes for revolution in his previous life, wished to continue the struggle for a rich

and democratic Vietnam. Sharpshooter rejected this appeal on the ground that the world of gods is not a place for secular ideals; Red Seed refused to yield to Sharpshooter’s verdict that his idealism was in violation of the ancient tradition of the supernatural. This head-on confrontation between the ghost of a communist soldier and the ancient deity from the mythical origin time of civilization continued and worried many otherworldly bureaucrats including its chief of law enforcement Dai Tien. The breakthrough came from Impartial Heaven. This young goddess liked Red Seed from the first moment she saw him in the otherworld’s prison and played an important diplomatic role on behalf of her soldier uncle. She cried on her knees when she was traveling together with Sharpshooter one day and begged him to allow uncle to stay with her as she was still lonely. This appeal from his favorite pupil caused the funda-

mentally good-hearted Sharpshooter many sleepless nights. Impartial Heaven recruited Red Monster to her plotting, too. ‘—The monster was persuaded to suggest to Sharpshooter his good intentions to try to bring himself to a positive, moral spirit. The monster made this offer condi-

tional on the acceptance of Red Seed to Sharpshooter’s tutelage. Sharpshooter had no idea why Red Monster suddenly changed his mind and was powerless against the multiple forces of persuasion, the connected nature of which he did not understand, and he finally gave in.

126 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Ky’s father told me about the day when Sharpshooter accepted Red Seed. Impartial Heaven came to say, “Today, Iam happy. Uncle will be with us. Today, I am happier than any day in my entire life. Thank you for your prayer.”

Letters from the prison In 1998 people in Cam Re were wondering about Lotus Flower. After Lotus Flower had bidden farewell to them and gone to a distant place to pursue her learning, she continued to return to Bien and Cam Re periodically. She appeared just before the lunar New Year of 1997 and read her new poem of good wishes for her family and village. Since the Chung Ming Festival, however, Bien’s family had not heard a word from Lotus Flower, and this silence worried them. Just before the seventh lunar month of 1998, Bien had a visitor. Whereas the visitor was not Lotus Flower, the visit was about her. The visitor introduced himself as a “comrade” (dong chi) of Lotus Flower. Bien’s parents were surprised to hear that Lotus Flower relayed a letter from prison through her comrade spirit. This was the first prison letter of the ten letters that Lotus Flower was going to send to her adoptive homeland via her trusted messenger Tien Nu. The comrade spirit was watchful during his brief visit, surveying the courtyard and the gate repeatedly. The parents of Bien, one having been a partisan fighter and the other an urban co so activist, immediately understood the situation and took action. Bien’s mother closed the gate and the shutters, put out the candle on the external shrine, and asked her children

to stay on guard behind the kitchen and near the communal well. Her “daughter” was in prison; there was a covert messenger from her; the prison authorities might be behind the messenger’s trail; these security spirits might have exceptionally watchful eyes. These exciting possibilities

filled the atmosphere, putting Bien’s family on alert. The first prison letter from Lotus Flower was brief. She wrote that she had been jailed under the order of Dai Tien for an unexplained offense and asked the family not to worry. The day after, the messenger was back with a more detailed message.

It turned out that Lotus Flower had committed a property-related criminal offense. While following her study in the academy, she had found a storehouse of talismans. She knew by then how to distinguish between good working talismans and ineffective ones. She was not yet able to make one herself and she could not resist the temptation to obtain a few. She wanted to show her adoptive family how much she cared about them, according to Bien’s father. So, in a covert operation that involved a

Transforming ghosts 127 few student spirits including herself, Lotus Flower took from the storehouse a few talismans known as van, made of animal teeth, hoping to being them home on her next visit to Cam Re. She also appropriated an unidentified coffee-flavored medicine that was supposed to be effective for head injuries; Bien’s father was one of the several Cam Re veterans who suffered from shrapnel particles remaining in their body. Altogether, it was known that she had stolen seven talismans from the academy’s property. Dai Tien, the hot-tempered chief of security in the other world, quickly discovered the illicit operation. Lotus Flower was brought to this deity and was interrogated about other participants in the offense. Lotus Flower refused to speak out and insisted that the operation was strictly hers alone. This infuriated Dai Tien, who immediately ordered his soldiers to incarcerate her. The messenger Tien Nu added that Lotus Flower was popular among the other students, who admired her gentleness and devotion to her homeland. According to Bien’s father, these students discovered problems in the other world during their study, believing that the good talismans were to be given only to the rich, and conspired to do something about the situation in their own youthful spirit. In her second letter Lotus Flower wrote: I am very saddened, so I write only a few, fragmented words to you. I have been always loyal to you and will remain so, always. My love is in confusion because of what they call justice. But I know I will never abandon my love for you, And please do not abandon me because of what you hear about me. My body is in a foreign country, but my soul is with you in my homeland.

In the spring of 2001, Lotus Flower was out of jail, and her messenger friend was able to visit Cam Re, openly accompanying his lady friend.

She also escorted to her homeland two other student-cum-comrade spirits from the academy and introduced them as Thuy Linh and Luu Huynn. It was estimated in Cam Re that the prison experience had matured Lotus Flower. Although some villagers worried whether Lotus Flower would ever be able to graduate from the supernatural academy given her shameful criminal record, this concern was small compared to the anticipation that the novice goddess was maturing with a deep-held commitment to her homeland. The friends she brought home for a brief visit reinforced Lotus Flower’s image as an ascending potential goddess for the future. All her friends had died young like her and had humble social backgrounds before their deaths. Lotus Flower was the youngest in the group, according to their death age. That her more senior friends

showed great respect to Lotus Flower was a clear indication to the villagers that she would soon turn out to be a powerful actor. Her critical

128 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

attitudes of bureaucracy added extra confidence to her benevolence. Ong Chiem joked, “The past creates; the present imitates it.” Bien’s father had been a local partisan leader who returned to his agricultural work after the liberation instead of seeking a political desk job. Her mother had been a co so and so had her aunt Ba Huong who helped to feed hundreds of hungry partisan fighters. After the liberation, Ba Huong refused to abandon her lifetime work in the marketplace that she had inherited from her mother and her mother’s mother. According to Chiem, this family tradition of duong cach mang (“the trail of revolution”) continued in the family’s spirit daughter. In his view Lotus Flower was imitating the tradition of her adoptive family and she would someday grow to be a scented flower plant feeding from the perfumed soil of the family’s tradition. I asked Ong Chiem one day what he thought about the incident of theft. He said, “That was wrong. Stealing is wrong.” We continued: “But she only wanted to help her family. She didn’t mean anything wrong.” “It’s still wrong. If she wants to help, she must learn how to make, not steal.” “But isn’t it also wrong to put her in jail for so many years for such a small thing?”

“It’s wrong, of course, not to take into account the intentions of her doing so. Officials, they never do.” “You think Lotus Flower will be able to change that?” “It is the tradition of her family that it breeds revolutionaries. No one can change that.” “Forgive me, Uncle, but do you really believe Lotus Flower is real?” “Nephew, if she isn’t, why are you asking me about her?”

Liberation The Vietnamese express the transformation of ghosts with the concept giai oan, “the liberation from grievance,” which alternatively can be called giai ngoc, meaning “open the prison” or “break the prison.” The idea is that a history of tragic death binds the soul of the dead to the

mortal drama of death and captivates it to the place of death, thus engendering a negative condition in the afterlife. The tragic or violent

transition to death turns into an environment of confinement after death. The most commonly cited example of the incarceration in postmortem ngoc is where road accidents recur. In these places, the existing afterlife prisoners repeat their tragic history of death, which appears in the form of repeated road accidents in reality. This results in more new fateful inmates in the site and thus makes the site an increasingly solid prison. The Vietnamese ritual specialists know different versions of incantation recited on behalf of these prisoners of history. According to

‘Transforming ghosts 129 the version I recorded from a thay cung (“master of ceremonies”) in Cam Re area: Now, your time in prison is over. Let me break open the prison and liberate your soul. Your former life has forced you to be bound in this place. Now, with this power, I set you free. Now, with this poem, I break your prison.

Emmanuel Lévinas writes referring to Martin Buber, “A real access to the otherness of the other does not consist in a perception but in thou-

saying. To speak to him is to let him realize his own otherness. The I~Thou relation, therefore, escapes the gravitational field of the [-It in which the externalized object remains imprisoned.”°” The grievance (oan) of the tragic dead, like the phenomenon of phantom salt mentioned earlier, is fundamentally a relational concept that points to a liberating, ethical horizon of communicative actions. The tragic and violent circumstances of “death in the street” confine the souls in the imprisonment of afterlife, whereas the absence of remembrance for their tragic existence on the part of the living augments the intensity and the wealth of grievance on the part of these prisoners of history. In this conceptual scheme, the living actively take part, with their inaction, in the augmentation of

grievance of the dead. The living generations may not necessarily be accountable for the occurrence of tragic death (they can be “accidental”) but they are liable for making it to an increasingly grievous death. In this

theory of memory, trauma is a historical injury that has long-lasting effects upon the life of the dead, and whose affectivity derives in part from the indifference of the living to the suffering of the dead. When the living are conscious of this ethical responsibility for the other’s somatic suffering

and proceed to undertake practical actions to account for it, the cumulative economy of grievance gives in to the distributive morality of remem-

brance. The grievous memory of the dead comes to lose its traumatic effect only when it is acknowledged by and shared with the living. The liberation from grievous death is therefore a two-way process. It

ought to involve the intervention of sympathetic outsiders such as the invocation of the prison-opening incantation and other related ritual actions, but it also requires that the fateful inmates should demonstrate a strong will for liberation. Apparitions are evidence for the presence of this will for freedom, on the basis of which the outsider’s ritual intervention usually takes place. In the case of Lotus Flower, the ghost’s will for freedom was manifested in the form of possessing the body of the family’s

daughter and the most significant external intervention in this episode was the reburial of her body in the periphery of an ancestral graveyard.

130 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

These two bodily relations developed into generative ties of kinship among unrelated strangers, through which the girl ghost and the family’s daughter came to merge in identity in the practice of spirit mediumship. Through the generative kinship relations the ghost transformed her sor-

row of displaced, unremembered death to a radical devotion to her adoptive family and community. ‘The same process took place with Red Seed, although in his case his iron will for continuous revolution was a more pronounced driving force for symbolic transformation than communal acceptance.

Making kinship Ghosts in Vietnam can be either an abstract category or concrete, distinctive identities. Being a category, they make up the complementary background to the ancestors and gods, an imaginary collective of displaced and unknown dead in the exterior of the moral social order (see chapter 1). However, this structure of representation exists within a wider

milieu in which human beings and ghosts make a myriad of direct, concrete interactions. Ghosts can be either a categorical outsider to the social order or partners of social actions, and the phenomenon of transforming ghosts represents this shift from the ideological and to the practical sphere of relationship most forcefully. Discussing the religious tradition in southern Vietnam that deified the spiritual remains of violent death or chet oan (grievous death, unjust death), Thien Do states, [Chet oan] is about death in strange places, away from family and home ... The propitiation of homeless souls is therefore mainly about the cultural hunger for and availability of their souls to the living for ritual relations of mutual care. With the communal veneration of the sufferers of violent death, however, deification brings to rituals the extra-lineage mobilization for solidarity.*’

Janet Carsten discusses this “extra-lineage” aspect of collective identity,

emphasizing the aspect of kinship as a proactive process of making intimate human relatedness rather than a set of prescribed rules about who relates to whom and how. Drawing upon her work in a Malay community where fostering is widely practiced, she emphasizes the centrality of co-residence and day-to-day sharing of food and mutual care in Malay kinship reckoning and highlights the house as the locus of generative Malay kinship practices.°’* Her stated intention is to grasp kinship

“from the inside” and through “the everyday intimacies that occur there.”** Although she advances her case in favor of the view of kinship “from the inside” and therefore in distinction to the view seen arguably

Transforming ghosts 131 from the outside as a system of rules and public norms, Carsten does not necessarily negate the relevance of the latter. Her intention is rather to foreground the domain of social life, which is, according to her, wrongly rendered to the marginal background in the dominant approach to kinship as a system of prescriptive rules.”*

We can introduce Carsten’s view of kinship to the drama of Lotus Flower. The living neighbors of this girl ghost had maintained certain ties with her before she revealed her identity in the form of spirit affliction.

These ties were of a general kind, based on the customary practice of giving offerings to the unknown, anonymous spirits of the dead. As such,

their meaning was arguably in contradiction to that of the ritual ties maintained at home with the known and related memory of the dead. ‘The drama of her liberation was to break out of the grid of anonymity and her subsequent empowerment as a novice goddess accompanied making alternative kinship ties with a circle of people in a land which is not, in the scheme of ancestor worship, her native place. However, there is another notion of place emerging in her story. This is a native place in prospective sense, a place that has the potential to become home in the future through

intimate and generative contacts with the living neighbors. Her story relates to two notions of native place: one is what Lotus Flower lost at death and a place closed to foreign identities, the other is what she aspires to have and a place that these displaced identities may make home with. The liberation of Lotus Flower consisted of breaking out of the marginal background of the genealogically enclosed place to an alternative homeplace that celebrates open relatedness and further foregrounding of the esthetics and ethics of this unbound place.

“Ghosts are a species in transition,” writes Stephen Teiser in his investigation of the tradition of ghost festival in medieval China.*° In the language of the rites of passage, the transitory identities are doubly liminal beings, who are neither severed from the living world nor incorporated to the world of the dead, and neither entirely separated from the negative space of “bad death” nor entirely assimilated to the transcendental, positive symbolic space of ancestors and gods.°° Teiser discusses Arthur Wolf’s comment, “the dead at one end of the continuum are true ancestors; the dead at the other end are almost ghosts,” to conclude that ritual ties established with ghosts effect “a transition from one status to the next.”°’ This transitional status makes transforming ghosts socially ambiguous beings. These identities therefore manifest the characteristics of both the inside and the outside of the classificatory order; elements of incorporative kinship and those of anonymous strangers; aspects of placebound communal life and imaginary mobile activities beyond the boundary of the place. In a way, the transforming ghosts derive their power

132 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam from the collapse of the place-centered moral bipolarity of death. They are auspiciously powerful, on the one hand, because they are anchored in a community, just as ancestors and established gods are, and, on the other,

because their magical activities go beyond the boundary of the community, just as ghosts are imagined to. As Philip Taylor notes, the “magical fame” of these particular spiritual identities is inseparable from their “symbolic ambiguity.”°®

The symbolic ambiguity is also manifested in the practical activities of the transforming ghosts, which reflect on their specific historical circumstance of death and biographical history before death. While the infuri-

ated Sharpshooter was hammering Red Seed, it was believed that the communist soldier ghost pleaded to the old man that his wishes were simply to continue to serve the people he was born to serve. It was also known in Cam Re that Red Seed refused to be placed on an altar and he even refused a poetic name to which every ascending spirit in Vietnam 1s entitled. Remaining as an unknown soldier, Red Seed appeared to be a prolific social activist in the 1990s. He traveled to find missing remains for the families of MIA, fetched small medicinal amulets for the sick, and was learning to become a more capable activist from his old master. Some people in Cam Re explained the particular attitude of this soldier spirit as arising from his life experience as a strong follower of revolutionary ideals. Red Seed appeared impatient with bureaucracy to people who knew him, and so did Lotus Flower. These ascending spirits got into trouble with the establishment and experienced additional afterlife imprisonment after the captivity of death. Listening to their stories, it appeared to me that the struggle for liberation continues after the liberation, and that emancipation is something that should be struggled for, even for emancipated beings. What drives these young spirits’ political activism in the world of am? What

force of imagination can make Lotus Flower connect with other likeminded spirits, collaborate with each other, create a network, enlarge this network to a network of networks, protect each other, challenge the ancient hierarchy, get jailed for this, strengthen their spirits through hardship, write prison letters and sing poems, sob and laugh in doing so, and nurture their

ideals for social justice? Is this a reflection, as Bien’s neighbor Chiem explained, of the revelation of the tradition of intimate revolutionary struggles in the place with which they made a new home? Or can it be instead a manifestation of the political and economic transformations that the place itself is undergoing now? What nourishes their mobili animi and their pursuit of a more democratic order in the polity of the supernature?’” In the next chapter, we turn to the political implication of liberating ghosts of war and will explore it in view of one important symbolic instrument for their liberty in contemporary Vietnamese life, which is money.

7 Money for ghosts

The evening was surprisingly cool for an evening in the seventh lunar month, the ceremonial time for wandering ghosts according to an ancient

calendar,’ and there was no sign of wind in the humid air. Three of us passed the vendor who sold half-matured eggs, and were about to turn onto the narrow footpath towards Cam Re passing the army base. The sentry in the guardhouse was examining the colorful lanterns in the distance, and his unfocused eyes spotted us only when we were almost at his feet. Everywhere were clouds of incense smoke. Illuminated by the red, yellow and blue lanterns, the clouds shifted in color. Shops laid out

magnificent banquets on their doorsteps between the shutters. Private houses prepared relatively modest, but equally impressive, tabernacles of offering in their front courtyards. As we were passing, some impatient people were already kowtowing in our direction with thick bundles of fuming incense sticks raised to their foreheads. Some did it in silence, others with audible poems of invitation. Leaving this blissful theatre of commemoration behind, the three of us stepped into the dark cemetery area behind the army base. No one else was around along this footpath on this unsettling evening. Walking in Indian file, we discussed the plot once again. In our previous meetings, we had agreed that each of us should ask one unorthodox question, either to the ancient deity Sharpshooter (Nghe Chien Xa) or to the young goddess Impartial Heaven. My companions said they were tired of worrying about health and financial problems and asking favors of Ky’s guardian spirits.

This time, they would stop being self-indulgent and talk about “their life.” I was happily dragged into this exciting plan and encouraged to confront my preoccupying thoughts about ghosts of war empirically rather than speculatively. The plan had risks however; I knew the doctrine of Ky’s father: thien co bat kha lau (“Tales of heaven must not be told”)

and also that gods and goddesses in Vietnam might get offended by inquisitive attitudes to their culture and history. A deity called Dai Tien had once become furious with me when I innocently asked the deity about his previous life during a séance. The medium’s facial muscles and eyes 133

134 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

turned to unforgettably horrific shapes, and the deity lifted a chair and threatened to hit me with it. Perhaps he thought that I was interrogating him. I was absolutely terrified and I still get terrified when I recall it. Out

of this and another similar event, I took the view that some gods and goddesses in Vietnam, unlike wandering spirits or new transforming ghosts, are not in favor of discourses on their historical identity. They can express feelings, and they would like people to recite poems that praise their mythical life. ‘(They show acute interest in the things the living

have to say about their transcendental life. However, they rarely talk about their own historical backgrounds or the social problems in their world, and may disapprove, to varying degrees, of our interest in these issues. So, I was excited and nervous at the same time. Marching in single file, we reviewed our questions, unwanted hypothetical situations, and our collaborative strategies to manage the crisis, should it arise. Our conversation with Impartial Heaven went amicably. She did not refuse any of our inquiries and answered them graciously. One of us asked her about the situation of Ho Chi Minh in her world. Ho Chi Minh is the supreme figure in the Vietnamese civic religion of nationalism and socialist revolution; recently, this spiritual leader of the nation has become also an important popular religious deity in certain circles.” Knowing this, my companion had been curious about the actuality of Uncle Ho’s spiritual power in the world of am and its rank in the hierarchy of power existing in

that world. The goddess apologized that she could not tell us anything about Ho Chi Minh because she had never met. him. She added that she was originally from a southernmost region of Vietnam and the man from the northeast. She had never been in the north of Vietnam, she said. That was a perfectly acceptable answer, and my companion was happy with it. As for the second question about her family life, the goddess was more hesitant but still accommodating. She told my other companion that she did not miss that much her parents or other people in her native land. She said that she had been too preoccupied with her social work to think about

them, and disagreed with our point that this was perhaps somewhat in violation of filial piety. My companion fully appreciated her self-defense that there were many more important things in the world than staying at home and serving one’s parents and ancestors.

Then it was my turn, and I regretted that I was there. It took some courage for me to say the words that I had prepared. When she heard them, the goddess looked at me with cold eyes and I began trembling. My

two companions took it in hasty turns to explain to the goddess why I wished to ask such an unusual question and how innocent my intention was. After what felt like a long and terrifying silence, the goddess excused

herself, saying that she was not able to answer my question, for her

Money for ghosts 135 knowledge of the world was limited and she was too young to understand such matters. Then she said that she would refer my question and explain

my intentions to Sharpshooter instead. About an hour later, I encountered the old deity. I cite our conversation from my fieldwork diary: KWON: Do people in your world still argue and fight for a cause? Is there still an “our side” and “their side” in your world, too? SHARPSHOOTER: No, my dear foreigner, dead people don’t fight. War is the business of the living. People in my world do not remember the intentions and the objectives of the war they fought while they were in your world.

Sharpshooter stopped talking at this point, coughed and tried to get his

breath. He is known to be a compulsive smoker; Ky chain-smokes, although he is not a smoker, when he is under the deity’s influence. When he resumed, Sharpshooter shifted from abstraction to a practical matter: SHARPSHOOTER: Foreigner friend, since you put a question to me, I’d like to put a

question to you. People in my world receive money, lots of foreign money, from people in your world. We don’t know what to do with it. Will you ask your people to stop sending this foreign money and instead send the money _we’re used to?

My companions later told me that I was so dumbfounded to hear this

from Sharpshooter that I could not respond to his polite request. Sharpshooter waited for my response for a short while, according to them, and then he faded out. Details of our conversation with Impartial Heaven and Sharpshooter circulated widely in the town neighborhood during the following days. Many had a good laugh about it. Some thought that the ancient deity wanted to get even with us — we bothered him with unusual inquiries so he retaliated against us with a riddle. The idea that dead people do not welcome new currencies traveled widely in my neighborhood, and the local men asked me more details about the evening during our early-morning gatherings at the coffee house, although the rumor certainly did not stop people burning more dollar money on the ensuing occasions. I was fascinated to hear from Sharpshooter that the world of the dead was oblivious to the ideologies of the living world. Sharpshooter said that people in his world did not respect the frontiers between ben ta and ben kia, or our side (the revolutionary side) and theirs (the American side). Following him, it transpires that the frontiers of the bipolar conflict are thoroughly demilitarized in the afterlife and that liberation from the cold war political ideologies is not only possible but also natural in the great chain of life. Sharpshooter argued that the transition to death, or another life, brings with it characteristic amnesia, iterating the popular knowledge

136 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

that obviates political ideology, although not social morality, from the other half of the universe. Whereas the pain of death and the pain of separation from loved ones are not forgotten, in this scheme the cause and the intention of the war that brought about their death are left in oblivion. In his account, war death comes to mean the death of the very ideology of war.

The ancient culture hero added that people in his world were concerned about money. From his perspective, ideology is not a social problem but money is. Are these inhabitants of am stressed about having too little money, like most of us in the opposite world? Or is the problem possibly about having too much money? Moreover, is it possible that the deity’s question to me is related to my question to him? Does the problem of money in the world of the dead have any relevance for the question of memory between the living and the dead? This chapter is about money offered to the dead, and this votive money’s magical relationship with the ideology and memory of war.

