Title: Fishers, monks and cadres : navigating state, religion and the South China Sea in central Vietnam /
Authors: Roszko, Edyta; Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
Year: 2020
Subjects: Fishing villages Vietnam.; Ethnology Vietnam; Local government Vietnam; Religion and politics Vietnam.; Ethnology; Fishing villages; Local government; Religion and politics; Social conditions; Vietnam Social conditions; South China Sea; South China Sea; Vietnam
Abstract: This remarkable and very timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as well as their farmer neighbours - even while handling new geopolitical challenges. The focus is mainly on marginal people and their navigation between competing forces over the decades of massive change since their incorporation into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1975. The sea, however, plays a major role in this study as does the location: a once-peripheral area now at the centre of a global struggle for sovereignty, influence and control in the South China Sea.
Contents: Introduction: a triad of confrontation -- 1. The coastal society: historical and vernacular geographies -- 2. Doing and making religion in Vietnam -- 3. Between land and sea: spatial and social boundaries among fishers and farmers -- 4. Discipline, purification and indiscipline among state agents, religious modernizers and fishers -- 5. Making the Paracels and Spratlys Vietnamese through commemoration -- 6. Women and new gendered ritual divisions -- Conclusion: shifting confrontation in the state-religion-society triadic relationship.