The ghosts of war and the spirit of cosmopolitanism

History of Religions

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 22-42

  Kwon, Heonik ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61349142383     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/592153     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. See John Gillis, ed., Commemorations: Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
2. Geoge Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
3. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4. Richard Werbner, "Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory, and Reinscription in Zimbabwe," in Memory and the Postcolony, ed. R. Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1998), 72.
5. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993), 144.
6. Gillis, Commemorations, 5.
7. Mark Mazower, Salonica, the City of Ghosts (New York: HarperPerennial, 2004).
8. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), 18.
9. Marilyn Strathern, "Parts and Wholes: Refiguring Relationships in a Post-plural World," in Conceptualizing Society, ed. A. Kuper (London: Routledge, 1992), 98-99.
10. Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 165.
11. See also H. Behrend, "Power to Heal, Power to Kill," in Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa, ed. H. Behrend and U. Lulg (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), 25-26.
12. Keith W. Taylor, "Surface Orientations in Vietnam: Beyond Histories of Nation and Religion," Journal of Asian Studies 53 (1998): 974.
13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
14. Luong advances a similar scheme of ideas with reference to Vietnamese kinship terminology and 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 toe (family or lineage) may mean the ancestral line of a patrilineage and/or can refer to the wider web of relations that include the collateral and affinal relatives of both parents. See Hy Van Luong, Discursive Practices and Linguistic Meanings: The Vietnamese System of Person Reference (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), 49-50.
15. Luong concludes that the coexistence and contrast of the spatially bound center and the spatially unbound periphery constitute the "fundamental parameters" of Vietnamese worldview; see Hy Van Luong, "Vietnamese Kinship: Structural Principles and the Socialist Transformations in Northern Vietnam," Journal of Asian Studies 48 (1989): 745, 754.
16. Shaun K. Malarney, "Return to the Past? The Dynamics of Contemporary Religious and Ritual Transformation," in Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, ed. H. V. Luong (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 225.
17. Hy Van Luong, "Economic Reform and the Intensification of Rituals in Two North Vietnamese Villages, 1980-90," in The Challenge of Reform in Indochina, ed. B. Liunggren (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Institute of International Development, 1993), 259-92.
18. Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 79-91
19. and "The Dollarization of Vietnamese Ghost Money," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2007): 73-90.
20. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (1915; New York: Free Press, 1995).
21. See Tan Viet, Tap Van Cung Gia Tien (Prayer book for ancestor worship) (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban van hoa dan toc, 1994), 105-14;
22. and also Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam: A Long History (Hanoi: The Gioi, 1993), 130-32.
23. Quoted from the text of Nguyen Du's "Van te co hon thap loa chung sinh," introduced in Tan Viet, Tap Van Cung Gia Tien, 105-14. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
24. The rice porridge (chao trang) offered at the external shrine for ghosts is often placed on the shrine together with many spoons meant for the large number of ghost visitors.
25. 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), 622, 998-99.
26. Some ethnological sources on Vietnamese religious beliefs note that the Vietnamese conceptualize ancestors and ghosts in contrary moral terms and in a clear hierarchy of values. Leopold Cadière, for instance, proposes the binary scheme of genies bons versus genies mauvais (beneficiary spirits vs. malignant spirits) and argues that the latter take "pleasure in annoying and harming [the living]." In this unrealistically simplistic scheme, the offerings made to the outward orientation amount to soliciting personal and communal safety from the malignant influence on the outside. See Leopold Cadière, Croyances et pratiques des viêtnamiens, vol. 2 (Paris: Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient, 1967), 59. This observation goes against the classical Vietnamese literary and poetic tradition such as Nguyen Du's, which presents sympathetic relations with displaced, socially excluded spirits of the dead as a core aspect of religious morality and the ethics of memory.
27. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 276-77.
28. See Arthur P. Wolf, "Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors," in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. A. P. Wolf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 131-82.
29. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, "Commemoration and Community," in The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist North Vietnam, ed. H. H. Tai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 228.
30. Shaun K. Malarney, Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam (Surrey: Routledge-Curzon, 2002).
31. The first quote is from Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press), 196
32. and the second is from Peter van der Veer, "The Victim's Tale: Memory and Forgetting in the Story of Violence," in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. H. de Vries and S. Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 196.
33. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 332.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett), 17.
35. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 19.
36. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin), 151.
37. Don Lam, "A Brief Account of the Cult of Female Deities in Vietnam," Vietnamese Studies 131 (1999): 7.
38. Related debates on "the culture of hospitality" animate contemporary normative political theories. See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001);
39. and S. Benhabib, J. Waldron, B. Honnig, W. Kymlicka, and R. Post, eds., Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
40. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (1775; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 118-19.
41. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 267-78.
42. Robert Stern, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Routledge, 2002), 135-45;
43. George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 19-42;
44. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1-25.
45. Stern, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit, 140.
46. 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), 132-54;
47. Robert R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 52-59.
48. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 5.
49. Hannah Arendt, quoted in Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 36.
50. Butler, Antigone's Claims, 12-25.
51. Quoted from Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. R. Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1984), 84-86.
52. The quote "family love" is from G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), 264.