Abstract
This study investigates how the collection and study of folklore in socialist Vietnam contributed
to the Communist Party of Vietnamʼs and the governmentʼs cultural policy. It focuses on the Sino-Vietnamese terminology used in the folklore studies of socialist Vietnam and explains their changes in relation to cultural policy. From the end of the 1950s, the collection of folk literature (van hoc dan gian) was promoted in provincial areas because of the Partyʼs mass cultural policy. There, both politicians and scholars recognized that the collection of folk literature could not be separated from the collection of folk arts. This led them to introduce the term van nghe dan gian (VNgDG), a phrase that combines the terms for folk literature and folk arts, to reorganize the collection. In the late 1970s, the Party strengthened its control over the cultural sphere to abolish traces of the “old regimes.” It thought that VNgDG contained many “old” elements that needed to be modified into more appropriate ones. And as China-Vietnam relations critically worsened at the end of the 1970s, VNgDG was finally criticized as being of “no use” because of its Chinese oriented content and methodology. On the other hand, scholars had to highlight the tradition of “Vietnamese culture” in order to confront the “long-lasting Chinese culture,” which led them to approach folklore from a historical perspective. At the same time, some scholars commented that VNgDG had become too “socialized” and emphasized the importance of scientific research on folklore. Consequently, they began to use the new term van hoa dan gian (VHDG), which literally means folk culture, to rejuvenate folklore studies. Currently, after the Law of Cultural Heritage was issued in 2001, the popularization of the concept of “intangible cultural heritage” (di san van hoa phi vat the) has made the status of the term “VHDG” unstable.
