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 Cho u (UCLA) to speak about her ongoing research on museums\, anthropology and knowledge production in Vietnam. There is no associated reading for this ev ent\, and a light lunch will be served. All are welcome.
Pin-Hua Chou is a third-year PhD student in the History Depa rtment at UCLA. Her research focuses on the decolonization of museums and a nthropology between metropolitan France and Indochina\, particularly Vietna m\, from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Her work spans museum stu dies\, 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.
My PhD research p roject “Between Empires: Museums\, Anthropology\, and the Politics of Knowl edge Production in Vietnam from Colonial to Post-Colonial Period\, 1940-195 4 and Beyond” focuses on the circulation of anthropological knowledge and m useum narratives between metropolitan France and Indochina during the colon ial and post-colonial periods. This research aims to explore what roles Vie tnamese researchers played\, beyond French anthropologists’ efforts to esta blish ethnology in Vietnam for colonial governance purposes. Vietnamese res earchers’ contributions were indispensable in both anthropological research and museum exhibitions. However\, after Vietnam’s independence\, the silen cing of some Vietnamese researchers due to their past connections with Fran ce also becomes a worthy topic of investigation.
The research’s histo rical background begins in the 1940s\, a period of transformation when many Vietnamese anthropologists trained in French academic institutions faced t he choice of whether to join Ho Chi Minh’s northern faction\, while also be ing influenced by both French and Japanese colonial powers in Vietnam. Nota bly\, most well-known Vietnamese scholars chose to join Ho Chi Minh’s indep endence movement\, possibly influenced by their exposure to Western philoso phical thinking during their training in France. These Vietnamese scholars learned to use Western thinking to reflect on their own situation and wield ed 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.
Ta king Nguyễn Văn Huyên as an example\, he was one of the scholars who held a n 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 his torical narratives until being gradually uncovered in the past decade. If s uch an important figure as Nguyễn Văn Huyên faced the fate of having his wo rks overlooked\, those contemporary Vietnamese researchers who were less fa mous than him\, or those who didn’t join Ho Chi Minh’s independence movemen t\, might have disappeared more thoroughly in the flow of history.
On e of this research’s core objectives is to unearth these forgotten Vietname se researchers from history. How did their works influence the development of anthropology in France and Vietnam? How did their participation and with drawal shape the role of museums as institutions of knowledge production? W hat were the mutual relationships between Vietnamese and French anthropolog ists? Moreover\, how did their intellectual transformations in both France and Vietnam profoundly impact French-Vietnamese anthropological theories an d museum practices? These questions form the core issues of this research.< /p>
Besides focusing on renowned scholars like Nguyễn Văn Huyên\, this re search 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 h istorical narratives but might have been completely erased from post-indepe ndence Vietnamese history for choosing to support South Vietnam. However\, their role as bridges connecting French-Vietnamese relations and their infl uence on knowledge production and cross-cultural exchange are equally worth y of in-depth study. Many existing studies focus on the grand narrative of North-South confrontation after Vietnam’s independence in 1954\, but did th is confrontation also permeate the operations of anthropology and museums a s channels of knowledge production? Can traces of North-South confrontation be found in these channels? These unresolved questions provide important a cademic value and exploration directions for this research. Another key poi nt to remember is that the period of 1940-1954 and beyond actually went thr ough several stages: from 1940-1945\, Vietnam was controlled by the Vichy r egime and occupied by Japan\; after 1945\, although Ho Chi Minh declared in dependence and established the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam\, Franc e had not yet departed\; after 1954\, France politically left Vietnam but s ought to strategically maintain cultural cooperation relationships\; in 195 5\, the United States established the Republic of Vietnam in the South. As reflected in this dissertation title\, empires came and went\, some never w ent\, and their dynamic presence simultaneously reflected how these scholar s grew up in a context that formed specific values.
CATEGORIES:Cluster LOCATION:Buchanan Tower 1112 GEO:49.268580;-123.253452 URL;VALUE=URI:https://history.ubc.ca/events/event/museums-anthropology-and- the-politics-of-knowledge-production-in-vietnam-1940-1954/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://hist.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/03/empires-cluster-march-21-2025.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20250309T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR