“Draft:Funeral rites in Vietnam”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Funeral, namely the manner in which the body is disposed of, is a kind of objective social phenomenon that is determined by human ideology, which belongs to the province of folk customs. Funeral rites in Vietnam are a complex of various cultures in the social practices related to death. It covers physical objects, beliefs, ethics, and morality, which has extended to the formation of the concept of death, funeral customs, death anniversaries, funeral businesses, and other related practices.

Performance of a funeral differs according to the social conditions and historical periods. Funeral customs and folk beliefs combined to form a cultural system of the funeral in Vietnam; at the same time, these ideas have been reconstructed in the context of social transformation and the Communist’s cultural reform, bringing on changes of cultural patterns in the category of traditional Vietnamese culture.

Overview

Funeral rites in Vietnam present a strong feature of diversity, in which ritual practices vary significantly in different communities. Some are attributed to deep-rooted socio-geographical differences that are preexisted before the Communist revolution, some are because of the differing acceptance of the state’s reform on funeral rites imposed in the second half of 1954, and others are related to the rapid economic development of Vietnam in recent years.

Works of filial piety

A funeral is an emotionally powerful practice in Vietnam, in which dutiful mores serve central. This has long been the case with Kinh’s funeral ritual practices, which are generally displayed as holding a series of rituals appropriately and adequately as well as subsequent veneration such as the annual ceremony of death anniversary, so as to send the deceased to the “other world” (the gioi khac)^[1].

In Vietnam, the dead are closely intertwined with the world of the living. For many Vietnamese, death is a substantial change from a temporal body into a part of the immortal ancestral spirit^[2]. However, the actions of the living determine how the spirit would exist. The cultural implication of funeral rites in Vietnam is built with the concept of filial piety, in which the performance of a funeral becomes a critical criterion of the definition of a dutiful daughter or son. Children are responsible for a morally-endorsed funeral that displays their piety. A less perfect funeral rite can be totally regarded as a failure of morality and will inevitably face critics and censures from their relatives and acquaintance. At the same time, it would be regarded as disrespectful and morally-offended for the family members of the deceased to get married during the first several years after the death of loved ones, or even to attend any celebratory events that are discordant with the grief of the death^[3].

Since the spirit will be immortal after death, for Kinh, the deceased are assumed to live a similar life to the living, which requires the living to provide constantly the souls of their dead relatives with all kinds of food and materials that guarantee the dead a comfortable and adequately fed and clothed in the other world. To avoid a socially-unaccepted, morally-inappropriate funeral rite, the living are desperate enough to fulfill their moral obligations by enlarging the choices of funerary objects and making them increasingly extravagant. In this context, the practice of offering the deceased with objects is developed, with a wide range of modern life products made of paper are created. Motorcycles, cars, mobile phones, and even the US dollar have emerged in rituals; by burning them, the smoke carries these items to the world where the dead live^[4].

Death

In Vietnam, the secular world goes parallel with the afterworld: those who are alive build a close reciprocity with the deceased, both spiritually and materially. The importance of death is explicit in Vietnamese society. “In Vietnam, it is important to be born and it is important to die.” Doan Van Thuyen, a Vietnamese geomancer said, “maybe it is even more important to die. Just as you want to have a smooth delivery at birth, you want to have a peaceful rest at death^[5].”

In essence, funeral rites remain in the province of family. For Kinh, the end of the life story is supposed to be at one’s home; in an ideal and peaceful way, the soul will rest in peace in the familiar environment, it is also convenient for a series of subsequent funeral rites to be held in the household. In the case of someone who died outside, it is unacceptable to bring the coffin back to home; as a consequence, the funeral is compelled to be held outside. Once someone died, several things are first required to be done by the family: prepare a coffin, clean the body, and lay the body into the coffin. Besides, it is also the family members’ responsibility to build an altar behind the coffin on which an urn with incense sticks burning and a picture of the deceased are placed.

Mourning

With the rapid development of the society, the funeral rites in Vietnam has shown a trend in which the process of the funeral is increasingly complicated. In addition to the complex moral conception and folk customs, the changes of culture and sociological environment have caused the change of funeral rites. In general, funeral rites in Vietnam present a kind of multi-tiered spiritual need, including the demands of sentiment, belief, social relations, and cultural identity.

Distribution of the mourning headband

After settling down the deceased’s affairs, the next step is to distribute the mourning headbands and white mourning dress to junior family members according to genealogy (With regards to the colors of headbands, different communities may have accordingly different definitions. Some communities regard the color as a demonstration of one’s genealogical relation with the deceased. In other cases, relatives and other condolence callers would bring their own headbands to the funeral).

