Phi Nguyen Yen
The settlement history of Huế is one of constant demographic shifts, political turmoil, and natural vulnerability. A borderland and battleground during Vietnam’s invasion of Champa Kingdom, the North-South Civil War between two Vietnamese clans Trịnh - Nguyễn, then the Indochina and Vietnam Wars, Huế is essentially a frontier territory and its people one of diaspora. Such postcolonial displacements and coercions have amalgamated in a fabric phantasm of memories, materialized in sacred sites and rituals engaging with the Afterlife: ancestral past, supernatural beings – territorial patrons, and Death. An investigation into locals’ everyday life shows how religious beliefs have created a sacred thread that connected communities throughout the region into a seamlessly consecrated landscape where the living cohabits with the dead, and the natural coexists with the supernatural. Existing artifacts are oftentimes in hybrid forms, related to the present as a part of the community’s shared history and attested to the dialogues and negotiation among different cultures: Việt migrants from the North, Chinese refugees (after the Qing’s conquest of the Ming), defeated Cham indigenous people, Việt imperial rulers, French and American colonial forces. Moreover, they manifest local tactics in the transmission of knowledge and the handling in the ambivalent memories of violence. Using personal field works, archival materials, and other secondary sources, this paper seeks to unravel the interplay among religion, migration, culture, and identity through their spatial manifestations while giving voice to marginalized social groups.
2021
