Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26(3), 2005, 339-358© Copyright 2005 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd

INTRODUCTION

Most contemporary scholars of Vietnam arefamiliar with two famous works by Frenchgeographers from the colonial period: Charles-Edouard Robequain’s Le Thanh Hoa (1929)and Pierre Gourou’s Les paysans du deltatonkinois (1936a). These two works continueto work as baseline studies of the relationsbetween “man and milieu” which, together withwork by some other geographers (e.g. Henry,

1932; Dumont, 1995), still offer the mostcomprehensive analysis of Vietnamese rurallife under French colonial rule. My personalinterest in the work of these geographers, andof Gourou in particular, stems from my PhDwork in the late 1970s, which dealt in part withthe nature of French knowledge aboutIndochina. I did long stretches of research inthe Centre des Archives d’ Outre-Mer (CAOM)

TROPICALITY AND TOPICALITY: PIERRE GOUROU ANDTHE GENEALOGY OF FRENCH COLONIAL

SCHOLARSHIP ON RURAL VIETNAM

John KleinenDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam,

Amsterdam, HollandJ.G.G.M.kleinen@uva.nl

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the relevance of the work of Pierre Gourou for Vietnamese and non-Vietnamesescholarship on colonial and postcolonial rural society in Vietnam. The term “tropicality” is used tosituate Gourou’s work within the framework of both French and Vietnamese regimes of truth. It isargued that Gourou was aware of the complex human geographies of the tropics and monsoonAsia and the challenges this posed to both Western and “tropical” peoples. Gourou and the issueof tropicality is used to show that Vietnamese scholars did not completely reject French colonialsystems of knowledge, and that decolonisation did not herald a complete shift in knowledgeabout rural Vietnam. Rather, since the 1940s there has been antagonism and accommodationbetween colonial and postcolonial, French and Vietnamese modes of knowledge production.While Gourou underscored the otherness of the tropics, and there are colonial overtones in hiswork, he had an immense influence on indigenous ethnography and geography in Vietnam andelsewhere in the formerly colonised world. The article traces this important influence and how ithas been both questioned and affirmed since independence in the Vietnamese context. It issuggested that the humanistic approach that Gourou pioneered in his 1936 study of the Red RiverDelta of northern Vietnam has outlived and been able to overcome the setbacks and drawbacks ofboth colonial and revolutionary/Vietnamese politico-intellectual projects.

Keywords: human geography, tropicality, Vietnam, Red River Delta, village studies

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in Aix-en-Provence, and there encountered theample published and unpublished research ofFrench scholars like Gourou, who were amongthe first to carry out extensive research in thecountryside of colonial Indochina.Subsequently, in the early 1990s, when Ireturned to the colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence as well as in Hanoi in connectionwith an anthropological study I undertook ofa village in the Red River Delta (Kleinen, 1999),I was again struck by the richness of the datathat Gourou and others collected. Indeed, asrecent Vietnamese scholarship intimates, andas I want to suggest in this paper, thegeographical knowledge created by Gourouespecially has an intrinsic value that hasseemingly transcended the ruptures of war andrevolution. This realisation was bolstered bythe appearance in 2003 of the first Vietnamesetranslation of Gourou’s 1936 masterpiece Lespaysans. While this translation, by theagronomist Dao The Tuan does not come witha critical introduction, it bears witness to thefallacy, in the Vietnamese context, of thepostcolonial fiction of radical discontinuity,at least at an intellectual level. Vietnamesescholars have not completely rejected Frenchsystems of knowledge; decolonisation andindependence did not lead to a completeoverhaul in the production of knowledgeabout rural Vietnam. Rather, there has beenantagonism and accommodation betweencolonial and postcolonial systems ofknowledge production.

Reflecting on my own research experience,and against the backdrop of contemporaryVietnam, I want to use Gourou to think bothpositively and critically about the nature andlegacies of French scholarship on Indochinaduring the late colonial period (roughly 1925-50). The paper traces aspects of the politico-intellectual genealogy through which the workof figures such as Gourou was implicated inFrance’s colonial project and later embraced,extended and contested by Vietnamesescholars in the postcolonial era. I use the term“genealogy” in a double sense. In the firstplace, I use it to elude to the webs of personal

and professional affiliation between Frenchand Vietnamese scholars that developed incolonial times – not least between Gourou andhis field assistants, a number of whom wenton to become important scholars andpoliticians in postcolonial Vietnam. But I alsouse the term “genealogy” in a more criticalFoucauldian, sense to capture the notion thatthe production and consumption ofknowledge about Vietnam has been marked byrelations of inclusion and exclusion.

Using the work of Pierre Gourou (Plate 1)and his Vietnamese assistants as my primeexample, I start with an examination of Frenchcolonial scholarship on Indochina during theinterwar years and then move to a discussionof Gourou’s Vietnamese legacy. Among otherthings, my paper seeks to show that war,revolutionary struggle and the postcolonialpolitico-intellectual search for understandingsof Vietnamese history and civilisation thatwere less tightly gripped by French ideas,methods and categories of knowledge did notlead to a blanket rejection of Frenchscholarship. Rather, the type of knowledgeproduced and imparted by Gourou and otherFrench scholars was paralleled by, andselectively incorporated into, Vietnameseresearch projects. Vietnamese scholars dwelton a number of key themes in Vietnamese socialand political life – the centrality of the village,for example – that animated Gourou (and laterPaul Mus). Conceived thus, the paperhopefully reminds us that some of the formativeconnections between French colonialism,decolonisation and what others in this SpecialIssue call “tropicality” can be found in themessy pragmatics of intellectual exchangeacross cultural and colonial divides.

GOUROU AND THE SCIENCE OFFRENCH COLONIALISM

Gourou (1900-99) and Robequain (1890-1967)had a close professional relationship first inIndochina, then, after the Second World War,as geography professors in Paris at the Collègede France and Sorbonne respectively, where

they promoted French geographical researchin the tropical world. Their work on Indochinamarks the first serious attempt by Frenchscholars to systematically analyse therelations between land and life in northernVietnam and bring French geographical ideasand methods to bear on one of France’s keycolonial possessions. They produced twoincredibly detailed, regionally focused fieldstudies, and upon their return to France in themid-1930s wrote more general and widelyinfluential books on the economy and landuse of Indochina (Robequain, 1935, 1944;Gourou, 1945).

