VIETNAM, CIVILIZATION and CULTURE – INTRODUCTION
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By PIERRE HUARD1
and MAURICE DURAND2
École Française D’Extrême-Orient3, Hanoi.
Animal life is merely a direct and definitive adaptation to an environment in which it leaves everything as it is. With man, that “unique being“, there is not only adaptation to a milieu but also revolt i.e. invention of material means and conception of spiritual ends aimed at assuring the permanence of human groups and preventing their elimination from a hostile nature. Thus, civilization and culture are apt to be born.
Civilization represents the whole of means, inventions and discoveries by which a people organizes its outward life. To culture, in itself a certain manner of living one’s life and adorning one’s leisure, is connected a number of independent creations of purely biological factors by which an ethnic group endeavours to manifest its most inward tendencies, spiritual needs and cosmological conceptions.
Each civilization has its demographic formula, its mode of living and dying, its style of life as well as its particular cultural level. Human dignity and inlelligence cannot be measured with a high living standard, thus, a very high degree of civilization may concur with a mediocre cultural level. In this case, there is abasement and degradation of knowledge in order to diffuse them to masses. A superior degree of culture does not admit vulgarization. It raises men above themselves so they might be as numerous as possible to reach the joy of mind. It might have as substratum an insignificant material comfort with ascetical tendencies. This is the case of Vietnam and that of the poor and overpopulated Northern rural region. As P. GOUROU4 has remarked, “in spite of its misery, it does not live in plainness, and nothwithstanding a frantic search of the most modest profit as well as a humble acceptance of an unremuneralive task, it has conceived a sane and reasonable civilization, missed by many far more developed countries, as well as a culture of Chinese inspiration comparable to all great classical cultures.
The Vietnamese Culture and Civilization thus constitute that conventional universe in which the Vietnamese are at a same lime, creators and creatures. Stuck to them, said civilization and culture insert themselves in the duration of history and become, for nationals as well as foreigners, the “world common to everybody” mentioned by ARISTOTLE5, the frame imposed to diverse activities practised in Vietnam within which everyone has to identify himself If this identification happens to be incomplete, there is a want of balance between the individual and this “common world” and sources of conflict just could not be averted.
Vulgarizing the essential facts of Vietnamese Civilization and Culture which the study has become compulsory in all Franco – Vietnamese schools of first and second degree would mean helping to comprehend a part of that “world“. Tentalives have been undertaken to this effect and we owe to Mr. NGUYEN VAN HUYEN6 one of the best works. H’e have not at all the intention to recommence his task. While awaiting for the writing by Vietnamese scholars of a Vietnamese Encyclopedia, task that has become more and more indispensable, our purpose is to simply furnish a working implement to all curious persons wishing to know how traditional Vietnam lived in the past.
We have attached a great importance io iconography. The monumental works of HENRI J. OGER7 (1908) and J. G. BESSON8 (1938) have been of little help to us. We have drawn a large umount of our illustrations other from the posthumous works of the lamented GEORGES DUMOUTIER9 (1850-1904), or from the chreslomalhy of ED. NORDEMANN10 (1914), and also from a Vietnamese language course of TISSOT11. Their figures, with traits soberly drawn, present a typically Vietnamese character.
Our work is voluntarily slopped at the start of the 20th century, at a moment where like all Extreme-Oriental cultures, the Vietnamese civilization had been submerged by that of the West. At that epoch, Vietnamese economy remained rurat and, since one to two thousand years had gone beyond Neolithic, stage to hall in closed circuit at that of Pre-industrial. The progressive substitution of portage for the truck and that of foreign merchandises for local products, consumed by producers, has seriously attacked, in Vietnam as well as in Europe, the stability of rural agglomerations that subsisted almost entirely by themselves with a living style and techniques that came from the depth of prehistory (VARRAGNAC13).
Under an apparent reabsoqition of their exterior morphology, important pans of traditional culture had been simply driven back with a more or less violent traumatism. The charm of a climate of secular dependence, expressed in a “father and mother’‘ administration, hud been interrupted, the Vietnamese “psyche” has suffered a deep shock to which revolution and civil war had given an immense volume. We do not have to deal ourselves here with this upsetting. We simply have to ask ourselves if, by the help of these hard experiences, would the Vietnamese culture be able, just like western civilization has been doing since a long lime, to explain itself with reality.
Does it realize that one of the functions of humanity is plasticity, the unremitting creation of new cultural values through an adaptation to circumstances in all fields: scientific, emotional, aesthetic, religious and technical?
It’s probable, because numerous Vietnamese intellectuals have acquired enough auto-criticism to penetrate objectively their traditions, turn them into a subject of study and thus conquer their independence with respect to said traditions.
The use of scientific methods does not imply at all a total elimination of religion and the sacred, such elimination has proven dangerous. Reason does not create its own themes. Il receives them from Myth, a mode of affective knowledge, parallel to rational knowledge which it completes. Present-day Vietnamese elite must affirm all elements of their own culture, ”not for resisting to western culture, but for truly accepting and assimilating it, using it as their sustenance instead of turning it into a burden, and mastering that culture but not living on its border, just like text examiners and book devourers (RABINDRANATH TAGORE14). Such elite must also understand the importance of science and technology in the comportment of contemporain men.
On this viewpoint, Vietnamese secular aptitudes find themselves, at the present time, under very favourable conditions to give to factors forsaken by their civilization the importance they well deserve. But mechanical technique and civilization are not neutral. They may, according to the manner they are used liberate the mind from its tight bonds with material life as well as deshumanize men.
The constant anxiety, that Vietnamese culture lias shown during centuries, not to assimilate any foreign element (Hindu, Chinese, Cham or Western) without trying to impose on it its personal peculiar character, constitutes a warrant that it has a sufficient cohesion to resist to external pressures and continue to express the quite particular relation it has established between the Three forces of Nature (Tam tai): Heaven, Earth and Man.
BIBLIOGRAPHY :
+ H. OGER. General introduction to the study of the technique of the annamese people, essay on material life, arts and industries of the people of Annam, Paris, Geuthner, 1908.
+ ED. NORDEMANN. Annamese chrestomathy, Hanoi 1914.
+ JULES G. BESSON. Drawn monography of Indochina (Tonquin, Annam, Cochinchina), Paris Geuthner, 1938.
+ H. TISSOT. Superior Course of Annamese, Hanoi 1910.
+ NGUYEN VAN HUYEN. Annamese civilization, Hanoi 1943.
+ A. VARAGNAC. Traditional civilization and sort of life, Paris, 1948.
NOTES :
◊ Source: Connaisance du Viet Nam, PIERRE HUARD & MAURICE DURAND, Revised 3rd Edition 1998, Imprimerie Nationale Paris, École Française D’Extrême-Orient, Hanoi – Translated by VU THIEN KIM – NGUYEN PHAN ST Minh Nhat’s Archives.
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