Death and wealth When the coffin was freed from its handcuff of bamboo strips and ready

to be entombed, the funeral specialist made a fuss about the coffin’s orientation. This funeral in Da Nang was for a woman who had been entitled Heroic Mother of Vietnam (Ba Me Anh Hung Viet Nam) for her sacrifice of five children to the revolutionary war, and the specialist whom people called Soul Guide was hired to lead the funeral party from the

deceased’s home to the town’s Martyrs Cemetery and to oversee the interment. Soul Guide argued that the foot of the coffin should be turned by some twenty degrees southwards so that the deceased would be truly comfortable. The relatives of the deceased understood the implicit message of his suggestion — the given orientation of the coffin was not conducive for the prospect of their prosperity. They supported Soul Guide and argued with the official from the town’s People’s Committee who insisted on respecting the ordered, strictly geometric burial custom in the

state cemetery. The entire crowd soon joined the debate, an absolute majority supporting the family’s position. Four pallbearers jumped into the hole reluctantly and struggled to change the coffin’s position. Soul Guide commanded them to keep their balance, calling their attention to the money notes placed on the coffin. The reorientation of the coffin was complete after some more haggling and the family stopped arguing with the pallbearers and resumed wailing. Shovels of red soil were thrown over the coffin; the four real Vietnam Bank notes disappeared from view one after another.

Money for ghosts 137 Death and wealth is a familiar combination in the Vietnamese tradition just as it is in many other traditions.’ One of the principal ways to display wealth in traditional Vietnam was through death (and marriage) ceremonies, and mortuary wealth traditionally had three related means of dem-

onstration: ancestral temples, family burial grounds, and funerals.* Displaying the deceased in luxury was not merely a sign of wealth, but the luxury of the dead was the wealth of the family.? In this sphere of values, the concept of wealth was expressive and demonstrative. If someone is wealthy and successful, he must be so in the eyes of the public, for his wealth becomes real when it has taken on publicly accepted forms of demonstration so that neighbors and friends should be able to see his wealth and weigh it publicly.° Affluent mortuary ritual and installations made the ancestry well off, and this was considered to be an important condition for the prestige of being wealthy. According to Hou Ching-lang, the idea of sumptuous death is related to an ancient concept of life as a type of bank loan.’ In old Chinese belief, every birth in this world was based on the allowance of a loan from “the Treasury of the Other World,” or “the Bank of Hell” (nhan hang dia phu, in Vietnamese).° The life of the living person proceeded in symbolic equivalence to the record of the loan from the bank. The more modest someone’s life situations were and parsimonious he is with worldly pleasures then, theoretically, the longer he could enjoy his loan. When he has used up the loan and passes away, the loan must be paid back and the burden of debt usually falls onto the descendants of the now defunct borrower.” It is not very clear from Hou’s description whether the Bank of Hell enforced interest rates on their credits of life or what its policies were against infidel clients. However, he makes the clear point that the postmortem immolation of wealth, real or symbolic, and the related custom of offering money to the dead were almost a legally binding act of debt payment (“judicial money,” according to Hou) in ancient China.'° The dead were subject to financial controls; just as we are, they were not at liberty if they were in liability."' It is interesting to compare this death-centered concept of wealth with the philosophy of money developed in the early political economy. Adam Smith, in The wealth of nations, describes the life of eighteenth-century tobacco merchants. Thanks to the increasing trade with the New World, these Glasgow merchants made what was then a staggering amount of money and developed an intuitive understanding of the meaning of the augmentation of wealth. These early heroes of commercial society were great moneymakers and religiously anti-consumption. Endorsing this ascetic attitude to money, Smith writes that the principle of parsimony that prompts us to save is “the desire of bettering our condition, a desire

138 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave.” '* Prodigality was the public enemy that jeopardized the community’s security 1n this orthodox political economy, and Smith believed that war is the most prodigal of all human activities.'? Parsimony was for the public good, for only this could make the nation prosper and thereby open the possibility of a participatory democracy by the moneymaking, moneysaving citizens as against the prodigal, money-wasting hereditary-landed elite. Smith considered the grave as the end limit of philosophical interests. ** Political economy, for him, was restricted to the sphere of life from the cradle to the grave, and he deciphered a perpetual war within us against the unnatural passion to waste the estate by the natural desire to save and accumulate wealth. This economic asceticism gave birth to the ethic of investment — the belief that virtue must be profitable to be a virtue and that gratification should be conceptual, not material, which Max Weber later delved into.'? The logic of investment is that enjoying the benefit of economic activity should be postponed for the sake of a greater future

benefit. In early commercial society, the true virtue was self-restraint

from worldly pleasures and the divine satisfaction of augmenting wealth.'° The economics of post-reform Vietnam, at popular level, is a mixture of two radically different theories of political economy. The theory of accumulation and investment applies to the living world. Parsimony was an elementary and fundamental technique of life for most Vietnamese I met and a principal element of the state ideology, and the state hierarchy of Vietnam is committed to capital accumulation.’’ People in rural and peripheral urban areas struggled daily to save money to afford their children’s education and to renovate their house or to open a shop, as well as to

be able to contribute more to the ancestral temples or to give a decent reburial to their dead relatives. In the economic sphere that concerns the dead, on the other hand, the virtue of self-restraint was difficult to see. The Heroic Mother of Vietnam received the four modest (real) bank notes for her way into the grave. However, soon after her entombment she will earn much more money just like many other dead in Vietnam to whom (replica) money notes are regularly offered as part of death commemoration. Big money begins rolling in from the moment of death. In addition to money, the coffin of the Heroic Mother of Vietnam was lavishly decorated with gold. Made of plastic foil dyed in the color of gold,

these coffin accessories are normally taken away and abandoned immediately before burial. However, some coffins carry this make-believe wealth underground. Unlike the feudal courtly customs of burial that

left real wealth with the dead, today’s mortuary industry keeps a

Money for ghosts 139 warehouse of mortuary wealth that costs only a fraction of what it represents. This industry is a transformation of old guilds of artisans and has prospered since the market reform. In this virtual economy for the dead,

the poor can act rich, something that is far more difficult in the real economy, and the difference between the poor and the rich becomes far less obvious than in lived reality.

Old money and new money Money burning is an increasingly familiar activity in Vietnam. It was officially forbidden before the late 1980s when the state launched a general economic and political reform, but since then has been extremely popular throughout the country. In the evening on the first and fifteenth day of the

lunar month, one can now easily see on the street or in someone’s courtyard that a large amount of paper notes is in flames. Money turning to ashes in this way is of specific types and meant for specific beings. People say “Money is as important for the dead as it is for the living” and they supply it to gods, ancestors, and ghosts as part of their commemorative rituals or communal feasts. The money notes used for this purpose

are not real money, distinct from the notes used for the funeral of the

Heroic Mother or the money that we believe is kept in our banks, although some of them may look very real. ‘The method of transferring the money 1s also different from the way this is done within the economic order of the living world — you burn it. Burning money in this context is to transform it from one economic order to another. When the money-offering/money-burning practice began to be openly

tolerated by the state hierarchy at the beginning of the 1990s, various ritual currencies appeared in the marketplace. Some were old traditional kinds (called giang vang bac), which take the form of brass coins printed on thin votive papers, or gold and silver bars, also printed on or made in paper. Today, this coin and precious metal ritual money (Simmel’s “money as substance”; money in the form of precious natural objects) can be burned together with the replicas of modern Vietnamese and US paper currencies (Keynes’ “fiat-money”; socially created money from the illusory naturalism).’®

The coin and precious metal votive money existed throughout the French and Japanese colonial occupations and the subsequent times of war. In the southern and central region, it lasted until shortly after the end

of the Vietnam War in 1975 when the state authority of the unified Vietnam banned the practice of money offering, extending the revolutionary cultural policy established in the northern region to the liberated

southern regions. After 1979, when some of the earlier hard-line

140 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam measures were modified into more accommodating forms, the coin and

gold money was revived and circulated as an informal economy. Meanwhile, the state mobilized the legacy of the liberation war as an instrument of national integration and sought to replace the traditional multivariate beliefs in gods, ancestors, and ghosts with a uniform civic religion focused on the cult of the fallen revolutionary soldiers (see chapter 3).*” Religious shrines were taken down, and the loose and complex network of these sites of worship, which constituted the distinc-

tive identity of the locale, gave way to the centralized, standardized installations of war commemoration such as the cemetery for the fallen revolutionary combatants located at the center of postwar village life. ‘The state insisted on ascetic commemorative practices for the heroic war dead

and strongly discouraged what it considered superstitious and wasteful acts incompatible with the “revolutionary sentiments,” including the custom of offering money to the dead.7° Today, commemoration in Vietnam has a wide political spectrum in terms of demonstrative wealth. At one extreme, there are public state shrines such as the village memorials for heroic war death. Votive money normally has no place on these austere shrines of secular national memory, although in some places this is changing.’ At the other end of the spectrum are the revived ancestral or other communal religious ceremonial occasions where wealth must be lavishly displayed.*” Household commemoration rituals rarely go to either extreme. ‘The most common activity is to refill the pots on the ancestral and household god altars with fresh water and flowers. Incense or candles are burned on the first and the

fifteenth day of the lunar month. Occasionally, food and money are offered to mark special ceremonial events.

For ordinary people, their daily commemorative activity fluctuates depending on need and capacity or sentiment. When the wife’s back pain worsened, one family I knew took the trouble to cook rice gruel on a fifteenth lunar day. After an unusually successful week, their neighbor, a tailor, burned a bundle of replica dollars in the street on the night of an unspecified date. Worried about her daughter working in a distant industrial zone, another neighbor burned a paper-made temple for the house-

hold goddess the day after she had an unpleasant dream. When her child complained of a nightmare, she placed a few ceremonial sweets on

her outdoor shrine for ghosts addressing the nameless infant spirits. When her mother-in-law felt seriously ill, everyone in her family spent a

spartan month in order to save extra money to contribute to the community temple. In communities that suffered incidents of mass civilian killing during the war, the families held their death-day commemorative rites separately

Money for ghosts 141 but simultaneously on the same day.** On these occasions, the smoke from incense and money in flames enveloped practically the entire hamlet. For the many casualties of war whose bodies are still missing from home burial, the condition makes their identity categorically a ghost (see chapter 3). Their families, during an ancestral rite, tended to burn more money on behalf of ghosts than for ancestors. In fact, the ceremonial rhythm of a Vietnamese household was the clearest indication of the household’s historical identity and fluctuating collective life. Votive money notes are now an integral part of Vietnamese domestic life. They are absent in the state sectors, but they are abundant in public demonstrations of lineage or place solidarity. In private households, the ritual money comes and goes just like the real money. In the 1990s, the dollar (Do La) ritual notes became familiar objects in domestic life. Local theories of the origin of this particular votive currency varied. One of my informants offered an explanation akin to the theory of generalized exchange.** He said, As people become more prosperous, or less poor if you like, they wish to share their wealth with the dead who never experienced other than poverty and violence. American money or Vietnamese money, that is not a matter of importance. Whether the dead can receive our money or not, this is not a fundamental issue. What is behind them, our motivations and good feelings, that is the fundamental issue.

What is hidden in the money, for this man who was a partisan leader during the war, is the desire to share and distribute.”° This desire to share,

for this elegant rhetorician of the history of revolution, is natural to humanity, as natural as the fate of coconut trees to bear coconuts. According to a wholesaler of ritual goods near the central market of Da Nang, the invention of dollar votive money is a manifestation of the Vietnamese saying, xua bay, nay bat chuoc (“The past creates and the present imitates 1t”). He believed that the current boom in Do La is partly a restoration of the pre-1975 spirit of the market. The wartime economy to the south of the Seventeenth Parallel was principally a dollar economy, and it is therefore natural, according to this man from a background of four generations in the trade, that this dollar economy of war should be the model restored to the present, which globally runs as a dollar world.

The majority of today’s ghosts are war dead, he added, and so these ghosts must be familiar with the wartime GI dollars. Hence it is also natural that people now prefer burning dollars to “Ho Chi Minh money,” which many ghosts from the South did not know before their death.

Some retailers went even further than the wholesaler. One veteran retailer sold old ritual money throughout the war in the then prosperous

142 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam marketplace of Da Nang where everything was traded, from US PX goods to mines and grenade launchers. According to her, the Do La notes were invented for foreigners. So many foreigners died on the soil of Vietnam mixed with Vietnamese, she said. Therefore, it was natural that the living should offer foreign money to this mixed group of war dead. According to

her theory, the dead should receive the things they were familiar with during their lifetime. American soldiers knew nothing but green homeland dollars and the military vouchers while they were alive, and they thus require the same type of money in the world of the dead. The Vietnamese

ghosts? They are used to this foreign money and actually prefer this money, she said. They know what this money can buy. Had they had enough of it, they would probably have escaped the fate of a war ghost anyway. So, they also should receive this money, she said passionately. This retailer’s theory of historical familiarity is also applicable to the changes in other votive objects of offering (hang ma, do ma). The commemorative commodities sold in the Vietnamese market have been made

increasingly specific to the historical identity of the dead. As for the offering of clothing, for example, the paper textile prints have taken on a variety of patterns. The traditional ones are still being sold, but they are greatly outnumbered by new products of complex vegetal motives and

color mixtures. Traditional Mandarin wear, female ceremonial dress, cowboy hats, Calvin Klein shirts and trousers, and full military uniforms

for soldiers are prepared in neat plastic packages. The soldier packs contain paper leather holsters for the pistol also. ‘These detailed, tailormade offerings were also an invention of the 1990s when personalized forms departed radically from the uniform ao giap of the past — the tradi-

tional miniature paper costumes in the shape of armor (for the dead soldiers). Some votive objects changed in form; others changed in mean-

ing. The plain white paper offering, which was traditionally for old scholars, was now also for the young who died without fulfilling their dream of study and scholarship. These young spirits received sweets and paper on which to write their thoughts. Spirits of young women could receive paper high heels together with paper silk robes or blue jeans, and boxes of paper jewels; and cosmetics and umbrellas could be burned for special occasions. In urban Vietnam, other historically specific monies were also invented

to cater for the needs of the dead in forms that are historically and culturally more familiar to different groups. For instance, the gold coins of the colonial Indochine Francaise became available in the year 2000. They look like the préces d’or that the French buy for their children on Saint Nicholas Day. In commemoration of several generations of ancestry, some people take great care to mix different forms of ritual money,

Money for ghosts 143 believing that the money offered should correspond to the money used by the particular historical group of ancestors before they became ancestors.

And the market has prepared packaged sets of mixed monies to attract these customers. The choice of this or that form of money was largely up

to the individual commemorator and the multiplicity of money 1n this sense was an aspect of the consumer market. Despite this diversification, and actually in interaction with it, the general trend in household rituals of the central region was towards increasing dollarization. The retailer I quoted above argued that the old uniform votive clothing and the new multi-pattern clothing, or the “real” (real-size) paper-made votive umbrella and the “fake” umbrella simply drawn on paper for that matter, have the same utility value for the dead. Only the living consumers see them differently, she remarked. Following her explanation, the diversification of votive commodities is related to their higher esthetic value, not higher use value. According to Georg Simmel, the develop-

ment of objects from utility value to esthetic value is “a process of objectification” — the objects becoming “more independent of the arrangements and the needs of the subject than if it is merely useful.””° As I will argue shortly, the increasing dollarization of Vietnamese ritual currencies can be seen in the light of growing independence of the objects from their traditional sphere of instrumentality, which is in part to demonstrate the social hierarchy of gods, ancestors, and ghosts. By the end of the 1990s, in the Da Nang and Quang Nam region, the Do La notes became the most prominent ritual monetary object in household practices. Pagodas and community temples still tended to be discriminatory — gold for the gods and goddesses inside versus Vietnamese or

American banknotes for the errant spirits outside. Some community elders versed in Sino—Vietnamese literature recalled that ritualized money offering, in old customs, followed an order — gods received gold, ancestors silver, and the rest coin money or no money.”’ In the opening day of Cam Re’s Tiger Temple, Ong Cop (Spirit of Tiger) earned substantial wealth. ‘The organizers prepared gold and silver money on the altar; these were laid out demonstratively in a long horizontal line. On the

altar for the wandering spirits prepared on the opposite side, a large

bamboo basket in the middle of the offering table was full of Vietnamese and American currencies. Green notes of one dollar, five dollars, and twenty dollars were stored in the basket and mixed with red or green notes of Vietnamese five hundred, one thousand and ten thousand dong. Ten thousand Vietnamese dong was roughly equivalent to one US dollar at the time of the ceremony. In the ceremony held a few years later, the basket was stacked with bundles of replica foreign notes, each of which contained a hundred fresh 1996-series notes of

144 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam one hundred dollars. The elders in charge of the ceremony still insisted on

traditional money for the tutelary spirits enshrined in the temple. For participants like myself, the development gave the impression that the wandering ghosts were becoming richer relatively more rapidly than the gods. The nominal value of the money notes prepared on their side was increasing each year; the old traditional money offered to the other side remained unchanged in formal value.

Heads and tails The Do La notes fluctuated both in form and value. The most popular currency in the mid-1990s displayed, on the front side, a portrait of

Benjamin Franklin and the insignia of the US ‘Treasury Secretary. A drawing of a Chinese pavilion representing the Bank of Hell (the Treasury of the Other World) was on the reverse side. In other versions, the reverse side displayed the US Independence Hall together with the incomplete pyramid under the eye of Providence,”® whereas the front side had the portrait and the insignia of the God of Hell, who was the sovereign of the other world and the mirror of the emperor of this world in the ancient tradition.”” The “heads and tails” of these hybrid Do La notes attempt to create an

ultimate authority. One side of the money introduces the supreme authority of human destiny that determines the cycle of life and death. The opposite side introduces the US Federal Reserve, a dominant financial institution in the contemporary world. The notes fuse the dominant authorities from both sides of the parallel universe into unity and guar-

antee the fantastic value they represent with their unified,- ultimate authority. Ihe Do La money notes are also oblivious to the distance between ancient religious beliefs and modern economic ideology to the extent that they are functionally inseparable. The Bank of Hell authorizes the money’s use value — for the spirits and the dead — whereas the US Treasury certifies the specific exchange value of the notes within the particular sphere of validity defined by the hell bank. ‘The two institutions collaborate to authenticate the currency; neither is solely in control. The Do La money will become “counterfeit” unless it is authenticated by the Bank of Hell, and it will become useless money, as did the Afghan currency in the early 1990s, without backing from the

dollar. One may imagine that the US dollar, with its awesome and unprecedented power, has taken over the financial matters of the entire human race, including the dead. The Vietnamese Do La, however, plays with ambiguity and never clarifies which side of the note is more authentic. Thus, one can equally imagine that the ancient Bank of Hell, in the

Money for ghosts 145 Do La money, has invited a foreign financial power to 1ts modus operandi in order to strengthen the bank’s sovereignty and modernize its business concerning the debts of human destiny.

Money’s two destinations The Vietnamese Do La is a token of authority and a store of value as any money proper. However, it is unique in that it betokens two seemingly incompatible authorities at once. If the ritual money has two sides, so does the organization of the ritual. Money, including votive money, is an object that consists of “heads and tails”; the ritual action, as noted earlier (see chapter 1), encompasses the street side of ghosts and the interior side for gods and ancestors, and delivers money to both orientations. Now we return to the episode of spirit conversation introduced at the start of this chapter and will explore the old deity’s concern about new votive

currency in the light of ritual money’s duality both in form and destination.

The money that worried Sharpshooter was the particular currency, which will appear to most of us as a crude replica of the US dollar. Sharpshooter was not the only deity opposed to the new currency. The understanding that the foreign money is not suitable for traditional community gods and established guardian spirits, as illustrated by the event in

Tiger ‘Temple, was widespread across the rural and peripheral-urban communities in Quang Nam — Da Nang region. These Do La notes are new to the Vietnamese ritual practice; they coexist with other more trad1-

tional kinds and are becoming a preeminent form in domestic ritual activity in parts of Vietnam. Is Sharpshooter against the Do La money simply because it is foreign in origin? Alternatively, is his resistance because the currency 1s annexing other more familiar traditional and domestic tokens of value? During his recent visit to Hanoi, former US president Clinton told Le Kha Phieu, the then Secretary General of the Vietnamese Communist Party, “Don’t fear it [globalization]. Embrace it.” Le Kha Phieu was not impressed and said, “We respect the choice, the lifestyle and political systems of other nations. We 1n turn demand that other nations respect our people’s choices.”°° Is it possible that some old gods of Vietnam, like the nation’s ageing party leaders, are suspicious of foreign ideas and skeptical of social change? On the other

hand, could it be the case that these gods are cautious about the risk of economic globalization, as all effective community leaders should be? More importantly, why does the anti-Do La sentiment rise only from such established deities as Sharpshooter and rarely from other

categorically lower beings in the am such as wandering ghosts?

146 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam Additionally, how is the resistance related to a central issue in money and culture that has preoccupied so many writers and critics — the monetization of morality??’ These questions do not invite simple answers. Money in an imaginary economy is as complex in identity as money in the real economy and may

actually have added complexity as it mirrors the complex questions of value in real money with added deflection. ‘This is certainly the case with the famous “art money” of J. Boggs, who provoked controversy by selling his replica drawings of US and European currencies as artworks.°* The subsequent discussion will focus on two main issues in the contemporary currency problem of Vietnamese ritual economy: convertibility of value and personal emancipation. These two issues are closely interrelated as Simmel notes: “[Modern money], by virtue of its perfect mobility, forms the bond that combines the largest extension of the economic sphere with the growing independence of persons.”°*? Simmel argues that the rise of money in an economy 1s inseparable from the growth of individual free-

dom in society.°* Monetary exchange promotes the parallel process of previously independent communities becoming mutually dependent and dependent persons becoming independent from traditional communal bondage.” In this understanding, money is a powerful instrument of the disintegration of traditional social boundaries and the expansion of the horizon of human relationship and individual freedom. Paul Bohannan’s analysis of the Tiv exchange system in northern Nigeria focuses on the extension of the economic sphere caused by the introduction of western money. The traditional Tiv economy consisted of three discreet spheres of exchange. The first sphere dealt with subsistence food items of yiagh — differentiated from the sphere of shagba in which the precious items of slaves, cattle, cloth, and metal bars circulated. The third

most prominent sphere of exchange dealt with rights in human beings (apart from slaves), such as rights in women. Bohannan explains that the Tiv understood these spheres of exchange hierarchically based on differential moral values.°° Thus, they believed that a man of honor would not

exchange slaves for food or obtain his bride with payments. Most exchanges were of what Bohannan calls “conveyances,” taking place within a specific sphere, and the acts of “conversion” — exchange of items between spheres — had strong moral implications and were highly

regulated.’ Bohannan argued that modern money, the British colonial currency, dismantled the order of the traditional Tiv economic system. This money provided “a common denominator,’ made every item exchangeable on a common scale, and hence broke the security of the traditional exchange spheres.°® Instead of relying on the elders who would procure a bride for

Money for ghosts 147 them within the institution of exchange marriage, the young Tiv men were driven to accumulate wealth in the hope of purchasing a bride on their own. The elders deplored the situation and blamed money for the breakdown of the traditional social order. In this situation, money is what Marx calles “a radical leveler” that extinguishes conventional social dis-

tinctions.°” As Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch note, however, this view of monetization is partial because it is unlikely that the young Tiv men and women, no longer having to depend on their elders for marriage, thought about money in the same negative way.*” The extension of the economic sphere that appeared threatening to the Tiv elders is not the whole story of monetization; modern money, as Simmel shows, integrates this phenomenon with growing personal freedom. The last point extends to the possibility to consider that the Do La money takes on different meanings between the two principal spheres it is imagined to circulate — among the placed ancestors and gods on the one hand and among the displaced ghosts on the other. Money has two sides, being a token of authority and a token of value at once: monetarists see the world mainly through the tail side of the object; their critics look to the other side in search for an alternative economic theory. Therefore, according to Keith Hart, proper analysis of the money world must look at both

“heads and tails” of the object.*! If money is a two-sided object, the monetization of economy is also a two-sided process. It may appear intimidating if seen from one side, whereas the same process may be experienced

as a rare opportunity to achieve personal freedom. Understanding the power of money that threatens the traditional social order runs the risk of imagining the power to inhere in money, unless we are able to identify what really constitutes the threat.

