“The Moon Remembers Uncle Ho”: The politics of music and mediumship in northern Vietnam

Abstract

Political ideology has had profound effects on mediumship in Vietnam: the Vietnamese Communist Party has condemned and prohibited mediumship, and there have been attempts to transform mediumship music, chau van, to suit a revolutionary socialist agenda. Since the 1980s, however, there has been a resurgence in mediumship rituals, len dong, and a theatricalized version of medium‐ship has been created. This article examines the ways in which political and cultural forces have impacted on len dong and chau van during the second half of the twentieth century. This is achieved through an investigation of the effects of official condemnation of mediumship at the local level and the strategies employed in the transformation and appropriation of music and mediumship within state‐condoned contexts. Ft is argued that official policy, while ultimately unsuccessful in entirely eliminating len dong rituals from Vietnamese cultural life, has interacted with the views and practices of adepts of mediumship and has, since the late 1980s, been reinterpreted in the light of a nationalist and culturalist discourse that legitimates mediumship as “folk culture “.