Lévi-Strauss Meets the Hùng Kings, or How the Reactionary Ideas of a South Vietnamese Catholic Structuralist Became Mainstream in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

• In Event: Harnessing Foundational Myths: Hùng Kings in Three Vietnams, 1965-2015 - Sponsored by the Vietnam Studies Group

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a scholar in the Republic of Vietnam by the name of Lương Kim Định engaged in a personal crusade to educate his compatriots about the time of the mythical Hùng Kings. A Catholic priest and philosopher, Kim Định was inspired by the ideas of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and sought, in the more than two dozen books that he wrote, to excavate the structure of meaning that had informed the world of the Hùng Kings so that the values of that ancient world could serve as a foundation for the society of his day, and as an alternative to communism.
With the unification of Vietnam in 1975, Kim Định’s work was discredited by the new government as reactionary. While Kim Định has never been officially exonerated, his structural interpretation of the past has essentially gained official acceptance. In the 1990s, the author of a textbook on Vietnamese culture which was widely adopted by universities relied heavily on Kim Định’s structuralist view of the past, albeit without making this intellectual debt explicit. As a result, today many of Kim Định’s ideas have become mainstream knowledge, although few are aware of the origin of these ideas.
Given that Kim Định’s scholarship is not well-known in academia today, this paper will begin by introducing his work and his structuralist interpretation of the Hùng Kings’s world, and will then trace the winding path of his scholarship toward its eventual official acceptance today.

Author

• Liam C. Kelley, University of Hawai'i at Manoa