Lives intimately connected: the living and the dead in contemporary Central Việt Nam

The thesis is a study of the importance of the dead in the making of kinship and the state in contemporary Vietnam. It focuses on the ritual practices surrounding death and the commemoration of the dead as enacted in Hue, the capital of imperial and colonial Viet Nam. The practices in question are undertaken by a multiplicity of actors, including families, lineages, descendants of the royal family and postsocialist state officials. The thesis aims at highlighting the centrality of the process of becoming an ancestor in the creation of kinship, and the problematisation of the often rigidly drawn distinction between kinship and state practices.In post-socialist Viet Nam, the landscape of the dead is an overgrown one marked by a plethora of departed whose posthumous fate preoccupies the everyday lives of villagers, royals, and state agents. This plethora includes celebrated war heroes, benevolent dead kin, malevolent ghosts, and glorious kings of the past. The study aims to show how different categories of the dead are made and remade by ritual actions and/or neglect of the living. It highlights the instability, uncertainty, and ambiguity that characterize posthumous existence as much as the conditions of the living. The changing historical trajectories of the city of Hue and its inhabitants from imperial capital to post-socialist tourist market place via the horrors of the battlefield are underscored by the fact that categories of the dead exhibit fluid boundaries and transformable attributes in equal measure.On a theoretical level, the study proposes a view of death as central to the formation of kinship. While descent theories emphasized birth, procreation and associated rights to inheritance, and alliance approaches placed due importance on marriage and exchange, the present study looks at kinship from the perspective of the relations between the living and the dead. Such multivalent, complex, and historically changing relations are essential in the articulation of a shared sense of intimacy punctuated as much by duties of commemoration as by exchanges of valuables and blessings that intertwine the everyday with the cosmological.The study charts the creation of intimacy between the living and the dead on an increasing scale that expands outwards from family rituals centered on domestic altars to state mausoleums dedicated to national 'uncle' (Ho Chi Minh) via lineage and village temples, local and provincial museums, and royal citadels and tombs. By drawing together all these different sites, the thesis departs in significant measure from recent studies of Vietnamese society and culture in which the distinction between kinship and the state have been overly stretched to make space for the concepts of hegemony and resistance. While noting tensions and disarticulations between kinship and state practices, the study highlights the historical and cultural embeddedness of state commemoration projects as well as the significant shifts in emphasis in family rituals that socialist and post-socialist modernity have brought about

Clinical trials and venture tribulations: stem cell research and the making of Vietnamese bio-entrepreneurs

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Family Rituals 2.0

The notion of family is broad (and changing) and encompasses a variety of different social structures beyond the classic conception of the nuclear family yet it is a cornerstone of our social worlds. Even as many in ‘Western’ society follow the trend of isolated living, in single occupant dwellings, for most people, notions of home are intimately tied to notions of family. We form familial bonds (regardless of traditional notions of kinship), with those with whom we live. The rise of network society and the pervasiveness of digital technologies has however, meant that the boundaries between our working and domestic lives are becoming increasingly blurred. The impacts of this on home and family life are being further exacerbated by changes in our patterns of living, which are pushing us towards increased mobility and itinerant domesticity. Increasingly, life is marked by significant periods of absence from home and family, and increasingly we may turn to digital technologies to help us mediate that absence. Arguably, a core element of domestic life is its ritualistic aspects, which are important features of the functional and emotional landscape of the home. Wolin and Bennett (1984) have defined family ritual as “a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time.” Family Rituals 2.0 sought to understand the ritual activities that families engage in during periods of remote working, and to speculate on the potential roles of technology in mediating complex working family lives

The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘digital glimpse’, which develops the existing framing of imaginative travel. Here it articulates the experiences of mobile workers digitally connecting into family life and everyday rituals when physically absent with work. The recent embedding of digital communication technologies into personal relationships and family life is reconfiguring how absence is experienced and practiced by workers on the move, and through this, new digital paradigms for life on-the-move are emerging. This paper explores how such social relationships are maintained at-a-distance through digital technology – using evidence from qualitative interviews with mobile workers and their families. Digital technology now enables expressive forms of ‘virtual travel’, including video calling, picture sharing, and instant messaging. This has implications for the ways in which families can manage the social and relational pressures of being apart. Experiences of imaginative travel created through novel media can enrich the experience and give a greater sense of connection for both those who are at home and those who are away. While technology is limited in its ability to replicate a sense of co-presence, ‘digital glimpses’ are an emergent set of sociotechnical practices that can reduce the negative impact of absence on family relationships

Comparing national home-keeping and the regulation of translational stem cell applications: an international perspective

A very large grey area exists between translational stem cell research and applications that comply with the ideals of randomised control trials and good laboratory and clinical practice and what is often referred to as snake-oil trade. We identify a discrepancy between international research and ethics regulation and the ways in which regulatory instruments in the stem cell field are developed in practice. We examine this discrepancy using the notion of ‘national home-keeping’, referring to the way governments articulate international standards and regulation with conflicting demands on local players at home. Identifying particular dimensions of regulatory tools – authority, permissions, space and acceleration – as crucial to national home-keeping in Asia, Europe and the USA, we show how local regulation works to enable development of the field, notwithstanding international (i.e. principally ‘western’) regulation. Triangulating regulation with empirical data and archival research between 2012 and 2015 has helped us to shed light on how countries and organisations adapt and resist internationally dominant regulation through the manipulation of regulatory tools (contingent upon country size, the state's ability to accumulate resources, healthcare demands, established traditions of scientific governance, and economic and scientific ambitions)

The sociality of death: life potentialities and the Vietnamese dead

Drawing on ethnographic material from Việt Nam, the chapter explores the dynamics of transformation in which the dead are engaged and foregrounds ritual engagements between the living and the dead as providing the required tropes for these transformations to be effected. The chapter deals with Buddhist ideas and practices and an ethnographic case in which death is conceived not as the end of life but rather as an opening up to numerous, uncertain metamorphic possibilities, whereby the soul of the deceased is held as capable of becoming substantiated as a cared-for dead kin that could eventually grow into an ancestral spirit, a restless ghostly entity, and/or be re-incarnated. These metamorphic potentialities are directly affected by the relations (or lack of) the dead enjoy with the living. It is precisely these relations that the ritual process seeks to actuate and enliven. Such relations are made manifest and instantiated in the very form the soul eventually assumes which in turn serves as the index of cross-boundary sociality and affect

The neglected side of philanthropy: gifts to hungry ghosts in contemporary Vi?t Nam

Anthropological interest in giving, including religious charity, has grown in recent years. However, studies of philanthropy have largely been confined to activities relating to human-to-human sociality. By contrast, this article explores conceptions of giving and acts of charity from the perspective of interactions between the living and the dead. Drawing on Buddhist traditions and popular rituals in contemporary Vi?t Nam, it takes an in-depth, ethnographic look at a series of ritual performances that seek to provide relief to ‘orphaned’ restless ghosts. Forms of religious charity constitute the unfortunate dead as the impoverished ‘other’ and strive to create a nexus of reciprocity that associates the living with the dead, and the human with the non-human. Further, the article argues that Vietnamese charitable acts for ghosts are not driven simply by an awareness of the needs and sufferings of others. Such concerns and sensibilities are undeniably instilled by moral and religious training in Buddhist disciplines. However, they are supplemented and reinforced by the menacing influence that the neglected dead are believed to be capable of exerting upon the living, in terms of the threat they pose, and the power they often exercise, putting one’s prospects for a prosperous future and general well-being in jeopardy

‘Have we become too ethical’?

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‘Have we become too ethical’?

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