CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TRADITIONAL VILLAGE AND COMMUNE ORGANIZATION IN THE NORTHWEST MOUNTAINOUS REGION (CASE STUDY OF THE MONG AND THAI ETHNIC GROUPS)

Abstract

In the era of modernization and international integration, Vietnam must tackle the relation between cultural identity and traditional and modern development which are very important
today. Vietnam’s culture not only is created by Viet people but ethnic
minorities play a key role to diversify national identity. Thereby,
researching village structure, social organization, and customs of
the northern mountainous villages is very important. Researching
traditional village models plays a key role to preserve positive
values of minority culture, simultaneously, some proposed policies
of modern villages may be applied for villages which lie in remote
areas in Vietnam. This is a repercussion of the policy of making
rural areas closer to urban areas and eliminating the disparity
between the rich and the impoverished, cultural differences, and
consolidating the national solidarity. Due to that, it is proposed to
develop new rural development policies for the Northwest ethnic
minorities in Vietnam. Because of the word limit of the article only
the Mong people and the Thai people are the main case studies.