Phung vieng

Phung vieng, which means visiting the family of the dead and sending condolences and comfort with gifts, serves as the first public displayed rite of death. Before the Communist reform, people lighted firecrackers and howled and cried to spread the news of death. After firecrackers were banned in Vietnam, people rely on the sound of wailing. After hearing the bad news, all relatives and friends are expected to visit the deceased family and express their condolences on death and provide help.

In rural communities, the mourners usually bring incense sticks and food to the deceased home. For Vietnamese, mourning is not only a symbolic ritual and a series of formal etiquette, but also a practice of sharing grief with family members of the deceased. When mourners arrive, they are expected to linguistically send their grief of the death and their willingness to divide the sorrow (chia buon) of the family. Malarney^[6] argues that this action epitomizes the social ideals behind funerals that the funeral is an attempt to soothe the living. Kinh perceive an appropriate and satisfying funeral the one in which many mourners attend. It serves as both a public presentation of the esteem and the regret to the deceased, but also helps relieve the family from the tremendous sadness.

According to Malarney^[7], the act of food gifts is another significant symbolic element of funeral rites in Vietnam. During phung vieng, normally, the family would receive all kinds of food and money sent by generous mourners, which will be utilized in the following feast of the funeral. By providing food and help both physically and financially, people are associated with each other as a unified community to share the duty and the costs of the funeral so that the bereaved don’t have to spend too much money on funerals and bear a heavier financial burden, considering the loss of loved ones is devastating enough to the family.

Additional offerings to ghosts

Of all the funeral rites in Vietnam, it is critical and vital to place a tray with lit incense sticks and bowls of rice porridge outside the house. This behavior sheds light on the effects of an unqualified funeral. In Vietnamese beliefs, an imperfect funeral would anger the soul and turn it into an evil ghost (con ma), which will remain in the world and wander around viciously for food and are particularly have to do with inadequately performed funeral rites where they can steal the offerings dedicated to the ancestor of that family. In Vietnam, there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers who sacrificed in war and without any rites to settle them rest in peace; their souls haunt around the living world permanently, trying to find the altars that prepared for them. In this sense the rice porridge serves as an additional offering to ghosts to prevent them from entering the house and disturbing the peaceful rest of the ancestor^[8]^[9].

Funeral procession

A complete funeral procession—which is characterized by endless wailing of the family members—is important in which the mourners accompany the dead from the home to a new world. In most cases, a small palanquin called “death car” (vong xa) with the picture of the dead and an incense urn on it, is at the head of the procession, behind which is the coffin, followed by long lines of mourners. Malarney depicts the detailed process of a procession: "Unlike other guests, who wear their mourning headbands, sons and daughters often wear distinct mourning dress that includes a white tunic made of coarse fibers and special headgear. Daughters wear a peaked cheesecloth cap, and the eldest son a “straw hat” (mu rom), a turbanlike cap usually made of wound straw; he will also carry a mourning staff.^[10]" There are also some cases in which the older son is in charge of lifting the coffin during the procession, while daughters must lie on the ground to symbolically stop the process. These practices are regarded as an expression of filial piety.

Burial

After the funeral preparation, mourning ceremony, and funeral procession, the body will be buried and rest in peace for good. This is the last moment of the dead in this world; as a result, it is usually performed in a serious and sorrowful way. There are a variety of burial customs and rituals in Vietnam for many are derived from different geographical and sociological environments, nonetheless, all of them reflect the worship of the soul.

Funeral feast

Funeral feast is the final step of a complete funeral rite. Dozens of hundreds of guests gather at the house to remember the deceased and express their condolences. In practice, the sad and serious nature of the funeral has been tempered by the scenes of lively conversation among the guests. Holding a feast collectively also reveals another moral function of a funeral in Vietnamese society^[11]. In the perception of the Vietnamese, sentimental (tinh cam) relationship is at the heart of one’s social relations, which endorse a strong sense of unity and reciprocity. Therefore, making contributions like gifts, food, money, or labor to funerals, in fact, show the mourners’ sentimental bond with the deceased family, in which failing to fulfill this kind of moral requirement would do harm to the maintenance of social relations.

As this funeral tradition maintained and continue to go strong, the moral conception of generous reciprocity has evolved into a form of extravagance. The Vietnamese Communist government has defined this reciprocal exchange as a waste of resources and attempted to educate the people to follow an economical and simpler way of mourning. Nonetheless, families all over the country still hold the exchange of gifts in funeral rites in great account that the government’s mobilization and reforms hardly affected them.