Robequain was a member of France’sprincipal research institute in the Far East, theHanoi-based École française d’Extrême-Orient(EFEO) established in 1900, and spent most of1924-25 in the second largest delta of northernVietnam, the plain of Thanh Hoa, which theFrench regarded as the pre-Chinese cradle ofVietnamese civilisation (see Parmentier, 1918;Goloubew, 1929). By the 1920s the region hadbecome a privileged field site for Western andVietnamese scientists working within anOrientalist paradigm that was bent ondiscerning the “essence” of Vietnamese history

and identity (see Bayly, 2000). One possiblereason for Robequain’s regional study mighthave been the fact that colonial policies forinternal migration to alleviate the congestedTonkin Delta were already in the making andthe province of Thanh Hoa had been selectedas a testing ground for them. In any event,Robequain’s study heralded the advance of acertain type of French science into a landscapehitherto unstudied in France (Bréelle, 2002:171-75).

Gourou did something similar, if on a largerscale. His work on the Red River Delta, whichculminated in a 660-page study, was the resultof a nearly 10-year stay in the region. Stillconsidered a landmark of rural sociology, Lespaysans probably remains the work mostquoted by contemporary scholars of Vietnam.Defended as a doctoral thesis in December1936 at the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne,it was published by EFEO in Paris in the sameyear. Gourou’s comprehensive account of thehuman geography of the Red River Delta wasunmatched at the time, and war and revolutionmade it virtually impossible to embark on similarstudies thereafter. On re-reading Les paysans,the contemporary fieldworker is still struck by

Plate 1. Pierre Gourou, Brussels, 1994. Photo courtesy of author.

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the hugeness and the accuracy of Gourou’sdata. The problems that faced the inhabitantsof this densely populated delta during the1930s still appear to exist, albeit in a differentcontext.

The bulk of Gourou’s fieldwork took placebetween the end of 1931 and the summer of1935. The alluvial plain of the Red River Deltathen comprised of more than 8,000 villages,the habitat of about 6.5 million peasants,spread out on a surface of about 15,000 km2

and relatively accessible by road. Being a paidofficial of the colonial school system (Gouroutaught at the prestigious Lycée Albert Sarrautin Hanoi), he was only able to go to the fieldon Sundays and during school holidays,especially the summer vacation between Juneand September. Another drawback in terms ofscholarship was that living among the localpopulation was simply “not done”, asVietnamese people viewed French scholarsassociated with the lycées and EFEO as partof the colonial state apparatus. Les paysanswas preceded by two publications that Gourouproduced for the colonial government:L’Indochine française (1929), written for the4th Scientific Congress of the Pacific held inJava in 1929, and Le Tonkin (1931), occasionedby the Exposition Coloniale in Paris, whichcan be read as a working draft of the largerstudy of the delta that was to follow.

Recent commentators have shown howRobequain and Gourou extended and adaptedthe regional paradigm of French geographicalinquiry pioneered by Paul Vidal de la Blacheto colonial settings and conditions (see Claval,1998:98-110; Bréelle, 2002; Bowd & Clayton,2005) – a paradigm characterised by its focuson regional distinctiveness and rural genresde vie (ways of life) and its commitment tofastidious fieldwork. While much can be saidabout such important disciplinary con-siderations, the point at hand is that theyshould not be considered in isolation fromwider colonial dynamics of knowledgeproduction and the consumption of geogra-phical knowledge by French and Vietnamese

audiences. In metropolitan terms, the work ofRobequain and Gourou became part of a space,symbolised by the Exposition Coloniale,“within which various systems ofrepresentation and different discourses on theOther came together to ‘materialize’ exoticcultures” (Norindr, 1996:15). The peasants andlandscapes of northern Vietnam were renderedas real yet exotic, as actors inhabitinglandscapes that were in many ways entirelydifferent from French landscapes. And asPierre Singaravélou (1999) has argued, Frenchscholars worked in a context where their abilityto materialise exotic cultures was deemed tohave important practical and ideologicalimplications for colonial rule.

One way in which Gourou, a nominallyindependent scholar, became important inthese metropolitan and colonial processes ofmaterialisation and exoticisation was throughhis focus on the Vietnamese village, which hedeemed to be the fulcrum of Vietnamese socialand political organisation. Yet the colonialproject during this period was by no meansmonolithic (see Kleinen, 1997). While, inGourou’s hands, the village became animportant locus of scholarship and debate,colonial research did not halt at the villageboundary, nor at the bamboo hedges erectedaround villages in the northern part of Vietnam.It is important to emphasise the diversity of –and, following Pierre Brocheux and DanielHemery (1995; 2001), the ambiguity in – theproduction of French colonial knowledge inIndochina. The distinguished French historianGeorges Boudarel (1976:158-59), for instance,who spent many years in Vietnam, could findno direct connections between ethnographic,sociological and historical-geographicalstudies on the one hand, and the decisions ofthe colonial state on the other. In a strict sense,this claim holds true for the work of Gourou.While Les paysans and L’utilisation du sol enIndochine française (1940) were widely readin France and Indochina, neither work was apolicy study commissioned or used by theFrench colonial administration in any directway. However, the dividing line between such

studies and those written on contract remainedquite thin. The establishment of theAgronomic Office in 1925 and related agenciesof knowledge production, like EFEO, made iteasy for the French colonial government tocull information and direct studies for its ownpurposes (see Brocheux & Hemery, 1995:126-27; Cleary, this issue). During the 1930s and1940s the colonial state also became aware ofincreasing range of research conducted byVietnamese scholars on the scope andcomplexity of rituals and ceremonies. At EFEO,the importance of Vietnamese personnel tocolonial scientific research was evidenced byan increase in the employment of researchassistants, secretaries, archivists andinterpreters or translators of texts.

Such Vietnamese knowledge producers andgo-betweens were attached to the Frencheducated elite of the indigenous populationand, on the face of it, might appear to havebeen important brokers in the power/knowledge relationship sketched by Norindr(1996) and Singaravélou (1999). Vietnameseemployees of EFEO generally enjoyed easieraccess to the countryside than their Frenchcolleagues, and many maintained closecontacts with their native villages. Theore-tically, they had a privileged stake in theapparatus of colonial control. But this imageis somewhat misleading, for as Boudarel(1987:9) recounts, Vietnamese careers werecarefully controlled and curtailed by EFEO;indigenous employees were granted morelowly positions and more limited career optionsthan their French colleagues. Politicalconsiderations also impacted the nature andlimits of academic freedom among the Frenchscholars associated with EFEO. Boudarel(1976:145-52; 1987:15) suggests that theytacitly agreed to a policy of self-censorshipand eschewed open criticism of the colonialventure.

