Stars, Spirits and Coal: Materiality and Immateriality in Northern Vietnam

Abstract

The lunar calendar is an important benchmark of time in Vietnam. It not only plays a role in setting annual celebrations and in picking dates for weddings or house construction, but it also guides an entire set of beliefs on which practices of avoidance, prayers for profit and work routines are based. This paper explores these everyday beliefs and practices in relation to the production, distribution and consumption of an ordinary cooking fuel, the beehive coal briquette. It illustrates how various efforts to invoke luck and avoid disaster are based within ideas about causality in which objects mediate between but also act upon people and the cosmological and spiritual order. In this paper, the example of the beehive coal briquette provides a starting point from which to examine these entanglements of humans and objects and the material and immaterial in contemporary Vietnam.

Keywords:

• Vietnam
• Material Culture
• Popular Religion
• Taboo
• Coal

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the research assistance of Ms Ngo Thuy Hanh and for the support received from my host institution, the Faculty of Sociology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. I am grateful for all comments and suggestions received on earlier versions of this paper, from Michael Dickhard and from two anonymous reviewers.

Funding

Research for this paper was conducted as part of a Fellowship for Advanced Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number PA00P1_134132/1].

Notes

[1] Both the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month are considered special days for worshipping. Some Vietnamese only eat vegetarian food on those days.

[2] This explanation of how avoidance can be related to the multiple meanings of the word đen serves as a reminder of the avoidance of the number four (tư, Sino-Vietnamese) in certain East Asian contexts because of its likeness with từ (Sino-Vietnamese), meaning death.

[3] Explanations as to why the fifth, fourteenth and twenty-third days of the month are inauspicious vary, ranging from those based on royal customs that reserved those days for the King and Generals, to numerological explanations related to ambiguous associations with the number five (numbers 14 (1 + 4) and 23 (2 + 3) all add up to five).

[4] See also the ‘Outline on Vietnamese Culture’ drafted by party ideologue Trường Chinh in 1943 (Đề cương về văn hoá Việt Nam).

[5] Religious practices that did not undermine revolutionary policy were tolerated in practice. There was, however, an official list of ‘superstitions to be “strictly prohibited and eliminated” [which] included fortune-telling, astrology, physiognomy, necromancy, going to trances, drawing lots before idols, making amulets, exorcism, worshipping ghosts, burning incense or sacrificial paper articles for spirits, and treating diseases with witchcraft’ (Marr 1981, 366).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was conducted as part of a Fellowship for Advanced Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number PA00P1_134132/1].