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Potent rituals and the royal dead: Historical transformations in Vietnamese ritual practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2014

Marina Marouda
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Abstract

This article considers the intricate entanglements of ritual, history and power by focusing on the recent rejuvenation of ritual practices pertaining to former kings as enacted in contemporary Huế, the former imperial capital of Việt Nam (1802–1945). It examines how the Nguyễn monarchs, who were previously repudiated by the early socialist regime, have been ritually reinstated as extraordinary ancestral figures and acknowledged as potent spirits to whom many turn for blessings. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material, the article traces changes in the locals' ritual engagements with the royal dead and pays attention to fluctuations in the posthumous fate of the Nguyễn royalty while highlighting the city's transformation from imperial capital to a tourist marketplace via the horrors of the battlefield.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 338 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2014 

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48 Ibid., p. 9.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 In her paper, Huynh includes a photograph of me attending a royal ritual with the caption ‘tourist taking photos’, rather than a fellow researcher who had been invited to observe royal rituals. This could be an indication of how foreign researchers are construed by local counterparts when they find themselves in the midst of the latter's fieldsite.

52 Marina Marouda, ‘Lives intimately connected: The living and the dead in contemporary central Việt Nam’ (Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh, 2009).

53 See also Johnson, ‘Renovating Hue’.

54 As mentioned earlier, this move by the Vietnamese state was not without precedent: the Nguyễn monarchy rigorously promoted the posthumous cult of loyal subjects while rendering the act of sacrificing to unregistered spirits punishable. Dror, Cult, culture and authority, pp. 55–6.

55 Marouda, ‘Lives intimately connected’.

56 See also Huynh, Revival of ritual ceremony.

57 All other structures in the citadel stand partially restored or dilapidated. For more on the royal temples, see HMCC website, http://www.huedisan.com.vn (last accessed 30 July 2014).

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60 Tảo mộ (‘weeding ancestral graves’) is a task reverently undertaken by ordinary kin groups across Huế in preparation for the Lunar New Year.

61 During my fieldwork, rumours circulated that provincial authorities offered to commission boats to take pilgrims to the royal tombs via the city's Perfume River, thus turning the occasion into a spectacle for the crowds, but the royal clan is said to have declined.

62 See Lockhart, The end of the Vietnamese monarchy.

63 See Wook Choi Buyng, Southern Vietnam under the reign of Minh Mạng.