Abstract
This chapter uses anthropological as well as historical approaches to explore the distinctive nature of colonialism in French-ruled Indochina. From this interdisciplinary perspective, it seeks to contextualize a rich but little-known series of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings on Indochina’s peoples and cultures. It notes particularly their emphasis on concepts of the community and of the transforming revolutionary event. And it argues that these writings’ distinctive understandings of race, culture, and polity profoundly affected the thought and action of Asians as well as Europeans, with these effects being felt both within and beyond the French empire.
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Notes
This is a shortened and edited version of an article originally published in Modern Asian Studies, 34, 3 (2000), pp. 581–622, and anthologized in Eric Jennings (ed.), French Colonial Indochina: A Reader (University of Nebraska Press: forthcoming). I am grateful to the editors of both publications for permitting its republication in the present volume.
The early Durkheim school was associated with the Dreyfusard republican left; its adherents played a major role in metropolitan and colonial intellectual life from the 1890s to the Second World War. See P. Besnard (ed.), The Sociological Domain. The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
A. Giddens, Durkheim (London: Fontana, 1978);
K. Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim: 1858–1917 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1960).
On Griaule, see James Clifford, ‘Power and Dialogue in Ethnography: Marcel Griaule’s Initiation’, in G. Stocking (ed.), Observers Observed. Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), pp. 121–56.
Founded in 1898 to run archaeological work in Asia, EFEO’s expanded brief reflected the heightened sense of national competition nourishing European Orientalist initiatives until well into the 20th century. Its counterpart in the French-ruled Mediterranean, the Mission Scientifique en Maroc, published the RMM; it too had an explicitly Durkheimian ethos. See E. Burke, ‘The First Crisis of Orientalism’, in J.-C. Vatin et al. Connaissances du Maghreb. Sciences Sociales et Colonisation (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984), pp. 213–26.
This engagement with the modern reached one of its most sophisticated expressions in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s path-breaking monograph The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
The concept of terroir – denoting the essences and qualities which characterized one’s native soil and thus shaped both human personality and the products and environmental features of a given regional milieu – nourished both conservative and leftist theorizing about the rural roots of French nationhood. See H. Lebovics, True France. The Wars over Cultural Identity 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Comparable to the encyclopaedic race, tribe, and caste surveys in British-ruled Asian societies are such works as J. Harmand, ‘Les races indo-chi-noises’, Mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris, 2d series ii (1882), pp. 314–68.
The region’s present-day Cham population is predominantly poor and rural and is now classed as one of some 60 ‘national minorities’ whose lifestyles are in need of being modernized and ‘uplifted’. See Philip Taylor, Cham Muslims of the Mekong Delta: Place and Mobility in the Cosmopolitan Periphery (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2007).
A. Bergaigne, ‘L’ancien régime du Champa’, Journal Asiatique (JA), Jan. 1888.
H. Parmentier, Inventaire descriptif des monuments cams de l’Annam (Paris, 1909–18).
See also G. Maspero, Le royaume de Champa (Paris and Brussels, 1928).
E.g. in JA and Revue d’Ethnographie (RE). See e.g. A. Aymonier ‘Les Chams’ RE (1885), pp. 156–60
C. Lemire, ‘Les tours Kiams de la province de Binh-Dinh’, RE 6 (1887), pp. 383–94.
See S. Bayly, ‘Caste and race in colonial ethnography’, in Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 165–218.
This tradition also fed into the pioneering work of Pierre Gourou on the Indochinese peasant milieu, and is still alive today in the Braudelian mandate underpinning such institutions as the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme at Aix-en-Provence.
See P. Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: Tauris, 1995).
On the Durkheimians’ intellectual rivals the Le Playists, see Lebovics, True France, pp. 20–23.
Maunier, Mélanges de sociologie Nord-africaine (Paris, 1930), pp. 54–87.
Zabarowski, ‘Origine des Cambodgiens, Tsiams, Mois, Dravidiens’, Bulletins de la Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1897), pp. 38–58.
See A. Cabaton, Nouvelles recherches sure les Chams (Paris, 1901).
Apart from his Nouvelle recherches sur les Chams (1901) he published extensively in journals such as the EFEO Bulletin.
See S. Bayly,z‘Racial readings of empire: Britain, France and Colonial Modernity in the Mediterranean and Asia’, in L. Fawaz and C. Bayly (eds), Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 285–313.
Cabaton, ‘Les chams musulmans de l’Indochine française’, pp. 165, 179–80, RMM 1, 6 (1907), pp. 129–80.
Another was Tran Van Giap, a Paris-trained EFEO Orientalist who published pioneering historical works on Vietnamese Buddhism (e.g. BEFEO 32, 1932, pp. 191–268).
In the 1930s, as Director of the Institute of Comparative Law in the University of Paris, Maunier edited a monograph series entitled Etudes de sociologie et d’ethnologie juridique). Its publications about colonial societies included such works as the Paris-trained jurist Le Van Ho’s monograph La mère de famille Annamite (1932) which used the perspectives of Durkheim and Mauss to transmit a covert nationalist message about the superior moral values encoded in the principles of traditional ‘Annamite’ (Vietnamese) civil law.
