"Learning Vietnamese Quan ho Folk Song in an Age of Intangible Cultural Heritage"

Lauren Meeker, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at New Paltz

Vietnamese musicians and scholars concerned with "authenticity" increasingly refer to quan ho folk song as sung by elderly singers in the villages of Bac Ninh province, quan ho's province of origin, as the standard by which quan ho should be measured as intangible cultural heritage. From this perspective, other quan ho singers who are professionally trained, those singing modernized or new-style quan ho, and members of quan ho clubs situated outside the quan ho region are positioned in a marginal relationship to authenticity. In this paper, I discuss how quan ho is taught and learned in these various contexts to examine how different quan ho practices are invested with cultural meaning by practioners. I argue that to understand what ties the different performance styles together for practitioners, one must move beyond a formal analysis of the genre, necessitated by the cultural heritage model, to focus on the culturally embedded ways that people engage with and learn their music. In quan ho, sentiment, generated through the exchange of songs, is the glue that ties the various forms of quan ho practice together and that ties singers to their music. The transmission of the bonds of sentiment through teaching quan ho hinges upon the notion of oral instruction as a form of social exchange. A focus on sentiment highlights the lived and shared experiences of quan ho singers and raises the question of whether local teaching styles are compatible with the intangible cultural heritage model.

Lauren Meeker is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her research focuses on the cultural politics, representation, and performance of folk music and theater in Vietnam. She is currently editing her own ethnographic film, "Singing Sentiment," which focuses on a Vietnamese folk singer with whom she worked closely during her dissertation research. She has recently published an article, "How Much for a Song? Local and National Representations of Quan Ho Folksong" in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and is working on a book about quan ho folk song.

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