La marge contextualisée: Nguyễn Từ Chi (1925-1995) et une ethnographie alternative dans le Vietnam socialiste

Abstract

Drawing from archival materials and interviews with family members, friends, colleagues, and students, I will reconstruct a biography of Nguyễn Từ Chi (1925-1995), a prominent yet perhaps the most controversial anthropologist who chose to be at the margins of Hanoi academic life during three decades of ‘high socialism’ (1960-1980), while conducting scholarly works of finest quality. I posit that Từ Chi’s life can be read far beyond an idiosyncratic story of an eccentric person who fell out of grace of the socialist structure, or someone who self-victimized. I aim at exploring the structural conditions within and against which Từ Chi made his choice by asking, What can be said from his choice about the material, social, and political conditions in which Từ Chi and his contemporaries lived? By material conditions I mean the ways scholars made their living, how research was commissioned, how their findings were published, and so on; social—the ways researchers related to one another in daily life and in scholarly arenas, how they came to identify themselves in terms of teacher-student, master-follower, supporter-opponent relationships, and so forth; and finally, political—the ideological settings within which certain kinds of knowledge could be and should be generated while others not. It is ultimately the power relations in the production of knowledge—in this case specific kinds of knowledge of ethnic groups in Vietnam—and the subjectivity of Vietnamese socialist intellectuals in this structuring that I want to uncover.