Hill Gates describes the “spirit money” in Chinese tradition and explains it as a material symbol of the penetration of petty commodity capitalism in the economy to religious imaginations.** Mayfair Yang rejects this explanation, which assumes equivalence of meaning between money in economic relations and money in ritual practice, and she takes on an opposite interpretative strategy with reference to contemporary money-offering practices. Drawing upon Bataille’s idea of the symbolic destruction of wealth, she argues that the growing ritual prodigality in contemporary China subverts the ideology of accumulation and the ethic

of investment in the market economy.*’ Stephan Feuchtwang also explores discontinuities between money for the dead and money for the

living. He reflects on the paradox that whereas the dead, possessing money, appear closer to the living in identity, giving money to the dead, in ritual practice, is intended for their journey to the other world and thus serves to sever their ties with the living.**

148 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

Despite their differences, these scholars commonly consider “spirit money” a unitary category. The very concept of “spirit money” in fact ignores the diversity in the concept of the spirit, whether it concerns the classification of ghosts and ancestors as in our discussion or the important distinction between “accursed spirits” and “holy spirits” in the modern conception of political sovereignty as in Georgio Agamben’s investigation of the issue.*” Bataille’s notion of symbolic economy is instructive for thinking about the production of mass human suffering and death as part of wealth creation in modern economic history, whereas it suffers from treating death as a unitary category, oblivious to the fact that in modern body politics, life and memory of life are classified in bipolar moral terms and assimilated to or excluded from polity accordingly (see the conclusion to this volume).*°

The ritual economy in Vietnam has aspects of discontinuity within itself as well as 1n relation to the real economy. Even if it takes an identical

form, ritual money may have quite different meanings depending on to whom it is given and where it is imagined to circulate. The traditional Bank of Hell had an elaborate system to demonstrate political hierarchy by means of money. The forms of money signified different positions in the social hierarchy of the other world — gold-receiving gods and deities at

the top and coin-receiving anonymous ghosts at the bottom of the hierarchy.*’ Money was central to this cosmology but mainly as a symbol of status and prestige rather than as an instrument of exchange and a token of exchange value. The ghost’s coin money was not convertible to the deity’s precious metal money, and this non-convertibility between different currencies was crucial for the money-centered religious imagination. Unlike in the imaginary economy, coins and precious metals were inter-convertible in the real economy but had separate functions. The transaction of landed property and the awards from the imperial court

tended to be made in gold, whereas taxation, including the French colonial head tax and labor tax on peasants, employed traditional brass

coins and later colonial paper money. Thus, we may argue that the traditional ritual monies took on the functional diversity of the traditional monies, and they expressed a social hierarchy — within the other world

and in relation to this world — based on money’s formal multiplicity. Money in the other world was a symbol of social inequality, as was its equivalent in this world, but the former obviated the economic aspect of social inequality. In other words, deities were superior to ghosts not because they had more money but because they used different money. Leopold Cadiére argues that gods, ancestors, and ghosts in the traditional Vietnamese worldview were differential categories and were so within a rigid hierarchy of values.*® This hierarchy was demonstrated in

Money for ghosts 149 the meaning of giving money to the ghosts as well as in the specific form of

money used for this purpose. According to Cadiére, offering food and

votive money was considered an act of tribute if it was for gods or ancestors and an act of charity if it was for ghosts. There are traditional popular tales that depict how ghosts would tumble on one another and fistfight amongst themselves to compete for the offering tossed to them on the ground, in contrast to the orderly table manners that were expected of ancestors. It is also argued that in traditional Vietnam, ghosts were mainly an object of fear and the ritual conducted on behalf of them was intended mainly “‘to avoid their wrath.”*”

Today, as described earlier, the moral identity of ghosts in communities of central Vietnam does not easily collapse to these negative values traditionally associated with them. Most families in this region have at least a few relatives whose bodies are still missing from the chaos of war

and whose identities are therefore not yet fully incorporated in the domestic ancestral altar. The proper incorporation of these identities into the ancestral ritual domain is believed to require the repatriation of

their remains to the family graveyard or somewhere else considered appropriate. The mass graves of civilian massacres, where bodies unrelated in kinship are enmeshed together, defy the wishes of their relatives

for such a reburial, and so do the many soldiers and civilians of the people’s war whose bodies are still missing from home burial (see chapter 3). Many fallen soldiers of the former South Vietnamese forces, even if their bodies were properly buried, have been excluded from the domain

of ancestor worship. It is not uncommon that families commemorate these tragic war dead at the shrine for ghosts rather than at that for ancestors, although they tend to keep this activity concealed from the public. In this case, people recite incantations of invitation for all anonymous spirits of co bac but do so hoping that the invited group of ghosts would include the spirits of their lost spouse, children, or siblings. In places affected by large-scale civilian killings, some people even publicly worship their parents or grandparents in the shrine for ghosts, believing that the spirit of the dead told them to do so in a dream or apparition.”°

With the historical background of a violent and protracted war, the ritual memory of kinship goes beyond the site of ancestral memory. The conceptual opposition of ong ba (ancestors and gods) versus co bac (wandering ghosts) is still part of the commemorative landscape. However, the history of mass death and mass displacement has broken the rigidity and stability of the conceptual duality. This observation somewhat resonates

with the literature on the social history of western Europe after the Great War, which describes how the experience of the catastrophic mechanical mass war death was not only appropriated by the dominant

150 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam political cult of the patriotic war dead but also generated critical cultural movements, including widespread popular interest in the ghosts of the

fallen soldiers.’ The eruption of ghost beliefs after the Great War, according to Jay Winter, was partly the expression of mass grief and partly

a subversion of the dominant political cult about the geist of heroic war death.°* Currently, household rites in parts of Vietnam show the ten-

dency to relate to anonymous ghosts in increasingly equal terms to ancestors and deities. Many families prepare equally copious offerings

in the outhouse shrine for ghosts as on the ancestral tablet and have

: renovated the shrine for ghosts as sumptuously as they undertook the renovation of the ancestral shrine. ‘This co-prosperity of opposite moral symbols is also expressed in the intimate lives of deities such as Sharpshooter. ‘This deity is the tutelary spirit of anumber of village mediums in Quang Nam — Da Nang. Some of

these mediums have recently accepted novel helper spirits who have transformed from war ghosts. The six-fingered village medium in Cam Re, through whom I conducted the conversation with Sharpshooter, worshiped this deity for many years but now he also associates with Impartial Heaven, the young female spirit who died in the chaos of war in her historical life, as well as Red Seed, the spirit of the unknown soldier of the communist army. Sharpshooter now shares the village’s oral reli-

gious history with these and other formerly anonymous ghosts of tragic death from the recent historical time who are vigorously transforming

into powerful tutelary spirits and minor communal deities. These upwardly mobile spirits may begin their careers as the followers of an established deity but eventually establish an independent domain of specialty and network of followers. In rural areas, it is also common to see a new shrine built in honor of a particular ghost and to hear the villagers whispering that this ghost shrine, despite its humble look, is actually more “powerful and auspicious” than the community’s ancient temples. As Philip Taylor notes with reference to a rising popular cult movement in a southern region, the more marginalized and socially excluded a spiritual entity in origin, the more powerful and popular that entity may become when it undergoes a symbolic transformation.?” When ghosts transform into deities, as was the case with Lotus Flower

which we saw earlier, the story of their transformation sometimes includes an episode of “misunderstanding” that triggers the change of identity — that the spirit mistook the generalised offerings for ghosts for a specific gift of tribute for an ancestor or a god. It is within this milieu of complex, dynamic interplay between political history and religious imagination that we should consider the meaning of

the proliferation of Do La money; that is, how this money can interact

Money for ghosts 151 with the vitalization of the traces of tragic war dead which are not assimilated either to the dominant state-instituted war commemoration or to the revived family ancestor worship. As noted previously, Do La money had become a thoroughly familiar object in the Vietnamese commemorative landscape by the end of the 1990s. Vietnamese families offer money to their household deities as well as to their ancestors. In doing so, they observe the same ritual order as that in the community temples such as the Tiger Temple — the double-sided, two-way acts of worship within the concentric dual structure of worship constituted by the shrine for gods and ancestors in the interior and the milieu of ghosts in the exterior. For domestic rituals, an increasing number of people tended to burn only the Do La money irrespective of the different identities and statuses of the recipients, and these include the six-fingered medium for Sharpshooter. In view of the above discussion, we may think of the proliferation of the Do La money in terms of a growing demonstrative instability in the hierarchical conception of gods, ancestors, and ghosts. Let us recall the interpretation of ritual splendor as politics of display (rather than politics on display) and related idea of symbolic power.°* I suggested similarly that Vietnamese ritual money in the traditional order was instrumental in asserting the moral symbolic hierarchy of ong ba (gods and ancestors) versus co bac (ghosts). It appears that money is instrumental in confusing the hierarchical, concentric order, just as it was before in ruling it.

The Do La ritual currency encompasses the hierarchically instituted spheres of values and incorporates these previously separate spheres into a single conceptual whole. Seen in this light, one implication of the dollarization of ritual money is fairly obvious: dollarization monetizes the ritual money. The discreet (non-convertible and endogenous) spheres of value that previously confined the movement of the traditional ritual monies are vulnerable now to the trans-spheric circulation of the Do La. The Do La has simplified the afterlife’s financial economy and has incorporated the

multi-centric system to a single extended sphere. The differences between the placed gods or genealogically related ancestors on the one hand and the unrelated, street-wandering, marginal ghosts on the other are made increasingly marginal in proportion to the intensity and popularity of Do La money in flames. Dollarization disrupts the traditional hierarchy between these categories and contributes to democratizing their political relations in the world of am. The money does not discriminate between the peripheral ghosts and the ritually appropriated family ancestors and established community deities located at the center of the ritual organization. These peripheral ghosts earn large amounts of money in the streets, and the money they make is a convertible currency in the

152 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam sense that it enables a contest of power with other higher social classes in supernature. Although people of am are making a lot of money across social classes in post-reform Vietnam, the way ghosts make money in this vigorous economic life is not the same as gods and ancestors. Ghosts in Vietnam, the war ghosts in particular, are imagined to be highly mobile actors 1n contrast to the deities and ancestors who are usually static, located beings. ‘The misery of being a ghost is in fact all about not having a specified place to relate to; a place where their historical identities are remembered and their grievances consoled. The nameless, poor, and unremembered ghosts of war, in the popular imagination, are condemned to migrate from place to place and somehow have to find their livelihood on the streets. The con-

dition signifies a perpetual liminal existence according to Arnold van Gennep, and, for Robert Hertz, an eternal state of exclusion from society.° > In Simmel’s terminology, this belongs to the social form of “the stranger,”

who is physically close to and, at once, relationally far from the locale.”° Ghosts become strangers to the community of the living by being outsiders to, according to Durkheim, the community’s realm of “true spirits” (see chapter 1).?’

Money and liberty Deprivation and mobility characterize co bac, the wandering ghosts. These characteristics make the money for ghosts far more money-like than the money for gods, even if the two transactions may employ the same type of money. Ordinary Vietnamese tend to burn more paper money for ghosts than for gods or ancestors, and more often. There are many reasons for this intimate association between ghosts and money. One relates to the idea of giai oan (“liberation from grievance”; or giai nguc, meaning “liberation from incarceration in grievous history”) — the

idea that the living must intervene in the business of the dead with practical actions in order to undo the grievance caused by tragic and violent death. The ghosts, by definition, are wealthier in grievance than the ancestors, and there are many such richly grievous ghosts in the Vietnamese perceptual environment that keeps the memory of the violent war. The popular domestic act of money burning, accompanied by small prayers, is believed to contribute to lessening their wealth of grievance. As noted earlier (see chapter 6), the grievance of ghosts is fundamentally a relational concept in that it arises because of the absence of social recognition, and a problem of social memory as it intensifies in proportion to the indifference of the living to their existence. Money-immolation in this

context is a symbolic act of recognizing the ghost’s existence in the

Money for ghosts 153 horizon of history and remembering, even fleetingly, its historical iden-

tity. Since the repetition of this act is supposed to help reduce the grievance and hence liberate the soul, the money for ghosts becomes the potential for emancipation. The wealthier the ghost becomes, theoretically, the freer it can become from coerced mobility and the lack of a place to locate its memory. For the welfare of the ghosts, therefore, money works quite magically

because it becomes true money, or what Simmel calls a “pure instrument” of human relations and freedom, in this transaction.?® The transaction of money between human and ghost is not bound by corporate ties but conducted anonymously. The money in this transaction is not merely nominal or metonymic, as is the case with the deity’s status money, but it acquires powerful meanings of accumulation and exchangeability. The

ghost’s relationship to money is about conversion of the wealth (of remembrance) with the possibility of self-emancipation. For war ghosts, each Do La bill they are offered 1s an incremental act of recognition, indicating a step towards genuine freedom from the imprisoning history of violent death.” Sharpshooter wants the restoration of the old non-convertible, spherespecific currencies. I asked why. The explanation I proposed was two-fold.

First, I argued that the dollar ritual money is disrupting the hierarchical order of the other world. The introduction of Do La to the Vietnamese ritual economy has blurred, as was the case with the colonial currency in the Tiv economy, the boundaries between existing, separate spheres of value and therefore weakened the social hierarchy which is partly based on maintaining these boundaries. The competing ritual currencies then demonstrate a contest of power between the mass and the elite and point to a significant reconfiguration in the polity of supernature, which currently appears to be something akin to a bourgeois revolution by the moneymaking and money-holding mass against the privileged elite. The

empowerment of the Cam Re ghosts of war described earlier can be considered partly in this light. Their fantastical political activism against the hierarchy of supernature may be a manifestation of the intimate history of revolutionary activism experienced by the people of Cam Re, in whose everyday communal life the stories of these spirit actors are embedded. Yet, in my opinion, the phenomenon also reflects on the demonstrative instability in the moral hierarchy of death, relating to the history of mass death and displacement (see chapter one), and the manifestation of this changing situation in the new ritual instruments such as the Do La money. Second, I described how memory-related the money-burning practice is for ghosts.

For the subaltern ghosts, money, convertible or not, does not appear to threaten social order. On the contrary, money for ghosts has a very positive,

154 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam ultimate value, which is the emancipation of the self. The money of Do La is situated between these two divergent perspectives, money as a token of authority or money as a token of value, and becomes meaningful within the milieu of the conflict of these two views.

Nowhere are these conflicts expressed more prominently than in the body of the ritual actor engaged in death commemoration — the body that

moves between the opposite orientations of inside out and outside in within the binary spatial structure of worship. It is primarily through this ritualized ambidextrous movement of body and the shifting perspectives accompanying the movement that the remembrance of death may become free from the constraints of moral hierarchy, and further that the structure within which it takes place may become less asymmetrical. ‘The psychologist J. J. Gibson made the famous remark about human perception of the environment: “Shift your position and you alter the image.”°°

According to the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, “To switch from one perspective to another is to switch whole domains of explanation.”®’

In the next and concluding chapter, we will return to this two-way commemorative practice and review its wider ethical and political implications.

Before we end this chapter, something more needs to be said about Sharpshooter. Arguing that understanding the monetization of economy should situate money within indigenous moral conflicts through which

the process takes a concrete shape, this chapter supports the moral economy approach to monetary exchange, which questions the assump-

tion that money is a transcendental object unbound by cultural contexts.°? Whereas monetization of the economy is not a culture-free process, modern money, as Simmel shows, can also change the cultural world irrevocably. This was true with the Tiv economy, and it is certainly true in the modern history of Indochina where the French Indochinese dollar,°? followed by the American dollar, facilitated the way to war,

revolution, and mass death.°* Against this background, I speculate whether, implicit in Sharpshooter’s narrative, there is an authentic his-

torical vision. ,

Perhaps this ancient warrior-scholar is against the dollar currency because he remembers how the collapse of the feudal hierarchy was followed by a long history of catastrophic violence and mass human suffering instead of a prosperous democracy. Perhaps he sees the violent history of French and American dollars in the shadow of the ghosts who are busily collecting the Do La. Perhaps he is aware that the horde of war ghosts was made what they are partly by the power of the dollar and that the money they are now after in order to be free from their grievances is already part of that very grievous history.

Money for ghosts 155 If he sees the current situation in this way, this ancient culture hero is confused between money in his world and money in the opposite world; that is, the dollarization of the virtual ritual economy and the dollarization

of the actual political economy. It is a mistake to confuse these two domains and to regard them merely as a continuum.°” The Vietnamese conceptualize am and duong as a relation of mimetic alterity. They have many idioms describing the two worlds as the same, mirroring each other, but equally numerous poignant metaphors about their being contradictory. In response to my question about the ideology of war, Sharpshooter also confirmed this point by saying that the dead do not remember the war in the same way as the living. He said that people in his world, unlike us 1n the living world, forget the intentions and the objectives of the war in which they fought in the past. As a token of gratitude to Sharpshooter for

telling us this revealing information, I wish to add that his confusion about money matters has a reason behind it — that the confusion between real and fantastic is already part of the materiality of Do La and the “heads and tails” of this new currency from the Bank of Hell.

~ Conclusion

Hannah Arendt once said, when she was asked what her position was on the politics of left and right: I really don’t know and [I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think that I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think that I am left or Iam a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’

If there was one political thinker who radically rejected the terms of the

cold war, according to Jeffrey Isaac, it was this author of The human condition, who believed in the power of human creativity to go beyond “a monologic politics that is incapable of projecting beyond the subject... a polarizing politics in which the Other becomes simply a projection of one’s own obsessions and fears ... epitomized by the mutual balance of terror and conformity.”” For Arendt, politics is above all about difference

and dissonance, the presence in the political arena of actors with alternative understandings and competing projects, the existence of “others

from whom one cannot escape and with whom one must share the world,” and she believed that recognizing and respecting this otherness is central to genuine politics and free political life.’ The bipolarity of left and right has been an important subject in the tradition of anthropological research, too, although within a different

frame of thought from that in contemporary political theory. Robert Hertz, in his classic essay on dual religious symbolism in the representation of death, explored how society constructs a conceptual moral hierarchy on the basis of apparently identical symbols — such as the right and left hand, and the “good death” and “bad death.”* He questioned why the right side represented, in European languages and beyond, positive values of strength, dexterity, faith, law and purity — including “good

death” which is ritually and metaphorically associated with the right hand in the ethnological material Hertz drew upon — whereas the left stood for all the opposite values and sinister meanings — including “bad 156

Conclusion 157 death,” to whose “unquiet and spiteful souls” the society is supposed to maintain the attitude of exclusion.” Hertz conceptualized the symbolic contrast of the left and the right hand as a bio-political phenomenon, the condition of the human body on which the society inscribes “the opposition of values and the violent contrasts of the world of morality.”° Hertz viewed that the antithesis of left and right was both a complementary bipolarity and an asymmetrical relationship — the former being the natural condition of homo duplex and the latter resulting from the

imposition of collective, hierarchical norms on the individual body. Furthermore, he argued that the symbolic bipolarity was “reversible dualism” in archaic or egalitarian societies, meaning that these societies did not postulate a fixed moral hierarchy in the life of the dead as they

lacked such a conception as to their own life. The aspect of symbolic reversibility explains why death rituals (or the lack of them) in egalitarian

societies appear to be shockingly unfitting to the theory of moral hierarchy and symbolic conquest based on the observation of hierarchical societies (see chapter 1).’ It also explains why Evans-Pritchard, dealing with the religious concepts in the relatively egalitarian Nuer society in southern Sudan, describes their conception of dead kinsmen with the term “ghosts,” against the dominant tendency in African studies that renders the equivalent category in other culture groups of the continent predominantly as “ancestors.”®

Based on the above premise that the conceptual polarity of death was universal, Hertz proceeded to stress the importance of the ambidex-

trous human body in social progress. Noting that the “evolution of society replaces this reversible dualism with a rigid hierarchical structure,” he writes, “The distinction of good and evil, which for long was solidary with the antithesis of right and left, will not vanish from our conscience. [The] constraint of a mystical ideal has for centuries been able to make man into a unilateral being.”” Observing that the principles of a social and political order are expressed in the language of the human body, Hertz expressed his vision of a progressive social order in a new language of the body: “[A] liberated and foresighted society will strive to develop the energies dormant in our left side and in our right cerebral hemisphere, and to assure by an appropriate training a more harmonious development of the organism.”’° Hence the ambidextrous human body which is free from the preeminence of the right hand represents a democratic social body which is freed from the moral symbolic hierarchy of right and left. ‘These two separate discourses about right and left — one about moral symbolic polarity in traditional societies and the other about ideological bifurcation in modern politics — can make a critical association in the

158 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam history of mass death in the cold war. If we consider the history of cold war in the light of the doctrine of deterrence of imagining war in order to prevent war, which largely represents the Western experience of the conflict,'’ it appears that the political history and the morality of death have no meaningful relationship. If we extend the scope of the history and include in it the experience of violent ideological confrontations and containment politics within national and local communities, which 1s what the cold war actually meant in much of the non-western world in the past century, the political bifurcation of the human community and a moral polarization of death become closely inter-related phenomena. In the history of the global conflict in the latter sense, the communities were driven to select politically good death from the mass of other war

death and to extract an ideologically cohesive genealogy out of the enmeshed history of violence across the ideological border. If the left and the right are both historically and genealogically constitutive of the social self, how can this identity be reconciled with citizenship in the state society, which is based on the renouncement of one’s relatedness

to the wrong side, according to how this is defined by the political

community? , The experience of the cold war as a violent civil conflict resulted in

political crisis in the moral community of kinship. It resulted in a situation

that Hegel characterizes as the collision between “the law of kinship,” which obliges the living to remember dead kin, and “the law of the state” which forbids citizens from commemorating those who died as the enemy

of the state. The political crisis was basically about a representational crisis in social memory, in which a large part of family—ancestral identities

is relegated to the status that I earlier called political ghosts, whose historical existence is felt in intimate social life but nevertheless traceless

in public memory. Hegel explored the philosophical foundation of the modern state partly through the ethical questions involved in the remembrance of the war dead, drawing upon the legend of Antigone from Sophocles’ epic Theban plays.'* Antigone is torn between the obligation to bury her war-dead brothers, according to “the divine law” of kinship on the one hand and, on the other, the reality of “the human law” of the state according to which she is prohibited from giving burial to the enemy of the city state.’” She gives a burial to her brother who died as the hero of the city, then proceeds to do the same for another brother who died as an enemy of the city. The latter act violates the edict of the city’s ruler, and

she is subsequently condemned to death as punishment. Invoking this powerful epic tragedy from ancient Greece, Hegel reasoned that the ethical foundation of the modern state is grounded in a dialectical resolution of the clashes between the law of the state and the law of kinship. **

Conclusion 159 For Judith Butler, the question is about the fate of human relatedness suspended between life and death, being forced into the liminal situation of having to choose between the norms of kinship and the subjection to

the state.’ |

Part of what I described in this book may be considered in the light of Hegelian ethical questions. Numerous individuals and families in southern and central Vietnam have been torn between the familial obligation

to attend to the memory of the war dead related in kinship and the political obligation not to do so for those who fought against the revolutionary state. ‘These families are today concerned about giving a proper home to the hitherto stigmatized ancestral memory from “that side” (ben

kia, the American side) and therefore seek to bring this memory into demonstrative coexistence with the memory of death on “this side” (bent ta, the revolutionary side) in their domestic and communal ritual space. The act of inviting the spirit of the brother who died on the opposite side of the revolutionary war into the domestic ritual is at once a moral and a political practice. It is political to the extent that the act works against the towering moral hierarchy of death in the state politics of memory, and in the sense of recovering the right to have rights, which Arendt describes as “the right to have a political home.”’° In the domestic ritual space, the brother’s identity is removed from the organization of national memory, which allows only the beholders of revolutionary patriotic merit, excluding the soldiers of “America’s puppet army” who fell on the other side of

the civil war. The invitation is also a moral act, in the sense that the democratization of memory is based on the empowerment of traditional

norms about death remembrance and related revitalization of familybased ritual activity. The efficacy of the act as a political practice is based on the fact that the act takes on a culturally familiar and morally legitimate form. It is interesting to compare the above social development to a recent proposition about political development beyond the conventional left and right oppositions. Painting an outline of social democracy in the post-cold war world, Anthony Giddens repudiates both what he calls the “rightist” idealization of the traditional, patriarchal familial order and the “leftist” view of the family as a microcosm of an undemocratic political order. In their stead, Giddens proposes a new model of family relations, which can synthesize the imperative of communal moral solidarity with the freedom of individual choice, as a unity based on contractual commitment among

individual members. This social form of democratic family relations,

according to Giddens, will respect the norms of “equality, mutual respect, autonomy, decision-making through communication and freedom from violence.” *’

160 ‘The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

Giddens writes about family and kinship relations at length in a work devoted to the political history of bipolar ideologies, because he believes that families are a basic institution of civil society and that a strong civil society is central to a successful social development beyond the legacy of left and right oppositions.’® His “third way” agenda is based on the notion that a new sociological thinking is in demand after the end of the cold war. According to Giddens, the political development after the cold war depends on how societies will creatively inherit positive elements from both right and left ideological legacies, and its main constituents will be “states without enemies” (as against the states organized along the frontline of bipolar enmity), “cosmopolitan nations” (against the old nations pursuing nationalism), “mixed economy” (between capitalism and socialism), and “active civil societies.”!” At the core of this creative process of grafting, Giddens argues, are the “post-traditional” conditions of individual and collective life, an understanding of which requires transcending the traditional sociological imagination that sets individual

freedom and communal solidarity as contrary values.*” The “posttraditional” society, according to Giddens, is expressed most prominently in the social life of the democratic family and “new kinship.” In the composition of “new kinship” presented by Giddens, however, there is little space for kinship practices that rise from the background of a violent modern history such as Vietnam’s. His account of right and left —

unfolds as if this political antithesis had principally been an issue of academic paradigms or parliamentarian organizations, without mass human suffering and displacement. Giddens’ discussion of the social

, order after the cold war is based primarily on the specific historical context of western Europe. In his accounts, the positions of left and right appear mainly as those about abstract versions of modernity and

schemes of social ordering. According to the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio, left and right are correlative positions, like two sides of a coin, in which “[the] existence of one presupposes the existence of the other, the only way to invalidate the adversary is to invalidate oneself.”7?