The foundation of the Institute for SocialStudies (Institut Indochinois pour l’Etude del’Homme, IIEH) in Hanoi in 1938 marked a shiftin orientation in colonial knowledge

production towards more specialised ruralfieldwork. Together with EFEO, it embarkedon an important project: to collect customarylaw codes (coutumiers) from Vietnamesevillages, which, in turn, would facilitateadministrative reforms in the countryside.EFEO had gained experience with a similarprogram in the early 1920s when its researcherscollected and published the codes ofVietnam’s ethnic groups and tribes – codesthat had never existed in a written form. Thesewere used as instruments to define thenationhood of the tribes (Salemink, 1999). Thework of the Vietnamese researchers who didthe fieldwork in the villages in the late 1930’sremained unfinished and their notes anddrawings, which are housed in the Han-NomInstitute in Hanoi, remain silent witnesses toan important body of knowledge thatdisappeared into the fog of war and revolutionand now await further study.

As this discussion suggests, EFEO can bedescribed as a research stimulating as well asintellectually disciplining institution in whichpatron-client relationships dominated (seeBourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).The institution was characterised by ahierarchical order that separated French fromVietnamese scholars and aggravated thecolour line between coloniser and colonisedwhich infused France’s colonial endeavour inIndochina. EFEO can also be viewed as apartner in a process of state simplification orcolonial governmentality. Indochina providedno exception to the wider colonial attempt togovern alien lands and indigenous peoplesthrough projects of classification andenumeration – through the delineation andcodification of a few primal units of colonialanalysis and management, such “tribe” and“village” (see Scott, 1996). Institutions likeEFEO and others such as the Association desAmis du Vieux Hue (Association of Friends ofthe Old City of Hue) and Société des EtudesIndochinoises de Saigon (SEIS) were directlyimplicated in this process in Southeast Asia.As EFEO personnel wrote about the Viet-namese past, they shared in what, in a wider

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colonial register, has been viewed as “theinvention” of Vietnamese tradition (Hobsbawm& Ranger, 1983).

Colonial developments in Indochina duringthe 1930s bring these connections betweenknowledge and power into vivid relief. Frenchcolonial policy on agricultural developmentbecame more hotly debated around 1930, whenthe world economic crisis hit Indochina andVietnamese nationalism threatened the colonialstate with episodes of urban and rural unrest.As Daniel Hemery (1977:11-12) has shown, thecolonial government took the question ofagrarian poverty seriously and admitted thatsome of the causes of political turmoil lay inthe growing polarity within the countrysidebetween landlords and peasants. Frenchcolonial scholarship, including geographicalworks like Gourou’s, was produced, read anddebated in this light. For example, the colonialagronomist Yves Henry produced a hugeinventory of land use and control entitledL’Economie agricole de l’Indochine (1932).His survey was conducted during a period ofserious social unrest, which led to the qualityof his work being questioned. Gourou(1936a:357), for example, suggested thatHenry’s surveys provided “a very approximateview of reality” and later scholars (e.g. Ngo,1973; Murray, 1980) have warned against theextensive use of Henry’s work. Yet Henryprovided a timely analysis of agrariandynamics that remained obscure to the colonialadministrations in northern and southernVietnam and also points to France’sdetermination at this juncture to discern thematerial roots of social and political unrest.

France’s Popular Front Government (1936-37) endeavoured to put serious social reformsinto effect. Money and time proved to be majorobstacles, allowing metropolitan policies andvested interests of influential sectors ofFrench society to seriously hinder a compre-hensive application of such developmentpolicies (Hemery, 1977:3-35; Marr, 1981:24). Themodernisation of the technical and scientificinfrastructure of the colony, consequently,

remained under-developed. Yet we should notlose sight of the increasingly development-minded nature of French colonial policy duringthis period and its articulation with studieslike Henry’s.

Gourou gives us another example of howmetropolitan concerns and colonial anxietiesover the direction of French colonial rule duringthe 1930s became entangled with a set ofostensibly scholarly concerns. As the head ofthe Agronomic Office, Yves Henry appearedas an expert witness for a special criminal courtset up to investigate the anti-colonial andnationalist Nghe-Tinh rebellion of 1930-31.Whether or not Gourou had worked in theNghe-Tinh region of north central Vietnam atthe time of the rebellion is not clear, nor isthere any indication that he was involved inthe activities of the criminal court. Upon hisreturn to France in 1936, however, Gourou wasasked to assist the Guernut Commission(named after Henri Guernut, Minister ofNational Education in the Blum Cabinet), whichwas set up by the Popular Front Governmentto deal with criticisms of French colonial rule(See Kleinen, 1988; Hérody, 2004). In a lengthyreport, Gourou spelt out the “pathological”demographic situation of the Tonkin Delta, atthe time one of the “most densely populatedagricultural areas in the world”.1 The documentreads like a development cooperationprogramme. Gourou stresses the need formodernising the agricultural base of the northernVietnamese economy through improvedagricultural techniques and sketched proposalsfor land reform and for the development of villagehandicrafts and small-scale industry. Most ofthese proposals remained dead words, however,largely because of the short time in which theCommission was able to do its work. By March1937 the Commission was already curbedfinancially and, subsequently, disbanded alongwith the Popular Front itself.

Gourou also touched upon questions ofcolonial administration and development inLes paysans, but did so in more guarded, andin some respects ambivalent, terms. He

describes the reconstruction of the Tonkinlandscape by the French as a“contamination”; Catholic churches, forexample, are depicted as “strange elements inthe surrounding countryside” (Gourou,1936a:567). For Gourou, the Tonkin landscaperepresented “the perfect bond establishedbetween man and nature…. Outside this [stateof affairs], there is only disorder and despair”(p. 575). Modern school buildings wereerected without much understanding for thisenvironment, he wrote, though he saw thereformed indigenous school system andFrench medical provision as French gifts tothe Tonkin peasants. Gourou favouredmoderate land reform, but limits hisassessment to a slowdown in the expansionof large grants and holdings (the so-calledconcessions). He touches on the severaltaxation measures that the French took tofinance their colonial enterprise and deploredFrance’s monopolies on salt and alcohol(surprisingly, he did not deal with opium). Forthe most part, however, and as Gavin Bowdand Daniel Clayton (2003) have argued,nowhere in his writings can we find asystematic concern with French colonisation.In this regard Gourou differed from hiscontemporary René Dumont (1995:xxxiv), whohad witnessed the bloody reverberations ofthe nationalist uprising in the provincial townof Yen Bai near Hanoi, and, some 40 years laterat an anti-Vietnam War conference in NewYork, suggested that “the first day of the Indo-China war [was] 6th of February 1930, and Iwas against war made by the French” (see alsoBruneau, 2000).2 Gourou’s political position atthis juncture was much more ambivalent andhe subsequent shirked discussion of the warin Vietnam (see Dupont, 2000); even at itsheight in 1972 his colleagues and admirers didnot ever mention the war (Barrère et al., 1972).

