Medieval Vietnam and Cambodia: A Comparative Comment

Abstract

Messrs. Chandler, Ebihara, Haines, and Whitmore have written thoughtful and stimulating essays. But they have not been overwhelmingly concerned with exposing any great differences between medieval Vietnam and its nearest Theravada Buddhist neighbour, Cambodia. No doubt unintentionally, the two societies have been made to seem rather similar to each other. After all, Vietnamese literati, like the authors of Cambodia's normative poems, also consecrated what David Chandler has called “the propriety of hierarchies, rote-learning, and tradition”. Vietnamese social theory, like that of the chbap, stressed “the teacher-pupil relationship”. May Ebihara's argument that Cambodian social strata were permeable, and were characterized by “fluidity of membership” rather than resembling “rigidly structured Indian castes”, could also be applied to Vietnam, as could, obviously, her theme of Cambodia's oscillation between periods of centralized and decentralized political power. Even the social categories the two societies used have similarities: the Vietnamese equivalent of the Khmer term neak chea (“good people”, meaning relatively free men) was also “good people” (lương dân) and referred to citizens like farmers, with morally valuable occupations, as opposed to people like actors who were thought to be “mean”. One is left with the impression that the countries of sixteenth-century Southeast Asia embraced much less social and economic diversity than the countries of sixteenth-century Europe, with all their sharp contrasts between Venetian patricians and Antwerp merchants, Italian rice fanners and Dutch market gardeners, conservative English craft guilds and revolutionary Flemish ones. Can any faith still be placed in Harry Benda's old suggestion that the “constant” clashes between Vietnamese and Khmers be “analyzed in terms of a basic polarization between different…social and political systems?”