Musical transmissions: Folk music, mediation and modernity in northern Vietnam

This dissertation examines the relationship between national and local identity and its connection to the mechanics and politics of the circulation of culture in Vietnam. I investigate this issue through the lens of Vietnamese folk music, focusing in particular on quan ho&dotbelow;&dotbelow; folk song and cheo musical theater. These two folk forms are both well known in Vietnam beyond their localities of origin because of their extensive presence in the mass media and they have also been subject to the intervention of government officials and scholars concerned with preserving the disappearing cultural heritage of Vietnam. Consequently, they are powerful sites in which formations of state power, national and local identity, and modern subjectivity are contested in contemporary Vietnam. In the dissertation, I investigate how changing social practices of performance reflect upon wider societal changes from the revolutionary period up to the present day. To do so, I examine compositional practices, embodied practices in performance, the mass mediation and professionalization of folk music, and the staging of culture. In this context, I engage directly with two main areas of broad anthropological and interdisciplinary import. First, I am concerned with the formation and structure of ethnographic knowledge and its role in state formation and national identity. In particular, I demonstrate how discourses of locality and local identity become crucial to broader definitions of national identity in post-revolutionary Vietnam. Second, I address how the concept of tradition emerges as an object in modernity only after its initial "disappearance." I argue that Vietnamese folk culture has returned as a representation of itself in the post-reform era particularly in its instantiation as "cultural heritage." Today folk culture is re-staged in the very places in which it is said to have originated but these re-stagings are now marked as national, as Vietnamese (as opposed to simply local) and, most recently, as "heritage.".