Direct criticism of the colonial state is nearlyabsent in Gourou’s work (see Gourou,1936a:267-68, 572-73). In Les paysans helargely repeats what he wrote in 1931 in LeTonkin about “the generous character of theFrench protectorate of Tonkin” (Gourou,

1931:347). At the height of the First IndochinaWar (1946-55) he was still convinced of theblessings of colonial leadership, proposingFrance as the sole and natural arbiter of anIndochinese federation (see Gourou, 1947;Bowd & Clayton, 2005; Bruneau, this issue).But what Gourou did do, and what impressedVietnamese scholars, was comment incisivelyon the importance and venality of the villageelites. As Popkin (1979:183) has remarked,Gourou “admired the way that Vietnamesepeasants were integrated into their villages”.There was “a strict tyranny” at work in thevillages, Gourou (1936a: 577) argued, but “thepeasant finds in village life powerful motivesof his interest: ambition, intrigue, the taste ofpower, religious sentiment, all these serve hisappetite sufficiently; thanks to the intense andwell organised village life, the peasant is morethan a miserable and ill-fed serf” (p. 575). “Thishard-working peasantry” represents a“balanced and sensible civilization” (p. 578).

In a footnote, Gourou (1936a:272) showsthat he was cognisant of the colonialimplications of his work:

It is clear that the Annamese villagerepresents for the government an easyand simple “governing machine”: itgoverns itself; it is responsible for thepayments of the taxes based onsolidarity and its task to upholdauthority is very limited; on the otherside the intrigues and rivalries of theparties concerned enable the mandarinsalways to be informed about whathappens in the commune and tointervene in case when the communemight become the place of suspectturbulence.

Altering the village, he argued, “would deprivethe peasants of what little happiness they had”(Gourou, 1936a:577). This did not necessarilymean that he saw the corporate village as aharmonious community. In passages in Lespaysans that borrow from the pro-Frenchjournalist and writer Nguyen Van Vinh, Gourou

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(1936a:269-72) dwells on institutionalisedcompetition and opposition within the village,and inter-elite conflict.3 Another journalist andwriter, Ngo Tat To, whose writings Gouroumust have known, attacked what he called “thesombre receptacle of rotten customs andmonstrous and barbaric traditions behind thebamboo hedge” (cited in Boudarel, 1991:89).The manipulation of land allotments, taxes andregistrations by village elites, the main topicsof his Tap an cai dinh (Deliberations in theCommunal House) and Viec lang (Affairs ofthe Village) published in 1939 and 1940respectively (Ngo Tat To, 1977: 143-208, 209-304), were concerns also shared by his one-time colleague at EFEO, Nguyen Van Huyen.Although Gourou does not say so directly, itappears that these Vietnamese writers wereinstrumental in convincing him of the need totake the village seriously and, importantly, notto romanticise its timeless qualities. Heregretted that EFEO had neglected the studyof village customs (Gourou, 1936a:264), but atthe same time brought an air of exoticism tothis discussion by representing the strengthsand weaknesses of the Vietnamese villagesystem as essentially Vietnamese and placingthe material and psychological aspects ofcolonial incursion in the background. It wasGourou’s contemporary and friend, Paul Mus(1949), who went on to popularise the viewthat the (northern) Vietnamese village was thebasic unit of Vietnamese society, a unit fromwhich the Vietnamese derived their socialcharacteristics and revolutionary fervour. Butthis idea stems from Gourou, and Musrecorded his intellectual debt to him by quotinghim as an expert on village affairs.

Gourou also introduced two furtherconcepts that are still superb instruments withwhich to understand the forces of the currentmarket liberalisation in northern Vietnam. Inhis description of why handicraft villages wentin for rigid specialisation, he raised thequestion of “symbiotic village relationships”and “monopolies of specialisation” (1936a:575-84). Gourou felt that villages resorted to“tradition” as a means of monopolising the

practice of certain handicrafts through a strictdivision of labour between villages in order tokeep those skills alive by strictly assigning toparticular communities (Abrami, 1995).

In Les paysans, Gourou stressed theecological adaptation of northern Vietnameserice farmers to their environment, and hereinlies the sum of the elements of the paradigm of“tropical geography” that Gourou went on tobuild and tower over at Collège de France. Hewas more concerned with the influence ofinternal factors such as history, cultureenvironment and civilisation than with externalinfluences such as colonialism. His postwarfocus on the landscape-producing capacityand strategies (techniques d’encadrement) ofthe peoples in the tropics is a case in point, forthis concept and methodology minimises theinfluence of colonialism and state intervention.Gourou’s paradigm came under attack duringthe 1970s by French academics (includinggeographers) who called themselves“tiermondistes” (“thirdworldists”) andfavoured more radical approaches (many ofthem Marxist) to issues of development andsocial change (see Bruneau & Dory, 1994;Raison, this issue).4 More recently, Bowd andClayton (2003:163) fuelled debate aboutGourou’s fieldwork in the delta by introducingDavid Arnold’s concept of tropicality andregarding Gourou’s representation of the RedRiver Delta as a “multifaceted space ofknowledge that incorporated ideas, expe-riences and representations from geography,Orientalism, colonialism and tropicality”. Bowd& Clayton (2005) also see in Gourou’sfieldwork the seeds of a longer-term scholarlyproject that rendered tropicality as ageographical science of othering that fusedscience and symbolism, and obfuscated therole that colonialism played in the“development” of the tropics (also see Frenkel,2002; Bankoff, 2003).

The point that I wish to labour here is thatGourou’s construction of the Tonkin Delta wasthe product of a particular author at a particulartime, in a particular place. But, implicit in this

critical discussion, to which I now turn, is thenotion that out of the power-laden entangle-ments of colonialism (in which Gourouparticipated) came a body of knowledge andset of connections with Vietnamese scholarsthat has had a more enduring significance. Thetopicality of Gourou’s work lies not just in whatit says about the relationship betweengeography, colonialism and tropicality inIndochina, but also in his open and cleardevotion to the Vietnamese peasants hestudied. At one level, his methodologicalapproach was akin to the modernanthropological quest to render nativeinformants as objects of analysis along thetemporal and spatial axes of othering describedby many postcolonial scholars. Les paysansis replete with the idea that the author (Gourou)is “here and now” and that the “other” (theVietnamese peasant) exists in another time;that the French geographer and his objects ofstudy, by extension the French andVietnamese, belong to different worlds, withinherently different cultural logics (Fabian,1983). Gourou represents the delta from a lofty– elevated and detached, or “scientific” –position: a “human science” that, I amsuggesting, was complicit with Frenchcolonialism. At another level, however, thiscritical positioning of Gourou fails to accountfor his attachment to the people he studied,his connection with his Vietnamese assistants,and the Vietnamese social life of his famouswork. It is to this side of Gourou’s engagementwith Indochina that I now turn.

