Revolution in the Village: Tradition and Transformation in North Vietnam, 1925-1988.

Abstract

For half a century, war, politics, or both severely limited opportunities for Western scholars to conduct field research in northern Vietnam, especially in rural areas. That situation began to change in the late 1970s, permitting a handful of scholars to work alongside Vietnamese researchers for more than a few days or weeks at a time. Hy Van Luong's Revolution in the Village is one of the most significant efforts to result thus far from the improvement in scholarly access. Although the book relies heavily on the personal testimony of one aged exile living in Toronto, whom the author credits as a collaborator, it also reflects two summers of research in a village northwest of Hanoi. Combining life history interviewing among the villagers of Son Duong with archival research in Vietnam, Canada, and France, the book focuses on the village sociocultural system's encounter with Western colonialism, capitalism, and socialist revolution, and sets out the theoretical implications for models of revolutionary processes in agrarian societies. In contrast to analyses of revolution in terms of nationalism, transplanted Western ideas, the peasants' subsistence ethic, peasants' rational self-interest, or conflictridden class relations, Luong's analysis places stress on the male-centered hierarchy of northern village structure in accounting for individual and group behavior. Reacting against the "racial dyarchy" of French imperialism, anticolonial activists used the hierarchical structure of the village as well as kinship and communal ties to mobilize other villagers. At all levels of society, moreover, the ideas of equality and liberty were understood as collective rights, not individual benefits. This was so in the 1920s, when the leading anticolonial party was the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang, or Vietnam Nationalist Party, as it was later during the communist ascendancy. Some measure of accommodation to these realities of tradition at village level was the price that any political movement in Vietnam had to pay for access to the great majority of the population. Significantly, according to Luong, villagers gave strong support to the Vietminh in the war against France "despite the high cost of their action, the few foreseeable tangible benefits in the early years . . . and the small odds of success" (p. 167). Their willingness to endure great sacrifice with little hope of material gain, at least for the first decade of the revolution, convinces Luong that something more than a cost-benefit calculus motivated peasants to act as they did. What motivated them was the "primary objective" of national independence shared by all Vietnamese, regardless of class, occupation, or region, as well as Vietminh attention to subsistence needs and reform within the community. The unity forged in war weakened, however, under the impact of state-led transformation of the village political economy. Discussion of post-1954 developments covers the familiar ground of land reform, cooperativization, and the displacement of precolonial village organizations by state-sponsored collectivist ones, but with important new analysis of the persistent male-centered hierarchy, for example, in the enduring preference for sons, male dominance in kinship and gender relations, and the internal organization of the village party chapter. In the 1980s, the introduction of a family contract system in agriculture and increasing socioeconomic differentiation, as in China, have helped to revitalize hierarchical social relations centered upon the kinship unit. The book is a most insightful analysis of the revolutionary dynamic in Vietnam in terms of a sociocultural model. It also points out aspects of Vietnamese peasant