Cultural anthropology in Vietnamese literary studies: Achievements and opportunities

Abstract

This paper, first of all, analyzes several reasons that have brought about the applicability of cultural anthropology in literary studies. Accordingly, humanities scholarship from the late twentieth century up to now has witnessed interpretations and analyses of literary texts based on the knowledge of cultural anthropology as well as the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches to literary texts in which literary texts have no longer been limited into the so-called “literariness”; rather, they are put in comparison to the texts of other fields. In its second part, this paper offers two reviews: the first on key investigations into Vietnamese literature that in many forms try to apply the knowledge of cultural anthropology to dealing with different literary issues, and the second on a history of cultural anthropology in Vietnam. These also aim to provide recommendations for opportunities of developing the approach of cultural anthropology in present literary studies in Vietnam.