Southeast Asia: Text, Ritual and Performance

On the Cusp of History: Exploring Incipient Vietnamese Civilization
2016-11-04 15:00 - 16:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
The Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside presents:
On the Cusp of History: Exploring Incipient Vietnamese Civilization
Dr. Nam C. Kim, Associate Professor, Section Chair – Archaeology
Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Exploring the underpinnings of Vietnamese civilization requires an engagement with textual narratives, archaeological data, and even the various agendas of modern-day communities. Like elsewhere in the world, legend, memory, and text have been combined in Vietnam to construct, reconstruct, and detail ancient origins, thus exploring the temporal margins between “prehistory” and “history.” Increasingly, the archaeological enterprise has been used as a means to complement or challenge existing historical and conventional knowledge. Sitting on the cusp of history, ancient communities and settlements of the Red River Delta during the first millennium BCE provide a glimpse of what many consider to be incipient Vietnamese civilization. Of particular interest is the Co Loa site, which occupies a prominent place within the national imagination of Vietnam today. This lecture explores recent archaeological investigations of the site and how findings have contributed to ongoing research about early “Vietnam”. In doing so, it considers the potential complementarity between history and archaeology, while also highlighting some of the methodological challenges researchers face when dealing with the early history of Vietnam.
Nam C. Kim investigates past societies and their lifeways through archaeological research. He is interested in the emergence of early forms of urbanism and archaic states, particularly in Southeast Asia. Kim’s work also explores the links between the material record and the concerns of contemporary societies, as they relate to issues such as national identity and cultural heritage management. Beyond his work on Asian archaeology, his research explores the various evolutionary and cultural dimensions of organized violence, warfare, and peacemaking throughout human history.

Sponsored by Anthropology, Asian Studies, and SEATRiP

The Uprooted: The Systematic Removal of Mixed-Race Children in Colonial Vietnam
2016-10-26 16:00 - 17:30 | HMNSS 1303
HISTORY LIBRARY TALKS
public & students welcome; light reception @ 5:30pm
In the 1890s, French colonists in Indochina founded charity organizations to “protect” mixed-race children born to Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao mothers. Protection societies gave them room and board in French institutions, tuition to the colony’s elite schools and job replacement upon reaching adulthood. A close examination of protection society rhetoric, membership, and actions reveals that the societies helped managed the colony’s racial agendas in ways that the colonial government legally could not. While the societies’ efforts to “save” métis children did in fact help many of these children and their mothers by providing food, shelter, and an education, their program also had dire consequences for some including permanent separation from mothers and high incidence of suicide. This talk draws on oral histories and colonial records to explore the lives of these mixed-race children.

Christina Firpo is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History and Women’s and Gender Studies at CalPoly University of San Luis Obispo, California. She is a author of The Uprooted (Hawaii, 2016) and has published numerous articles in such journals as Vietnamese Studies, French Colonial History, and the Journal of Social History. She is currently writing a book titled Negotiated Affections: Informal Economies of Clandestine Prostitution in Northern Vietnam, 1920-1954.
Co-sponsors:

Southeast Asian Studies Program (seatrip.ucr.edu)
Department of Ethnic Studies (ethnicstudies.ucr.edu)
Global Studies Program (globalstudies.ucr.edu)
