Seminar Series: Abstract

Catechism, Faith, and Practice: a Cultural History of Vietnamese Catholicism, 1600-1780
Nhung, Tuyet Tran - University of Toronto

While the scholarship on Vietnamese Catholicism is relatively rich in examining the influence of missionaries to the area, most works privilege the links between the transmission of the religion and the formal imposition of French imperial power in the area in the late 19th century. What else has been written about Vietnamese Catholicism has been done so from the perspectives of European missionaries, who left a giant trove of documentary evidence now housed in archives in France, Portugal, and the Vatican. This study seeks to disentangle the history of Vietnamese Catholicism from colonialist and nationalist narratives and places it in the context of the daily lives of its believers, everyday women and men in 17th and 18th century Viet Nam. I approach the project from three vantage points: the message and teachings of Catholicism, the sociological foundations of the Church in Viet Nam, and the experiences of the believers.

Between the pages of missionary’s journals, letters to their superiors and loved ones in Europe, and reports to the Vatican, occasionally the voices of the local believers call out.These sources, which were written in either the newly romanized vernacular script (quốc ngữ cổ) or the demotic script (chữ nôm)—a vernacular script that used combinations of Chinese characters to reflect the spoken word, range from letters, testimonies of faith, local inquisition testimonies, ethnographic observations, and devotional pamphlets and morality texts intended to circulate among believers. Individual narratives, as the French and Italian micro-historians remind us, enable us to extrapolate on broader issues in social life, referring to the phenomenon known as “the exceptional normal.” In the manuscripts examined, Catholic believers narrate different stories about faith and adversity, but they share in their ability to allow us to imagine what life might have been like for such people living in seventeenth and eighteenth century Vietnamese society. In reading through these manuscripts, I was interested in how Vietnamese Catholics narrated and understood their experiences in local society.What were their primary concerns and how did they articulate these concerns? How did they define their loyalties within their immediate communities of faith, kin, and location? Did the intended audience of the narrations frame the stories themselves? By examining how Vietnamese Catholics narrated their “ideas, sentiments, and practices,” I hope to explore what kinds of meanings and impacts this faith had on their lives and to provide a preliminary sketch of how believers situated themselves within the prevailing socio-economic structures.

Nhung Tuyet Tran is Canada Research Chair in Southeast Asian History and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Her intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religious practice in Vietnamese society. She is the author of “Gender, Property and the ‘Autonomy Thesis in Southeast Asia’: the Endowment of Local Succession in Early Modern Viet Nam” Journal of Asian Studies (67,1) and is the co-editor (with Tony Reid) of Viêt Nam: Borderless Histories (2006), a collection of revisionist essays on Vietnamese histories. Her major book projects include the first gender history of Viet Nam (in any language), Familial Properties: Gender, State and Society in Early Modern Viet Nam (forthcoming) and is currently working on a cultural history of Vietnamese Catholicism. Tran is committed to public history and has collaborated with (or advised) Vietnamese museums on several projects. Most recently, she worked closely with the Viet Nam Museum of Ethnology’s founding director to design the first ever approved exhibit examining the lives of Vietnamese Catholics, entitled Living through the Sacraments. Tran has organized several international conferences on Vietnamese Studies and is involved in initiatives that seek to bridge the gaps between Vietnamese and Western academia and the power differentials that exist between these groups.