This privileged experience of left and right oppositions as both being integral parts of the body politic, however, may not extend to other historical realities of the cold war. In the latter, the left and right were mutually exclusive positions rather than correlative ones, in the sense that taking the position of one side meant denying the other side a raison-d’étre from the political arena. Seen in a wider context, we cannot think of the history of right and left without the history of mass death. Right and left were both part of anti-

colonial nationalism, meaning different routes towards the ideal of national liberation and self-determination.** In the ensuing bipolar

Conclusion 161 era, it transformed into the ideology of a civil strife and war, in which achieving national unity became equivalent to annihilating one or the other side from the body politic.*? In this context, the political history of right and left is not to be considered separately from the history of human lives and social institutions torn by it, nor is the “new kinship” after the

cold war from the memory of the dead ruins of this history. Family relations are important vectors in understanding the decomposition of the bipolar world order. This is not merely because they are an elementary constituent of civil society as Giddens believes, but rather because they have actually been a vital site of political struggles and ideological conflicts during the cold war. Seen against this historical background, it 1s

misleading to define the state in the post-cold war world merely as an entity without external enemies. Rather we have to think of it, as did Hegel in his “philosophical anthropology” of kinship, state and law, as an entity that has to deal with internal hostilities and reconcile with society, a significant part of which it condemned to an unlawful status.** What has happened in Vietnam since the early 1990s is along this hopeful trajectory

of reconciliation, and the empowerment of the rights to remember and console the dead has been a central element in this important social progress beyond the left and right. Communities in Vietnam are moving beyond the politics of left and right and are in the midst of an important process of social reconciliation. The revival of ancestor worship in the 1990s contributed to bringing the stigmatized memory of death on the “wrong side” to a realm of genealogical commonality with the dominant memory of death on the “right

side.” To relate to the dead according to the traditional genealogical paradigm, in this context, was partly a way to move beyond the modern political hierarchy of death. Furthermore, I showed that the practice of

kinship memory in today’s Vietnam is a powerful alternative to the politics of heroic national memory in a more fundamental sense. The worship of heroic war death centralized the plurality of kinship memory

into a unified ritual community of the nation, whereas the worship of ancestors consolidates the plurality of political heritage back into a untfied genealogical community. In this movement of the memories of the dead, however, a critical change has taken place in the practice of death remembrance. In the practice of kinship memory, the memory of death on “our side” (in genealogical terms) does not efface the memory of death beyond this domain of corporate solidarity but relates to it within a wider relational framework of concentric dualism.

This progressive development does not support the view of society that projects to it the mysterious propensity to conquer the traces of bad death. Nor does it support the theory of social solidarity that privileges

162 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

exclusively the ritual relationship with established ancestral spirits, ignoring the spiritual identities excluded from this privileged social domain as well as the historical conditions and political dynamic that engendered the moral hierarchy. Hertz notes, “The right is the inside, the finite, assured well-being, and certain peace; the left is the outside, the infinite, hostile and the perpetual menace of evil” — the contrast of right and left takes on primarily the spatial differentiation of inside and outside in many cultural practices including the Vietnamese.*? Within

this system of structure and practice, the body of the ritual actor, in central Vietnam, moves between the interiority of genealogical memory

and the external space of anonymous death, and associates with contrary memories of death across the moral polarity. This ambidextrous social action, which unites the conceptually separate domains of values in incorporative practice, does not exclude the milieu of bad death, nor incorporate it to a symbolic closure, but gives it a sovereign status in the horizon of history. This exclusive inclusion of bad death is what makes

the popular memory practices in Vietnam depart decisively from the convention and the social memory of war liberated, substantively, from political control. Going back to Hegel’s law of kinship, it is important to note that the

epic hero in Sophocles’ play had two brothers; one died as the war hero of Thebes and another brother died as the enemy of the city. The body of the hero brother is buried according to an appropriate rite and his

name is enshrined as the city’s patriotic hero, whereas the body of the “traitor” brother is left abandoned outside the city’s wall, forbidden funerary rites, and his name is not called upon in public lamentations over the dead. Hegel does not pay much attention to this dual concentric symbolism of death which constitutes, in my opinion, a core element of the epic narrative, nor do other more contemporary commentators on Antigone including Butler, who delves instead into the element of incest she finds hidden in Antigone’s love for her dead brother.*° Considering this element (see the verses in note 26), it appears that Antigone’s predicament relates not merely to the conflict of kinship norms with the moral claims from the state as Hegel describes it but also, more specifically, to the bifurcation of kinship obligations into left and right, and outside and inside, within the structure of concentric moral symbolic dualism. Butler argues, “Antigone represents not kinship in its ideal

form but its deformation and displacement.”?’ I will argue that the condition of displacement relates above all to the dispersal of the memory of the dead across the traditional moral boundary of inside and outside, good death and bad death, which is typically the social consequence of a civil war.

Conclusion 163 In the legend of Antigone (verses 570—90), the city’s ruler Creon inter-

rogates Antigone, demanding her to explain how she can fail to differentiate between her two brothers, the hero from the traitor, whereas in the eyes of her hero brother, according to Creon, it will be surely an impious act to render his enemy the honor of burial (verse 575). Antigone defends her act invoking (verses 580—5), “Death longs for the same rites for all. Who, Creon, who on earth can say the ones below [Hades, the god of the underworld] don’t find this pure and uncorrupt?””® (verses 1185—95). Later in the story, the city’s blind prophet Tiresias upholds her claim that the divine law does indeed prescribe burial for all dead men. She declares that the rights of the dead are universal and part of “the great unwritten, unshakable traditions” (verse 505). Seen in this light, Antigone’s claim is not merely an expression of “family love” and blood relationship as Hegel understood it, nor is it necessarily an allegory for “the limits of kinship” relating to incestuous affection and illegitimate love as Butler describes it.?? Rather we should consider it also to be an assertion of a particular

ethics of memory relating to the inalienable rights of the dead to be properly buried and grieved. This religious imperative becomes part of the assertion of the law of kinship through the specific experience of a civil war, which divides the family in political terms. In other words, the act of

claiming the rights of kinship to remember the dead, against the background of a civil war, is at once that of empowering the universal ethics of commemoration. This book explored the Vietnamese history of mass war death and their

culture of commemoration in the above light, considering the ritual milieu involving the ghosts of war as being in touch with both kinship norms and universal ethical, religious values. The Vietnamese category of chet duong (violent death in the street) refers to the representational crisis in genealogical memory caused by the displacement of death and afterlife

from home. The recent war made “death in the street” a generalized phenomenon rather than an isolated event and the postwar state politics of heroic death added further, politicized conditions of afterlife displacement. Displacement in death thus speaks of a challenge to the law and moral power of kinship, according to how these are defined by Hegel. However, in cultural practice, the category of chet duong points to a further moral and ethical dimension other than the morality of kinship

and in relation to the latter. Within the dual structure and two-way practice of Vietnamese ritual commemoration that encompasses the symbolic domains of inside and outside (right and left; house and street), the displaced ghosts of the dead on the street side are entitled to acts of

social recognition from their living neighbors, just as are the placed ancestral spirits on the house side. The composition of this ritual

164 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

landscape entails that the law of kinship (manifested in the form of ancestral worship on the house side) can coexist with the principle of hospitality (for the unknown, displaced spirits of the dead on the street side). It entails further that the rights of kinship (to remember the dead kinsmen), against the historical background of generalized mass displacement, can be guaranteed only in interaction with the efforts to guarantee the rights of the dead (to be remembered) beyond the narrow sphere of

kinship. |

‘Today, Vietnamese villagers are relatively free to interact with diverse spirits of the dead in their everyday lives, and they do so, in the central region, increasingly within the concentric spatial organization consisting of the interior shrine for ancestors and the external milieu of ghosts. The idea discussed in the last chapter that the war dead forget the ideology of

war must be an expression of the reality that the living are actively accounting for their memories across the political and moral border of

inside and outside, and good death and bad death. If the practice of remembering the other creates the effect of forgetting in the other, this entails that the memory of the dead (for the living) and the memory of tragic death (for the dead) are correlative phenomena. And the more widely they are remembered, in this scheme, the further the war dead are removed from the history of their tragic death. When ghosts of war undergo this process of gzai oan (liberation from grievance) through ritual intimacy with human actors and communities, they may transform to important genius loci. In this trajectory, the transforming ghosts create a powerful social network, in popular imagining, among displaced and unrelated individuals. ‘This network of spirits is open to diverse historical identities and mobilizes their individual grievances to an imaginative, collective drama involving an expanding circle of actors. I situated this phenomenon of transforming war ghosts in Vietnam in two backgrounds. On the one hand, I suggested that the imagining about their vitality is a derivative phenomenon of a particular structure and practice of commemoration. Without the two-way organization of commemoration and the practice of shifting perspectives between the place of ancestors and the space for ghosts, the distance between the two categories of death would not have been narrowed to the point of a creative fusion. This commemorative practice may develop into a fantastical drama of making intimate adoptive kinship ties with unknown, alien spirits of war dead, as demonstrated by the episodes from Cam Re, or it may involve, as we discussed regarding the dialogue with the ancient culture hero Sharpshooter, a powerful symbolic instrument for social anonymity such as money. Either way, the transformation of ghosts is based on a generative moral solidarity with a human community, which

Conclusion 165 only can effect the transition from one status to the next.” In this context, the ritual act of hospitality and its openness to displaced foreign spirits can coexist with the demonstration of unity with familiar ancestral spirits in the ambidextrous, practical human action. If the ghosts of tragic death can indeed be liberated from their grievous, incarcerating history through this human action that incorporates the polarity of moral opposition into

the ambidexterity of moral engagement and only this engagement can indeed liberate the human body, as Hertz presaged. From the secular politics of symbolic hierarchy, each of their individual liberations is an act of affirmation of the power of human solidarity to liberate itself from its confinement within a narrowly defined boundary of social solidarity.*!

On the other hand, I suggested that social intimacy with displaced spirits, which enables the latter to make a vital symbolic transformation, relates to the history of sociality in the lived experience of the violent war. As we discussed with reference to Nguyen Du’s poetic world, the intimacy with displaced spirits of the dead 1n social practice is an expression of the familiarity with mass displacement in historical experience; the existence of ghosts is then integral to the ritual actor’s historical self-

identity as much as that of ancestors. In this sense, the ghosts of war testify to the enduring condition that Butler calls “kinship in displacement” and the violent political history that caused the displacement. In parallel with this predicament in the given organization of kinship relations, I emphasized also the proactive horizon of making kinship. In the social history of Vietnam War, radical displacement of human lives from their social basis coexisted with vigorous everyday actions to counter the

condition of mass displacement. A multitude of human networks of sympathy and trust with and amongst displaced individuals rose with and against the devastating background of radical social bifurcation and civil war, and I believe that this as yet unrecorded and unacknowledged

history of the Vietnam—American War is also reflected in the social imagination about the ghosts of war. The “liberation from grievance” in Vietnam takes a simple habitual movement of the human body between the placeless memory and the memory of place within the structure of habitation that separates the two; yet, the alacritous, ambidextrous body

may have its own history of habituation, relating to the multitude of anonymous human actions of making kinship with and amongst displaced strangers.

The ghosts of war that inhabit this milieu of historically reflexive, morally inclusive social practice are not the same thing as the “collective phantom” or the “specter” of the past conflict we saw at the beginning of this book, which allegedly forces its way into the present time to manifest its menacing presence in the form of a new crisis.°” The ghosts of war in

166 The Ghosts of War in Vietnam

Vietnam cannot be considered within the same scheme of ideas and values as the specter of the Vietnam War that is argued to continue to haunt American memory. However, it is also inconceivable to think that

the two are entirely unrelated. The origin of the specter was in fact a blatant denial of the power of the human community to think beyond right and left, and good and evil — the very power that makes the ghosts of war thrive in Vietnam.

Notes

Introduction 1. Milan Kundera, The book of laughter and forgetting (New York: HarperCollins,

1996). For a careful discussion of the statement presented in this fiction of Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting [erasure of unwanted figures and events from official history]” (p. 4), see Richard S. Esbenshade, “Remembering to forget: memory, history, national identity in postwar east-central Europe,” Representations 49 (1995), pp. 72-96.

2. The phrase “the specter of ideology” is from Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Mapping ideology (London: Verso, 1995). The expression “the specter of Marx” is quoted from William Roseberry, “Marx and anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), pp. 25—46. That of “specter of communism” is from Melvyn P. Leffler, The specter of communism: the United States and the origins of

the cold war, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). The expression “the ghost of Stalin” is quoted from Adam Hochschild, The unqutet ghost: Russians remember Stalin (New York: Penguin, 1995) and that of “ghost of the cold war” is from Adam Michnik, Letters from freedom: post cold war realities and freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

3. Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin chronicle,” in One way street and other writings, trans. by E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (New York: Verso, 1979), pp. 314-17; 4. Istvan Rev, Retroactive justice: prehistory of post-communism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 5. Ronald C. Finucane, Appearances of the dead: a cultural history of ghosts (Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 60. Also Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the middle ages: the hving and the dead in medieval society (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1998). 6. Belinda Lewis, “Protestantism, pragmatism and popular religion: a case study of early modern ghosts,” in J. Newton and J. Bath (eds.), Early modern ghosts, proceedings of the Early Modern Ghosts conference held at St John’s College,

Durham University, 24 March 2001 (Centre for Seventeenth-Century Studies, University of Durham, 2002), p. 82. 7. Ibid., pp. 85, 88.

8. The quote is from Stephen Prickett, quoting Coleridge in “Christmas at Scrooge’s,” in M. Hollington (ed.), Charles Dickens: critical assessments, vol. 2 (East Sussex: Helm, 1995), p. 563.

9. Ibid., pp. 562-3. 10. Among notable exceptions, see Rev, Retroactive justice; Robert M. Hayden, “Recounting the dead: the rediscovery and redefinition of wartime massacres 167

168 Notes to pages 4-11 in late- and post-communist Yugoslavia,” in Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, history, and opposition under state socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 167-84; Katherine Verdery, The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1999); Caroline Humphrey, “Remembering an ‘enemy’: the Bogd Khaan in twentieth-century Mongolia,” in Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, history, and opposition under state socialism (Santa Fe: School of American . Research Press, 1994), pp. 21-44; Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.), The country of memory. remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Shaun K. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); Erik Mueggler, The age of wild ghosts: memory, violence, and place in southwest China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Jun Jing, The temple of memories: history, power, and morality in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 11. Verdery, The political hves of dead bodies, pp. 126-7.

12. The term “imaginary war” is quoted from Mary Kaldor, The imaginary war: interpretation of East-West conflict in Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 13. See Odd Arne Westad, The global cold war: third world interventions and the making of our times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2. 14. Walter LaFeber, “An end to which cold war?” in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The end of the cold war: its meaning and implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13-14. 15. Bruce Cumings, “The wicked witch of the West is dead. Long live the wicked witch of the East,” in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The end of the cold war: its meaning

and implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 88. The expression “Long Peace” is from John Lewis Gaddis, The long peace: inquiries into the history of the cold war (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 16. Quoted from Greg Grandin, The last colonial massacre: Latin America in the cold war (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 170. 17. Ibid. 18. Heonik Kwon, After the massacre: commemoration and consolation in Ha My and My Lat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 19. See, for example, Janet Carsten, After kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Janet Carsten (ed.), Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 20. Michael Jackson, Paths toward a clearing: radical empiricism and ethnographic

inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical realism: theory, history, community (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

Chapter 1 Ghosts of war 1. William J. Duiker, Vietnam: revolution in transition (Boulder CO: Westview, 1995), p. 189. 2. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds (New

York: L. C. Page, 1958), original edition in 1852, p. 618.

Notes to pages 11-12 169 3. Shaun K. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), pp. 41-50. 4, Dutker, Vietnam: revolution in transition, pp. 181—4. Philip Taylor, Goddess on the rise: pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of

Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 39-42. 5. Seth Jacobs, America’s miracle man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, religion, race,

and US intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950-1957 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For the role of French Catholic religious evangelism in early French imperial ventures to Indochina, see Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: colomial encounters (New York: Berg, 2001), pp. 12-17. 6. Shaun K. Malarney, “The limits of state functionalism and the reconstruc-

tion of funerary ritual in contemporary northern Vietnam,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996), pp. 540-60. 7. David G. Marr, Vietnamese tradition on trial, 1920-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 54-100; Philip Taylor, Goddess on the rise: pugrimage and popular religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 9. See also Malarney, “The limits of ‘state functionalism’,” p. 541, and Patricia Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: new histories of the national past (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 71.

8. See Markus Schlecker, “Going back a long way: ‘home place,’ thrift, and

temporal orientations in northern Vietnam,” fournal of the Royal Anthropological Association 11 (2005), pp. 512-15. 9. Taylor, Goddess on the nse, pp. 135-63; Hy Van Luong, “Economic reform and the intensification of rituals in two north Vietnamese villages, 1980-1990,” in B. Lyunggren (ed.), The challenge of reform in Indochina (Cambridge MA:

Harvard Institute for International Development, 1993), pp. 259-92; Shaun K. Malarney, “Return to the past?: the dynamics of contemporary religious and ritual transformation,” in Hy V. Luong (ed.), Postwar Vietnam: dynamics of a transforming society (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 225-56. 10. Bao Ninh’s The sorrow of war and Duong Thu Huong’s Novel without a name, mentioned in the introduction, are good examples. Other Vietnamese writers

who suffered from government censorship include Nguyen Huy Thiep and Pham Thi Hoai. See interview with the writer Le Minh Khue in International Herald Tribune, November 29, 2001, and Pham Thi Hoai’s “The machinery of Vietnamese art and literature in the post-renovation, post-communist (and

post-modern) period,” UCLA Southeastern Studies Occasional Papers (2004) posted at the eScholarship Repository, University of California, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgirarticle=1001 context=international.uclacseas. 11. “Kicking the ‘Vietnam syndrome’,” Washington Post, 4 March 1991.

12. Christian G. Appy, “The ghosts of war,” The Chronicle Review 50 (2004), p. B12-13. Also available online at http://chronicle.com/free/v50/ 144/44b01201.htm. 13. Colin Powell, A soldier’s way: an autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1995),

pp. 297-8. 14. Bruce Cumings, War and television (New York: Verso, 1992), p. 2; Douglas Kellner, “From Vietnam to the Gulf: postmodern wars?” in M. Bibby (ed.),

170 Notes to pages 12-14 The Vietnam War and postmodernity (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts

Press, 1999), p. 226. 15. Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam shadows: the war, its ghosts, and tts legacy (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Also Robert McMahon, “Contested memory; the Vietnam War and American society, 1975-2001,” Diplomatic History 26 (2002), 159-84. 16. Ian Roxborough, “The ghost of Vietnam,” in D. Davis and A. Pereira (eds.), Beyond warmaking: rethinking armed forces and their role in politics and state formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Appy, “The

ghosts of war”; Frank Rich, “The Vietnamization of Bush’s vacation,” International Herald Tribune, August 29, 2005. See also Marilyn B. Young, “In the combat zone,” Radical History Review 85 (2003), pp. 253-64; Robert K. Brigham, Is Iraq another Vietnam? (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). Brigham defines the fundamental similarity between Vietnam and Iraq as “the American beliefs about the use of power” (p. xiii), including the belief that the nation’s political ideals can be enforced onto other nations of the world by military means. 17. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Verso, 1979), p. 216. 18. Schmitt, Ghosts in the middle ages, p. 227. 19. Appy, “The ghosts of war,” p. 12.

20. Michael Bibby, “The post-Vietnam condition,” in M. Bibby (ed.), The Vietnam War and postmodernty (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 149. See also Philip K. Jason, Acts and shadows: the Vietnam War in American literary culture (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). According to Arnold Isaacs, “The war and its ghosts continued to hover over traditional life and spirit. Rather than becoming a historical event that would automatically recede into the past, Vietnam lingered as a symbol, a metaphor for everything that troubled Americans in the closing years of what had once been called the American Century.” See Isaacs, Vietnam shadows, p. 3.

21. See Jonathan Neale, The American War, Vietnam 1960-1975, (Chicago: Bookmarks, 2001). In official Vietnamese literature, the American War is called chien tranh chong My cuu nuoc (“The War of National Salvation Against

America”) and the “French War” khang chien chong Phap (“The Resistance War Against France”).

22. Marilyn B. Young, “The Vietnam War in American memory,” in M.E. Gettleman, J. Franklin, M.B. Young and H.B. Franklin (eds.), Vietnam and America: a documented history (New York: Grove, 1995), p. 516. 23. Powell, A soldier’s way, p. 208. 24. Ibid.

25. Charles E. Neu, “The Vietnam War and the transformation of America,” in C. E. Neu (ed.), After Vietnam: legacies of a lost war (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 2000), p. 6. 26. Jay Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning: the Great War in European cultural history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 15-28.