Death anniversary

The moral obligation to perform a socially-accepted ceremony to the deceased lasts even after the funeral. A lot of families in Vietnam hold the corresponding rites on the thirty-fifth, forty-ninth, and hundredth day after death, which called the raising up of the soul rite (le sieu hon). More importantly, the family is required to perform a rite of death anniversary, especially in the first and the third year after death. On that day, the family would invite the soul of the dead to return home to accept the offerings. Some communities in northern Vietnam have the tradition of secondary burial in the third year after the death in which the family would exhume the coffin and clean the bones and put them into a small urn for a second time burial. Once finished, people feel that the deceased is eventually live in the other world.

Funeral customs of ethnic minorities

Some ethnic minorities have their own mechanisms for organizing the structure of funeral rites. Luu, Nguyen, Tran, Vi, and Vo's research of the funeral customs of ethnic minorities in Vietnam draws a complete image of the multi-ethnic Vietnamese’s spiritual worlds of the multi-ethnic Vietnamese^[12]. According to the book, Muong believe that one has ninety souls that are scattered throughout the body. After death, they would combine together into a whole ma (soul) and then travel across the universe to the Land of the Dead. In this process, there is a kind of ritual specialist (mo) to lead the soul of the deceased to the eternal destination. For that reason, most of funeral rites in Muong communities rely on the ritual performance of mo.

For Hmong Vietnamese, a complete funeral includes the ghost eviction rite, the funeral visiting rite, the pan-pipe playing rite Khen, the dead-removal rite, the inhuming rite (lowering the coﬃn into the grave), the three-day rice sacrificial rite, the spirit-releasing rite, and the cow ghost worship^[13].

For the Black Thai^[14], funeral rites take place in the forest and are assisted by the whole kinship system. They transport the coffin into the forest and burn the body there. The male descendants would pick up the remaining bones, washing them with wine and placing them into a jar and are buried later. A buffalo is sacrificed to the deceased.

In he Giarai community in the central highlands of Vietnam, after more than a decade of burying the dead, the family would abandon the tomb^[15]. Different from the funeral rites above, Khmer have long followed the tradition of cremation^[16].

Social functions of funeral rites

As far as the study of Vietnamese mortuary culture is concerned, the value of funeral rites that draws academic attention is not merely its role in meeting the physiological requirements, however, its role in social integration. For functionalism, funeral rites tell the stories of a family—both as a network of kinship linked by genealogy, and as the form of the ancestral veneration that lasts from generation to generation—which presents the conceptions deemed crucial to the maintenance of the mainstream norms and orders and hierarchy. For a country like Vietnam in which Confucianism dominates its cultural system, people of different classes, social statuses, and religions all attempt to maintain the Confucian code of ethics—nobility and lowliness, by which the expressions of “death” reveal similar ideology accordingly. Based on such cultural root, intellectuals in Vietnam formed extraordinarily exhaustive disciplines of funeral rites, fostering morality and the inner sense of order and security of its people, legitimatizing the hierarchies of the power structure. The concept of filial piety and moral responsibility in the Vietnamese community, together with the obligatory and compulsory processions and ceremonies, establish a set of socially-accepted practices that is embraced by most of the Vietnamese.

Some researches have indicated the sociality of funeral rites as an occasion for the unity of kinship linked by genealogy and the maintenance of other social relations, and as the form of the ancestral veneration that lasts from generation to generation. Luu, Nguyen, Tran, Vi, and Vo^[17] argue that funeral rites serve as the symbolic and religious practices of freeing the deceased into another world of immateriality, on the one hand, and as a process to help the family through a tough time of mourning and mental suffering on the other. Bennett^[18] argues that traditional funeral rites still play an essential role in contemporary Vietnam society and are served as links between families and communities. Mortuary ceremony is constructive in connecting families and kinship and relieve the grief about the death. More profoundly, funeral rites in Vietnam provide answers to the relationship—both spiritually and materially—between the living and the dead.

Funeral rites become not only a test of the morality of the relatives, but also cohesive practices intertwined with the coexistence and consistency of time and space. Shohet’s^[19] research on the contemporary form of Vietnamese funeral rites—which takes an ethnographical approach to mortuary placards and a variety of inscriptions on them, connecting the commodification of these funerary materials with the personalization of condolences—reveals the social nature of mourning. According to the author, while reflecting the valorization of the Vietnamese funerary tradition, these inscriptions and mortuary banners jog collective sentiments and construct ethical relations at a funerary ceremony, thus serving as prescriptive affordances to regulate mourning in the process of death.

