Date: Friday March 21, 2025
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM PT
Location: Buchanan Tower 1112
The Empires in Asia Cluster is delighted to welcome Pin-Hua Chou (UCLA) to speak about her ongoing research on museums, anthropology and knowledge production in Vietnam. There is no associated reading for this event, and a light lunch will be served. All are welcome.
About the speaker:
Pin-Hua Chou is a third-year PhD student in the History Department at UCLA. Her research focuses on the decolonization of museums and anthropology between metropolitan France and Indochina, particularly Vietnam, from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Her work spans museum studies, the history of museums, the history of anthropology, modern French history, and modern Vietnamese history. She is currently a Peter Baldwin Fellow at the Wende Museum.
About the talk:
My PhD research project “Between Empires: Museums, Anthropology, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in Vietnam from Colonial to Post-Colonial Period, 1940-1954 and Beyond” focuses on the circulation of anthropological knowledge and museum narratives between metropolitan France and Indochina during the colonial and post-colonial periods. This research aims to explore what roles Vietnamese researchers played, beyond French anthropologists’ efforts to establish ethnology in Vietnam for colonial governance purposes. Vietnamese researchers’ contributions were indispensable in both anthropological research and museum exhibitions. However, after Vietnam’s independence, the silencing of some Vietnamese researchers due to their past connections with France also becomes a worthy topic of investigation.
The research’s historical background begins in the 1940s, a period of transformation when many Vietnamese anthropologists trained in French academic institutions faced the choice of whether to join Ho Chi Minh’s northern faction, while also being influenced by both French and Japanese colonial powers in Vietnam. Notably, most well-known Vietnamese scholars chose to join Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement, possibly influenced by their exposure to Western philosophical thinking during their training in France. These Vietnamese scholars learned to use Western thinking to reflect on their own situation and wielded it as a weapon in the independence movement. Though not everyone did so, many scholars became important drivers of Vietnam’s independence movement while simultaneously receiving training from French institutions.
Taking Nguyễn Văn Huyên as an example, he was one of the scholars who held an important position in Vietnam’s nation-building process. However, after Vietnam’s independence, his French-language writings during his time as a Vietnamese anthropologist were overlooked in both French and Vietnamese historical narratives until being gradually uncovered in the past decade. If such an important figure as Nguyễn Văn Huyên faced the fate of having his works overlooked, those contemporary Vietnamese researchers who were less famous than him, or those who didn’t join Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement, might have disappeared more thoroughly in the flow of history.
One of this research’s core objectives is to unearth these forgotten Vietnamese researchers from history. How did their works influence the development of anthropology in France and Vietnam? How did their participation and withdrawal shape the role of museums as institutions of knowledge production? What were the mutual relationships between Vietnamese and French anthropologists? Moreover, how did their intellectual transformations in both France and Vietnam profoundly impact French-Vietnamese anthropological theories and museum practices? These questions form the core issues of this research.
Besides focusing on renowned scholars like Nguyễn Văn Huyên, this research will also explore those Vietnamese anthropologists who were trained in French institutions but didn’t join the northern faction. Unlike Nguyễn Văn Huyên, they were not only inadequately recorded in French-Vietnamese historical narratives but might have been completely erased from post-independence Vietnamese history for choosing to support South Vietnam. However, their role as bridges connecting French-Vietnamese relations and their influence on knowledge production and cross-cultural exchange are equally worthy of in-depth study. Many existing studies focus on the grand narrative of North-South confrontation after Vietnam’s independence in 1954, but did this confrontation also permeate the operations of anthropology and museums as channels of knowledge production? Can traces of North-South confrontation be found in these channels? These unresolved questions provide important academic value and exploration directions for this research. Another key point to remember is that the period of 1940-1954 and beyond actually went through several stages: from 1940-1945, Vietnam was controlled by the Vichy regime and occupied by Japan; after 1945, although Ho Chi Minh declared independence and established the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, France had not yet departed; after 1954, France politically left Vietnam but sought to strategically maintain cultural cooperation relationships; in 1955, the United States established the Republic of Vietnam in the South. As reflected in this dissertation title, empires came and went, some never went, and their dynamic presence simultaneously reflected how these scholars grew up in a context that formed specific values.
