Monday, March 22nd, 2010 Living in the Sacraments: Catholicism in Contemporary Viet Nam

Description

The exhibit, « Living in the Sacraments : Catholic Culture in Contemporary Viet nam « on display at the Museum of Ethonoly in Hanoi, December –May 2009, marked the first time that an exhibit on Catholicism appeared in Ha Noi. The Exhibit’s key message was that Catholicism is a key part of Vietnamese Culture, despite popular discourses representing it as a foreign faith. This exhibit, the first of its kind at a national museum in Viet Nam, reflects a developing relationship between the Vietnamese State and the populace, but there remain difficulties and tensions between the two parties. This paper examines the circumstances that enabled the research, including the negotiations between the different parties with a stake in the exhibit. It also explores possibilities on how the argument of the exhibit, that Catholicism is a key component of the multiple facets of Vietnamese culture, can be accepted into everyday discourse. The presentation also examines the role of public history in civil discourse.

Nguyen Van Huy was the founding director of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (1995-2006). He received his doctorate in ethnology at the Vietnam Institute of Ethnology of the Vietnam Namtional University. Professor Huy was one of the first Vietnamese ethnographiers to study the relationship between economic dvelopment and ethnic relations in Vietnam. Since the 1960s, he has been an active and vocal advocate for ethnic minority groups in Viet Nam, as evidenced in the vision of the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology that he founded. He is the author of over sixty journal articles and ten monographs. His most recent publications include Faces, Voices and Lives: Experience of a Director in Building a Museum for Communities (The gioi Publisher, Hanoi, 2008) and Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit (co-edited with Laurel Kendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004), a companion to the exhibit of the same name at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (2004). He has received the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (République Française, 2007), Aid to Artisans Award (2002), and Rockefeller 3rd Award (Asian Culture Council, 1999).