Kathleen Gough and the Vietnamese Revolution: Ideological Voices and Resistance

• Published in: Anthropologica (Ottawa) Vol. 35; no. 2; pp. 220 - 226
• Main Author: Luong, Hy V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Waterloo Wilfrid Laurier University Press 01.01.1993; Canadian Anthropology Society
• Subjects: Agricultural development; Agricultural policy; Agriculture; Anthropology; Attachment; Cadres; Capitalism; Citizens; Collectivization; Colonialism; Dictatorship; Empathy; French language; Gender relations; Gough, Kathleen; History; Homogeneity; Ideology; Imperialism; Intelligentsia; Juncture; Labor force participation; Learning transfer; Literacy; Marginality; Mass media; Peasants; Physicians; Political economy; Political revolutions; Proletariat; Protection; Resistance; Rituals; Social conditions & trends; Social structure; Socialism; Sociocultural factors; Vietnamese; War; Women; Womens rights; Working women; Vietnam
• ISSN: 0003-5459; 2292-3586
• DOI: 10.2307/25605734

I find Gough's comparative data from her research in south India quite informative. Although India had started the "green revolution" earlier and its cultivated area per person (.23 hectare) in 1984 was more than double the Vietnamese figure (.11 hectare), Vietnam produced 55 percent more food grains per person (Gough 1990: 105 - 106). Vietnam also had a considerably higher literacy rate (87% vs. 35%), lower mortality rate (10% vs. 14%) and more doctors (8 vs. 2.7 per 10,000 inhabitants). Gough suggested that it was the difference between socialist and dependent state capitalist development that accounted for the aforementioned differences between Vietnam and India (ibid.: 106). In other words, according to Gough, the post - colonial Vietnamese state constructed on the principle of the dictatorship of proletariat had strongly promoted the collective interests of formerly oppressed elements. It had basically eliminated the exploitative class structure and the subjugation of women characteristic of the French colonial and American imperialist periods. On gender relations, Gough emphasized the higher rates of women's labour participation in north Vietnam than in India or Canada (close to 100% vs. 14% and 36%) and of Vietnamese women's representation in decision - making governmental bodies (16.9% of the North Vietnamese National Assembly in 1971 versus 4% in the Indian lower house of Parliament and 9% in the upper house in 1976 and 0.4% in the Canadian Parliament in 1969). Gough also cited the state - promoted increase in the access of Vietnamese women to education, their living conditions and the legal protection of women's rights in Vietnam (1976:chap. 7; 1990:chap. 17). The achievements of the Vietnamese socialist state, consistently marginalized by the voices of capitalism, constitute a major point of convergence between Gough's and her speaking subjects' perspectives. They counter the dominant ideology in North America which attributes the so - called Vietnamese economic "malaise" to the interference of a "totalitarian" state with the invisible hands of the market. In my opinion, it was inevitable that Gough's representation of other voices was shaped by the historical and sociocultural contexts of her dialogues with her speaking subjects. They were not extended dialogues in the standard participant observation context. Her first visit to Vietnam in 1976 lasted only 10 days. The return research in 1982 included dialogues with 45 members of the Vietnamese intelligentsia and conversations with other citizens in chance encounters. It may be an irrelevant question whether, in 1982, Gough requested a more extended field period and the use of the anthropological participant observation method in one or two communities. I believe that at that particular juncture it was extremely difficult for a scholar from the West to gain from the Vietnamese permission for standard anthropological field work. Furthermore, from anecdotal information in her books, her interaction with Vietnamese subjects was also highly structured by north Vietnamese interactional ritualism. Vietnamese interaction with outsiders tended to be highly ceremonial in that the speaker role was initially reserved for authority figures and that it was pervaded with ritual speech (Gough 1977:23, 57). As a result, the represented voices from Vietnam were mostly the official voices of northern leaders and intelligentsia members. In my opinion, this led to an assumption of a relative ideological homogeneity in the Vietnamese social formation. It was on the basis of this premise that in her earlier book on Vietnam, Gough was optimistic about the result of a socialist transformation of South Vietnam. By 1982, this optimism had been tempered by Gough's knowledge of the difficulties of the Vietnamese state in collectivizing the southern economy. Gough touched on the historically shaped regional heterogeneity of ideological voices in attributing the collectivization difficulties in many southern areas to cadres' inexperiences and "the attachment of peasants to commercial farming and private profits" (1990:123 - 124). However, Gough also suggested that by late 1986, almost all southern Vietnamese cultivators had already joined co - operatives or mutual aid teams (ibid.: 154, 233, 439). In my assessment, the collectivization of southern agriculture was only nominal in many communities because of cultivators' widespread subversion of state policy in the Mekong delta.