From Love Story to Class Consciousness: Subjection of Ethnic Tai in Vietnam

• In Event: 272. Emotional and Intimate Variations: Historicizing and Contextualizing Affect Amid Changing Political Economies in Mainland Southeast Asia, Part 2. Sponsored by the Thailand/Laos/Cambodia Studies Group

Abstract

Ethnic Tai is ranked the third largest ethnic group in Vietnam. Based on the “ethnography of speaking,” I employ ethnographic fieldworks, historical research, and literary studies to focus on a Tai folktale titled Song Chu Son Sao (“advising my lover”), referred as SCSS hereafter. SCSS is original to the Tai. By unknown author, the whole folktale of SCSS was written in Tai Dam script with about 2,000 sentences in verse. It was one of the most popular texts recited by the Tai in special occasions. It is a romantic story of a man and a woman. To Vietnamese government-sponsored ethnologists, however, SCSS shows signs of class consciousness that emerges among the ethnic people themselves. Given that, in the 1960s, the Vietnamese government sponsored scholars to study and translate this story into Vietnamese. An excerpt of SCSS is selected to be thought in a high school textbook teaching school students nowadays. I argue that SCSS is an example of ethnic cultural artifacts that illustrates the “subjection” (Foucault 1978; Butler 1997) of both the Vietnamese state and the ethnic people. Despite implementing its strong cultural assimilation policy, Vietnam has revived and appropriated ethnic cultural practices continuously. This cultural policy is a statecraft appropriating ethnic cultures in order to create ethnic subject. However, the policy demonstrates ethnic people’s subjection to preserve ethnic identity and culture. As a result, this paper will shed new light on understanding of relationships between nation-states and ethnic minorities through the politics of a love story.

Author

• Yukti Mukdawijitra, Thammasat University