"Colonial" and "Postcolonial" Views of Vietnam's Pre-History (Essay‪)‬

In surveying its pre-history, Vietnamese ancestries--in terms of culture, language, and genotype--is firmly grounded in the Southeast Asian region (Glover and Bellwood 2004). Yet having such ancestries has not always been positive, at least before the mid-1960s. That is, scholars writing before the mid-1960s had regarded Southeast Asian civilization as having no roots--a prehistoric backwater stuck fast in the Stone Age (Heine-Geldren 1937; Karlgren 1942; Janse 1958; Chang 1964; Graham Clark 1961; Fisher 1964). These scholars, on the one hand, believe each civilization possessed its own genius. On the other hand, they believe the importance of studying Southeast Asian history is its "classical" period in which the region's transition to statehood was owed to Indian cultural and Chinese economic and political influences (Coedes 1968, pp. 252-53). In this view, Vietnam was fortunate. That because it was a meeting ground of both interior riverine and maritime trade links, Vietnam became a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional diffusion and migration from advanced civilizations. From such contact, state formations in what is now Vietnam were thought to have been established and flourished in the early Christian era, whereas the tribes in Southeast Asian prehistory did not know how to rule (Coedes 1966, p. 268; Coedes 1968, p. 403). So that areas of northern Vietnam were considered "Sinicized", "little China", or "the smaller dragon". Meanwhile, the early states in southern Vietnam, such as Champa and Funan, were depicted as Indianized states or colonies. At best, historians writing before the mid-1960s like John Cady and Joseph Buttinger held that Southeast Asian civilizations were imported but evolved as individual adaptations. In some cases the modifications illustrate local genius of the more advanced culture of China or India and of which is precisely what makes them Indochinese and why the territory may properly be called Indochina (Cady 1964, p. 4; Buttinger 1958, p. 19). However, such a prevailing view essentially kept at bay postulations that civilizations in Vietnam could have been a makers of history able to emplace or replace foreign influences that would be considered integral to their cultural core across time and space. By implication, colonialist study on prehistory or colonialist archaeology wherever practiced serves "to denigrate native societies and peoples by trying to demonstrate that they had been static in prehistoric times and lacked the initiative to develop on their own", as argued by historian archaeologist Bruce Trigger (1984, p. 363). To what degree is this true of colonialist studies on Vietnam's prehistory by the Chinese, French, and the Americans?