Sacred Scripts: : Writing as Ritual Performance in Northern Vietnam

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This project is an ethnographic study of ritual writing in the Red River Delta of Northern Vietnam, with a focus on Ngưu Sơn Village (a pseudonym), Nam Dinh Province. My colleague Phan Phuong Anh (Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts Studies) and I are investigating how the writing of sacred texts in ritual contexts creates religious and cultural meaning for both the ritual specialists who perform the writing and their clients. We are particularly interested in the motivations and broader socio-cultural meanings behind choice to use either the character script (han nom) or the alphabetic national script (quoc ngu) in ritual practice. We examine whether these different scripts access a different notion of the sacred and also the role ritual practices play in the construction of local identity in rural Vietnam. Our theoretical approach to these questions is to bring together the ethnography of writing, the anthropology of performance, and visual anthropology. We focus on written language in use, as performance, to examine how religious and cultural meaning is created through sacred scripts.

Related publications:

Lauren Meeker & Phan Phương Anh. Reaching for texts: Evidence and ambiguity in narratives of lineage history in a northern Vietnamese village, History and Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2021.1885399 (Online publication on 2/16/21; Hardcopy publication date forthcoming).