HOMO ACADEMICUS GOUROUAND HIS VIETNAMESESTUDENTS

French and Vietnamese experts and assistantsprovided Gourou with a wealth of informationfrom district and provincial offices andarchives. Excellent knowledge of the Frenchlanguage enabled many of these Vietnameseassistants to work closely with their French“superiors”, whose mastering of the Vietna-mese language was comparatively lower. It was

with the help of local mandarins that Gouroumanaged to organise a survey to collect datafrom 2,000 villages. Together with a populationcensus, this survey data served as thebackbone of his 1936 study.5 Furthermore, whileGourou had a sufficient knowledge of theVietnamese language, he still relied onVietnamese friends, field assistants and,occasionally, an interpreter who understoodlocal dialects. How extensive his Vietnamesenetwork was is difficult to reconstruct fromhis publications – especially given thatGourou seldom cited the works of Vietnamesescholars.

But we know that Nguyen Van Khoan(1901-70) (Plate 2), who was employed at EFEOat the time Gourou lived in Hanoi, was a closecollaborator. Gourou’s Collège de Francecolleague Paul Mus (1977:19), who in the1930s was an interim director at EFEO, calledKhoan among others his and Gourou’s“workmate”. In 1934 Khoan was appointed asresearch assistant, a position that enabled himto publish in EFEO’s prestigious Bulletin.Khoan taught Gourou Vietnamese, but provedequally valuable as a colleague in the field;his writings on local rituals display his uniqueknowledge of a world that was relativelyinaccessible to outsiders and includes what iscommonly regarded as the best description ofthe Vietnamese institution of the dinh, thecommunal house where villagers worship theguardian spirit and in which the worldly powerof the male notables is ritualised (Nguyen VanKhoan, 1930).6

Nguyen Van Khoan was part of a widernetwork of Vietnamese scholars associatedwith EFEO. He figures in a 1937 photographtogether with two Vietnamese colleagues, NgoTat To and Tran Van Giap (Plate 2), and someFrench members of EFEO, such as thendirector, George Coedes, Madeleine Colani,Victor Goloubew and Louis Bezacier(Clementin-Ojha & Manguin, 2001:137). Andit might be him we see again on a photographtaken around 1955 when EFEOs successor,the Institute for Scientific Research of the

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Orient (Dong Phuong bac co hoc vien; latertransformed into the Committee for Literary,Historical, and Geographical Research, bannghien cuu Van Su Dia), presented itspersonnel. The recovery of voices like Khoan’shelps us to identity a commonality of directionand focus among French and Vietnamesescholars during the colonial period as well asthe hierarchical relations of knowledgeproduction that during the 1930s had keptKhoan’s work in a subordinate position toGourou’s.

Another of Gourou’s collaborators, VoNguyen Giap (b. 1911), the future victoriousgeneral at the battle against the French at DienBien Phu (1953-54), provides us with a differentangle on this French-Vietnamese liaison. Giapworked with Gourou on housing types in

central Vietnam and Gourou used his researchin a pre-dissertation work (Gourou, 1936b).Gourou does not mention Giap’s contributionin this work published in 1936, but perhapsthis has less to do with his authorial tactic ofnot naming or formally acknowledging hisassistants as it does with the fact that Giapwas a former political detainee. Set free onprobation in 1931 and sent to Hanoi, Giapstudied under Gourou at the lycée AlbertSarraut for a baccalauriat métropolitaincomplet, the equivalent of a Bachelor degree.7

Gourou remembered him as a particularlyprecocious and inquisitive student who tookextensive notes during his classes on thehistory of European warfare (Bréelle, 2002:199).Giap had organised a clandestine studentsupport network to donate money to theIndochinese Communist Party, and become

Plate 2. Vietnamese personnel of the Institute for Scientific Research of the Orient (DongPhuong bac co hoc vien), Hanoi, 1957-58. Seated are Nguyen Van Huyen (centre), Tran Van

Giap and Nguyen Van Khoan (second and third from left respectively).Photo courtesy of the Institute of Social Sciences library, Hanoi.

involved in student protests in Hue after theunsuccessful Yen Bai uprising, instigated bythe Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Viet NamQuoc Dan Dang). Arrested and sentenced totwo years’ hard labour by the provincial courtof Thua Thien in late 1930, he was freed onprobation in November 19318 and rehabilitatedon 31 January 1935 by Justice Minister BuiBang Doan, whereupon he enrolled at theSchool of Law at the University of Hanoi,graduating with degrees in law (1937) andpolitical economics (1938).7 As Marr (1981:328)describes it, after his pardon in 1935, Giap livedthe life of “a law student, high school teacher,journalist, editor, and a member of theIndochinese Communist Party”.

It is possible that Giap used Gourou’s coverto travel to his native province Quang Binh,north of the imperial capital of Hue in CentralVietnam, during his years on probation. Giaphelped Gourou to collect the data for his“supplementary thesis” in the summer of 1935,for which he used Giap’s fieldnotes anddrawings of houses in several provinces alongthe central coast. Giap’s extensive knowledgeof the countryside enabled him to write VanDe Dan Cay [The Peasant Question] (1937-38) under the penname Van Dinh, with TruongChinh (alias Qua Ninh), the main ideologue ofthe Communist Party (see Truong Chinh & VoNguyen Giap, 1974). Giap also presented acritical report of peasant conditions to JustinGodart, a French government delegate touringIndochina for the Popular Front. Both thisreport and his book reveal Giap’s extensiveknowledge of the living conditions ofVietnamese peasantry, and his indebtednessto Gourou. The Peasant Question would serveas a manifesto for the radical reform of thepolitical and economic life of Vietnam’speasantry and was key to Vietnamesecommunist thinking and planning during the1930s. Vietnam’s struggle for independencewas, after all, decided in the villages, wherethe recruits for Giap’s “people’s army” camefrom and where the power struggle with theFrench armed forces and colonial establish-ment was centred.

