Quote:
Originally Posted by Hurricane88
So Vn culture is rojak, neither here nor there...oso definitely not confucian according to your comments above?
Not sure what the moral of story is...care to coment in brief...  |
Hi Bro. Will try to explain my argument simply and keep this short. Thanks to all for the points too.
All cultures are
rojak to one extent or another. Our labels for this or that culture often gloss over and mask the complexity of history and processes of cultural formation as well as inter-cultural interaction. When does one "culture" or ethnicity end and the next one begin? Are the markers always as clear and obvious as the lines demarcated by the modern border posts and barbed wire fences of national boundaries? What is "Chinese" and "Vietnamese"? In a shorthanded everyday way, these names might seem very self-explanatory and self-evident but probe a bit deeper and they are themselves extremely problematic.
After all, there are Chinese (PRC) citizens of Vietnamese ethnicity called the Jīng (京族), which is the Mandarin Chinese rendering of the Vietnamese ethnonym
Kinh. Across the border, one can also find a large population of
người Hoa, who are the ethnic Chinese community of Vietnam. So are either of these folks Vietnamese or Chinese? Or both? Should we resort to using hyphens? And if so, which comes first? Or what? It gets better. The Vietnamese government recognizes 53 official minorities other than the Kinh majority. For the Chinese, the number is 54, in addition to the dominant Han (who are actually a culturally and linguistically diverse lot, whether in the PRC or elsewhere around the world). Who gets to be labelled a minority and to which label is one assigned in particular are also interesting questions, because the process of ethnic classification practiced by the modern nation-state is itself arbitrary and biased, one which obliterates the cultural diversity and complexity on the ground for the sake of administrative ease and bureaucratic conformity. And beyond that is where the confusion can get ridiculous. So when we talk about Chinese, for example, are we talking about Chinese nationality or Chinese ethnicity (which is usually a shorthand for members of the Han majority)? Both labels include and exclude strikingly different populations. Throw in even more interesting ingredients, such as the struggle to assert a separate Taiwanese identity in the territory known as the RoC and it gets even muddier. So would you call an ethnic Korean from Yanbian (or should that be Yeongbyeon?) who holds a PRC passport Chinese? What about a Kazakh from Xinjiang? Have you ever imagined how would someone like that self-identify or the problems that he or she might face with respect to the affiliation of his or her identity? I'd wager quite a few Tibetans and Uighurs (or Taiwanese) would bristle at the very suggestion that they are somehow "Chinese" in some way. The problematic nature of these examples just demonstrates the tenuous existence that people with a hybrid identity (especially if they are also socially or politically marginalized) face, in a world of nation-states that insist on an essentialized identity. Food for thought?
To cut a long story short, I think we should sometimes be a little more sensitive and thoughtful when throwing such labels about. I think it is hard to avoid the use of such totalizing and essentializing labels, especially in everyday usage but even when we use them, let us bear in mind that these are loaded terms with contested meanings after all. And that using them in a particular way may come across as racist, offensive or culturally imperialistic to certain individuals, that is all.
Of course Vietnamese culture is Confucian. To some extent. I don't think that can be denied. But is this Confucian influence ALL that defines "Vietnamese-ness"? And would having a Confucian cultural backbone make them anymore "Chinese"? That was just my original point. I don't think anyone can deny that what we take to be "Vietnamese culture" (ignoring for a moment what I mentioned in the prior paragraphs) has been influenced and enriched by "Chinese culture". But there are other strands involved as well. Don't forget that the current consensus in linguistic circles is that Vietnamese is undoubtedly an Austro-Asiatic (specifically Mon-Khmer) language and not related to any Sinitic language (which belong in the Sino-Tibetan family), despite a massive amount of borrowed vocabulary and other influences. Throw in centuries of interaction with (and the eventual assimilation of) much of Champa and the Chams, as well as a late veneer of colonial French influence and the underlying currents of the postcolonial Vietnamese cultural mix and experience gets even more interesting. Nonetheless, even while acknowledging their cultural debt to China, most ethnic Vietnamese will also treat the Chinese component (culturally at least) of their ancestry with a great deal of ambivalence. Whether or not their choice to be so narrowly nationalistic is right or not, a Vietnamese looking at the history of their interaction with China will also recall in their collective social repository, a number of invasions, long periods of harsh occupation and other acts of domination and violence. And multiple examples of Chinese (specifically, PRC) expansionism and imperialism (towards Vietnam) have not just been consigned to museums and history books, but actually unfolded in recent memory. It is a wound that hasn't quite completely healed. Thus I think many of them would find this characterization of 'Vietnam" as a "Little China" a particularly offensive affront and one designed to denigrate and obliterate the collective identity of their shared notion of the Vietnamese people. It is also symptomatic of a particularly Sino-centric way of looking at the world, an outlook that is rather xenophobic and racist. The moral of the story? I don't think there is any. I simply just believe that calling a Vietnamese (or Korean) "Chinese" just because of their Confucian heritage
can be viewed as pretty hurtful, insulting and offensive if you happen to be on the receiving end. Not that I buy any of the exclusionary nationalist fictions that underpin such thoughts EITHER way, in any case.
I apologize if I haven't been able to articulate my position clearly and adequately. It seems to have been too long, yet too short. Anyway, it's kind of off-topic anyway and discussions of this nature are quite ill-suited to a forum of this nature so this will be my last comment on this issue. Thanks for your time.