Legend, Legacy and the French 12/01 Raid in 1948

Abstract

Comparison is drawn between a village's circle of lay Buddhists and an association of former ex-guerrilla fighters in a Northern Vietnamese commune and their respective modes of commemoration. Both groups commemorate the same raid by French soldiers on their commune in 1948, known as the 12/01 Raid. The Association's mode of commemoration is conceptualized as legend; a story that is considered true, but which also retells the 12/01 Raid in terms of a series of ordeals and trials, and with the protagonists overcoming them. The Buddhists' commemorative mode is conceptualized as legacy to capture their vision of a common tragedy. It is argued that the Buddhists commemorate the 12/01 Raid in terms of a common, fateful point of origin, and that legend should be considered a restricted version of legacy.

Keywords:

• Historiography
• Memory
• Legend
• Legacy
• Representation
• French Colonialism
• Vietnam

Notes

The contrast pertains to the conceptual pair of history and memory in the Human Sciences. Through the works of Nora (1989), Hobsbawm (1999, 2009a, 2009b), Anderson (1991), and others, the term history has become closely associated with industrialization, modernity, nation, national identity, and state formation. Memory has thus often taken on the role of a contrasting foil, that which is not written into books, not reified in monuments and museums, not associated with nation and state. Memory is here unwritten knowledge of the past, orally transmitted, and performed through commemorative rites (see esp. Connerton 1999). It is frequently associated with marginalized or subaltern groups, what Foucault (1980) termed “counter-memory”.

The contrast drawn between history and memory has come under criticism for ignoring the ways in which history and memory are interdependent (Hue-Tam Ho Tai 2001c). History shapes memories—private, familial, and collective. One group's collective memory may become codified as official history. Especially in state socialism, official history has considerably shaped private and social memories (see esp. Watson 1994). Some critics of the history-memory dichotomy have taken especially issue with the tendency to simply presume on the nobility of the poor and other subaltern groups and their memory as more authentic (see Hershetter 1993).

Modern history considered in terms of a representational economy of scale does not imply a paucity of representations as such. Reprentational forms (history books, speeches, monuments, etc.) appear in large numbers, but they correspond closely to one another, having gone through the same process of abstraction. Thus, with regard to its framing of post-colonial memory, McHale (2002: 26) came to consider Vietnam's Party a “memory machine”, “churning out an impressive array of texts, such as communist memoirs, novels, and histories, that re-present the past in approved ways”. Party history could be said to “overlay” private and regional experiences and forms of expressing these experiences with a plentitude of modernist representational forms.

Critique of structuralism's ahistorical model of culture (Sahlins 1985) and of Geertzian assumptions about culture as unified systems of meaning (Sewell 1999) brought forth approaches that took note of the variability of shared concepts and narratives, along with changing social institutions. The diversity and, not infrequently, incongruence of concepts and narratives within a given community was recognized as an internal agent of change. The term memory came to accommodate part of this discovery of this multivocality and its relation to social and cultural change.

The link between history and society's self-knowledge was especially prominent in Marxist-derived state-socialist ideologies. This has been shown especially well for example for the case of socialist China (Anagnost 1997: 17ff).

My discussion of these terms is restricted to Northern Vietnam. The term làng had never been an administrative unit but, in the words of Kleinen, denoted “a physical cluster of dwellings and at the same time to a rural commune with a certain social cohesion, which does not exclude conflict … làng is the socio-cultural denominator of an administrative unit” (1999: 7). Up until the Revolution, the term xã had denoted such clusters of dwellings as administrative units. The interim revolutionary government then chose the term xã to designate its new commune units, usually comprising several làng communities, replacing and often subdividing the pre-revolutionary administrative units of cantons (tổng). The làng communities were then formally subdivided into smaller units, first called xóm (neighbourhoods), then during coop times (late 1950s to late 1970s) renamed and partly restructured as đội (brigades); after the inception of the reforms in the 1990s, they were re-named as thôn (hamlets; often also translated as village). In present-day Vietnam, a speaker often seamlessly shifts between the terms thôn, làng, and sometimes xóm, while referring to the same socio-spatial entity. The main focus of the present study, Đông Úc is one of Thanh Hà commune's four làng communities and consists of seven of Thanh Hà's thirteen thôn or hamlets.

