Moral Responsibility, Gender, and Social Change in Lineage Ritual in Northern Vietnam

FAIN: FT-259640-18

Lauren Meeker
SUNY Research Foundation, College at New Paltz (New Paltz, NY 12561-2407)

Ethnographic research and completion of a paper on the adaptations to modern social changes in the ritual practices of North Vietnamese rural villages.

This project is an ethnographic study of the gendered dimensions of moral responsibility in northern rural Vietnam, with a focus on lineage ritual. The research examines how village women, who are structural outsiders in their lineages, negotiate what are often overlapping and conflicting moral positions in order to establish themselves as moral persons in the community. In particular, the study considers how this process is affected by changing cultural values and customs. More generally, the study demonstrates how individuals construct moral and social personhood in concert with broader authoritative discourses in times of rapid societal change. It also highlights the diverse ways that local communities address a core humanistic problem: how individuals, each embodying a singular way-of-being in the world, come to live together in a moral community.

Associated Products

Being Witnessed Saving Others: Moral Personhood in Women's Popular Buddhist Practice in Rural Northern Vietnam (Article)
Title: Being Witnessed Saving Others: Moral Personhood in Women's Popular Buddhist Practice in Rural Northern Vietnam
Author: Lauren Meeker
Abstract: In popular Buddhist practice in rural northern Vietnam, moral personhood does not merely belong to the self but is embedded in the intersubjective relationship among individuals, the gods, and the community. The inner moral person, characterized as heart/ mind (tâm), is constituted in the very process of becoming visible in the social world through virtuous action (đức) subject to the intentional acts of being witnessed for (chứng cho) by the gods and one’s peers. Drawing upon popular Buddhist practice of the female followers of a ritual specialist in Bathing Buffalo Village, this article argues that the act of being witnessed for bridges the gap between the invisible and deeply felt experience of moral selfhood and the visible manifestation of that self in the social realm through acts of altruism and filial piety and reveals the inherently social nature of moral personhood.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911819000068
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of Asian Studies
Publisher: The Journal of Asian Studies

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