Gourou would meet Giap again at the DalatConference, held in 1946 to avert war betweenFrance and Vietnam, and described him as “acommunist negotiator” – signalling the factthat they were no longer teacher and student.The two men met again, privately, in the early1990s. During the four-hour interview I heldwith Gourou at his Brussels home in August1994, he told me that Giap, then in Paris toseek medical treatment, had travelled incognitoto Brussels to see his old professor and thatthey chatted about the past. Gourou and Giapbelonged to different worlds and hadpresented radically different manifestos for thefuture of Indochina/Vietnam at Dalat. Butagain, beyond this fact of difference and theimplication of implacable opposition, these twofamous figures had a bond that exceeded andoutlasted the Indochina War, one that wasarguably important in the young Giap’spolitical trajectory as a communist intellectualand revolutionary. Their minds met over thefigure of the village – albeit for Gourou withthe methodologies of French geography andprofessional accreditation in the background,and for Giap with Marx, Lenin and how tofoment revolutionary struggle in theforeground.

In Les paysans, Gourou does not mentionthe work of Nguyen Van Huyen (1905 [1908]-1975) (Plate 2), but it seems highly unlikelythat these two scholars did not meet. Huyenreceived his education in Hanoi, Montpellierand then Paris, where he was connected withthe Société Asiatique de Paris and had taughtVietnamese at the École des langues Orientalesvivantes between 1932 and 1935 (forbiography, see Nguyen Phuong Ngoc,2004:249-78). Initially devoted to Orientalphilology and history, the Société Asiatiqueand its journal encompassed the disciplinesof the humanities and the social sciences forthe area stretching from the Near East to Japan.In 1934, Huyen submitted his thesis on thecustom of a singing contest between boys andgirls, along with a supplementary thesis onthe Vietnamese stilt house, to the Sorbonne:he was, in fact, the first Vietnamese to receive

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a degree from the Sorbonne and his work gotwide press coverage, including his interviewson radio (e.g. La Depêche des Colonies, 20February; Aube, 21 February; Paris-Midi, 23February; and La République, 24 March 1934).Marcel Mauss (1947:89) quoted his work inthe influential Manuel de Ethnographie. Onhis return to Vietnam in 1935, Huyen taughthistory and geography at the Lycée duProtectorat, which the indigenous eliteattended; in that same year, Gourou left Hanoinever to return.

Huyen’s works surely influenced Gourou’sideas on how the traditional organisation ofthe village acted to impede agriculturalprogress. Unlike Gourou, Huyen acknowled-ged his sensitivity to the works of Vietnameseauthors who were in favour of seriouseconomic and political reforms at the villagelevel, such as Vu Van Hien (1939) and DaoDuy Anh (for his publications see Dinh Luc &Truong Diep Bich, 1996). At the UniversitéIndochinoise (popularly known as Universityof Hanoi), and the newly erected IIEH, Huyentaught courses on the social and religioushistory of Vietnam.9 Travels to his in-laws inLang Son brought him to study the marriagesongs of the Tho minority in that provinceand also alerted him to the threats posed toethnic minorities by colonial rule (Nguyen VanHuyen, 1941). His writings are best summarisedby Le culte des immortels en Annam and Lacivilisation Annamite (Nguyen Van Huyen,1944; 1995), major works that present asociological overview of Vietnamese historyand culture based on the available sources ofresearch by both Vietnamese and Frenchscholars. Heavily empiricist in orientation, hewrote extensively about village tutelary spirits,spirit cults, religious practices, festivals andlocal ceremonies. The village of Yen So, about25 km from Hanoi in the province of Ha Dong,was Huyen’s main site of data collection.Huyen was admitted to EFEO as a languageteacher and temporary assistant at the age of28 and became a permanent member in 1940.In the early 1940s he accepted a politicalposition as a member of the powerless Federal

Council of Indochina, a powerless and littlerespected advisory body for the Governor-General composed of Vietnamese andEuropeans (see Pinto, 1946:58-59;).

Huyen’s scholarly reputation made himeligible for the most respectable educationalpost that members of the academic elite couldaccept: on the Conseil des RecherchesScientifiques de l’Indochine, an advisorybody for the colonial government in mattersof all kinds of scientific research.10 In spite ofthis last function – and being listed in thecolonial who’s who, the Notabilités deL’Indochine in 1945/3? – the revolutionarygovernment invited Huyen to assume overallresponsibility for its scientific institutions, aposition linked to the Ministry of NationalEducation. He became the first director of thenew Institute for Scientific Research of theOrient, the successor of the old EFEO, whichin the 1940s was already renamed HeadInstitute for the Far East (Truong Vien DongBac Co) (Thompson & Adolf, 1947).11 Then inJuly 1947, Huyen accepted the post of Ministerof Education in Ho Chi Minh’s governmentand in this capacity was responsible for theideological struggles among students ofmiddle, high and vocational schools inpreparation for the land reform campaigns ofthe early 1950s (see Ninh, 2002:104, 210; forfurther biographical details, see Nguyen VanHuyen, 1976; 1990; 1996; Phan & Ha, 2000).

At the time Gourou worked in Hanoi, healso must have met two other assistants, bothin EFEO’s ethnological section (Serviceethnologique et paléo-ethnologique), namelyNguyen Van To (1889-1947) and Tran Van Giap(1898-1973). Nguyen Van To was, in the wordsof David Marr (2000:12), “a conservativescholar…. acceptable to radical Vietnamesebecause of his integrity and patriotism”. Hisearly work on Vietnamese traditional art andthe spread of quoc ngu (the romanised formof Vietnamese), which earned him thepresidency of the influential Association forthe Dissemination of Quoc Ngu (Hoi TruyenBa Quoc Ngu), and his prolific writings in

French and Vietnamese journals made him apivotal figure in the Vietnamese intellectualscene in Hanoi. The French colonialgovernment honoured him with an Order ofKnight of the Legion of Honour.12 As an editorof the weekly journal Tri Tan (To Know theNew), published between 1941 and 1945, hepopularised the scholarly writings publishedin EFEO’s Bulletin for a broad readership.Although the bulk of the journal’s articles werecriticised by the influential journalist andhistorian Dao Duy Anh (1904-86) as “not goingback to original sources, failing to subjectdocuments to critical analysis” (cited in Marr,1981:280), the quality of the more scholarlycontributions were judged as praiseworthy,even by modern standards (for more on theTri Tan group, see Marr, 1981:179-80; Ninh,2002:25, 35). After Independence in 1945,Nguyen Van To became Minister of SocialAffairs in Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionarygovernment and, in 1946, Chairman of the FirstAssembly’s Standing Committee; in 1947 hewas killed at the hands of the French. In theobituary carried in 1997 in Xua & Nay (Pastand Present), the leading magazine of theAssociation of Vietnamese Historians, To ispraised “for his publications, his rigorouscommentaries on the work of Vietnamesecolleagues, and even the respect he is said tohave engendered among senior Frenchacademics at EFEO” (cited in Marr, 2000:14).

