Theories of Ethnicity and the New Challenges to Ethnic Studies in Vietnam
Abstract
For the last few decades since the 1960s, a major concern of Vietnamese anthropologists was to search for a theoretical framework to serve the work of ethnic identification. The Russian-influenced theoretical approach, which is based on three factors, namely the ethnic linguistic features, a shared common culture and an ethnic self-consciousness has been adopted as a standard measure for ethnic classification. Ethnographical studies and ethnic policies have also been built around this theoretical framework. By reviewing the soviet theory of ethnicity and the debate between primordialist and circumstantialist over ethnicity within the Western anthropology, this article attempts to point out some limits of monopolizing one certain theoretical framework as well the weakness of using the criteria of ethnic classification based on cultural factors as applied in the Vietnamese ethnology. In the context of ethnic process and social transformation taking place rapidly in Vietnam, the issues of transnationalism and multiple ties of ethnic relations put new challenges to the old adopted version of ethnic classification and raise a need of searching for new theoretical approaches that may serve as satisfactory models for understanding the ethnicity in Vietnam 21st century.
