Agrarian Unrest from an Anthropological Perspective: The Case of Vietnam

Abstract

Twentieth-century peasants have played a central role in the making of the modem world. This is undoubtedly the case in the Vietnamese revolution, which has attracted considerable attention from a number of specialists on agrarian politics.' This paper critically examines the fundamental premises in three recent important works in sociology and political science on the Vietnamese revolution in particular and agrarian unrest in general: Jeffery Paige's Agrarian Revolution, James C. Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant, and Samuel Popkin's The Rational Peasant. These premises will be analyzed in relation to the peasant-based movement of 1930-1931 in Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh, two provinces in North-Central Vietnam (see map). As the most serious pre-1945 challenge to French colonialism, the Nghe-Tinh movement epitomizes, in certain major aspects, the dynamics of the Vietnamese revolution at large. In the following analysis of the theoretical literature and the Nghe-Tinh movement, I will argue that when utilitarian logic is applied to a particular case without a systematic consideration of the environmental and normative parameters of individual action (Popkin and, in a broad sense, Paige), this application amounts to an abuse of utilitarian logic. Both rewards and political strategies are intrinsically mediated by sociocultural rules-rules within which agrarian relations are inextricably embedded, inconsistent as these normative elements may be. The costs and benefits of human action are always informed by the complex structural principles of a specific sociocultural system. However, if agrarian unrest is examined exclusively in terms of the structural opposition between peasants and the lords and state (Scott), such an analysis can only partially enhance our understanding of their behavioral choices. In the closed corporate communities of precolonial and colonial northern Vietnam, agrarian relations encompassed both an intricate hierarchical order and a radical egalitarian principle. They involved both utmost solidarity and intense competition. I will argue that without an in-depth analysis of the ambiguities and contradictions in structural principles and ecological parameters, neither the Nghe-Tinh movement, nor the Vietnamese revolution, nor agrarian unrest in general can be fully understood.