Taylor (2007), in his study of recent rural development programs in Southern Vietnam among Khmer communities, observes a comparable process of marginalization of the rural poor and the intensification of “communalist religious orientations … as a response to contemporary economic difficulties and marginalization” (2007: 45).

For the duration of the research project, twelve months, I lived with a villager family in Thanh Hà commune. I conducted all conversations in Vietnamese, made brief notes on location, and later expanded them the same day at home. I did not tape-record any conversation, given the intimidating effects. I also compiled basic biographical and socio-economic data on all families in Hamlet 7, the most populous hamlet with about 1000 inhabitants and 350 households. I conducted two-hour interviews with over 150 households in Hamlet 7 and compiled additional data on remaining households. The focus on Hamlet 7 and its village Đông Úc was balanced with a participation in all major commune events in Thanh Hà during the time of my stay.

Hamlet 7 is the most populous of Thanh Hà's thirteen hamlets and Đông Úc village (làng) is the largest of the four villages.

Recently, Vu Tuong (2009) has argued that important policy changes within the Viet Minh leadership in the year 1948 had been neglected by historians. He draws attention to a growing polarization of communist and non-communist positions within the Viet Minh in that year, resulting in significant shifts of policies, away from a unified patriotic front toward a communist leadership intent on building a socialist state. The communist faction did however not escalate the conflict but could afford to await opportunities. To what extent these novel findings have a bearing on the 12/01 Raid of 1948 on Thanh Hà is difficult to determine. What seems safe to argue is that the seeds of this polarization, for example a growing Party membership, boosted the coordination of regional uprisings, for example in the Hải Kiến inter-zone, which in turn prompted the French military to step up its efforts. See e.g. Marr (1984, 1995) for a detailed examination of the socio-political changes during the colonial period that prepared the ground for anti-colonial uprisings.

The largest French military operation in Tiên Lãng district took place in August 1953, code-named Operation Claude (Vietnamese authors later transcribed this commonly as cờ-lốt). The operation was devised as a cleaning (nettoyage), a complete elimination of the enemy within the territory of Tiên Lãng.

The first emulation campaign in Vietnam occurred in 1948 (De Tréglodé 2001: 24).

Kim Ninh (2002) has documented the early phase of cultural education in socialist Vietnam. A collection of writings by the chief architect of the New Culture, Truong Chinh (1977), offers insights into the ambitions prevalent at the time.

See Chanh Cong Phan (1993: 163) and Vu Ngoc Khanh (1994: 17–18).

The ritual dancers performed twice for the yết tổ and another three times for the tế tổ.

If we take into consideration that customarily Tết is thought to extend over several weeks, the French Raid could even be said to have occurred during Tết.

The honorific title “Venerable” (đại đức) referred to the current monk of Đông Úc pagoda.

The important use of the term công in the pre-reform context of collectivized labour, where công denoted a day's labour (Vo Nhan Tri 1990), has also received little attention.

A detailed discussion of notions of lộc among Buddhist believers in Hanoi can be found in Soucy (1999).

For an overview of Vietnamese concepts pertaining to death and afterlife, see Chanh Cong Phan (1993).

In the case of monk Quy, the situation was further aggravated by the fact that in the mid-1970s, the then chairman of Thanh Hà had had three of the commune's pagodas torn down by work teams from the agricultural coop as part of a commune-wide anti-superstition campaign. The sarcophagi with the bones of monk Quy and two other clerics were moved from Đông Úc pagoda out to the commune's graveyard, where they were buried hastily and without any tombstones. Ever since, their graves were left unattended. For Vietnamese, whether in Thanh Hà or elsewhere, the ill-treatment of the bones constitutes one of the most unethical acts, which is likely to entail retribution. This relates also to the ghostly state of many other victims included into the prayers at Đông Úc pagoda. Their bones never received a proper burial, some still lie in distant parts of the country; others have disappeared during the land reforms and collectivization measures between the late 1950s and mid-1970s.