Making Ordinary People Actors in National History

‘Hanoi life under the subsidy economy’ in the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

Authors

• Margaret Bodemer University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.127470

Abstract

This paper analyzes a recent exhibit in Vietnam’s national ethnology museum which depicted ordinary people’s everyday experiences during the postwar, pre-reform era in Hanoi, an era which was full of hardship and had rarely been  discussed publicly prior to this. The exhibit narrated a critical yet nostalgic representation which favored the experiences of ‘ordinary citizens’’ above official discourses about this period. I argue that the exhibit designers aimed to pose ordinary citizens as significant actors in national history, thereby narrating Vietnam’s modern history in a new way. In the course of critically examining
the past and the present, the exhibit pushed the boundaries of social criticism and public discourse, and showed that museum exhibits are not neutral spaces
for the production of knowledge but, rather, can become sites which mediate indirect negotiation between people and the state and re-interpret the past for
the present and the future.

 

Keywords: museums, politics of memory, personal narratives, subsidy system, Vietnam