Vietnam in transition : education, culture and ethics : a reader and curriculum

Preface by Christoph StückelbergerThis book reflects on the process of constructing a curriculum for Vietnam studies designed for educators and researchers in the field of social studies. Based on a selection of scholarly works, proceeds of seminars and conferences on education inside and outside Vietnam, the English edition proposes an analysis on factors that affect the learning environment of Vietnam as a young nation in the context of globalisation. The texts presented cover a large spectrum of subjects, starting with the changes in the educational and cultural background of Cochinchina under the French colonial period, visiting the role of higher education in an economy in transition, including the major literary trends in the pre-1975 Southern Vietnam modernisation process, among others. Transcripts of seminars and conferences reflect participants’ visions on the future of Vietnamese education, with the editor’s comments as takeaways at the end of each section

Silk and post-conflict Cambodia: Embodied practices and global and local dynamics of heritage and knowledge transference (1991-2018)

My thesis examines silk in terms of craft, heritage and use in contemporary Cambodia under the perspective of a history of trade, conflict, loss, and foreign influence. In Cambodia, silk weaving developed into a cottage activity since the twelfth century, producing ceremonial textiles for the domestic market and trade. The Khmer Rouge regime, which claimed close to two million lives between 1975 and 1979, heavily impacted this ancestral craft by impeding silk yarn production, weaving, and skills transmission. The country’s slow reconstruction boosted by the reopening of foreign investment in the 1990s has deeply modified its cultural landscape. How to sustain threads of knowledge and cultural identity in a postconflict context? In this thesis, the dynamics of rupture and revival of cultural practices and knowledge redefined under local and global tensions are investigated through the scope of silk. In doing so, the position of silk in Cambodia and its global diaspora since the fall of the destructive Khmer Rouge regime opens the way to a polyvocal exploration. Angles of analysis include looking at the enmeshment of silk in Cambodia’s history, geography and geopolitics and the structuration of the silk sector via its main foreign and domestic actors since the 1990s. Recentring on the weavers’ key role in skills transmission, the craft of Cambodian silk weaving and the meaning of textiles and dress are lenses through which this study explore themes of embodiment, tacit knowledge, cultural memory, identity, and empowerment. Through several periods of fieldwork in Cambodia and Long Beach, California, combining ethnographic methodologies, interviews and Action Research, this thesis produces its own base of primary oral and visual resources. This prime material on contemporary silk practices in post-conflict Cambodia are put in dialogue with archival and object-based studies to reveal an updated critical perspective on the multilayered nature of silk. Ultimately, the polyphony of the human geography forming the silk sector aims to delink monolithic narratives on Cambodian cultural identity and heritage

Urban Studies

This work contains a selection of papers from the International Conference on Urban Studies (ICUS 2017) and is a bi-annual periodical publication containing articles on urban cultural studies based on the international conference organized by the Faculty of Humanities at the Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia. This publication contains studies on issues that become phenomena in urban life, including linguistics, literary, identity, gender, architecture, media, locality, globalization, the dynamics of urban society and culture, and urban history

Differences between European and Lebanese Americans\u27 values about marriage.

Drawing upon the emerging literature that examines differences in values about marriage, this study examined how broader cultural values of western societies, based in individualism, and eastern societies, based in collectivism, shape values about marriage. In comparing the marital value system of European Americans with that of Lebanese or Lebanese-Americans, a theory of cultural identity was utilized. While Americans were expected to value the self-reflective aspect of marriage, which nuclearizes marriage around the husband-wife relationship, the Lebanese were expected to value the familial aspect of marriage, which views the union as a relational entity, the value of which is closely connected to that of the family system. Using a Q sort technique—a method of rank ordering a set of statements about values of interest—two factors were extrapolated, indicating two distinct sets of values regarding marriage. The first cluster of individuals (Factor I) consisted of two thirds of the Americans sample and a quarter of the Lebanese sample. The second cluster (Factor II) consisted of a majority of the Lebanese and a single American participant. As hypothesized, the values highlighted in the first factor, or \u27western\u27-driven factor, focused on romance; the endorsement of physical and psychological intimacy; and the belief that marriage is a private enterprise that only takes account of the marital values of the couple (i.e., \u27couple\u27 individualism). Also as hypothesized, the beliefs highlighted by the second factor, or Lebanese factor, focused on values such as psychological intimacy more than physical closeness as well as the importance of family, in particular their own parents, to marriage. Also important to this group was the endorsement of romanticism, particularly the idea of soul mate as marital partner. Demographic characteristics of the Lebanese sample indicated that education was a determining feature for distinguishing factor loadings. Specifically, we found that the Lebanese who loaded on the \u27western\u27-driven factor were significantly more educated than their compatriots who loaded on the \u27Lebanese\u27 factor. With regards to gender, both a Q sort and ANOVA analysis found no differences within nationality or between nationalities, disconfirming previous research that American women are more communal (i.e., more \u27eastern\u27) than American men; and that women immigrants adopt the host cultures\u27 values more readily than their male counterparts when such country provides more opportunity. Finally, we recommended that the development of a marital quality scale for Arabs in general should include items that reflect the values found in this study to be important to the majority of the Lebanese in addition to the traditionally \u27western\u27 items that were found to also be of value to this population

