Third Edition Spring 2013 - Institute of East Asian Studies, UC ...

produce political resistance, social solidarity, and civic virtue. 7 InVietnam’s history there are many examples of each of these politicalevents as leaders have utilized a constructed identity to anchortheir legitimacy to power. With this being understood I draw attentionto the process by which a culture memory is produced.Production of Cultural MemoriesIn Destination Culture, Barbara Gimblett discusses how cultureis produced. Her focus is on heritage as the new mode of cultureproduction in the present and how it has recourse in the past.Gimblett emphasizes how:Heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. Despite a discourseof conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recovery,re-creation, recuperation, revitalization, and regeneration, heritageproduces something new in the present that has recourse to thepast. Such language suggests that heritage is there prior to its identification,evaluation, conservation, and celebration. By production, I donot mean that the result is not “authentic” or that it is wholly invented.Rather, I wish to underscore that heritage is not lost and found, stolenand reclaimed. It is a mode of cultural production in the present thathas recourse to the past.Gimblett’s analysis of culture production serves as a tool for understandingphotography in Vietnam.As Gimblett’s writings stress, culture is neither lost norfound. Culture is ubiquitous and takes on various forms. Vietnamis comprised of an ethnically diverse people, however the governmenthas promoted one cultural identity, namely the identity constructedby the Communist party. At no point in Vietnam’s historyhas a constructed culture been so clearly produced than of thatsurrounding the Vietnam War. This identity is remarkably visiblein the photography of the Vietnamese during this period, and iseven more identifiable when compared with that of the Americans.7 Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. The Country of Memory: Remaking the past in Late SocialistVietnam. Berkeley: University of California, 2001.Contrasting FocusesUnlike Westerners who were primarily in Vietnam on a “voluntarybasis and could walk away if they so desired, the freedom toleave their country and the war was not an option for Vietnamesephotographers.” 8 The war was at home for Vietnamese photographersand their contingence to the domestic suffering of war permeatedthe meanings and subjects that Vietnamese photographerschose to capture, as well as into the images that the National LiberationFront promoted. In addition, Vietnamese photojournalismwas not predicated on violence and disaster alone, but upon theplacement of suffering within a broader spectrum of wartime experiencesand subjectivities, and it thus produced a more extensiveand informative visual history. 9 As explained in Schwenkel’s writings,culture played a huge role in what was photographed by theVietnamese during the war.Unlike reporters working for the Western press, most of whomwere independent of the war effort and thus regarded as “objective”outside observers, Vietnamese correspondents were consideredcultural soldiers of the revolution, whose weapons consistedof pencils, paper, and in the case of photojournalists, cameras. Ininterviews and conversations, photographers stressed the importanceof photography to serve the country, denounce the war tonational and international audiences, and transmit and propagateinformation from the front. But they also emphasized their multivalentroles as cultural producers immersed in the social worlds ofthe people who comprised their subject matter. They endeavoredto show the crimes, destruction, and techniques of war, as well asthe cooperation, compassion, and social interactions among soldiersand villagers.Despite the variety of cultural messages captured by Viet-8 Schwenkel, Christina. Exhibiting War, Reconciling Pasts: Photographic Representationand Transnational Commemoration in Contemporary Vietnam. Journal ofVietnamese Studies 3.1, 2008.9 Ibid29 Mark Portillo Constructing “Culture” 30