The Power of the Marginal: Women’s Ritual Power and Social Belonging in Rural Vietnamese Lineages
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The Power of the Marginal: Women’s Ritual Power and Social Belonging in Rural Vietnamese Lineages
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Abstract:
In this paper, we examine women’s ritual power in Ngưu Sơn Village, a rural village in the Red River Delta of Vietnam. We argue that women’s ritual power stems from the contingent and flexible social status that women hold in village life vis-à-vis male power. We understand women’s ritual power to be the assemblage of actions expressed through ritual and narrative performances which enable women to forge lasting social relations among the living and between the living and dead through an ethics of care. Women in Ngưu Sơn use an ethics of care in their ritual performances and narratives of belonging in the community to negotiate the moral ambiguity that arises when structural hierarchies in the lineage conflict with State sanctioned ideas of socialist modernity and gender equality. We discuss women’s participation in two areas of spiritual life: the women’s ritual sacrifice group (tế lễ nữ) and worship of lineages’ potent female ancestors (cô tổ). The women’s sacrifice group is a relatively new addition to the ritual life of the village and demonstrates how women are embedded in broad structures of power and sociality at the village level that cross-cut lineage ties. We examine how women use assertions socialist modernity’s promise of gender equality (bình đằng) and of performance professionalism (chuyên môn) to assert their ritual authority. The second example, the worship of lineage cô tổ, exemplifies the role of marginality in women’s ritual power at the more intimate level of the family and lineage.
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Power of the Marginal.2024_8.5 x 11 flyer Final Digital