27. See Nancy Roberts, Civil war ghost stories and legends (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992).

Notes to pages 14-16 171 28. See James W. Trullinger, Village at war: an account of conflict in Vietnam (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 116-29; Jonathan Schell, The real war (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 193-204. 29. Trung Chinh, Primer for revolt (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp. 102-17. 30. Ibid., p. 116. 31. In Vietnamese, this phrase reads “Tinh quan dan nhu ca voi nuoc,” meaning “The affectionate relationship between the army and the people is like what fish feel for water.”

32. Jonathan Schell, The real war, pp. 198-200. Also Jonathan Schell, The military half: an account of destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968). Village massacres, such as the internationally

known incident in My Lai in March 1968, were widespread in the five provinces of central Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. See Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 28-33. 33. Georges Condominas, We have eaten the forest: the story of a montagnard village in the central highlands of Vietnam (New York: Kodansha, 1994), p. xiii.

34. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam, pp. 179-80; Shaun

Malarney, “The realities and consequences of war in a northern Vietnamese commune,” in M.B. Young and R. Buzzanco (eds.), A compan-

ton to the Vietnam War (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2002), p. 74; Derek Summerfield, “The social experience of war and some issues for the humanitarian field,” in P. J. Bracken and C. Petty (eds.), Rethinking the trauma of war (New York: Free Association Books, 1998), p. 26.

35. The term “contemporary past” is borrowed from Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (ed.), Archaeologies of the contemporary past (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 8-9. 36. Phan Huy Duong, “The billion dollar skeleton,” in W. Karlin, Le M. Khue and Truong Vu (eds.), The other side of heaven: post-war fiction by Vietnamese and American writers (New York: Curbstone, 1995), p. 226.

37. Michael Bibby notes that there is a tendency in the Western culture of “making Vietnam a metaphor or allegory for Western history.” “The postVietnam condition,” p. 149. 38. Eugene Kamenka (ed.) The portable Karl Marx (New York: Penguin, 1983),

pp. 289-90; Mark A. Schneider, Culture and enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Extending this point about shifting domains, Schneider makes a somewhat unsettling remark that modern apparitions dominate the discipline of anthropology, the science of culture, more than any other branches of science (p. x11). 39. Huu Ngoc, Dictionnaire de la culture traditionnelle du Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gio, 1997), pp. 147-8; Huynh Sanh Thong (ed.), The heritage of Vietnamese poetry

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 25-30; Nguyen Khac Vien, Nguyen Van Hoan, and Huu Ngoc (eds.), Anthologie de la literature vietnamienne, book 2 (Paris: L’>Harmattan, 2000), pp. 200-6; Phan Ke Binh, Vzét-Nam phong-tuc (Moeurs et coutumes du Vietnam), book 2, trans. by N. Nouis-Hénard (Paris: Ecole Francaise d’Extréme-Orient, 1980), pp. 134—5.

40. Léopold Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 2 (Paris: Ecole Francaise d’Extréme-Orient, 1957), pp. 66-70.

172 Notes to pages 16—20 41. Tran Ngoc Them, Co so van hoa Viet Nam (The foundation of Vietnamese culture), (Ho Chi Minh City, 1998), pp. 52-61; Huu, Dictionnaire de la culture traditionnelle du Vietnam, pp. 147-8. 42. See Jack Zipes, Fairy tales and the art of subversion (New York: Routledge,

1991), pp. 174-7. 43. About this particular category of religious ritual specialists called thay or thay

cung, see Didier Bertrand, “The thay: masters in Hue, Vietnam,” Aszan Folklore Studies 55 (1996): 271-86.

44. See Arthur P. Wolf, “Gods, ghosts, and ancestors,” in A.P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and ritual in Chinese society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 159. 45. According to Lévi-Strauss’ typology, representations of the soul “are grouped between two poles: a “sociological” pole where the souls, gathered 1n a society after the fashion of the living, generally keep “out of the way” and are periodically invited to renew their ties with the latter; and secondly, a “naturalist” pole where the soul, considered from the point of view of the individual, breaks down into an organic society of functional souls, each presiding over a particular vital activity.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural anthropology, vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 64.

46. Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, How natives think (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 [1910]). Also E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theortes of primitive religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 88-9. 47. Schmitt, Ghosts in the middle ages, pp. 1-2. 48. See Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 13-17. 49. Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 70-76.

50. Sherry B. Ortner, “The foundings of Sherpa religious institutions,” in E. Ohnuki-Tierney (ed.), Culture through time: anthropological approaches (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 89. 51. Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the arts of memory,” in J. Clifford and G. M. Marcus (eds.), Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 194—233. 52. Ibid., 199. See also Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: oral history and textual authority in tribal fordan (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1997), p. 3. 53. Kirsten Hastrup, “Native anthropology: a contradiction in terms?” American Anthropologist 95 (1993), pp. 147-61; Kirin Narayan, “How native 1s a ‘native’ anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95 (1993), pp. 671-87. 54. See Alan Macfarlane, “On individualism,” Proceedings of British Academy 82

(1992), pp. 185-8; Julian Pitt-Rivers, “The stranger, the guest, and the hostile host: introduction to the study of the laws of hospitality,” in J.G. Peristiany (ed.), Contributions to Mediterranean sociology: Mediterranean rural

communities and social change (The Hague: Mouton, 1968), pp. 13-30; Jeremy S. Eades, Stranger and traders: Yoruba migrants, markets and the state in Northern Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993). 55. See Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and modern rebellion (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1993); Richard Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt on the stateless,” Parallax 11 (2005), pp. 46-60.

Notes to pages 20-4 173 56. See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 57. Georg Simmel, On individuality and social forms, edited by Donald N. Levine

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 143-9. 58. Ibid., p. 145. 59. Malarney, Culture, ritual and revolution in Vietnam, p. 179. 60. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study 1n terror and healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 7. 61. Emile Durkheim, The elementary forms of religious life, trans. K. E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995 [1915]), p. 280.

62. Ibid.., 277. 63. Ibid., 276. 64. Maurice Bloch, Placing the dead: tombs, ancestral villages, and kinship organization in Madagascar (New York: Seminar Press, 1971).

65. Ibid., pp. 37-72. 66. Maurice Bloch, Prey into hunter: the politics of religious experience (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992). 67. Arnold van Gennep, The rites of passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 164-5; Stephen F. Teiser, The ghost festival in medieval

China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 217-21. Van Gennep hoped to write a “general theory of ghosts and hauntings,” probably

in the light of residues of the order of rites of passage, which he did not complete. See Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, p. 275. 68. Bloch, Placing the dead, pp. 164—5, also Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds.), Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 15-16.

69. Roy Wagner, Symbols that stand for themselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 70. Simmel, On individuality and social forms, pp. 355-6, 363. 71. See Ernst van Alphen, “The other within,” In R. Corbey and J. Th. Leerssen (eds.), Alterity, identity, image: selves and others in society and scholarship (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 1-16, and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and alterity: a popular history of senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). 72. See Stephen Kern, The culture of time and space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 152-3.

73. According to Edmund Leach, “Durkheim and his followers seem to have believed that collective representations were confined to the sphere of the sacred, and since they held that the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane was universal and absolute, it followed that it was specifically sacred symbols that called for analysis by the anthropologist.” Quoted from Political systems of highland Burma (London: Bell, 1954), p. 12-13. According to E. E.

Evans-Protchard, the sacred and the profane “are on the same level of experience, and far from being cut off from one another, they are so closely

intermingled as to be inseparable.” Quoted from Theories of primitive religion, p. 65. 74. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. D. Heller-

Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 75-9. See also

174 Notes to pages 24—5 Charles Stewart, Demons and the devil: moral imagination in modern Greek culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 222-43. 75. Van Gennep, Rites of passage, p. 26. 76. This led Arthur Wolf to make his famous statement, “Whether a particular spirit is viewed as a ghost or as an ancestor depends on the point of view of a particular person. One man’s ancestor 1s another man’s ghost.” Wolf, “Gods, ghosts, and ancestors,” p. 146. See also Bloch and Parry (eds.), Death and the regeneration of life, pp. 15-16.

77. Robert Hertz, “The pre-eminence of the right hand: a study in religious polarity”, in R. Needham (ed.), Right and left: essays on dual symbolic classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1960, p. 22. See Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 16-27, and the conclusion to this book.

78. It is argued that ghost beliefs, in Confucian cultures, are mainly a female domain in contrast to the male-dominated domain of ancestral worship. See Stevan Harrell, “Men, women, and ghosts in Taiwanese folk religion,” in C. Bynum, S. Harrell, and P. Richman (eds.), Gender and religion: complexity of symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). In Vietnam, these two domains are very mildly gendered. Men as well as women can actively participate in rituals for ghosts. The image of an avenging female ghost seeking justice, which

Harrell highlights in the context of Chinese popular religion, exists in Vietnam too but not in such a preeminent form as he paints. The idea of injustice implied in the category of vengeful ghost can incorporate patriarchal hypocrisy but is nevertheless not reducible to it.

79. See Shaun K. Malarney, ““The fatherland remembers your sacrifice’: commemorating war dead in north Vietnam,” in Hue-Tam H. ‘Tai (ed.), The country of memory: remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 46-76. About Vietnamese war monumental art, see also Bertrand de Hartingh (ed.), Viet Nam: arts plastiques et visuels de 1925 a nos jours (Brussels: Commission

Européene, 1998). 80. James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 81. The first verse of Vietnam’s national anthem says: Soldiers of Vietnam, move forward, With the single will to save our Ancestral Land. Our hurried steps are trampling on the long and arduous road. Our flag, reddened with the blood of our victory, bears the spirit of our country. The distant echoes of gunfire join the songs of our march. The path to glory runs over the bodies of our enemy. Against all hardships, we together build the bases of our resistance. There is no end in our struggle for the people. Run to the battlefield! Forward! All forward! Our Vietnam is strong, eternally.

The anthem was composed by Van Cao in 1944 and endorsed personally by

Ho Chi Minh in 1945. Van Cao was subsequently banned from public

Notes to pages 25-9 175 performance until recently. The long purge was caused by his critique of the early land reform (1950s) in northern Vietnam. 82. See George Mosse, Fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the World Wars

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: the politics of national identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3-24; Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-producing traditions,” in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.,) The invention of tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

83. Don Lam, “A brief account of the cult of female deities in Vietnam,” Vietnamese Studies 131 (1999), p. 7.

84. About this legendary antiwar poet, see Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 321-6; Susan Bailey, “Vietnamese intellectuals in revolutionary and postcolonial times,” Critique of Anthropology 24 (2004), p. 325.

85. The phrase “ghosts come and go like swallows” is my modification of thap thoang, Meaning “to appear and disappear alternately, hauntingly,” following the popular analogy of this movement with the movement of swallows. 86. George Mosse, Fallen soldiers, pp. 59, 107-8. 87. Ibid., p. 89-90. 88. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of

nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 198.

Chapter 2 Mass excavation 1. Hy Van Luong, “Postwar Vietnamese society: an overview of transformational dynamics,” in Hy V. Luong (ed.), Postwar Vietnam: dynamics of a transforming society (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), pp. 1-2. 2. On the idea of bureaucratic socialism, see Gareth Porter, Vietnam: the politics of bureaucratic socialism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). On the idea of “everyday resistance” or “bottom up pressures” in the context of bureaucratic socialism, see Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, The power of everyday politics: how Vietnamese peasants transformed national policy (Ithaca NY: Cornell

University Press, 2005); Adam Fforde and Stafan de Vylder, From plan to market (Boulder CO: Westview, 1996). For a discussion of everyday resistance in the context of demographic policy and internal migration of population, see Andrew Hardy, Red hills: migrants and the state in the highlands of Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003). 3. Malarney, “Return to the past?” p. 225. 4. Taylor, Goddess on the rise. 5. See, for instance, Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Modernity and its malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1993). For an excellent summary of this research trend in African context, see Peter Geschiere and Michael Rowlands, “The domestication of modernity: different trajectories,” Africa: Fournal of the International African Institute 66 (1996), pp. 552-4. 6. See Ruth Mendel and Caroline Humphrey (eds.), Markets and moralities: ethnographies of postsocialism (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Robert W. Hefner (ed.),

176 Notes to pages 29-32 Market cultures: society and morality in the new Asian capitalisms (Boulder CO: Westview, 1998).

7. The quotes are from Jonathan Nashel, “The road to Vietnam: modernization theory in fact and fiction,” in C.G. Appy (ed.), Cold war constructions: the polincal culture of United States imperialism, 1945-1966 (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 132-4. 8. Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds), Global capitalism (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 2-3, 11.

9. Chris Hann, “Farewell to the socialist ‘Other’,” in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies, and practices in Eurasia (New York: Routledge,

2002), pp. 1-11. 10. Paul A. Volcker, “The sea of global finance,” in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds), Global capitalism (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 75-85. 11. Chris M. Hann (ed.), Soczalism: 1deals, ideologies, local practice (New York: Routledge, 1993). 12. Katherine Verdery, “Whither postsocialism?” in C. M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies, and practices in Eurasia (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 17. 13. Quoted from John Borneman, Subversions of international order: studies in the political anthropology of culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 3. 14. Allen Hunter (ed.), Rethinking the cold war (Philadelphia: ‘Temple University

Press, 1998), pp. 8-11. 15. Borneman, Subversions of international order, pp. 2—5. 16. The expression “imaginary war” is quoted from Kaldor, The imaginary war. 17. Mark P. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: the making of postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

18. The quote “struggle between socialism and capitalism” is from Hann, “Farewell to the socialist ‘other’,” p. 10. See also John W. Young, Cold war Europe, 1945-1991: a political history, second edition (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), p. 1. 19. Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004). See also Grandin, The last colonial massacre. 20. Geoffrey Robinson, The dark side of paradise: political violence in Bali (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma, ““When

the world turned to chaos’: 1965 and its aftermath in Bali, Indonesia,” in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (eds.), The specter of genocide: mass murder in historical perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 289-306.

21. Dong-Chun Kim, War and society: what the Korean War meant for us (in Korean, Seoul: Dolbege, 2000). 22. Tai, The country of memory, p. 1.

23. Stephan Feuchtwang, “Kinship and history: disruption, commemoration, and family repair,” paper presented at the conference, Chinese Kinship and Relatedness, University of Manchester, April 21—23, 2006. See also Jing, The temple of memories; Mueggler, The age of wild ghosts. 24. Mark Mazower (ed.), After the war was over: reconstructing the family, nation, and state in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Also Sarah F. Green, Notes from the Balkans: locating marginality and ambiguity on the Greek—Albanian border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 71-3.

Notes to pages 32—5 177 25. Verdery, The political lives of dead bodies; Bette Denish, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: nationalist ideologies and the symbolic revival of genocide,” American Ethnologist 21 (1992), pp. 367-90; Hayden, “Recounting the dead”, pp. 167-84. 26. Lewis M. Stern, The Vietnamese Communist Party’s agenda for reform: a study of the eighth national party congress (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1998), pp. 72-3.

27. Ibid., p. 72. 28. On this important category of political entitlement and social memory, see Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Faces of remembrance and forgetting,” in Hue-IT'am H. Tai (ed.), The country of memory: remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 173, 179; Kwon, After the

massacre, p. 112-14. Also Karen Turner and Phan Thanh Hao, Even the women must fight: memories of war from North Vietnam (New York: John Wiley,

1998); Tran Bach Dang, Bui Thi Me, ke chuyen doi ninh (Bui Thi Me, a story of her life), (Ho Chi Minh City: Nha xuat ban tre, 2001). 29. Murray Hiebert, Vietnam notebook (Singapore: Charles E. Tuttle, 1995), pp. 152-9; Vietnam Economic Times, no. 9 (1995), pp. 18-19. For the statistical figures in later years, see Vietnam World Bank, Attacking poverty (Hanoi: Vietnam World Bank, 1999); also available online at www.worldbank. org.vn/data/e_indicator.htm 30. See Luong, “Economic reform and the intensification of rituals”; Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam, pp. 204—6; Kwon, After the massacre,

pp. 68-70. 31. Tan Viet, Viec ho (the work of the family), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoa dan

toc, 2000), p. 5. Also Pham Con Son, Thin than gia toc (the spirit of the family), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoa dan toc, 1998), pp. 189-97. 32. In Vietnamese: “Doi cha an man, doi con khat nuoc.” The saying means literally, “If the father eats salty food (all his life), his children will be thirsty (later).” For an excellent discussion of the metaphors of food in Vietnamese

expression of human relations and collective identity, see Le Huu Khoa, “Manger et nourrir les relations: alimentation et transmission d’identité collective,” Ethnologie francaise 27 (1997), pp. 51-63. 33. Quoted from Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam, pp. 178.

34. According to Tan Viet, “Ancestor worship is the deep-rooted culture of Vietnamese people. This precious tradition has been forgotten for some reasons; now it should be revived and revitalized ... Between 1945 and 1975, the whole nation concentrated on the struggles against France and America. Having achieved national independence, we now have good conditions to restore cultural lives ... Although they are not officially allowed to do so, our party cadre leaders also have roots and thus informally volunteer to do family work. Family feeling is natural feeling.” Tan Viet, Viec ho, p. 5. 35. Quoted from the written copy of the speech: The ceremony was held in the commune of Dien Duong, Quang Nam Province, in February 2000. A longer extract of the speech is cited in Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 63-4. 36. The term xac is also a popular central-Vietnamese vernacular reference to spirit mediumship or those who practice it, known more generally as len dong. About the latter, Ngo Duc Thinh, “Len dong: spirits’ journeys,” 1n Nguyen

178 Notes to pages 35—42 Van Huy and L. Kendall, Vietnam: journeys of body, mind, and spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Ngo Duc Thinh (ed.), Dao mau va cac hinh thuc shaman trong cac toc nguoi o Viet Nam va Chau A (The religion of the

mother goddess and forms of shamanism among ethnic groups in Vietnam and Asia), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban khoa hoc xa hoi, 2004); Barley Norton, “Vietnamese mediumship rituals: the musical construction of the spirits,” The World of Music 42 (2000), pp. 75-97. For a study conducted in the immigrant Vietnamese communities in France which highlights the aspect of syncretism in Vietnamese spirit worship, see Pierre J. Simon and Ida Simon-Barouh, Hau bong: un culte viétnamien de possession transplanté en France (Paris: Mouton, 1973). 37. For a theory of spirit possession as a communicative action, see Michael Lambek, “Spirits and spouses: possession as a system of communication among the Malagasy speakers of Mayotte,” American Ethnologist 7 (1980), pp. 318-32. 38. The term “theatrics” used in this specific context is from Clifford Geerz, Negara: the theatre state in nineteenth-century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 39. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 216. 40. Quoted from Jiirgen Habermas, The philosophical discourse of modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 6. 41. Philippe Ariés, The hour of our death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Peregrine, 1983), pp. 471-2. 42. Cam Reis a fictive name of an actual community situated in the northern part of Quang Nam province between Da Nang and Hoi An. 43. Nguyen Duy Hinh, “Thu ban ve quan he Viet Cham trong lich su,” (A discussion of the Viet—Cham relations in history), Tap Chi Dan Toc Hoc, no. 2, 1980.

44, The kingdom of Champa controlled the territories which are now the central and southern regions of Vietnam from approximately the seventh century.

The Dai Viet had taken over the Quang Nam — Da Nang region by the beginning of the seventeenth century. 45. Cited from my recorded conversation with the officer and the ritual specialist in the latter’s home in Da Nang, December 1998. 46. Tan Viet, Viec ho, p. 5. 47. Luong, “Economic reform and the intensification of rituals,” pp. 259-92. 48. Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 84. 49. Jean Comaroff, “Defying disenchantment: reflections on ritual, power, and history,” in C. F. Keyes, L. Kendall, and H. Hardacre (eds.), Asian visions of authority: religion and the modern states of East and Southeast Asia (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 301-14. 50. Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.), Magical interpretations, material realities: modernity, witchcraft, and the occult in postcolonial Africa (New York:

Routledge, 2000), p. 6. 51. Benjamin, One-way street and other writings. The quote “the dialectical relationship between old and new” is from Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p. 223. 52. Stern, The Vietnamese Communist Party’s agenda for reform, pp. 72-3.

Notes to pages 42-7 179 53. On various forms of “arranged marriage” between the southern entrepreneurship and the northern bureaucracy, see Neil Sheehan’s enterprising After the war was over, Hanoi and Saigon (London: Picador, 1992).

54. Neil Jamieson writes an entire modern political history of Vietnam in this light, focusing on the creative practices to graft the modern, Western, or the unfamiliar ideas to the traditional, indigenous forms. Understanding Vietnam.

Chapter 3 Missing in action 1. Bill Clinton, My life (London: Hutchinson, 2004), pp. 930-1. 2. The Sunday Times, 19 November 2000. 3. Mark P. Bradley and Marilyn B. Young (eds.), Making sense of the Vietnam

Wars: local, national, and transnational perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. Anderson, Imagined communities, p. 9. 5. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p. 104. 6. The Quartermaster Review, September—October 1963.

7. In 1998 the Vietnam Unknown was identified as Air Force Lieutenant Michael Blassie by a DNA test. His remains were subsequently removed from the gravesite and reburied in his hometown of St Louis at the request of his family. After his departure, it has been decided that the grave of the Vietnam Unknown will remain empty. 8. Gillis, Commemorations: the politics of national identity, p. 13.

9. Michael Rowlands, “Remembering to forget: sublimation as sacrifice in war memorials,” in A. Forty and S. Kichler (eds.), The art of forgetting (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 130-7. 10. Quoted from J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and ghosts: a history of battle in classical antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 2. 11. Bruce H. Franklin, MIA or mythmaking in America (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993). 12. Kirby Farell, “The Berserk style in post-Vietnam America,” Etnofoor 13 (2000), pp. 12-18; Tony Williams, “Missing in action: the Vietnam construction of the movie star,” in L. Dittmar and G. Michaud (eds.), From Hanoi to Hollywood: the Vietnam War in American film (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). See also James W. Gibson, Warrior dreams: paramilitary culture in post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); John Hellmann, “The Vietnam film and American memory,” in M. Evans and K. Lunn (eds.), War and memory in the twentieth century (New York: Berg, 1997).

13. Michael J. Allen, “Help us tell the truth about Vietnam: POW/MIA politics and the end of the American War,” in M. P. Bradley and M. B. Young (eds.), Making sense of the Vietnam Wars: local, national, and transnational perspectives

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Thomas Hawley observes that the missing bodies from the Vietnam War became “the most material indication of the defeat that occurred in Southeast Asia, an ever-present reminder of the catastrophe that continues to afflict the American body politic.” See Thomas M. Hawley, The remains of war: bodies, politics, and the search for

180 Notes to pages 47-51 American soldiers unaccounted for in Southeast Asia (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 4. 14. The quote is from Williams, “Missing in action,” p. 129. 15. Cited from the extracts of the document, POW/MIAs: Report of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, United States Senate (United States Senate, 1993), available at www.alipowmia.com/ssc/ssc6.html. For full report, see

the online document available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/pow/senate_house/investigation_S.html. 16. “US—Vietnam POW/MIA progress: lifting the embargo,” US Department

of State Dispatch, vol. 5, no. 9 (28 February 1994). Available online at http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/erc/briefing/dispatch/1994/html/ Dispatchv5no009.html. See also Hiebert, Vietnam notebook, p. 174. 17. Mark E. Manyin, “The Vietnam—US normalization process,” Congressional Research Service issue brief for Congress, 177 June 2005, p. 4. Available online at www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB98033.pdf. 18. Seth Mydans, “Of soldiers lost, but not forgotten, in Vietnam,” The New York Times, 19 April 1999. 19. Bao Ninh, The sorrow of war, p. 22. 20. Mydans, “Of soldiers lost, but not forgotten, in Vietnam.”

21. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, “Monumental ambiguity: the state commemoration of Ho Chi Minh,” in K.W. Taylor and J.K. Whitmore (eds.), Essays into Vietnamese pasts (Ithaca NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1995), p. 273. 22. Foran excellent analysis of hero memorials in a North Vietnamese village, see Malarney, “The fatherland remembers your sacrifice,” pp. 46—76. 23. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam, p. 168. 24. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam, pp. 108-47. 25. See Vu Ngoc Khanh, Van hoa gia dinh Viet Nam (Family culture in Vietnam), (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Van Hoa Dan Toc, 1998). 26. Malarney, “The realities and consequences of war in a northern Vietnamese commune,” p. 73. 27. Stephen Whitfield proposes that the cold war politics had both diplomatic and domestic—political dimensions and that these two dimensions should be analytically integrated. Stephen J. Whitfield, The culture of the cold war, second edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 28. See B.B. Fall, “Viet cong: the unseen enemy in Viet-Nam,” in M. G. Raskin

and B.B. Fall (eds.), The Viet-Nam reader (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 252-61; Douglas E. Pike, Viet cong: the organization and techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 166—93, 224—5. 29. Lich su dang bo thi xa Ho1 An, 1930-1947 (History of the Communist Party in

Hoi An, 1930-1947), (Da Nang: Nha xuat ban tong hop Da Nang, 1996), p. 131-74. 30. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam, p. 205; Philip Taylor, Fragments of the present: searching for modernity in Vietnam’s south (Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 119-58. 31. Examples of the active local history project in Quang Nam province are: Tieu doan bo binh 72 anh hung (The heroic infantry battalion 72), (I'am Ky: Nha

Notes to pages 52-64 181 xuat ban Tam Ky, 1998); Hot An thi xa anh hung (The heroes of Hoi An) (Da

Nang: Nha xuat ban Da Nang, 1999). 32. About this new official category of war heroes, see Turner and Phan Thanh Hao, Even the women must fight.

33. Taylor, Fragments of the present, pp. 126-34. 34. See Daniel Zwerdling, “Vietnam’s MIAs,” special broadcast from American Radio Works, April 2000. Available at http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/vietnam/vnation/mias.html.

35. The dream is remarkably similar to the scene, “the return of the dead,” in Abel Gance’s 1919 film F’accuse. See Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p. 16.

36. Bertrand, “The thay: masters in Hue,” p. 284. 37. In Quang Nam, these mediums are popularly called xac or nhap xac. The alternative expression popular in other central Vietnamese regions is thay dong ho or dong. See Maurice M. Durand, Technique et pantheon des mediums

viétnamiens (dong), Publications de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extréme-Orient 45 (Paris: Ecole Francaise d’Extréme-Orient, 1944). 38. This missing soldier was a thoat ly, meaning literally “being cut off (from the homeland).” It refers to the elite partisan fighters who, unlike most other peasant fighters who had a double responsibility for military action and food production, were removed from agricultural work to concentrate on combat duties only. See Pike, Viet cong, p. 238. 39. On the state’s approach to religious and ritual matters, see Malarney, “The limits of ‘state functionalism’ and the reconstruction of funerary ritual in contemporary northern Vietnam,” pp. 540-9. 40. Kwon, After the massacre, p. 67-8, 158-62. 41. Nguyen Van Huyen, The ancient civilization of Vietnam (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1995), p. 62-3; Nguyen Van Huyen, Le culte des immortels en Annam (Hanoi: Imprimerie d’Extréme Orient, 1944). 42. Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 161-5, 179-81. 43. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Memory and naming in the Great War,” in J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: the politics of national identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 151. 44, Richard Werbner, “Smoke from the barrel of a gun: postwars of the dead, memory, and reinscription in Zimbabwe,” in R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the postcolony: African anthropology and the critique of power (New York: Zed

Books, 1998), p. 72.

Chapter 4 The phantom leg 1. Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), pp. 1-2. 2. The term “global cold war” follows the definition put forward by Odd Arne Westad, as a framework that includes not only the East-West and US-USSR “contest of power” dimension of the bipolar political history but also the North-South “relation of domination” aspect of the history. Westad coined the term as a way of integrating the history of revolutionary struggles in the

182 Notes to pages 64-7 postcolonial world within the making of bipolar geopolitical structure. The global cold war.

3. Ward Just wrote, “The war will not end when the Americans leave. One part of the war will end but the war has more than one part.” “The American blues,” in W. Karlin, Le M. Khue and Trung Vu (eds.), The other side of heaven: post-war fiction by Vietnamese and American writers (New York: Curbstone, 1995), p. 8.

4. Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, “Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton in conversation,” in W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds.), Global capitalism (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 2-3, 9-12; Mary Kaldor, New and old wars: orgamzed violence in a global era (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1999);

Chris M. Hann, “Postsocialism as a topic of anthropological investigation,” C. M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies, and practice in Eurasia (New

York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1-11. 5. James M. Scott (ed.), After the end: making US foreign policy in the post-cold war

world (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 6. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 16-18.

7. Anthony Giddens, Beyond left and right: the future of radical politics (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 8. Westad, The global cold war, pp. 2—5, 396; Christian G. Appy (ed.), Cold war

constructions (Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Mazower, After the war was over.

9. LaFeber, “An end to which cold war?” pp. 13-14. 10. Arjun Appadura, Modernity at large, p. 18. 11. Whitfield, The culture of the cold war. 12. Among notable examples: Ron Robin, The making of the cold war enemy: culture and politics in the military-intellectual complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Christopher Shannon, A world made safe for differences: cold war intellectuals and the politics of identity (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001);

Douglas Field (ed.), American cold war culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005); Christina Klein, Cold war onentalism: Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 13. Marilyn Strathern, Reproducing the future: anthropology, kinship and the new reproductive technologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 245. 14. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), and John Hassard and John Law (eds.), Actor network theory and after (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Also Manuel Castells, (ed.), The network society: a cross-cultural perspective (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004). 15. Max Gluckman, Custom and conflict in Africa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).

16. Simon Harrison, The mask of war: violence, ritual, and the self in Melanesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). 17. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and netwars: the future of terror, crime, and militancy (Santa Monica CA: RAND, 2001). 18. Ibid., p. 1. See also the online document available at www.rand.org/pubs/ monograph_reports/MR994/MR994.ch.2.pdf 19. Ralph Peters, “The culture of future conflict,” Parameters 25 (1995-96), pp. 18-27.

Notes to pages 68-84 183 20. Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and netwars, 369. See also the online document available at www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/ MO1382.after.pdf 21. Peters, “The culture of future conflict,” p. 18. Also Ralph Peters, Beyond terror: strategy in a changing world (Mechanicsburg PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), pp. 323-3. See also the online document available at www.carlisle. army.mil/USAWC/parameters/1995/peters.htm 22. See Kaldor, New and old wars, pp. 29-30. 23. Pike, Viet cong, pp. 229-230. 24. Victor Turner wrote on the idea of anti-structure, “I have used the term ‘antistructure,’ but I would like to make clear that the ‘anti’ is here only used strategically and does not imply a radical negativity. Structure has been the theoretical point of departure for many social anthropological studies that it has acquired a positive connotation — even though I would prefer to regard structure rather as the ‘outward bound or circumference,’ as Blake might have said, than as the center or substance of a system of social relations or ideas. When I speak of anti-structure, therefore, I really mean something positive, a generative center.” This quotation comes from Victor Turner, Dramas, fields, and metaphors: symbolic action in human society (Ithaca NY:

Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 272-3. About the idea of symbolic weapon, see Wagner, Symbols that stand for themselves, pp. 50-1. 25. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception, trans. by C. Smith (London:

Routledge, 1962), pp. 76-7. 26. See Alexander B. Woodside, Community and revolution in modern Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976); Hy Van Luong, Revolution in the village:

tradition and transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992); Trullinger, Village at war; George Condominas, “La guerilla viet: trait culturel majeur et pérenne de l’espace social vietnamien,” L’Homme 164 (2000), pp. 17-36; Kwon, After the massacre,

pp. 33-50. 27. E.P. Thompson, “Ends and histories,” in M. Kaldor (ed.), Europe from below: an East-West dialogue (New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 7—25.

28. See Townsend Hoopes’ excellent description on how all these elements actually worked together in the formulation of policies. The limits of intervention (New York: David McKay, 1969), pp. 7-32. 29. Kaldor, The imaginary war.

Chapter 5 Death in the street 1. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p. 70.

2. Jay Winter, “Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War,” in J. Winter and E. Sivan (eds.), War and remembrance in the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3. Ibid., pp. 47-56. 4. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, pp. 2-4. Paul Fussell, The Great War and modern memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). 5. Quoted from Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, pp. 73, 76.

184 Notes to pages 84—9 6. See Kellner, “From Vietnam to the Gulf: postmodern wars?” Also Cumings, War and television.

7. Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, pp. 56, 65, 69. 8. In Vietnamese: “Mot tat khong di mot li khong roi.” 9. James J. Fox “On bad death and the left hand: a study of Rotinese symbolic

inversions,” in R. Needham (ed.), Right and left: essays on dual symbolic classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 351. 10. John Middleton, “Lugbara death,” in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds.), Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 145.

11. Gerard C. Hickey, Village in Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 121. 12. Wolf, “Gods, ghosts, and ancestors,” p. 159. 13. Léopold Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, p. 59. 14. See Huynh Sanh Thong, The heritage of Vietnamese poetry, pp. 25-30; Huynh Sanh Thong (ed.) An anthology of Vietnamese poems from the eleventh through the twentieth century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 77-83; Nguyen Khac Vien et al. Anthologte de la literature vietnamienne, book 2, pp. 200-6.

15. Quoted from the text of Nguyen Du’s Van te co hon thap loa chung sinh introduced in Tan Viet, Jap van cung gia tien (Prayer book for ancestor

worship), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoa dan toc, 1994), pp. 105-14. About the act of co hon (calling the spirits) or cau hon (raising the spirits) in popular practice, see Phan Ke Binh, Vzét-Nam phong-tuc, book 2, pp. 134—5. 16. The rice porridge (chao trang), when offered on the external shrine for ghosts, is often placed there together with several spoons, which signifies that the food is for a large number and many different kinds of ghost visitors.

17. In classical version, this part of the verse writes, “All who have come, be seated and partake: spurn not these trifles, gifts of our goodwill.” Quoted from Huynh Sanh Thong, An anthology of Vietnamese poems, p. 83. 18. See Nguyen Thach Giang and Truong Chinh, Nguyen Du: tac pham va lich su van ban (Nguyen Du: his works and their history), (Ho Chi Minh: Nha xuat ban Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, 2000), pp. 622, 998-9. Also Nguyen Du, Vaste recueu de legends merveilleuses, trans. by Nguyen ‘Tran Huan (Paris: Gallimard,

1962). Some believe that Nguyen Du’s works, particularly his best-known epic story of Kim Van Kieu, constitute “the spirit of the [Vietnamese] nation.” See Maurice M. Durand and Nguyen Tran Huan, Introduction a la literature vietnamienne (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1969), p. 94. 19. Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam: a long history (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1993), p. 132. The protagonist in Bao Ninh’s The sorrow of war, Kien, feels “a stranger onto himself” and he often finds himself wandering 1n the street, while he 1s trying to write about the soldiers who fell in the Jungle of the Screaming Souls. It is no accident that the street where Kien wanders in a state of trance 1s named after Nguyen Du. See Bao Ninh, The sorrow of war, pp. 79-80.

20. Wolf, “Gods, ghosts, and ancestors,” p. 159. 21. Ibid., p. 146. 22. Stephen Teiser engages with the question in his work devoted to the origin of the “ghost festival” in Chinese tradition to conclude that “the coupling

of apprehension about ghosts with the propitiation of kin represents a

Notes to pages 89-96 185 necessary ambivalence about the dead.” Teiser, The ghost festival in medieval

China, p. 221. Although I agree with Teiser’s point about ambivalence in broad terms, I also believe that the coexistence in social reality of two contrasting attitudes to ghosts — between an extreme conceptual contrast with ancestors, on the one hand, and the interchangeability with the latter in ritual practice — calls for further investigation. The issue is about ambivalence; yet, the concept of ambivalence as a sociological category, as Bauman shows, does

not explain anything but instead is meant to raise a plethora of critical questions about contradictions in politics and morality. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and ambivalence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 23. Quoted from Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds.), Death and the regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 15-16. See also Bloch, Placing the dead, pp. 164—5.

24. Robert Hertz, Death and the right hand trans. by R. Needham and C. Needham (London: Cohen and West, 1960), p. 86. 25. Edward Casey, Getting back into place: toward a renewed understanding of the place-world (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 140-1. 26. The expression “society of ancestors” is quoted from Bloch, Placing the dead, ch. 2.

27. Foran exemplary classical poem that laments life away from home, see Nguyen Khac Vien, Nguyen Van Hoan, and Huu Ngoc (eds.), Anthologie de la literature vietnamienne, book 1 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000; original edition published in Hanoi, 1972), pp. 173-4, 213, 215. Also see two verses entitled “Homesick soldiers” in Huynh Sahn Thong, The heritage of Vietnamese poetry, pp. 155-6. See also “Chinh phu ngam (The song ofa soldier’s wife)” and Yen Thao’s “My home” in Huynh Sanh Thong, An anthology of Vietnamese poems, pp. 398-418. 28. See Tran Huien An’s “My mother’s son” in zbid., pp. 391-2. 29. See Stephen Addiss’ “Introduction” to Pham Duy, Musics of Vietnam, edited

by Dale R. Whiteside (Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), p. xvi. 30. Schlecker, “Going back a long way”, pp. 509-612. 31. William J. Duiker, Sacred war: nationalism and revolution in a divided Vietnam (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 66-7. 32. Addiss, “Introduction,” p. xvi. See also the poem “Me Moc” in Nguyen Khac Vien and Huu Ngoc (eds.), Anthologie de la literature vietnamienne, book 3 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), p. 159. 33. Ho Si Hiep, “Bac Ho voihoc sinh mien Nam tap ket,” in Truong hoc sinh mien

Nam tren dat Bac (The school for southern students in north Vietnam), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban thinh tu quoc gia, 2000), pp. 55-63. 34. Lydia M. Fish, “General Edward G. Lansdale and the folksongs of Americans in the Vietnam War,” The Fournal of Amencan Folklore 102 (1989), pp. 390-411.

35. Robert K. Brigham, ARVN: life and death in the South Vietnamese Army (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 49. 36. Ibid., p. 113. 37. See Sara Ruddick, Maternal thinking: towards a politics of peace (London: Women’s Press, 1990). 38. Paul Giran, Magie et religion annamites (Paris: Librairie Maritime et Coloniale, 1912), p. 46; Nguyen Van Ky, “Les enjeux des cultes villageois au Vietnam

186 Notes to pages 96—9 (1945-1997),” in J. Kleinen (ed.), Vietnamese society in transition: the daily politics of reform and change (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2001), pp. 185-06. 39. Dong Vinh, “The cult of Holy Mothers in central Vietam,” Vietnamese Studies 131 (1999), pp. 73-82. Also Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 59-68.

40. Ngo Duc Thinh, Dao Mau o Viet Nam (The worship of mother goddesses in Vietnam), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban khoa hoc xa hoi, 2002). 41. ‘Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 251-5, 278-83. 42. See Nguyen Minh San, “The Holy Mother of mounts and forests and Bac Le festival,” Vietnamese Studies 131 (1999), pp. 89-98; Thai Thi Bich Lien, Le hot Ba Chu Xu nui sam chau doc (The festival of Ba Chua Xu), (Ho Chi Minh: Nha xuat ban van hoa dan toc, 1998). 43. Don Lam, “A brief account of the cult of female deities in Vietnam,” Vietnamese Studies 131 (1999), p. 7. Also Nguyen Van Huyen, The ancient civilization of

Vietnam, p. 102-4; Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 199-203. In her recent, fascinating study of the development of a mother cult in northern Vietnam, Olga Dror develops this gendered poetics of Vietnamese religious landscape into a moving narrative of the cult of Princess Lieu Hanh. She describes how the popular mother cult survived the centuries in artful conflict with the state that

sought to assimilate the cult into the order of the dominant Confucian moral and ritual hierarchy. See Olga Dror, Cult, culture, and authority: Princess Lieu Hanh in Vietnamese history (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).

44, Thien Do, “Unyjust-death deification and burnt offering: towards an integra-

tive view of popular religion in contemporary southern Vietnam,” in P. Taylor (ed.), Modernity and re-enchantment: religion in post-revolutionary Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, in press).

45. Keith W. Taylor, “Surface orientations in Vietnam: beyond histories of nation and religion,” fournal of Asian Studies 53 (1998), p. 974. 46. Hy Van Luong, Discursive practices and linguistic meanings: the Vietnamese system of person reference (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), p. 49-50. 47. Hy Van Luong, “Vietnamese kinship: structural principles and the socialist transformations in northern Vietnam,” Fournal of Asian Studies 48 (1989), pp. 745, 754. 48. Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam: a long history, pp. 110-21; Duiker, Sacred war, pp. 8-11. See also Huynh Lua, Lich su khai pha vung dat Nam bo (History of the opening of the Southern land), (Ho Chi Minh: Nha xuat ban thanh pho Ho Chi Minh, 1993); Nguyen Duy Hinh, “Thu ban ve quan he Viet Cham trong lich su,” (1980). 49. Taylor, “Surface Orientations in Vietnam,” p. 951. William Duiker calls the “March to the South” in the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries an ideological equivalent in Vietnamese historiography to the United States’ “manifest destiny” in its nineteenth-century territorial expansion. Duiker, Sacred war, pp. 8-9. 50. For published examples of ancestral ritual oration, see Pham Ngo Minh and Le Duy Anh, Nhan vat Ho Le trong lich su Viet Nam (The character of the Le family in Vietnamese history), (Da Nang: Nha xuat ban Da Nang, 2001), pp. 784—92.

51. Bertrand, “The thay”, pp. 278-9. 52. In a related perspective, Casey notes that movement is intrinsic to place. Getting back into place, p. 131, 280.

Notes to pages 99-108 187 53. Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling, and

skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), ch. 13. 54. Georg Simmel, The philosophy of money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), ch. 4. 55. The phrase “bond of bereavement” is quoted from Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning, p. 228. Judith Butler calls this bond “the community on the basis of vulnerability and loss.” See Judith Butler, Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 20. 56. Wolf, “Gods, ancestors, and ghosts,” p. 146. 57. Michael Taussig, The nervous system (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 178-9. 58. For this idealized concept of native place expressed as que or que huong, see Hardy, Red hills, pp. 23-8; Schlecker, “Going back a long way,” pp. 510-12. 59. The parallel existence of religious forms may be seen in the light of early debates on the tradition of “Vietnamese humanism,” which concern the dialectical

resolution of Indic and Sinic cultural heritages and between the Buddhist “knowledge” about self-enlightenment and the Confucian ideas about secular “actions” and moral order. See Nguyen Dang Thuc, “Vietnamese humanism,” Philosophy East and West 9 (1960), pp. 129-43.

60. Meyer Fortes, “Strangers,” in M. Fortes and S. Patterson (eds.), Studies in African social anthropology (London: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 229-30, 250. 61. Simmel, On individuality and social forms, p. 139.

Chapter 6 Transforming ghosts 1. In Vietnamese: “Doi cha an manh, doi con khat nuoc.” For a discussion of alimentary metaphors in Vietnamese culture, see Le Huu Khoa, “Manger et nourrir les relations”, pp. 51-63. 2. Cited in Bruno Bettleheim, Freud and man’s soul (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 61. 3. J.S. La Fontaine, “Person and individual: some anthropological reflections,” in M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes (eds.), The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 130. 4. It is believed that women have more soul elements than men because of their procreative capacity and their allegedly higher ability to feel and process feelings. 5. Nguyen Van Huyen, The ancient civilization of Vietnam, p. 237. 6. Wagner, Symbols that stand for themselves, pp. 58-80. 7. Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 3 pp. 182-3. 8. Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 2 pp. 53-66. 9. Wagner, Symbols that stand for themselves, p. 69. 10. Durand, Technique et pantheon des mediums viétnamiens, p. 8.

11. About this formidable nationalist hero of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces in central Vietnam, see Nguyen Thang, Quang Nam: dat nuoc nhan vat (Quang Nam: land and people), (Da Nang: Nha Xuat Ban Ban Hoc, 1996), pp. 491-532. 12. Bruno Bettleheim explains that mental illness in Freudian psychoanlysis is a metaphor as well as an empirical reality and that in this metaphor, “the body

188 Notes to pages 108-18 stands for the soul,” that is, the analyst sees the patient’s soul as zf1t was body in clinical medicine. Freud and Man’s Soul, pp. 39-40. 13. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy (London: Arkana, 1989), pp. 5-6. 14. See Mackay, Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. 15. To counter this problem, the con co magic board draws four separate entry points for thanh (saint), than, tien, and quy (monster, evil spirit). Than and tien are translated variously to genies, deities, gods and goddesses, or spirits. 16. Cadiere, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 2, p. 59; Phan Ke

Binh, Viét-Nam phong-tuc, book 1, pp. 79-80. Also Durand, Technique et pantheon des mediums viétnamiens, and Ann Helen Unger and Walter Unger, Pagodas, gods and spints of Vietnam (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), p. 20. Dror, Cult, culture, and authority, pp. 30-42.

17. Ibid., p. 20. See also Stevan Harrell, “When a ghost becomes a god,” in Arthur P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and ntual in Chinese society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 201. 18. Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 2, pp. 65-6.

19. Ibid., pp. 66-70. 20. We may think of this ambivalence in terms of Jonathan Parry’s note on Hinduism: “Duality [of purity and impurity] is abolished, polarities are recom-

bined. [It] thus recaptures the primordial state of non-differentiation.” Jonathan Parry, “Sacrificial death and the necrophagous ascetic,” in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds.), Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 100. Alternatively, we can think about the condition as a constructive state of ambivalence, which, according to Zygmunt Bauman, challenges the social force of classification: Bauman, Modernity and ambivalence.

21. See Nguyen Kien’s biographical account, The unwanted (New York: Little and Brown, 2001). 22. I recorded this poem of Lotus Flower and her other letter from prison to be presented later. Her earlier poetic renderings of her life are cited from “The diary of Lotus Flower,” a handwritten record of séances kept by a secondaryschool student of Cam Re. I thank the student for showing me the material. 23. Lotus Flower probably meant the family’s offerings to the wandering ghosts, not specifically for her sake. Riverside in Vietnam is known to attract ghosts, and hence it attracts offerings too. 24. Quoted from “The diary of Lotus Flower.” 25. The freedom of movement, and related independent personality, appears to be one of the main elements in the legends about powerful feminine supernatural figures in Vietnamese tradition such as Princess Lieu Hanh, the primary deity in the worship of Mother Goddesses (Dao Mau). See Vu Ngoc Khanh, Lieu Hanh Cong Chua (Princess Lieu Hanh), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoa, 1991). 26. We may understand this situation in the light of Sahlins’ well-known diagram

about the structure of gift exchange and imagine that the domestic foodsharing at the core concentric circle is stretched infinitely to the far exterior, resulting in the condition that the offerings made to the unrelated, anonymous spirits are understood as a family meal from the perspective of the recipient. See Marshall Sahlins, “On the sociology of primitive exchange,” Stone age economics (New York: Routledge, 1974), p. 199. The idea that the act of gift-

Notes to pages 119-33 189 giving generates the constellation of two radically different perspectives is now an established view. See Marilyn Strathern, The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1988), pp. 18-19, and Marilyn Strathern “Qualified value: the perspective of gift exchange,” in C. Humphrey and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.), Barter, exchange and value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1992), pp. 179-81. This idea is based on the critique of the structuralist scheme based on “women as an object of exchange”: see Marilyn Strathern, Women in between: female roles in a male world, Mount Hagen, New Guinea (New York: Seminar Press, 1972). For an attempt to explain this problematic of parallax vision in terms of “two cognitive systems,” see Maurice Bloch, “The

past and the present in the present,” Man 12 (1977), pp. 278-92. 27. Harrell, “When a ghost becomes a god,” p. 195. 28. See Norton, “Vietnamese mediumship ritual”, pp. 75-97. 29. For an excellent discussion of similar figures, see Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 111-18.

30. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas reader, edited by S. Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 64. 31. Thien Do, “Unjust-death deification and burnt offering”, 32. Janet Carsten, The heat of the hearth: the process of kinship in a Malay fishing community (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-

Jones (eds.), About the house: Lévi-Strauss and beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 33. Carsten, After kinship, p. 45, 56.

34. Carsten writes, “In many cultures, houses are the particular domain of women and children; coming to understand kinship via the house thus has the effect of foregrounding them as subject.” Ibid., p. 49. 35. Teiser, The ghost festival in medieval China, p. 220. 36. van Gennep, The ntes of passage, pp. 163-5. 37. Teiser, The ghost festival, p. 219. Cadieére also highlights the semantic contrast

between than (genie-spirit) and ma (ghost) in Vietnamese conception and explains it as a moral hierarchical conception. According to Cadiére, the than refer to honored spirits of a moral community, and they incorporate positive identities at all levels of the society from family ancestors and village guardian spirits to the national cult objects. These identities are in contrast to those in

the category of ma, which, according to him, designates the souls of bad death, abandoned and avoided by the society: Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 3, pp. 53-65. 38. Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 199-208. 39. For Machiavelli, mobile animi denotes “the mobile spirit of the mass” in face of which “men with power tremble incessantly.” Quoted from Waldemar Voise, “La Renaissance et les sources des sciences politiques,” Diogene, no. 23 (1958), p. 61.

Chapter 7 Money for ghosts 1. Huu Ngoc, Dictionnaire de la culture traditionnelle du Vietnam, pp. 147-8, 350-1. The fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month is Tet Trung Nguyen,

190 Notes to pages 134—7 when the inhabitants of the other world are allowed to visit those of the opposite world and enjoy the pleasures of the living world. 2. See Christopher Giebel, “Museum-shrine: revolution and its tutelary spirit in the village of My Hoa Hung,” in Hue-Tam H. Tai (ed.), The country of memory: remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2001); Shaun K. Malarney, “The emerging cult of Ho Chi Minh?: a report on religious innovation in contemporary northern Viet Nam,” Asian Cultural Studies 22 (1996), pp. 121-31. 3. Marcel Mauss, The gift: the form and the reason for exchange in archaic societies,

trans. W.D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990 [1925]), pp. 5-7. Malinowski writes that among the Trobriand Islands of Polynesia, the death of certain important individuals requires the community to accumulate a staggering amount of food and valuables in preparation for the funerary and commemorative events. At a prefigured time, the cumulated wealth is distributed across the islands in dramatic rituals and travels, according to Malinowski, like the water dammed up in store, then let loose at high velocity and in great magnitude. This mortuary distribution of wealth is supposed to widen the scope of the community’s exchange network. The Native Americans of the Northwest coast maintained a network of rites called potlatch, meaning “to feed” or “to consume,” in which groups competed in demonstrating wealth, and sometimes, in destroying it. In the nineteenth century, many of these peoples were obliged to work for the

white settlers. They accumulated commodity objects from the Hudson Bay Company and disposed of these goods in lavish potlatch ceremonies. In the highlands of Indochina, the ethnic minorities used to build a separate funerary house for the deceased and adorn it with elaborate woodcarvings. During the Vietnam War, two new figures were added to the pantheon of sculptures in the Gia Lai funeral houses: the statue of an American Officer and that of a communist soldier. When each house was complete, the highlanders started accumulating

wealth (grain and pigs) in the hope of realizing a collective ceremony of consumption in two or three years. After the feast, it is argued that the funeral house was abandoned, the death forgotten, and the entire area often abandoned. See Bronislow Malinowski, Argonauts of the western Pacific (New York: E. P. Dutton,

1922), p. 492. About the podlatch ceremony, see Helen Codere, Fighting with property: a study of Kwakiutl potlatching and warfare, 1792-1930 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1950). About Gia Lai funeral houses, see Bernard Y. Jouin, La mort et la tombe: Pabandon de la tombe (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1949); Phan Cam

Thuong and Nguyen Tan Cu, Dieu khac nha mo Tay Nguyen (Vhe sculpture of funeral houses in Central Highlands), (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban my thuat, 1995). 4. Nguyen Van Huyen, The ancient civilization of Vietnam, pp. 51—67.

5. According to Clifford Geertz, ritual splendor is “paradigmatic, not merely reflective of social order.” The interpretation of cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 332. 6. Geertz, Negara: the theater state in nineteenth-century Balt. 7. Hou Ching-lang, Monnaies d’offrande et la notion de Trésorerie dans la religion chinotse (Paris: College de France, 1975), pp. 5-16.

8. The idea of “hell” in this scheme is semantically close to what we would generally mean by “the other world” and is not the same as hell in the Roman

Notes to pages 137-41 191 Catholic tradition, although the idea, originally, contains certain notions of sin and expiation also. See Teiser, The ghost festival in medieval China, pp. 179-90. The traditional Vietnamese conception of “the other world” (the gioi khac) incorporates “heaven” (thien) as well as “underworld” (am phu or dia phu). The ritual currency, although it is terminologically associated with am phu, is meant for the beings across the spheres.

9. John McCreery, “Why don’t we see some real money here?: offerings in Chinese religion,” fournal of Chinese Religions 18, p. 5. 10. Hou, Monnaies d’offrande, p. 130.

11. Despite this equivalence, the accumulation of wealth could have opposite meanings for the living and the dead. For the dead, lots of wealth and money was a positive thing, for this paid their debt of life and increased their holdings in the Bank of Hell, which was meaningful for their possible return to the world of the living. The same, for the living, could be bad news, for this decreased their holdings in the same bank and accelerated their approach to death.

12. Adam Smith, The wealth of nations, books 1-3 (New York: Penguin, 1982 [1776]), p. 305. 13. Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smiuth’s wealth of nations: a philosophical com-

panion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 250-7. 14. See David E. Stannard, The puritan way of death: a study 1n religion, culture, and social change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

15. Max Weber, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (London: Routledge, 1990 [1930]), pp. 39-50.

16. Michael H. Lessnoff, The spirit of capitalism and the protestant ethic (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1994), p. 90.

17. About the political ideology of thrift in socialist Vietnam, see Marcus Schlecker, “Going back a long way”, pp. 512-15. About the post-reform drive for capital accumulation, see Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: anatomy of a peace

(New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 31-57. 18. “Money as substance” is quoted from Simmel, The philosophy of money, pp. 190-203. The term “fiat-money” is quoted from Keith Hart, The memory bank: money 1n an unequal world (London: Profile Books, 2000), pp. 245-51. 19. Malarney, Culture, ritual, and revolution in Vietnam.

20. Ibid., pp. 52-76. Also Malarney, “The limits of state functionalism and the

reconstruction of funerary ritual in contemporary northern Vietnam,” pp. 540-60; Duiker, Vietnam: revolution in transition, pp. 181-4.

21. See Malarney, “The emerging cult of Ho Chi Minh?” Also Giebel, “Museum-shrine.” 22. Karsten W. Endres, “Spirited modernities: mediumship and ritual performativity in late socialist Vietnam,” in P. Taylor (ed.), Modernity and re-enchantment: religion in post-revolutionary Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, in press); Taylor, Goddess on the rise, pp. 83-110. 23. Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 60-2. 24. Sahlins, Stone age economics, pp. 191-6.

25. For similar ideas expressed by the same person in a different context, see Kwon, After the massacre, p. 114.

192 Notes to pages 143-6 26. Simmel, The philosophy of money, p. 74.

27. See Stephan Feuchtwang, Popular religion in China: the imperial metaphor (Surrey: RoutledgeCurzon, 2001), pp. 19-22; Gary Seaman, “Spirit money: an interpretation,” fournal of Chinese Religions 10 (1982), pp. 82, 86-7.

28. According to Gombrich, the Great Seal symbol in the US one-dollar bill expresses the hopes and aspirations of the New World for the dawn of a new

era: “Novus ordo seclorum alludes to Virgil’s prophecy of a return of the Golden Age, and so does the other Latin tag, Annuit Coeptis, ‘He [God] favoured the beginning.’ But it is the image of the unfinished pyramid rising toward heaven and the ancient symbol of the eye of Providence that gives the

entire design [following the advice of the English antiquarian Sir John Prestwich] the character of an ancient oracle close to fulfillment.” E. H. Gombrich, The image and the eye: further studies in the psychology of pictorial representation (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), pp. 152-3.

_ 29. A recent model I purchased in the Da Nang market is a good replica of the 1996 series legal tender US one hundred dollars, issued by the United States of America but certified by the Bank of Hell. The artists and manufacturers of ritual money have since been experimenting with innovative ways to make even thinner the demarcation line between fantasy and reality. The building

of the Bank of Hell has changed from a classical Chinese pavilion to a skyscraper in a more recent version, and replicas of credit cards such as American Express have also appeared in urban marketplaces. 30. The Sunday Times, 19 November 2000. 31. This is in fact one of the most illuminating aspects of the Western tradition of

ghost narrative. For Dickens, for instance, the ghost appearing in his A Christmas carol was a literary device to express predicaments in the social morality of money. After he read the story in Edinburgh, Dickens said that he wished he could take his listeners “into the gaols and nightly refuges [in the coal mines of northern England]”; places where “my own heart dies within me when I see thousands of immortal creatures condemned, without alternative or choice, to tread, not what our great poet [Alexander Pope] calls “the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire”, but one of jagged flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance.” Quoted from Brian Sibley, “The ghost of an idea,” an introduction to A Christmas carol: the unsung story (Oxford: Lion Books, 1994), pp. 24—5.

32. Boggs has painted American and European currencies and sold them for higher prices than the original value of the note he painted. He also sold his signature, and the prices of his money paintings have been rising. The US Treasury viewed the painter as a criminal counterfeiter, and the US Secret Service has made a series of attempts to convict Boggs and stop his unusual artwork. Lawrence Weschler, in his insightful book about Boggs, considers that the idea of exchanging art money for real money is evocative of the mysticism of exchanging “one abstraction for another” and hence can be deeply subversive in terms of money reality and humorous about the art world. According to Weschler, Boggs explores how the system of values we live by is only a collective imagination after all and how comical the serious

game of values we humbly submit to on a daily basis can turn out to be

Notes to pages 146-50 193 when we fuse two games into one playground, that is, the game of pricing artwork and the exchange value game of money into art money. See Lawrence Weschler, Boggs: a comedy of values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 33. Simmel The philosophy of money, p. 349. 34. Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the modern mind: Georg Simmel’s philosophy of

money (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 62-8. 35. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch (eds.), Money and the morality of exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 4.

36. Paul Bohannan, “Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv,”Amencan Anthropologist 57 (1955), pp. 61-3. 37. Paul Bohannan, “The impact of money on an African subsistence economy,” The Fournal of Economic History 19 (1959), pp. 496-7.

38. Ibid., pp. 499-503. 39. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1976 [1887]). 40. Parry and Bloch (eds.), Money and the morality of exchange, p. 14.

pp. 637-56. :

41. Keith Hart, “Heads or tails?: two sides of the coin,” Man 21 (1986),

42. Hill Gates, “Money for gods,” Modern China 13 (1989), pp. 259-77. 43. Mayfair Yang, “Putting global capitalism in its place: economic hybridity,

Bataille, and ritual expenditure,” Current Anthropology 23 (2000), pp. 540-60. 44, Feuchtwang, Popular religion in China, pp. 19-22. The possession of money makes the dead appear as also having a variety of worldly needs and desires just as the living do. In this sense, we can argue that the ritual money evokes two relations of resemblance — between forms of money, on the one hand, and between types of being on the other. Money’s mimetic relationship has what Maurer calls “an effect of similitude” on the relationship between the living and the dead. Bill Maurer, “Chrysography: substance and effect,” The AstaPacific Fournal of Anthropology 3 (2002), p. 53. 45. Agamben, Homo sacer, pp. 75-9.

46. Ibid., pp. 136-43. Also Georgio Agamben, State of exception (Chicago: _ University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1-31. 47. Seaman, “Spirit money,” pp. 86-7. 48. Cadiére, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des viétnamiens, vol. 2, pp. 60—5.

49. Hickey, Village in Vietnam, p. 121. 50. See Kwon, After the massacre, pp. 77-82, 95-102. The idea that some spirits of tragic death are self-conscious of their inadequacy to join the ritual realm

for ancestors implies that these beings are in a process of symbolic transformation. The transformation of ghosts involves not only an intervention of sympathetic outsiders (to acknowledge their grievous existence in the form of giving prayer and other offerings on their behalf) but also the growth of

vital self-awareness and the will for freedom on the part of ghosts. The process requires a mutual and collaborative effort between the living and the dead. 51. Kern, The culture of time and space, 1889-1918, pp. 287-312; Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning.

194 Notes to pages 150-5 52. Ibid., pp. 15-28. 53. Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 206.

54. Geertz, Negara, 121-3. 55. van Gennep, The rites of passage, pp. 164—5; Hertz, Death and the nght hand, p. 86.

56. Simmel, “The strangers,” in On individuality and social forms. 57. Durkheim, The elementary forms of religious life, pp. 276-80. 58. Simmel, The philosophy of money, p. 211.

59. The stated purpose of giai oan is to participate in the liberation of ghosts. However, the idea, in practice, may be mixed with other purposes such as the augmentation of luck on the part of those who bring it into action. As Simmel writes, “money finds its place in the inter-weaving of purposes” (Simmel, The philosophy of money, p. 210). Since the idea of luck, in commercial society, includes chances to augment material wealth, as Laurel Kendall shows, we can perhaps say that money offered to ghosts, not to mention money to gods and goddesses who are explicitly associated with magical capacity for wealth creation, represents thoughts of real money that are meaningful for the living.

We may think of this condition of interwoven purposes also according to Maussian theory of gift-giving, as the creation of obligation, and imagine that money given to ghosts is partly intended to oblige the ghosts to bring remittance to the donors in the form of real money. See Laurel Kendall, “Korean shamans and the spirits of capitalism,” American Anthropologist 98 (1996),

pp. 512-27. For the Vietnamese deities of wealth creation, see ‘Taylor, Goddess on the rise, and Le Hong Ly, “Praying for profit: the cult of the Lady of the Treasury (available online: www.holycross.edu/departments/ socant/aleshkow/vnsem/lehongly.html).

If this way of explaining the phenomenon is relevant and the idea that money for ghosts is partly a tool to make real money is valid, the discussion ought to involve Marx’s philosophical critique of commodity and money fetishism rather than Simmel’s sociology of money, which this book does not do. For the idea will make money for ghosts a fetish of money, not what Simmel calls a pure instrument of human relations and freedom. About money fetishism, see Michael Taussig, “The genesis of capitalism

amongst a South American peasantry: devil’s labor and the baptism of money,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977), pp. 138-45. 60. Quoted from Gombrich, The image and the eye, p. 197. 61. Strathern, Reproducing the future, p. 107. 62. Parry and Bloch (eds.), Money and the morality of exchange, pp. 1-32. 63. The French-controlled La Banque de l’Indo-Chine was established 1n 1875 and began printing dollar/piastre notes for the colony in the 1880s. See 100 years of Vietnamese currency (Ho Chi Minh: Nha xuat ban tre, 1994), pp. 22-9; ‘Tien Viet

Nam (Vietnamese money), (Hanoi: The National Bank of Viet Nam, 1991). 64. See Pierre Brocheux, The Mekong Delta: ecology, economy, and revolution,

1860-1960 (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of

Wisconsin-Madison, 1995), pp. 17-50, 173-186; James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 91-113.

65. See Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Notes to pages 156-60 195 Conclusion 1. Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: the recovery of the public world, ed. M. A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), p. 334. Quoted from Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Hannah Arendt as dissenting intellectual,” in A. Hunter (ed.), Rethinking the cold war (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 272.

2. Ibid., p. 284. 3. Ibid., p. 283. 4. Hertz, Death and the right hand. 5. Ibid., p. 78, 86. John Middleton also writes, “[the] deaths that are considered as bad lead to a condition of confusion and disorder but without the means for

removing and resolving them.” Middleton, “Lugbara death”, p. 142, and John Middleton, “Some categories of dual classification among the Lugbara of Uganda,” in R. Needham (ed.), Right and left: essays on dual symbolic classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 369-90. See also Fox, “On bad death and the left hand”, pp. 342-68. 6. Hertz, “The pre-eminence of the right hand”, p. 21. 7. Maurice Bloch, “Death, women, and power,” in M. Bloch and J. Parry, Death and the regeneration of life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 229-30. 8. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 144-76. 9. Hertz, “The pre-eminence of the right hand,” pp. 8, 21—2. Also Hertz, Death and the right hand, p. 113. For the original French version, see Robert Hertz, “La preeminence de la main droite,” in Sociologie religieuse et folklore (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 108-9. 10. Ibid. 11. See Kaldor, The imaginary war. 12. Robert Stern, Hegel and the phenomenology of spirit (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 135-45; George Steiner, Antigones: how the Antigone legend has endured 1n Western literature, art, and thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 19-42; Judith Butler, Antigone’s claim: kinship between life and death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 1-25. 13. Stern, Hegel and the phenomenology of spirit, p. 140. 14. About the conflicts between the moral claims of kinship and those of the state, and the related idea of reciprocal recognition of each other’s claims between

the two separate moral subjects, see Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s theory of the modern state (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 132-54; Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s ethics of recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 52-9. 15. Butler, Antigone’s claim, p. 5. 16. Quoted from Dana R. Villa, Politics, philosophy, terror: essays on the thought of

Hannah Arendt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 36. 17. Anthony Giddens, The third way: renewal of social democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 90-3. 18. Ibid., p. 89. 19. Ibid., pp. 69-86. 20. Giddens, Beyond left and right, pp. 13, 124-33.

196 Notes to pages 160-5 21. Norberto Bobbio, Left and right: the significance of a political distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 14. 22. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam; Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the origins of the Vietnamese revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 23. Duiker, Sacred war. 24. The quote “philosophical anthropology” is from Avineri, Hegel’s theory of the modern state, p. 135. 25. The quote is from Hertz, “The pre-eminence of the right hand,” p. 13. See also, Fox, “On bad death and the left hand,” pp. 346—53. 26. Butler, Antigone’s claims, pp. 12-25. In verses 570-90, Antigone defends her act of giving burial to her brother Polyneices and the city’s “enemy,” in a series of statements involving several shifts of perspective (first from the perspective of her hero brother Eteocles to that of Hades the underworld god, and then to that which Hegel associates with family love or female sentiment): CREON: Wasn’t Eteocles a brother too — cut down, facing him (Eteocles’ brother Polyneices)? ANTIGONE: Brother, yes, by the same mother, the same father. CREON: Then how can you render his enemy such honors, such impieties in his eyes? ANTIGONE: He will never testify to that, Eteocles dead and buried. CREON: He will — if you honor the traitor just as much as him. ANTIGONE: But it was his brother, not some slave that died. CREON: Ravaging our country! — but Eteocles died fighting in our behalf. ANTIGONE: No matter — Death longs for the same rites for all. CREON: Never the same for the patriot and the traitor. ANTIGONE: Who, Creon, who on earth can say the ones below don’t find this pure and uncorrupt? CREON: Never. Once an enemy, never a friend, not even after death. ANTIGONE: I was born to join in love, not hate — that is my nature. CREON: Go down below and love, if love you must — love the dead! While I’m alive, no woman is going to lord it over me.

Quoted from Sophocles, The three Theban plays, trans. by R. Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 84-6. 27. Butler, Antigone’s claim, p. 24. 28. Sophocles, The three Theban plays, p. 85. 29. The quote “family love” is from G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of religion, trans. by E. B. Speirs and J.B. Sanderson (New York: Humanities

Press, 1962), p. 264. The quote “the limits of kinship” is from Butler, Antigone’s claim, p. 23. 30. Teiser, The ghost festival in medieval China, p. 219. 31. The picture may relate to the idea of “society outside society” in Marx’s early writing. Marx explains this idea as the revelation of man’s species-being, which,

claiming “no traditional status but only a human status,” rises from the state of self-alienation in its extremity. See Karl Lo6with, Max Weber and Karl Marx

(New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 109-11. 32. See chapter 1 of the present volume. The “specter” of the Vietnam War is quoted from Appy, “The ghosts of war,” p. 12. The “collective phantom” of Vietnam War is quoted from Schmitt, Ghosts in the middle ages, p. 227.

