75th Anthropology Anniversary Colloquium Series Fall 2009 – Museums, Anthropology and the Work of Culture in Contemporary Vietnam: The Politics of Memory in the Exhibit “Hanoi Life under the Subsidy Era” at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Thursday, 19 November 2009, 3:00 PM at Crawford 105, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Presented by Margaret Bodemer, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology

A recent exhibit at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME) titled “Hanoi Life under the Subsidy Era” enlisted Hanoi residents – “ordinary citizens” – to document and discuss their experiences through a critical period in recent Vietnamese history. In this presentation I draw on 12 months of fieldwork at the VME in Hanoi to explore the significance of the exhibit, and the museum practices that produced it, for longer historical transformations in Vietnamese national identity. In the exhibit, people talked about their experiences and life strategies under the postwar, subsidy economy in Hanoi (1975-1986). In effect, the exhibit provided an alternative narrative, “a view from below,” in contrast to the official national history of Vietnam, which posits the state as the main actor in important events. In this presentation I argue that the exhibit constitutes a new emerging perspective on the relationship between people and the state in contemporary Vietnam. The presentation is part of a larger dissertation project that explores the transformations of Vietnamese ethnology and museums in the context of shifting visions of Vietnam from a colony without an indigenous civilization to a modern, independent, multi-ethnic nation state.

Maggie Bodemer is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at UH Manoa. Her work in cultural anthropology focuses on issues of culture, national identity and the state. Her publications include articles in Asian Ethnology (Japan), Asian Anthropology (Hong Kong), and Explorations in Southeast Asian Studies. With museum director Nguyen Van Huy, she co-edited the volume Faces, Voices, and Lives: My Experiences in Building a Museum for Communities, published in 2008 by The Gioi Publishers.

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