In December 2016, the element titled “Practices related to the Viet beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms” was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Under Vietnam’s socialist government, rituals and festivals related to the beliefs in Mother Goddesses had been prohibited as superstition before the Doi Moi period. Even though these beliefs and related practices were reevaluated and revived as a beautiful tradition, especially after the 1990s, there has been constant debate over whether beliefs in Mother Goddesses can be categorized as superstition. The question here is why Vietnam’s government applied for the inscription of this element while it had not yet concluded the debate. In this article, by considering this question we examine how Vietnam’s government intends to increase control over this element through naming, protecting, and avoiding its transformation. We also demonstrate that the framework for the heritagization of this element has been changed from theaterization to purization as beliefs, so that the government can criticize and prevent stage adaptation or theaterized rituals as an unintended transformation of heritage.

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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.

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