J. Leuba, Un royaume disparu: Les Chams et leur art (Paris, 1923, first pub. 1915).
Lau, ‘La population cham’, Bulletin et Travaiux de l’IIEH, 6 (1943), pp. 213–23.
Review of The Hindu Colony of Cambodia by Phanidranath Bose (Madras, 1927), p. 620, VMGS (Dec. 1927), pp. 620–21. The other major outlet for such writings was the Journal of the Greater India Society.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Anon, ‘Contemporary thought reviewed’ [review of a work by the Greater India polemicist Kalidas Nag].
Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies (1927), pp. i, 21.
See David Chandler and Christopher E. Goscha (eds), Paul Mus (1902–1969). L’espace d’un regard (Paris, 2006).
After joining Charles de Gaulle’s anti-Axis Free France movement, Mus spent much of the Second World War working in Calcutta with the British intelligence directorate responsible for anti-Japanese propaganda operations. He was parachuted into Japanese-controlled Annam in 1945 and undertook another dangerous mission in 1947 in an abortive attempt to negotiate peace terms with Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), leader of the revolutionary nationalist Viet Minh movement spearheading Vietnam’s 1946–54 anti-French liberation war.
Mus, Le Viet Nam chez lui (Paris, 1946), pp. 10–11.
Mus, Sociologie d’une guerre. (Paris, 1952).
I. W. Mabbett and D. P. Chandler (eds), India Seen from the East. Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa (Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1975), p. 5.
Mus, Ho Chi Minh, Le Vietnam, L’Asie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971).
E.g. S. J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed. Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Mus, Le destin de l’Union Française de l’Indochine à l’Afrique. (Paris, 1954), pp. 128–32.
Mus, Le destin, p. 132: again there is a striking contrast with British anthropologists whose Durkheim-inspired functionalism generated very few such comparative reflections on morality and culture in their own society.
This reflects the influence of another of Mus’s pre-war mentors, the radical-pacifist philosopher Alain (1868–1951) who had taught him at his Paris lycée.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 301. A shortened version of this work was published in English as John T. McAlister Jr and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and their Revolution (New York: Harper, 1970).
Mus, Sociologie, p. 303.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 306, and McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, pp. 146–48.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 92. There are comparable themes in Maunier’s account of Algeria as a domain of defective sociality, the chief offenders in his view being urban Arabs whom he saw as hoarders of useless uninvested wealth and concealers of women whose seclusion denied them healthy sociability and circulation. Maunier, Loi française et coutume indigène en Algerie. (Paris : Les Éditions Dornat-Montchrestien, 1932), p. 35.
The theme of resistance is prominent in Mus’s work, especially Sociologie d’une guerre in which he aroused much controversy by insisting that there were close parallels between wartime French resistance to German occupation and Vietnamese resistance to foreign rule.
Mus, Le Viet Nam chez lui, p. 33.
Ibid.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 220. Unlike his views on the Vietnamese, Mus had decidedly Orientalist opinions about the ‘fatalistic’ qualities of Muslim thought.
Mus, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 19–23. In both Hanoi’s and Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City’s historical museums, national history is still portrayed as an episodic sequence of resistance episodes, with pictorial montages of Vietnamese liberators fighting a series of invaders including the Chinese and the French.
Ibid., p. 24. Here Mus echoes the perspectives of such scholars as Tran Van Giap in ascribing to the Vietnamese a sense of their homeland as a defined and bounded polity mapped in real territorial space, rather than a disembodied abstraction or projection of idealized ‘galactic kingship’. He thus anticipates Benedict Anderson in relating the emergence of national consciousness to the acquisition of concrete geographical knowledge through map-making and the writings of pilgrims and other travellers. But for Mus, this ‘modern’ sense of nationhood has its roots in classic Vietnamese texts, most notably in pilgrimage accounts describing the known world as a composite of defined polities with their own humoural essences, and with Vietnam/Annam existing as a co-equal imperial realm to that of China. Ibid., pp. 32 ff.
Ibid, pp. 79–80.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 82.
Ibid, p. 38.
Ibid., p. 39.
McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 98.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 140.
Ibid.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 139 ff and McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 96.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 142 and McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 96. The son of a pioneering colonial educator, Mus was brought up in Hanoi and attended state-run schools admitting francophone Vietnamese and Eurasians as well white pupils.
McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 103.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 146; and McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 96.
Mus, Sociologie, p. 143; and McAlister and Mus, The Vietnamese, p. 101.
From the 1950s until his death in 1969, Mus held a visiting professorship at Yale, where he taught John McAlister in the late 1950s. McAlister was an important influence on participants in the debate between the Scott-Wolf moral economists and their opponents, notably Samuel Popkin, whose seminal monograph The Rational Peasant. The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) builds on Mus and McAlister, as well as Gourou and other French cultural geographers whose writings share many of the intellectual orientations of the Annales historians.
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Bayly, S. (2012). French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina. In: Roque, R., Wagner, K.A. (eds) Engaging Colonial Knowledge. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230360075_8
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