The Intellectual Property and Alternative Legal Protection for Thai Cultural Heritage Properties, Traditional Knowledge and Products

This thesis comprises a study into whether the existing intellectual property regime, a sui generis system, or any adaptations or modifications of them have been successfully adopted for protecting both tangible and intangible cultural property and traditional knowledge of Thailand. How other developing countries have dealt with misappropriation issues and the limitations of the current intellectual property regime has also been studied. A number of concerns about and obstacles to traditional knowledge have been pointed out: the existing intellectual property system may have increased the risk of misappropriation or unauthorised use of traditional knowledge without consent; most developing countries have no comprehensive national policies or legal frameworks covering traditional knowledge; lack of effective legislation, authorities and mechanisms associated with intellectual property; the high cost of intellectual property procedures and management; the threat to the intellectual and cultural property rights of indigenous peoples; loss of cultural traditions/ articles and biodiversity; problems with maintaining and passing on cultural expression; as well as inequitable benefit-sharing and remedies. Intellectual property rights and traditional knowledge have become increasingly controversial globally, and sometimes they overlap. Due to the presumption that traditional knowledge is in the public domain, the current intellectual property rights regime can not efficiently and appropriately protect traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions/folklore, or provide equitable sharing for indigenous and local communities. Sometimes domestic legislation is insufficient, incompatible or in conflict with international intellectual property norms and policies. The most feasible solutions need to be rigorous, but flexible enough to cover the various forms of traditional knowledge and access to the generic resources of individual communities. Policy-making, development of categorisation and management of biodiversity data and local knowledge systems, effective strategies and mechanisms, international co-operation and support all need to be taken into consideration. It would be ideal to have a single legal system to protect all forms of intellectual property; unfortunately, in reality, this is impossible. However, depending on the capacity of governments and the readiness of their people, alternative or sui generis rights or a combination of any regimes of both preventive and positive protection could be developed and adapted and play a complementary role to balance the interests of all parties, while the general public can still access appropriate usage and benefits. Various ideas and alternative solutions from the different perspectives of international forums and other countries are gathered, analysed, proposed and recommended here for Thailand in particular

Government munificence and the struggle to be poor. Politics, power and the Local State in Vietnam’s Northwest Borderlands

Successive regimes since colonial times have sought to develop and incorporate the lands and people of northwestern Vietnam under a biopolitical imaginary: to nurture and render the state periphery productive and integrated into a unified nation state. However, local people of the region have always had their own ‘projects’, which they pursue on the ‘margins’ of this state project of power (Ortner 2006). This thesis sets out to understand, through an ethnographic study of Vĩnh Thủy, an ethnic minority commune in northwestern Vietnam, how the different projects of power at work in Vĩnh Thủy commune come together in (and through) the local state. I theorise the local state as a political space created through the coming together of the projects of power of four vectors in Vĩnh Thủy: the centre state, the local community, local officials, and the translocal flows, actors and institutions that are increasingly prevalent in the northwestern uplands. These projects of power meet around the governmental narratives, technologies and everyday rituals of state that permeate the commune, and through which the biopolitical imaginary of integrating the uplands into the wider nation state is projected, and enacted. Prominent governmental processes in Vĩnh Thủy commune include regulating the division of political office between ethnic minority groups; identifying ‘the poor’ and delivering poverty reduction support; and attempting to modernise the uplands through ‘the market’. Projects of power congeal around these governmental processes and are contested, negotiated and made anew in the local state space. Governmental schemes are themselves productive of power, as through them local ethnic minority people exercise a particular, dexterous and constantly learning form of political agency, what James Scott (1998) has called metis. However, where Scott saw metis operating independently of the systems of state power, in Vĩnh Thủy metis instead flourishes within the governmental processes of state, and is sustained and nurtured by them. Local elites in the commune, and local people in so far as they are connected to these elites and therefore to power, pursue their projects within and through the regulating technologies of state. They reshape them as they are applied in the local state space, even as they are themselves shaped by them. It is through the local state too, that ideas of state are locally re-imagined, and thereby achieve relevance and potency for the people of Vĩnh Thủy. State ideas are shaped in the local state space through an intense politics of intimacy, which recognises that local elites pursue projects of power for the benefit of themselves, their lineage groups and their wider networks, but which also privileges notions of general provision, obligation and duty to the unfortunate, and to the community as a whole. Hopes, dreams and desires for development also crystallise around the state and ensure that local people remain bound in to locally imagined ideas of state, despite these dreams and desires frequently being frustrated

Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number 3-4

Edited by Dan Duffy and Kali Tal. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson