(Philip Taylor) (PDF 3.1MB) - ANU

114
PHILIP TAYLOR
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., p.70.
67 Pierre Brocheux, The Mekong delta:
ecology, economy and revolution, 1860-
1960 (Madison, Wis.: Center for Southeast
Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin­
Madison, 1995).
78 Nguyn Ccng Blnh et ai., Van h6a va cl1
dan dling bang song citu long [The culture
and population of the Mekong delta] (HE>
Chi Minh City: Social Sciences Publishing
House, 1990), p.27.
1. The baroque cultural character of this region ... can be described in
summary: nothing about it is unique. Rather it should be understood as an
incorporation (tbau b6a) of all kinds of things from all different regions
gathered together here.
2. As this is a busy crossroads always encountering the new, there is not one
cultural pattern, artistic form, or cultural need or taste surviving in its original
form over a specified time. Everything is in constant and rapid renewal (dtJi
m6'i) creating new forms responding to the needs and tastes of each era.65
3. [These two points have "organic links" with a third characteristic of Nam
BQ culturel-that is, the faddishness and exoticism in the cultural taste of the
people of Nam BQ.66
Another work of note in this same vein was the study of the Western
Mekong delta by French-Vietnamese historian, Pierre Brocheux.67 Brocheux
argued that the Mekong delta's plural society, ostensibly a feature of French
colonialism was in fact anticipated by and crucially instigated by the plural
society of pre-colonial times, marked by a "vertical cellular structure" of
different ethnic groups each performing complementary economic functions.
Whereas such works elided the Significance of colonial modernization by
finding it anticipated in pre-colonial times, others did so by omitting reference
to the colonial power as he engineer of transformations during the colonial
period. For example, the collectively written work, The Culture and Population
of The Mekong Delta referred to the enormous project of canal digging in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century which had expanded the cultivable
area of the Mekong delta fourfold.68 The authors argued that this had led to an
unprecedented level of rice exports in the early twenties of this century: a level
which had not been attained since. Western scholarship conventionally
attributes these achievements to the French colonial project of expanding
export agriculture and yet the above-cited work made no mention of these as
French initiatives. Rather, by such omission, these externally-generated
initiatives were Vietnamized, or, more precisely, indigenized as part of the
distinctively dynamic history of the Mekong delta.
Such views radically disputed the tradition-modernity dichotomization
through which the French colonization of Vietnam had been taken to
constitute an event of historic rupture with the past. For these authors French
colonization in Vietnam represented less of a break with the past than
previously conceived, particularly in the region of Na m Bf}, whose precolonial
society was seen to have anticipated many of the features typifying
modernity. As most of these authors focused on the period of Vietnamese
settlement, up to two hundred years prior to the founding of the colony of
Cochinchina, their works might be considered historical. However, classifying
them as pre-modern historians or late imperial historians is problematic,
given the kinds of claims they were making. They might be more suitably
classed as modern historians, due to their collective efforts in shifting the
inception of Vietnamese modernity back at least two hundred years prior to
French colonization, as well as geographically delimiting its emergence to the