Unlike To, Tran Van Giap is acknowledgedby Gourou (1936a:127) in a reference on thehistory of Buddhism, but not for hisethnographic contributions. In 1915, Giap wasamong the last of the candidates to sit for thetriennial imperial examinations for mandarinsin Nam Dinh before they were abolished threeyears later. He subsequently went to Francein 1927 to study at various prestigiousinstitutions of linguistic studies and, in 1930defended, two theses (see Tran Van Giap, 1932;1938). Giap served as the scientific assistant(assistant scientifique) in charge of EFEO’sChinese department between 1931 and 1946.During this period he also founded theAssociation for the Dissemination of Quoc

Ngu, which made him a natural ally of theVietminh, and, in 1945, joined the CommunistParty and wrote an official report exposing thecrimes of the French colonialists. In themaquis, he worked for the Ministry ofEducation, a position he left when he joinedthe Committee for Literary, Historical, andGeographical Research. In 1956 he wasinvolved in the discussions about theconstruction of the stages in Vietnam’snational history along Marxist lines, proposingthat slavery covered a long period (Pelley,2002:49). He published occasionally in theInstitute of History’s leading periodical Tapchi Nghien Cuu Lich Su (Journal of HistoricalResearch). It was also Giap who negotiatedwith the then director, Maurice Durand, thetransfer of EFEO as well as the Museum LouisFinot (the future Museum of National History)to the Vietnamese government. In his laterposition as Deputy Director of the Institutefor Research of the Orient, he prepared thegroundwork of his extensive bibliographiccompilation of Chinese and Nom texts writtenby Vietnamese scholars on literature, historyand geography (Tran Van Giap, 1990; also see1996, for his oeuvre). While he did notparticipate in the Vietnamese version of the“Hundred Flowers Campaign” of the 1950s,Giap was, in 2004, posthumously awarded theHo Chi Minh medal for his “greatercontribution to the national cause of socialistconstruction and safeguarding theFatherland”. Nguyen Van Huyen and Dao DuyAnh13 also received this honour posthu-mously.

POSTCOLONIAL VIETNAM:HYBRIDISATION OF COLONIALSCHOLARSHIP?

While the activities of EFEO were halted in1959 by Hanoi’s revolutionary government, inrecent years, the historical participation ofVietnamese scholars both there and at theshort-lived IIEH has occasioned a much milderpostcolonial assessment of the nature andlegacies of French knowledge production than

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has been the case in other formerly colonisedsocialist countries, where the imposition ofWestern or colonial science has been seen aspart of that domination. In Vietnam there hasbeen no blanket rejection of French knowledge.Indeed, it might be argued that Vietnamesescholars were in some ways complicit withFrance’s colonial project. Until 1958, pre-1954books on Indochina were only reluctantlyreprinted with the approval of the Ministry ofCulture. “Balanced” judgement of thescientific legacy of the past was not alwaysupheld, particularly by those historiansconnected to the Institute of History of theDemocratic Republic of Vietnam. After 1959,postcolonial historical debate about theinfluence of French colonialism on Vietnamcentred at the Institute of History and in thepages of its influential periodical, Nghien cuuLich su. Many historians were divided in theiropinions about the value of the archaeological,linguistic, geographical and historical studiesleft by the French. While one view painted theinheritance as “an Augean stable to be cleanedby the waters of a revolutionary Alpheus”(Mac Duong, cited in Evans, 1985:122), othersdefended the groundwork laid by Frenchscholars and their Vietnamese collaborators.At the height of the Vietnam War, the chiefParty historian Tran Huy Lieu14 criticisedRobequain and Gourou for misrepresentingVietnamese history. Specifically, he argued thatthey had sinicised the geography of the RedRiver Delta, much in the same vein as what theFrench historians Henri Maspero and LéonardAurousseau and French Orientalists like EmileGaspardone and Maurice Durand had donefor Vietnamese history (see Boudarel, 1987:16-18).

This debate about the value of Frenchscholarship has waxed and waned over thedecades, and been guided by what PatriciaPelly (2002:43) has dubbed as a “Marxishidiom” – a hybrid Vietnamese Marxist traditionthat has sought to apply some rigid theoreticaland methodological principles to history andother disciplines (also see Marr 1981:313-39).Like Gourou and Robequain before them,

Vietnamese researchers lent a willing hand togovernmental practices based upon arepresentational canon. The analysis of ruralsocioeconomic relations of the pre-revolu-tionary countryside, as Vo Nguyen Giap andTruong Chinh developed it in the 1930s,became a matrix in which class relations wereto be moulded. In the first official publicationsabout the traumatic land reform period (1953-56) the earlier descriptions of Gourou, Henryand Robequain were cast negatively asdepictions of colonial life (see Tran Phuong,1968; Ngo Vinh Long, 1973). During thisperiod, independent research on thecountryside was neither encouraged norextensive. Yet at the 90th anniversary of EFEOin 1992, inaugurating its return to Hanoi,Vietnamese scholars spoke in more positiveterms about the French scholars of the past,although there was no specific mention ofGourou (90 Nam, 1995).

As Vietnamese and foreign researchers (likemyself) have returned to rural field researchover the last two decades, appreciation ofGourou has come full circle. There are now aplethora of new village monographs and arenewed interest in the Vietnamese country-side and peasantry. It is this return to the fieldthat has prompted Gourou’s return to thescholarly spotlight once more. Nearly everyrecent work on Vietnamese rural society that Iknow of quotes – often chapter and verse –from the few human geographers who collecteddata more than 70 years ago. The focus on thevillage community, which in Gourou’s handsbore some essentialist traits, has become moreoriented towards issues of migration andmobility, and more multidisciplinary projectsstress the importance of the study of therelationship between humans and their naturalenvironment (Papin & Tessier, 2002). Thetropicality and Orientalism of these earlierworks is not contested. Vietnamese geogra-phers working today seem not to bother abouttheir discipline’s colonial heritage. Vietnam’sleading geographer, Le Ba Thao (1923-2001),has used Gourou’s work as a seeminglyunproblematic source of knowledge. “Man

has step by step turned the Red River Deltainto a big granary”, and “has lived harmo-niously with nature and has known how toput it to avail”, he writes, in the Englishtranslation of his Vietnam: pays et régionsgéographiques (Le Ba Thao, 1997:324). ForThao, village society represents a timelesssocial organism: “The basic unit in the socialorganization in the Red River Delta is alwaysthe villages and the communes. This is a tightorganization, it is more or less autonomous(the king’s rule is behind the village’s custom),the villagers are bound by clannish relations,ritual relations, communal relations” (Le BaThao, 1997:327). Here Gourou’s echo isunmistakeable, and this image of thetraditional village is endlessly perpetuated bymany contemporary Vietnamese historians andgeographers (e.g. Nguyen Khac Vien, 1993;Phan Huy Le et al., 1993).

