On February 10, 1930, the Ministry of Colonies in Paris received a “most urgent” cable reporting that two Vietnamese companies in the colonial infantry had revolted in Yên-Báy, a town located 153 kilometers northeast of Hanoi (AOM-P-NF,322–2614). Other “urgent” cables reported armed violence in the northern provinces of Phú-Thọ, Thái-Bình, and Hải-Dương, as well as bombing incidents at colonial government buildings in Hanoi. The initial report of three casualties among the ranking French officers in Yên-Báy was subsequently revised upward to ten. The revolt received heavy coverage in the press of both the French metropolis and the Far Eastern...

In Hanoi on November 23, 1925, Phan Bội Châu, the soul of anticolonial activism, was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. On March 24, 1926, Phan Chu Trinh, the other much-admired anticolonialist and the primary spokesman for the reformist school, died in Saigon shortly after his return to Vietnam from a fourteen-year exile in France. The trial of Phan Bội Châu in Hanoi provoked nationwide agitation for his pardon. In Saigon 60,000 mourners attended Phan Chu Trinh’s funeral procession. His passing was also observed in at least sixteen other localities throughout the country (Marr 1981:15–23).

These tumultuous events...

In the aftermath of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party uprising in February 1930, the French undertook quick and strong repressive measures. In Yên-Báy French troops maintained a careful check on the population. They prohibited the movement of wood rafts down the Red River from the highlands and hindered other normal economic activities, causing a loss of 10,000 piasters in revenue in March alone. As a collective punishment, the defensive bamboo hedges of Sơn-Dương and many other villages were leveled, exposing the internal landscape, “shamefully” in native perception, to the entire outside world. A large number of Sơn-Dương houses were burnt down....

On September 2, 1945, to a tumultuous crowd of half a million Vietnamese in Hanoi as well as to the nation and the world at large, HồChí Minh declared the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam:

“We hold truths that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This immortal statement is extracted from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. Understood in the broader sense, this means: “All peoples on the earth are born equal;...

On June 30, 1987, the village of Sơn-Dương organized a formal ceremony to receive the Third-class Labor Medal from the national government. The village was commended for a wide variety of achievements, ranging from agricultural production and a rapid decline in birth rate to measures of economy in the life-cycle rituals. Invited to the ceremony were not only the incumbent high-ranking cadres from surrounding villages, the district, and the province, but also retired high-ranking cadres from Sơn-Dương and the oldest villager from each of the four hamlets to represent the rest of the population. In a departure from local tradition...

In 2006 the village of Sơn-Dương was more integrated into the Vietnamese market economy and the global capitalist system than at any point since the consolidation of power by the postcolonial Vietnamese state in 1954. This integration was partly facilitated by a better road and transport system. Living standards had significantly improved as a result of agricultural decollectivization and market economy participation, the greater vulnerabilities of the poor notwithstanding. The relatively egalitarian class system during the command-economy era had also become gradually restructured as a result.

Two decades earlier, a Sơn-Dương villager wishing to get to Hanoi had to ride...

With the contraction of economic space under state control and increasing private wealth, villagers in Sơn-Dương intensified their ritual activities and relations in their social networks, both through gift exchanges and through the establishment of numerous voluntary associations. Social relations intensified mainly among the villagers of Sơn-Dương, in parallel with the considerable persistence of village endogamy, despite the stronger integration of Sơn-Dương into the national economy and the global capitalist system. The male-oriented, and class-structured model of Vietnamese society also gradually reasserted itself and strengthened both within the kinship domain and beyond.

Of the 382 married couples in the 283...

In July 1998, revisiting Sơn-Dương commune for the first time in seven years, I was startled by the profound crisis that had arisen in the relationship between the local population and the commune administration. As a reflection of its magnitude, from 1993 to 1998, under strong local social pressure, many Communist Party secretaries and presidents of the People’s Committee had quickly succeeded one another. Tensions reached a boiling point during my visit: local families were reportedly refusing to pay not only their irrigation fees but also commune levies. These arrears had totaled US $18,000 for half a year. As a...

The past century has witnessed violent turns in the encounter between capitalist imperialism and the social formations of agrarian societies at the periphery of the capitalist world system. The emerging social formations at the periphery, which are built on the basis of noncapitalist principles in many cases, have also been fundamentally restructured in the past half a century. In many respects the dynamics of this encounter and subsequent restructuring are epitomized in the Vietnamese revolution. The Vietnamese transformation has influenced important theoretical models embedded in the major traditions of contemporary Western social theory represented by John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx,...