CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TRADITIONAL VILLAGE AND COMMUNE ORGANIZATION IN THE NORTHWEST MOUNTAINOUS REGION (CASE STUDY OF THE MONG AND THAI ETHNIC GROUPS)

Abstract

In the era of modernization and international integration, Vietnam must tackle the relation between cultural identity and traditional and modern development which are very important today. Vietnam’s culture not only is created by Viet people but ethnic minorities play a key role to diversify national identity. Thereby, researching village structure, social organization, and customs of the northern mountainous villages is very important. Researching traditional village models plays a key role to preserve positive values of minority culture, simultaneously, some proposed policies of modern villages may be applied for villages which lie in remote areas in Vietnam. This is a repercussion of the policy of making rural areas closer to urban areas and eliminating the disparity between the rich and the impoverished, cultural differences, and consolidating the national solidarity. Due to that, it is proposed to develop new rural development policies for the Northwest ethnic minorities in Vietnam. Because of the word limit of the article only the Mong people and the Thai people are the main case studies.