Commemoration and the State: Memory and Legitimacy in Vietnam (Essay‪)‬

Commemorations sanitize the messy history lived by actors. They contribute to the continuous myth-making process that gives history its more definite shapes: they help to create, modify, or sanction the public meanings attached to historical events deemed worthy of mass celebration. As rituals that package history for public consumption, commemorations play the numbers game to create a past that seems both more real and more elementary (Trouillot 1995, pp. 655-66). In Vietnam, tens of thousands of soldiers who died fighting the French and Americans never received a proper burial or a grave with their name on it. The earth absorbed the flesh and blood of the combatants leaving only the bones--a thin thread connecting the dead with the living, a son with his parents, who hope that the bones belonged to their loved one. These soldiers and their martyrdom became most potent symbols of the official struggle over memory and legitimation of the war (see Malarney 2001). But the Vietnamese pantheon of war heroes comprises not only those who died recently resisting foreign aggression. National monuments, museums, and publications project a tradition of patriotic devotion onto the remote past. They commemorate events and long-standing traditions of "protecting ancestral land" dating back to the very origins of Vietnam. Heroic figures have emerged whenever the country has had to repulse a foe, and many of these figures have been incorporated into a national pantheon of heroes. Those who are not recognized by the state, however, have not necessarily been forgotten; rather, local officials, communities, and individuals often speak on their behalf. These groups engage in contestations over memory as they attempt to integrate their own narratives into the dominant official history and, thus, to turn their kin or fellow villagers--the "unknown dead", the "wandering souls"--into heroic and meritorious members of their locality.