With the recent translation of Gourou’s(2003) magnum opus a larger Vietnameseaudience will finally become acquainted withthe details of his work. While reviews of thistext have not yet appeared, the Association ofVietnamese Historians’ magazine Xua & Nayhad recently hailed French researchers likeGourou as “sincere of scientific purpose andengaged in path-breaking work of significanceto later generations of scholars in independentVietnam” (cited in Marr, 2000:6). No longer arescholars like Gourou viewed through strictlynationalist-communist lenses as enemyimperialists. Because the Red River Delta isaccorded a privileged place in the annals ofVietnamese history, its main investigator, PierreGourou, has became the “pioneer ofVietnamese rural studies… whose work hasnot lost its originality and actuality” (Dao TheTuan, 2004:23-24).

With respect to Gourou and his work onIndochina, the term “tropicality” can be seenas a technical one that captures hisgeographical interest in the specificity oftropical climate, topography and vegetation –as a term that is perhaps less sinister thanothers in this Special Issue may make out. To

be sure, Gourou was part of a dominantWestern discourse that “orientalised” – orperhaps even “tropicalised” – his objects ofstudy. But as some (Bréelle, 2002:243; Bowd& Clayton, 2005) have argued, Gourou alsorepresented the Far East and the tropical worldwith humanistic, poetic and idealisticconceptions and images. Since overpopu-lation was the key problem facing the Red RiverDelta, the colonial project was doomed to failor at least it would have a limited impact upondevelopment. In this regard Gourou differedprofoundly from his contemporary Robequain,who adapted Vidalian geography to the Frenchcolonial project. Gourou’s tropicality waslinked to the power of a discursive intellectualformation that sustained a regime of truthduring and after the French colonial period.More than anyone, Gourou was aware of thetopicality of his subject: the complex humangeography of the tropics and the challenges itposed to both Western and “tropical” peoples.He had a keen sense of the otherness of thetropical world, yet, in my reading of much ofhis work at least, he did not define suchotherness as completely alien to the northerntemperate zone (Arnold, 1996:6). Nor did hedeny the Vietnamese peasants their ownhistory or geography. In his 1936 study Lepaysans, Gourou was ultimately concernedwith the dilemmas posed by the particulargeography of the Tonkin Delta – with humangeography in its purest sense.

ENDNOTES

1 With respect to the montagnard population, theGuernut Commission seemed to have had more success(see Salemink, 1999:262-63).

2 In 1933, Andrée Viollis’ famous notes on theFrench use of torture in Indochina in the aftermathof the Nghe-Tinh uprisings (1930-31) were publishedby the Catholic magazine l’Esprit.

3 Nguyen Van Vinh (1882-1936) (aka Tan Nam Tu)was an enthusiastic populariser of the national scriptquoc ngu, who in 1912, together with the Frenchpublisher F.H. Schneider, founded Dong Duong TapChi (Journal de l’Indochine), a quoc ngu newspaperthat encouraged modernisation along French lines.As a member of the Consultative Assembly for North

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Vietnam, Vinh picked on the theme of thereorganisation of village administration, for whichhis poor peasant background afforded him aconsiderable insider’s knowledge of village life innorthern Vietnam (Marr, 1981:116-17, 151-52;Jamieson, 1993:65-69, 71-80). After Independencein 1945, Vinh was denounced as a “francophileassimilationist”, but nowadays his translations ofFrench classics and his zeal to promote Vietnamesejournalism (in quoc ngu) are lauded (see also Goscha,2001:319-46).

4 Gourou’s rigorous defence of fieldwork, however,did not go unnoticed by his colleagues and admirers,which partly explains why the University of Nijmegenhonoured him with a doctorate honoris causa in 1988.

5 Except [Apart from?] Le Travail [significance?],there were other journals like Nam Phong (SouthernWinds/Ethos Journal) and L’Annam Nouveau (NewAnnam) that regularly published stories with a socialbackground. For more on publishing activities in thecolonial setting see Marr (1981:44-53).

6 Nguyen Van Khoan’s research focused on theceremonial aspects of the dinh, its associated buildingsand religious objects, though not discussing the socialsignificance of this institution, which over the yearsled to an involution of village rituals, including thecostly custom of banqueting.

7 Gouvernement General, dossier 53.447, ‘Reportby French Secret Police on political prisoner VoNguyen Giap, 1938’, CAOM.

8 Résident Supérieur d’Annam, dossier 898, ‘Letterfrom Resident Superieur to Governor Generalregarding poltical prisoners in central Vietnam,1938’, CAOM.

9 Other topics of courses and conferences focusedon tattoos, the caste-like differentiation amongvillage elites, funerary customs, name-giving practicesof the royal family, indigenous law and Taoist cultsvenerating immortal beings.

10 Members of the Council included Leopold-MichelCadière, Pierre Coedes and Louis Malleret; theVietnamese members were Hoang Xuan Han, laterthe Minister of Education in the Tran Trong Kimgovernment, Phan Quynh, later the Minister ofInterior in the same government, Ngo Dinh Nhu,brother of later President Ngo Dinh Diem, and VuVan Hien, a lawyer.

11 Today EFEO has reinstalled an office under thename Vien Vien Dong Bac Co Phap tai Hanoi (TheFrench School of Far Eastern Studies in Hanoi).

12 Together with Nguyen Van Huyen and Tran VanGiap, Nguyen Van To also figures in the 1945/3?

Notabilités de l’Indochine. The Tri Tan group wascharacterised by Truong Chinh as composed of“feudalist intellectuals”, who, as Ninh (2002:35) putsit, “were inclined to nationalization but because theylooked to the past they were hostile to science andthe masses”.

13 Order 16-LCT/HDNN, Chairman of the StateCouncil, November 2000. Dao Duy Anh was initiallyinvolved in the the 1950s “Hundred FlowersCampaign” – which in Vietnam was officially knownas the Nhan-van Giai-pham affair, after two literaryjournals of the time – but had issued a statement ofself-criticism in the People’s Daily of 21 May 1958(see Ninh, 2002:159).

14 Marr (2000) remembers Tran Huy Lieu’s courageouspersonal position in the Hundred Flowers Campaign.In France, Yves Lacoste (1976) had pointed to theabuse of Gourou’s thesis for the war effort in Vietnam,but later apologised for this “blunder and injustice”(Gourou et al. 1984:51).

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