Papers

• 140 years of colonial commodity expansion: Territoriality in two northern Vietnamese borderland districts Patrick Slack McGill University

  Attempting to gain sovereignty within borderlands and among borderlanders, authorities have attempted to organize territory through economic, political, environmental, and social interventions, known as territoriality. Put more bluntly, De Koninck (1996: 231) calls this territorial push the state process of the “colonization of their borderlands”. Over the last 140 years, French colonial authorities, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam have sought to do the very same in their northern borderlands, particularly promoting intensive cash cropping and agricultural production. Such interventions have targeted highland ethnic minority Mien (Yao, Dao), Hmong, and Hani farmers in the study sites of this study who have conducted semi-subsistence livelihoods since the point of colonial contact. Despite visible failures of agricultural interventions across colonial and state governments, both in the archives and from farmer perspectives, approaches to rural development have been repeated (with many failures) to this day. Although these interventions have, at least at face value, had economic motivations to exploit these frontier areas, I argue that they have had political and social intentions of partisanship, social integration, and more ‘productive’ citizens.
  In this work, I combine archival data regarding interventions from colonial and state perspectives with lived experiences of ethnic minority individuals in these two borderland districts. I use data collected from over six months of ethnographic fieldwork (interviews, oral histories, and colonial photo elicitation) in these two borderland districts in Vietnam and over three months of archival research in Vietnam, France, and the United States. Using government reports about reconnaissance of borderland regions, profitable crops, frontier police, economic reports, and communist party histories of these areas, I attempt to depict how interventions and livelihoods have co-evolved (or not) over the past 140 years. Only intending to use a handful of archival materials at the beginning of my research, I detail my own trials and tribulations of approaching the archive and applying this to my own research questions. My aim is to explore my own findings in my archival and contemporary research approaches, ultimately to inform two ends: 1) How may successes and failures of rural development approaches inform more appropriate interventions today? 2) How can other scholars with more ‘contemporary’ research focuses explore and incorporate longitudinal data that is available in the archive?

• Studying marginality in a colonial situation from judicial archives: the case of fraudulent practices and opium consumption in North Vietnam (1870s-1946) Thomas Clare Institute of Asian Researches [IRASIA], Aix-Marseille University

  Historians interested in the margins must deal with the archival shortcomings inherent in these areas. At first sight, colonial archives appear rationally ordered. But the fragmented nature of the documents exposes the limits and weaknesses, and the doubts, anxieties and ignorance of the colonial project (Stoler, 2009). This paper proposes to integrate the contributions of historiography, which has called for a redefinition of the historian’s approach to the colonial archive, to focus on the specific case of judicial archives in Vietnam in colonial situation. In Cochinchina, then in Annam and Tonkin, the French colonial power implemented a powerful tax system based largely on opium revenues. For this reason, smuggling practices were severely repressed, as they threatened the colonial order. The characterization of the “fraud” forms a transgression against which the colonial order can exert its coercion, through a strong repression that poorly conceals the impotence of the colonial administration in the face of the extent of the phenomenon.
  The files of opium traffickers judged by the courts have been widely preserved in archives. The ritualized, orderly nature of the judgments sometimes gives the impression of full control by the French administration over its constituents. But if we read between the lines, these files reveal a multiplicity of fraudulent practices and practitioners. Furthermore, many gaps remain, as these documents give access to only a slice of the lives of men and women, in very restricted contexts. Behind police and customs reports, judgment records, testimonies and questioning, and all administrative papers, I seek to uncover hidden emotions, motivations, family histories and social ties. The erasures, stamps and various sources of information are all clues that call into question the apparent mastery of customs judgments.
  Comparing these individual files reveals a complex social fabric that forces us to redefine the historian’s social categories. “Smuggler”, “trafficker”, “criminal” or “marginal” are all concepts defined purely by the colonial state and are proving inadequate. The contributions of the social sciences concerned with drug trafficking and organized crime help the historian to extend these categories, and to redefine a more complex social stratification of smugglers and the division of fraudulent industry. The small peddler or the small retailer (the fraudsters most represented in the customs archives) constitute only the small emerged part of the whole of the smuggling networks. As today, the point of sale is the visible part of the traffic, but this obscures all the actors who intervene much earlier. The “Opium Syndicates” designate the holders of this traffic from the point of view of the colonial administrators. But the syndicates are not well known, and completely escape repression, except for rare exceptions, when a network is broken up. In the eyes of the colonial power, the activity of the opium syndicates, as organized crime, constituted the main political threat to the colonial order. The links maintained with land and sea piracy, arms trafficking or armed anticolonialism placed smuggling at the heart of the threats to security and colonial domination. Thus, opium smuggling could be considered as part of the acts of resistance to the colonial order.

• Where are Vietnamese martial arts? An overview of possible archives about bodies cultures in (post)colonial context. Mickael Langlois University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne / UNIL

  Martial arts represent an important cultural aspect in Asia. In Vietnam, numerous schools and styles are present. This diversity can be explained by a rich history and numerous circulations (national and international) that have taken place. However, if the actors of the martial arts community present a history with distant origins linked even to the mythological origins of the country, the colonial period and the period of civil war (1945-1975) are often presented as ‘dark ages’ where decadence and secrecyare commonplace for martial artists. This raises the question of the visible traces of these martial practices. This paper will focus on the creation of a corpus around Vietnamese martial arts (1905-1960’s) and the difficulties encountered. It will be divided into three parts:

  1. The first difficulty is to read into the archives practices that do not bear their name. The words “martial arts” is much more recent than we think, and French archives use other terms to define them. The analysis of images, particularly postcards, can help to overcome this problem. But then face another problem, that of the researcher’s gaze and the risk of identifying practices that are not practiced in reality at all.

  2. Some combat sports, and even other martial arts in Vietnam, have gained greater visibility in Vietnamese society. We, therefore, present how analyzing these allows us to better contextualize the practice of Vietnamese martial arts.

  3. In this final section, I will introduce practitioners and masters who are themselves seeking to retrace their history. These are often foreign practitioners or the Vietnamese diaspora living outside Vietnam. While these individual initiatives often have a very limited audience, for the historian, they are archives to be handled with meticulous care.

Abstract