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Index

Addiss, Stephen 185 Bien, body-finder 109-11, 112-15

Adorno, Theodor W. 12, 35 family tradition and Lotus Flower

Agamben, Giorgio 24, 148 (Lien Hoa) 128 Alphen, Ernst van 173 mobility of 115

American Civil War, ghosts of 14 prison message from Lotus Flower 126 American diplomatic ties with Vietnam, and soul-searching 117

MIA discoveries 44—5, 57 biological classification of bones 49

use of Vietnamese medium 57 problems of identification 50 American War, Vietnamese interpretation bipolarity of left and right 156

of 13, 14-15 Bloch, Ernest 16 ancestor worship 189, 193, 194, 195

see also Vietnam War Bloch, Maurice 22, 23, 147, 173, 174, 185,

domestic rite 98 Bobbio, Norberto 160

external rite 98-9 bodies, amalgam of past and and ghosts of children 116 present 35—6 see also domestic ritual space; see also xac ghosts body-finding, through spirits 53—4, 109-10,

Anderson, Benedict 45, 175 111-15

Antigone, see Butler; Hegel Bohannan, Paul 146-7

Appadurai, Arjun 65 bond of bereavement 101 Appy; Christian 12, 169, 170, Borneman, John 176

182, 196 Bradley, Mark P. 31, 179

Arendt, Hannah 156, 159 Brigham, Robert K. 94, 170

Aries, Philippe 36 Brocheux, Pierre 194

Arquilla, John 67—8 Buchli, Victor 171

art money, 146 Butler, Judith 159, 162, 163, 165, 187, 195

August Revolution 11

Avineri, Shlomo 195, 196 Ca Ong, spirit of whale 117 Cadiéere, Léopold 87, 107, 148, 171,

Ba Chua Tien, mother goddess 120 188, 189

“Ba Me Que” 91 capitalism, domination of 29-30 origins of 91 Carsten, Janet 130-1, 168 Bailey, Susan 175 Casey, Edward 24, 89, 186

Bao Ninh 1, 27, 48, 169, 180 Castells, Manuel 182 Bataille, George 147, 148 censorship, of literature about ghosts 11 Bauman, Zygmunt 185, 188 Chien Xem Ma (medium) 53-4

Benjamin, Walter 2, 42, 167 involvement of family in searches 54—6

Berlin Wall, fall of 65 and party officials 57-8 Bernstein, Richard 172 and US MIA missions 57

Bertrand, Didier 172, 181, 186 children of people strategy 92-3

Bettleheim, Bruno 187 Chile, legacy of Pinochet 31

Bibby, Michael 13, 170, 171 civil war, and war ghosts 13, 14 214

Index 215 Clinton, President Bill, visit to Hanoi 44, 145 official requests for 56

POW/MIA issues 47 loosening of state control 61 clothing, as votive offering culture of 35-6 changes in tradition 142 obstacles to memory 58 utility value for dead 143 relations with living 41, 42—3

Co Chin Trung Thien; see Impartial Heaven rights to burial 163

co so activists 70-1, 73, 94, 95-6 death

Co Tien 109 ambidextrous human body 157, 162

Codere, Helen 190 dual religious symbolism 156-7 coffin making, boom in 28 offerings; wealth

coexistence of life and death 7, 36 and wealth, see money; prosperity; votive coffins, use as magical instrument 38-9 death at home (chet nha), coexistence with

see also funerals death in the street 86

cold war death in the street (chet duong) 7, 20, 163-4 decomposition of 66-7 commemorative practices 86 results of decomposition 62-3 and displaced spirits 89, 99, 103 definition of state 161 imprisonment of souls 129 global experience of 31, 64 Degung Santikarma 176

differences in 65 Denish, Bette 177

local forms of 66 desertion, and co so mothers 94, 95-6 new social order 159-60 Dickens, Charles 3, 192

ordering 30 Do La money 141-2

political crisis in moral community of designs of 144

kinship 158-9 disruption of hierarchy of other

political use of MIA problem 46-7 worlds 153

position of left and right 160 duality of meanings 144—5, 147, 150-1 reality of mass death 4—5, 160 effect on classification of spirits 151-2

rejection of terms 156 opposition from deities 145—6, 153

two-dimensional history of 66, 80-1 see also Sharpshooter; votive offerings

collaborators domestic ritual space classification of 74—5 change in 58

civilian support networks 73-4 heroic death certificates 59 and neighbourhood surveillance 73 increasing privacy and coexistence of old

Comaroff, Jean 175, 178 and new era 59-60

Comaroff, John 175 moral and political practice 159 commemorative practices in Vietnam 48,164 Don Lam 26, 97, 101

changes in tradition 5, 35, 48-9, 59-61 Dong Vinh 96

desire to remember 105 Dror, Olga 186

domestic ritual 86, 140-1 Duiker, William J. 168, 169, 185, 186, 191,

and shifts in meaning 86 196

official state practices 24—5, 83, 140 Duong Thu Huong 1, 169 communist authority in Vietnam, political Durand, Maurice 181, 184, 187, 188

use of POWs 47 Durkheim, Emile 7, 87, 99, 100, 152

Condominas, George 171, 183 Dwyer, Leslie 176 Cooper, Nicola 169

Cummings, Bruce 4, 168, 169, 184 Eades, Jeremy S. 172 economic renovation in Vietnam (doi mo1) 29

Dai Tien, chief of security in other world, 119 effect on reburials 33

anger at question on former life 133 Eliade, Mircea 188

interrogation of Lotus Flower encounters with ghosts 36—40

(Lien Hoa) 127 Endres, Kirsten W. 191

dead, the Esbenshade, Richard S. 167

communication with Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 157, 173 Chien Xem Ma 53-6 exhumation of missing soldiers 44 Huynh Phung 51-3 official American delegations 44

216 Index

Fall, B. B. 180 use in narrative 2 family record system (ho so) 74-5 in European literature 2—3 result of use 75 in Vietnam 2, 3 families, basic to civil society 160, 161 in classical literature 87-8

Farell, Kirby 179 Vietnamese conception of 7

Faris, Wendy B. 168 wandering souls (co bac) 16, 100, 131, festivals, held by emigrant communities 91 152(see also Nguyen Du)

Feuchtwang, Stephan 147, 176, 192 encounters with 16, 36-40

Fforde, Adam 175 and troublesome ghosts 17-18, 37,

Field, Douglas 182 39-40, 113-15

financial globalization 30 see also Chien Xem Ma; kinship practice;

Finucane, Ronald C. 167 Lotus Flower; ritual revival; the Fischer, Michael M. J. 172 stranger; transformative spirits; France, and ghosts of First World War 14 votive offerings

French war ghosts, in Vietnam 14 Gibson, J.J. 154 funerals, orientation of coffin 136 Gibson, James W. 179

see also money; votive offerings Giddens, Anthony 29-30, 159-60, 161, 182

Gaddis, John Lewis 168 Giebel, Christopher 190, 191

Gates, Hill 147 Gillis, John R. 46, 175 Geertz, Clifford 178, 190, 194 Giran, Paul 185 Gennep, Arnold van 24, 152, 173, 189 global order

Geschiere, Peter 175 change in 64—5

ghost of Vietnam, and American society and experiences of cold war 65, 66

12, 165 and network warfare 67-8

ghosts globalization, meeting between Clinton and absence in social theory 23—4 Le Kha Phien 145 and ancestors 20, 21—2, 24—5, 87, 88-9, Gluckman, Max 182

100, 157 Gombrich E. H. 192, 194 3,5, 42 historical backgrounds 119, 134

background circumstances of death gods and goddesses

ceremonial time for 133 spiritual remains of violent death 130 concept of the stranger 20-1, 100, 102 votive money 143

domestic ritual space 58 anti Do La sentiment 145-6

history of mass displacement 89, 104 superior currency 148 importance of money for 152 see also Impartial Heaven; Sharpshooter

interest in humans 19, 88, 165 Grandin, Greg 4, 168, 176 lack of discrimination against former Greece, civil war in 32

enemy 26—7, 37-8 Green, Sarah F. 176

meanings of apparitions 10, 18-19 Gulf War, and memory of Vietnam War 12 notion of place and home 101, 131

oblivious to modern ideologies 135-6 Habermas, Jurgen 178

of prisoners 72 Hann, Chris M. 176, 182

places for worship of (khom) 34 Hardy, Andrew 175, 187

political 21, 62—3, 158 Harrell, Stevan 174, 188, 189 public knowledge of 17 Harrison, Simon 182 relational reference to 109 Hart, Keith 147, 191 and religious revival 85 Hartingh, Bertrand de 174 and revolutionary cultural policies 11 Hassard, John 182

sensitivity to 105 Hastrup, Kirsten 172

social/political obstacles to memory 58 Hawley, Thomas M. 179-80

state’s attitude to 10-11, 24—5 Hayden, Robert M. 167, 177 transformation to mobile deity 117 heavy soul, and phantom salt 104

stages of 118 Hefner, Robert W. 175

transitional status of 131 Hegel, G. W. F. 158-9, 161, 162-3

Index 217

Hellman, John 179 Jouin, Bernard Y. 190

heroic death certificates 59, 61-2, 75 Jun Jing 168, 176 Heroic Mothers of Vietnam 33, 52, Just, Ward 182 136, 138

Hertz, Robert 24, 89, 152, 156-7, 162,165 Kaldor, Mary 168, 176, 183, 195

Hickey, Gerald 87, 193 Kellner, Douglas 169, 184 Hiebert, Murray 177, 180 Kendall, Laurel 194

history Kerkvliet, Benedict J. Tria 175 relationship with memory 12-13 Kern, Stephen 173, 193 use of fiction in post socialist society 2 Keynes, J. M. 139

Ho Chi Minh 174 Kim, Dong-Chun 176 Ho Si Hiep 185 kinship relations 6, 8, 97-8, 103

ho so reports, see family record system association with the stranger 100-1

Hobsbawm, Eric 175 fictive kinship 83, 84—5, 96, 103, 117,

Hochschild, Adam 167 118, 130-1, 161

homesickness 90-1 good and bad death 161, 162, 164

during French war 91 mass death and displacement 149-50, 165

and songs 93—4 through civil war 162, 163 Honig, Bonnie 173 political crisis in 158-9

used by revolutionary networks 94 new model after cold war 159-60, 161

Hoopes, Townsend 183 transformation of spirit 130

Horkheimer, Max 12, 35 see also Lotus Flower; Hegel; surrogate

Hou Ching-lang 137 motherhood Hugh-Jones, Stephen 189 Klein, Christina 182

Humphrey, Caroline 168,175 Kolko, Gabriel 191

Hunter, Allen 176 Kundera, Milan 2, 167

Hutton, Will 176, 182 Kwon, Heonik 168, 171, 172, 174, 177,

Huu Ngoc 171, 184, 185, 189 181, 183, 191, 193

Huynh Lua 186 Ky Huynh Phung, reburial of 51-3 history of 123-4

transformation to thanh 108 spirit network 124

Huynh Sanh Thong 184, 185 see also Impartial Heaven; Sharpshooter

Impartial Heaven (Co Chin La Fontaine, J.S. 187

Trung Thien) 150 LaFeber, Walter 4, 168, 182

diplomacy of 125 Lambek, Michael 178

established deity 119 Lap, amputee of Tiger Temple community

and Ho Chi Minh 134 biography of 77, 82

mobility of 120 and prison survival 77 network of followers 119, 122 life after prison 77-8

- questions to 133 strength of community 78-9 on family life 134 Temple worship 78—9 on war 134 US and VC blame for amputation Independence War with France 11 75-7, 79

Indonesia, end of cold war 31 Laqueur, Thomas 61

Ingold, Tim 99 Latour, Bruno 182

investment, importance for Adam Law, John 11, 16, 108, 182

Smith 138 Le Duy Anh 186

Isaac, Jeffrey C. 156, 172 Le Hong Ly 194 Isaacs, Arnold R. 170 Le Huu Khoa 177, 187 Le Minh Khue 169

Jackson, Michael 168 Leach, Edmund 173

Jacobs, Seth 169 Leffler, Melvyn P. 167 Jamieson, Neil L. 175, 179, 194 Lendon, J. E. 179

Jason, Philip K. 170 Lessnoff, Michael H. 191

218 Index Lévinas, Emmanuel 129 mass reburial movement 32—4

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 18 Maurer, Bill 193 Leéevy-Bruhl, Lucien 18 Mauss, Marcel 190

Lewis, Belinda 167 Mazower, Mark 176, 182 liberation from grievance, see transformative McCreery, John 191

spirits McMahon, Robert 170

Lien Hoa, see Lotus Flower mediums, use in MIA missions 52—4 light soul, and phantom salt 104 pastoral role 54—6 communication with other souls 104 Mendel, Ruth 175

“Long Me” 90, 91 Merleau-Ponty, M. 79 banned by communist authority 93 MIA missions 49

and homesickness 93-4 communication with the dead 50

Lotus Flower (Lien Hoa), spirit of 109-13, Michnick, Adam 167

115, 129, 132 Middleton, John 184, 195

and ghosts of children 116 missing bodies

introduction of other wandering spirits American preoccupation with 46

116, 127 in armed forces 46

letter from prison 126 collaboration between ritualists and liberation and kinship 131 governing body 52-3 reintroduction to families 116 Chien Xem Ma 53-4

soul-searching 117 Vietnamese priority 48

theft of talismans 126-7 see also death in the street; war veterans transformation to goddess 120, 127,150 | modern memory 84 visit from comrade to Bien’s family 126 monetization, and growth of individiual

Lowith, Karl 196 freedom 146, 147 Lucas, Gavin 171 cultural context 154

Luong, Hy Van 97-8, 169, 175, 177, Tiv exchange system 146~7

178, 183 money, and ritual action 8, 136 burning of 139, 141

Macfarlane, Alan 172 and liberation from grievance 152 Mackay, Charles 168, 188 memory-related 153

magic, post socialist 41 complexity of imaginary economy 146 of spiritual remains from violent death 97 different meanings of 148, 153 Malarney, Shaun K. 48, 168, 169, 171, 173, dollar ritual notes 141-2, 143 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 190, 191 familiarity of currency 141

Malinowski, Bronislow 190 foreign currency 135 Manyin, Mark E. 180 historically specific 142-3 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 4 replica money 138, 139

Marr, David G. 169 superiority of deities 148 Marx, Karl 16, 147, 194, 196 transaction between human and ghost 153 mass death see also Do La money; votive offerings

and cold war paradigm 4—5, 31-2, 158 money, in real economy, separate functions

development of voluntary informal of coins and metal 148

networks 83, 84—5 Mong Linh Cong Chua, and Bo Thien

and history of left and right 160 Nga 121

importance in history 5, 27 Moore, Henrietta L. 42 moral identity of ghosts 149 Mosse, George 175 revival of religious practices 83, 85, 140 Mueggler, Eric 168, 176 unresolved issues in central Europe 32 Mydans, Seth 180 in Western Europe after First World

War 149 Narayan, Kirin 172

mass displacement Nashel, Jonathan 176

development of histories 6, 27, 160 native place, love of 90-1 and displaced afterlife 85-6, 99, 165 expressed in song 90, 91

see also death in the street personified by mother 92

Index 219

Neale, Jonathan 170 post-socialism, differences in concept of 67 potlatch rites, of native Americans 190

networks definition 31-2

in Vietnam 68—9, 80 Powell, Colin 12, 13, 170

neighbourhood surveillance 73 Prickett, Stephen 167 and resolution of conflict 80, 81 prosperity

social and civil 70-1, 81 comparison with European philosophy

of spirits 121 137-9

Vietcong revolutionary cells 69-70 and funeral rites 136

Neu, Charles E. 1770 life as a bank loan 137

Nghe Chien Xa, see Sharpshooter sharing with the dead 141 Ngo Duc Thinh 97, 177 public commemoration of war heroes 24—5 Nguyen Dang Thuc 187

Nguyen Du 87-8, 98, 165, 184 Quang Nam Province Communist Party Nguyen Duy Hinh 178, 186 collaboration with ritual specialists 52—3, 56

Nguyen Huy Thiep 169 reaction to market economy reform 51-2 Nguyen Khac Vien 88, 184, 185, 186 reburial of Huynh Phung 51

Nguyen Kien 188 recovery of missing civilian bodies 56-7 Nguyen Minh San 186 Quy Ba Chan, see Red Monster Nguyen Tan Cu 190 Neuyen Thach Giang 184 reburial, of Huynh Phung 52

Nguyen Thang 187 effect of market reform 33-4 Nguyen Tran-Huan 184 and postwar politics 49 Nguyen Van Hoan 184, 185 of unearthed bones 32-3, 43

Nguyen Van Huyen 181, 186, 187, 190 see also Lotus Flower; ritual revival

Nguyen Van Ky 185 Red Monster (Quy Ba Chan or Than Do/ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 105 Quy Do) 121, 122-4 Norton, Barley 178, 189 battle with Sharpshooter 124—5 and Impartial Heaven 125 Ortner, Sherry 19 Red Seed 150 battle between Red Monster and

Parry, Jonathan 147, 174, 185, 188, Sharpshooter 124, 132

193, 194 relationship with Sharpshooter 125—6

patriots, ho so reports 74—5 struggle for liberation 132

Pelley, Patricia M. 48, 169, 196 symbolic transformation 130 Peters, Major Ralph, network war 67-8 religious symbols 22

Petersen, Douglas, MIA recovery 47 and ghosts 22-3

Pham Con Son 177 representation of right and left 156—7 Pham Duy 26 religious tradition, and mother of the home-

Pham Ngo Minh 186 place 96—7

Pham Thi Hoai 169 religious worship Phan Cam Thuong 190 collective and domestic rites 98, 101, 103 Phan Huy Dong 15 and political tolerance 29 Phan Ke Binh 171, 184, 188 society’s exposure to global market 29 Phan Thanh Hao 177, 181 remembrance, and liberation of spirits 129,

phantom salt 104, 105 154, 164

Pike, Douglas E. 180, 181, 183 renovation of ancestral home and tombs 34

Pitt-Rivers, Julian 172 reunification, of Vietnam 11

Poggi, Gianfranco 193 Rev, Istvan 2, 167

political history, use of ghosts in post- reversible dualism 157

socialist tradition 3 revolutionary cultural campaigns 11-12 political identity 79-80 revolutionary songs, and motherhood 92

see also collaborators Rich, Frank 1770

political use of POW/MIA issues 46-7, 49 ritual actors 20, 21-2

Porter, Gareth 175 in death commemoration 154

220 Index ritual currencies 139 social transformation in Vietnam 28—9 competing currencies 153 effect of devastating war 31-2 increasing dollarization 143 effect of economic security 30

ritual revival 34, 41 ritual revival 34

body-finding missions 50 transition from cold war 30 collaboration with governing body see also religious worship

52-4, 56 societal unity

breaking open the prison 128 kinship practice 100-1

display of wealth 140 and mobility and liberty 100 family reburials 61—2 and religious ritual 100 and human displacement 81 see also Stranger, the

the missing and the unknown 99 socio-cultural dimension of cold war 66, 85

see also mass death; Nguyen Du and death in the street 163-4 road accidents, and transformative Vietnamese revolution 80-1, 83

spirits 128 see also kinship; networks

Robin, Ron 182 93 Robinson, Geoffrey 176 Sophocles 158, 196

Roberts, Nancy 170 songs, as political and military instruments Ronfeldt, David 67—8 Soul Guide, funeral specialist 136

Roseberry, William 167 soul

Rowlands, Michael 175, 179 duality in Vietnamese tradition 105-6

Roxborough, Ian 170 inversion of order after death 106—7

Ruddick, Sara 185 retention of vital life forces 107 see also xac

Sahlins, Marshall 188, 191 South Korea, mass death in 32

sanctions, postwar use of 47 specters of history, in former eastern-bloc

Sanders, Todd 42 countries 2, 165

Schell, Jonathan 171 spirit networks 119, 121 Schlecker, Marcus 92, 169, 187, 191 features of 121—2 Schmitt, Jean-Claude 12, 16, 167, 172, see also Ky

173, 196 spirit water, and phantom salt 104

Schneider, Mark 16 Stannard, David E. 191

Scott, James C. 25, 194 state politics of commemoration 24—5,

Scott, James M. 182 83, 140 Seaman, Gary 192 , and countermovement 83, 84

security studies, importance of networks stranger, the

67-8 concept of 19-20, 24

Shannon, Christopher 182 symbol of life 102

Sharpshooter (Nghe Chien Xa) 120-1, symbolic construction of social identity 23

122, 150 and Vietnamese conception of

battle with Red Monster 124—5 ghosts 20-1

questions to 133 Steiner, George 195

on ideology of war 135-6, 155 Stern, Lewis M. 177, 178

request for local money 135, 136, 145, Stern, Robert 195

153, 154-5, 164 Stern, Steve 31 Sheehan, Neil 42 Stewart, Charles 174

Shryock, Andrew 172 Strathern, Marilyn 66, 154, 189

Sibley, Brian 192 street children, and revolutionary Simmel, Georg 7, 8, 20, 23, 100, 102, 139, networks 70

143, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154, 173, Summerfield, Derek 171

187, 194 Sunday Times, The 192

Simon, Pierre J. 178 surrogate motherhood 92-3

Simon-Barouh, Ida 178 belief in distant reciprocal action 96 Smith, Adam 137-8 kinship with enemy soldiers 94, 95—6

social democracy, post-cold war 159-60 support for both sides 95

Index 221 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho 168, 176, 177, 180,196 urban communities, invented by war 71-2

Tan Viet 177, 178 US Department of State 180 Taussig, Michael 21, 101, 173, 194

Taylor, Keith, W. 97 Van Cao 174 Taylor, Philip 29, 41, 97, 132, 150, Van Le 1

169, 172, 180, 181, 186, 189, Verdery, Katherine 4, 30, 32, 168

| 191, 194 Vietcong revolutionary cells

Teiser, Stephen F. 131, 173, 184, 191, 196 case study in Danang Hospital 69—70

terrorist attacks, and networks 67, 68 infrastructure of 69 Tet Trung Nguyen, and wandering and social networks 70-1

Vietcong support network, expansion of Thaighosts Thi133 Bich Lien 186 73-4

Thien Do 97, 130 Vietnam and World Bank 177

Thompson, E. P. 80 Vietnam War

Tiger Temple, community of 71-2 American interpretation of 13, 84

ceremonial calendar 78-9, 86 network-type experience 68

connections between 78 new interpretation of 1

fear of prisoners’ ghosts 72 post-World War II origins 64

political identities 72, 75, 79-80, 95 prolonged ending of 64

problems with 73 Vietnamese state, and money burning 139,

support networks 73-4, 81 139-40

see also Lap Villa, Dana R. 195

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Voisé, Waldemar 189

anonymity of 45-6 Volcker, Paul A. 176

change in public approach to 46 votive offerings 10, 11, 17, 34, 87-8, 100,

tombs 133, 136, 137, 141, 143—4 removal for roadworks 38 changes in meaning 142

renovation of 34 Chinese spirit money 147 in “Cam Re” 36 in classical lierature 87-8 trade agreement, between US and classification of spirit 148 Vietnam 64 hierarchy of values between gods,

tradition ancestors and ghosts 148, 151 attitude of modern Vietnamese state 10-11 historical familiarity of objects 142—4 commemoration of war dead versus replicas of coins 139 ancestor worship in North Vietnam see also Do La money

11-12, 24-5 Vu Ngoc Khanh 180, 188 | wandering souls 16 Vylder, Stafan de 175 Tran Bach Dang 177 Tran Huien An 185 Wagner, Roy 106-7, 183

Tran Ngoc Them 172 war dead

transformative spirits 119, 150, 164—5 differing perspectives of 14 historical circumstances of death 132 refugees 15

liability of the living 129 war ghosts

liberation from grievance 128-9, 132, destruction of war 15

152-3, 164, 165 memory of war 13

social ambiguity of 131 natural phenomenon 16 will for freedom 129 state rejection of 25—6

Trullinger, James W. 171, 183 war refugees, encouragement to return to

Truong Chinh 171, 184 homeland 15

Turner, Karen 177, 181 war veterans, welfare of, MIA issues 44—5

Turner, Victor 183 warfare, post-modern 67, 68, 81 in Vietnam 68-9 Unger, Ann Helen 188 Watson, Rubie S. 168 Unger, Walter 188 wealth creation, and mass suffering 148

United States Senate 180 wealth display, and funerals 137, 138, 140

222 Index Weber, Max 16, 138 xac, Vietnamese concept of 35-6, 107 Werbner, Richard 181 body-lending 107-8 Weschler, Lawrence 192 exit of spirit from body 108-9 Westad, Odd Arne 168, 181, 182 see also Lien Hoa Whitfield, Stephen J. 66, 180 ,

Williams, Robert R. 195 Yang, Mayfair 147, 194 Williams, Tony 179, 180 Young, John W. 176

Winter, Jay 14, 45, 83-4, 85, 101, 150, Young, Marilyn 13, 64, 170, 179 178, 181

Wolf, Arthur P. 87, 88-9, 101, 131, Zamora, Lois P. 168

172, 174 Zipes, Jack 172

Woodside, Alexander B. 183 Zizek, Slavoj 167 First World War and modern memory 84 Zwerdling, Daniel 181

Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare Titles in the series:

1 Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History Jay Winter 2 Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919 Jay Winter and JeanLouis Robert 3 State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War Edited by

John Horne 4 A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945 Michael Richards 5 War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century Edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan 6 European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment and Propaganda, 1914-1918 Edited by Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites

7 The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in

Australia Joy Damousi |

8 The Legacy of Nazt Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 Pieter Lagrou

9 War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius 10 The Spint of 1914: Miltarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany Jeffrey Verhey 11 German Anglophobia and the Great War, 1914-1918 Matthew Stibbe 12 Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany Zee W. Mankowitz

13 Commemorating the Insh Civil War: History and Memory, 1923-2000 Anne Dolan 14 Fews and Gender in Liberation France Karen H. Adler 15 America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 Jay Winter (ed.)

16 Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain Janet S. K. Watson 17 Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I Maureen Healy

18 The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism, 1914-1940 Mona L. Siegel

19 National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Post-War Czechoslovakia Benjamin Frommer

20 China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationahzation Xu Guoqi 21 The Great War: Historical Debates, 1914 to the Present Antoine Prost and Jay Winter 22 Citizen Soldiers: The Liverpool Territorials in the First World War Helen B. McCartney 23 The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914-1940 Stefan Goebel

24 The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918 Roger Chickering 25 Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919. Volume 2: A Cultural History Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert 26 The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire Jan Riiger 27 Ghosts of War in Vietnam Heonik Kwon