Those who experience: Impacts of landscape transformation on the elderly in a peri-urban village, Vietnam

This dissertation explores the impacts of landscape transformation on local elderly in a rural village in the North of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Employing the villagers' definition of landscape, I focus on investigating changing processes of houses, home gardens and sacred places in the village from 1986 to the present. The year 1986 is the time when the Renovation policy was initiated nationally, and this shifted the country from subsistence to a more market oriented economy. In order to gather insightful information for comparison two different informant groups have been selected to interview: local elderly and urban elderly. I also sought assistance from an undergraduate student who conducted additional interviews under my guidance.;Findings from field research indicate that the studied landscapes have undergone significant changes since mid-1990 in ways that urban characteristics have gradually replaced traditional settings and values. Key driving forces in this process include State policy and urbanization. These two forces have significant impacts on people's interpretations of modernity which lead to the landscapes' changes. New settings of the three identified landscapes have both positive and negative impacts on local elderly. While the new landscapes bring people satisfaction and convenience materially, they also make people feel nostalgic as they have replaced traditional systems where the elderly have more voice with new systems where the elderly have less power.;Under this situation, some traditional values including houses and ritual practices have been revived by the village elderly as reaction to changing processes. This brings to a new interpretation of modernity which is not necessarily associated with development.