"Forget
the War? The Question of Everyday Life in Contemporary Saigon"
Christophe Robert, Yale University
Conducting ethnographic research in Saigon today means confronting a deafening
silence. A generation after the end of war in 1975, the city is still
haunted by the process of post-war "re-education." In the name
of internal security and post-war reunification, the new authorities registered
military officers and civilian officials from the defunct Republic of
Vietnam and imprisoned them in remote camps. These men were to be "decontaminated"
from all traces of foreign ideologies and associations, and "made
over" into socialist citizens.
Southern Vietnamese families who experienced this process, as well as confiscation of property (houses, businesses, land) and educational discrimination, interpret it as a violent act of revenge by the northern Vietnamese victors. The official language of the period implicitly stressed the blood debt these men and their families owed to the People. They were accused of treason for their collaboration with American imperialists.
Today, a generation after the end of the war, it looks on the surface as if these debts have been repaid. Urban life in the booming consumer society of post-market reform Vietnam seems amnesiac, fast-paced, and chaotic. But older people in Saigon express nostalgic, ambivalent memories of wartime and loss of loved ones through the idioms of "being sad" (buon) and discussions of official greed and corruption. I analyze how these forms of sadness and silence still structure local public and private life today. The absence of mechanisms through which southern Vietnamese could evoke publicly the disruptions of the violence of the civil war and of post-war economic and refugee crises helps perpetuate an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and economic insecurity. Time has not made these issues disappear; the silences of the older generations have simply been displaced onto the next generations.
Christophe
Robert joins the Yale community this year as a postdoctoral associate
with the Council on Southeast Asia Studies and Lecturer in the Department
of Anthropology. Dr. Robert received his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology
from Cornell University in 2005, and taught as a lecturer in anthropology
at Princeton University during 2005-2006. He is currently writing a chapter
for a volume called Encounters with Violence (Berg, forthcoming), in which
he describes how the violent legacies and memories of the Vietnamese nationalist
wars against the French and the Americans shape everyday life in post-war
Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. He is writing another article on the commodification
of sexuality in contemporary Vietnam, in order to understand the practices
of, and debates about, commercial sex work in the context of a re-emergent
consumer society and rapidly changing gender and family roles. Finally,
he is working on a manuscript for a book on consumption, criminality,
and youth culture in post-war Vietnam. In all of these projects he focuses
on the metropolitan areas of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, as they highlight
best, in his view, the radical political and social changes occurring
in Vietnam today.
For current Yale SEAS Seminars and Events schedule, see: http://www.yale.edu/seas/Seminars.htm