Funeral rites in social transformation

The state’s interests in funeral rituals

Funeral rites have long been a focus of intense interest of the Kinh bureaucrats. Dating back to the first half of the 20th century, a series of regulations on the morally legitimate conventional process of funerals were made by the Ministry of Rites in Vietnam^[20]. For the government, funerals could be employed as an effective cultural mechanism to promote and consolidate official ideology, in which an abstemious perception and the exhibition of filial piety served as the core. A demonstration of filial piety was crucial at both the funeral rites and a series of regular, formal, and ethical commemoratory rituals by virtue of the state’s intention in maintaining harmony and prosperity. By encouraging people to adhere to an ideological-endorsed manner of funerals, the state bounds the public in a hierarchical order of filial piety.

The social function of funerals continued to support the governance of communism, which developed the ideological discourse of funeral rites—which was referred to as the “state functionalism”^[21] by scholars—in consolidating the Communist position in Vietnam society. Similarly, the government attempted to establish a new discourse of rites that would advertise official ideas and values. This long reform campaign—began in 1954 and moved ahead thirty-two years, and profoundly rebuilt all kinds of funeral rites—however, produced some new forms disharmonized with the conventional ideas of funeral rites. With its abandonment in 1986 a lot of previously prohibited ritual practices have enjoyed a revitalization.

The limited success of the cultural reforms was predictable as the state’s unified norm for funeral practices failed to take the cultural diversity of Vietnam and different kinds of local peculiarity into account. What’s more, people objected to the state’s standardization of funeral rites for many of them felt impeded in conducting their moral obligations at the funeral ceremonies, which impinged impersonal on their long-sticking ethics.

Dollarization of ritual currency

In a research of recent situation where the US dollar joss paper has become prevalent in some areas of Vietnam, Kwon^[22] illustrates the significance of money on the funeral rites, in extension, the shift of power relations in the imagined world of the deceased. Kwon argues that the dollarization in Vietnamese ritual economy is less like the derivations of a coherent cultural system than like a break of the hierarchy in the sacred world. The prevalence of Do La in the Vietnamese funeral rites has obscured the bounds between existent domains of values and morality and undermined the social hierarchy built on a fixed social stratification. This process also reveals the power struggles between the masses and the elite and embodies a compelling restructure in the world of spirits, performing as the embourgeoisement of funeral rites against the ruling class.

References

1. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=186 |edition=first}}
2. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=186 |edition=first}}
3. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=189 |edition=first}}
4. ^{{cite journal |last1=Kwon |first1=Heonik |title=The Dollarization of Vietnamese Ghost Money |journal=Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute |date=2008 |volume=13 |page=73-90}}
5. ^{{cite journal |last1=Bennett |first1=Molly |title=Forever Home: Funeral, Burial and the Life After This Life in Hue, Vietnam |journal=Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection |date=2009 |page=793}}
6. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=189 |edition=first}}
7. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=189 |edition=first}}
8. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=189 |edition=first}}
9. ^{{cite book |last1=Taylor |first1=Philip |title=Modernity and Re-enchantment: Religion in Post-revolutionary Vietnam |date=2007 |publisher=Institute of SoutheastAsian Studies |location=Singapore |page=161-193}}
10. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=192 |edition=first}}
11. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=194 |edition=first}}
12. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=197 |edition=first}}
13. ^{{cite journal |last1=Nguyen Thi Song Ha |first1=Thi Song Ha |last2=Ho |first2=Xuan Dinh |title=Rites in the Lifetime of Hmong People |journal=Vietnam Social Sciences |date=2014 |volume=2 |issue=160 |page=61-72}}
14. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=204 |edition=first}}
15. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=208 |edition=first}}
16. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=212 |edition=first}}
17. ^{{cite book |last1=Nguyen |first1=Van Huy |last2=Kendall |first2=Laurel |title=Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |location=California |isbn=0-520-23871-0 |page=197 |edition=first}}
18. ^{{cite journal |last1=Bennett |first1=Molly |title=Forever Home: Funeral, Burial and the Life After This Life in Hue, Vietnam |journal=Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection |date=2009 |page=793}}
19. ^{{cite journal |last1=Shohet |first1=Merav |title=Two Deaths and A Funeral: Ritual Inscriptions’ Affordances For Mourning and Moral Personhood in Vietnam |journal=American Ethnologist |date=2018 |volume=45 |issue=1 |page=60-73}}
20. ^{{cite book |last1=Malarney |first1=Shaun Kingsley |title=Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam |date=2002 |publisher=RoutledgeCurzon |location=London}}
21. ^{{cite journal |last1=Malarney |first1=Shaun Kingsley |title=The Limits of “State Functionalism” and the Reconstruction of Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Northern Vietnam |journal=American Ethnologist |date=1996 |volume=23 |issue=3 |page=540-560}}
22. ^{{cite journal |last1=Kwon |first1=Heonik |title=The Dollarization of Vietnamese Ghost Money |journal=Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute |date=2008 |volume=13 |page=73-90}}