Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. viii, 192 pp. (Figures.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3568-2.
Village quan họ singers in Vietnam’s Bắc Ninh province say that their songs “rise up and out of the belly” (64). The singers, who sing in pairs (hát đôi), appear to be whispering to each other, and their performances involve minimal movement. But their voices loudly resonate as they “play an instrument in the throat” (57). Their bodies become infused with stoic energy, fueled by sentiment, and the singers would say that they “did not know how to get tired” (63).
As Lauren Meeker shows in this compelling ethnography, the songs performed in the villages of Bắc Ninh, where quan họ is said to have originated, are not something one simply goes to “watch.” Building from fieldwork in Diềm village, the book details the fascinating social dynamics of quan họin the village setting, showing how singers, gathered in partner groups called bọn, would engage in ritualized exchanges of song with groups from other villages with which they had established friendship relations. In this way, the book not only provides a clear and detailed analysis of one of Vietnam’s most important styles of folk song, but it also depicts the larger “soundscape” of quan họ, in which cultural performances express, produce and reproduce social relations at both the village and inter-village levels (18–20).
But these soundscapes are not confined to Bắc Ninh. The book documents how this musical style has been an object of national attention by Vietnamese folklorists, ethnologists, intellectuals and culture workers ever since Ho Chi Minh declared independence from France in 1945. In 2009, furthermore, UNESCO registered quan họ as an element of “intangible cultural heritage.” Thus, in addition to offering a detailed study of Bắc Ninh, the book also shows how quan họ is appropriated and heralded as a part of Vietnamese national heritage and national character. Quan họ has been updated, revised and “corrected” by experts or culture workers from Hanoi (only 30 kilometres away) who transformed the music to make it harmonize with various historically situated agendas, ranging from socialist projects of egalitarianism in the 1950s, to the exaltation of heroic struggle and unity of the war years, to more recent efforts to capitalize on the potential “value” of cultural heritage and branding in the post-reform era.
For the purposes of nationalism, part of the allure of quan họ stems from the very fact that it is deeply local. While this might seem like a contradiction, Meeker develops compelling arguments about the way heritage in twentieth-century Vietnam speaks in the universalizing idioms of the state, all while national rhetoric claims to build on diverse local practices as sources of authenticity. Both local singers and national folklore experts alike will commonly assert that people from Bắc Ninh have a special capacity to embody the music, and Meeker’s evocative ethnographic discussion of “the way of practicing” (lối chơi) quan họ in Diềm village help explain some of the logic behind such assertions. The book’s clear explanations of quan họ performances, coupled with carefully chosen and precise ethnographic details, shows how the situated, embodied and relational practices of village-based performance tightly integrate this style of folk song into a complex set of social relations. As such, it is hard to imagine how quan họ could be performed outside of this web of social relations. But this is the magic of nationalist heritage, as it transforms diversity into a source of unity. As Meeker shows, the emergence of a professional, staged, style of “new quan họ” after 1969 encouraged professional singers to transcend the local context and present quan họ as part of a national repertoire. In the process, they simultaneously elevated and transformed many of the attributes of village quan họ. What emerges is a distinct set of differences between new and old-style quan họ. Where old-style quan họ is rooted in the village, new-style quan họ is performed on a stage and can be broadcast anywhere. The old style is meant to be listened to, and is performed by sentimental, slow moving, often elderly, coy and drably dressed members of a parochial but sentimental rural society symbolically associated with the premodern past. The new style, by contrast, is meant to be watched, and the performers are theatrical, full of stylized movements, often young, flirtatious, colourfully dressed citizens of a gregarious national society made modern by a commitment to preserving their national heritage for the future.
It would appear from these strings of difference that the new and the old styles of quan họ are irreconcilable opposites. But Meeker shows how these binary oppositions are in fact mutually entangled with each other in a series of productive tensions that are not so much contradictory as generative. A local, “authentic” old-style quan họ rooted in Bắc Ninh is not undermined by the development of a national “new-style” quan họ. Instead, Bắc Ninh’s authenticity as the centre of quan họ is reinforced by the nationalist impulse to find local cultural essences, even as those imperatives themselves transform the conditions within which that authenticity is produced. In developing this argument, Meeker goes a long way in showing how the sounds of quan họ do different things for villagers, young and old, yesterday and today, than they do or did for revolutionary cadres and ideologues of the past, or for modern-day government officials, scholars, media companies, culture departments and international agencies. To see this required going, as Meeker’s informants always insisted, to Bắc Ninh. But in going there, she also shows what happens when the sounds of quan họ rise up and out of the belly of Bắc Ninh to be broadcast across the nation, and inscribed in the records of UNESCO.
Erik Harms
Yale University, New Haven, USA
pp. 356-357