Searching For Truth In Saigon

The Age

Saturday July 8, 2006

JOEL S. KAHN

This discipline can help promote the essential integrity of other cultures. It also helped Joel S. Kahn understand why a seemingly alien city felt like home.

ONE OF THE GREAT merits of the discipline of classical anthropology was its desire to expose the contingency of our own ways of life by demonstrating that ours are not the only ways of organising human society. Among other things this gave traction to important critiques of modernity and the West, which undermined the apparent naturalness of "our" way of doing things by raising the possibility of alternatives. And by promoting a view of the essential integrity of other cultures, anthropology also played an important role in combating racism and assumptions about the cultural superiority of ruling groups at home and abroad. That anthropology's mission of cultural critique has in recent years come unravelled is, I think, a great pity, particularly in a time of constantly increasing consumption and continually advancing waves of national chauvinism and xenophobia. Demonstrating that "our ways" are neither the only ways, nor necessarily the best ways, would seem to be more important than ever.

How to explain, and perhaps offset this decline of an intellectual project that once captured the imagination of a much broader public has exercised my mind during an anthropological career that has involved journeys to, and encounters in south-east Asia over some three decades. But it wasn't until I made a visit to Vietnam's Saigon - now officially Ho Chi Minh City, but everyone still calls it Saigon - that I experienced these matters at a personal, even emotional level, and, moreover that I came to feel that, in a way that I find almost impossible to describe in purely rational terms, somehow in Saigon I might find a resolution. The best way I can find of describing why I came to feel this way is to say that I came surprisingly quickly to feel at home in what was to me a quite alien city.

It seems even to me rather odd to say that I felt at home in a city I had not previously been to, whose languages I did not speak, whose peoples and spatial layout I did not know. But I can hardly say that I have ever had this sense of being at home elsewhere in South-East Asia, even though I have spent considerably longer periods of time living in villages, towns and cities in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. I know much more of the histories, languages, peoples and socio-spatial topographies of these places than I do of Saigon's. Yet never have I felt such pleasure in simply being in these places as I did in Saigon. And never have I felt in any way at home in them.

Crucially, in Saigon I lacked what most people might see as the main basis for attachment to a particular place, namely primordial - that is ethnic or "blood" - connections to its inhabitants. Yet in a number of ways I felt more at home in Saigon that in places where I do or have had such primordial attachments.

Was it then because Vietnam has come to resemble places that I might more readily call home that I came to feel this way? At least at first sight there are plenty of things familiar to Westerners in Saigon. These include Western fast food outlets, tourist hotels and facilities; shops selling the products of a global consumer society also being sold in Melbourne, London and New York, not to mention Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta; beautifully restored French colonial buildings and broad, tree-lined boulevards; numerous Catholic churches; and of course the even stronger legacy of another Western religion, namely socialism. Vietnam must be the only country in the world where statues of Lenin are still standing. And where else in South-East Asia can one eat baguettes and pate and drink superb coffee in long standing local establishments?.

Yet by no stretch of the imagination can one say that Saigon is just like the places that I might be expected to feel at home in. It was not the familiar things that produced this sense of home. Instead when I try to analyse what it was that produced this feeling, I think that it was because I realised that Saigon more than any other is a place where many of the interconnected chains of people, places, events, ideas and influences that together construct my own personal and intellectual biographies come together and intersect with each other. A strong sense of connectedness rather than familiarity; that is what came over me during my short stay in Saigon.

Such connections may not be all that pleasant to recall. Judging by the reactions of those around me, I was clearly not the only one to come away from the War Remnants Museum profoundly disturbed by the exhibits and photographs of Vietnamese victims of American phosphorus bombs, napalm and Agent Orange.

My generation of Americans and Australians have seen these photographs, have heard of the places, the battles, the events. They are part of the biographies of all of us who lived through those times. But where are the memorials in America and Australia not just to the soldiers on "our side" but to the Vietnamese participants in and victims of war? Were they not part of the events? I had to travel to Saigon to be reminded of this most intimate of connections between Asia and the West.

But my visit uncovered a second and unanticipated set of connections, this time with the peoples among whom I had been conducting anthropological research for just over 30 years.

When I went to study at the London School of Economics, I had determined that I would do research on Vietnam in the admittedly youthful and perhaps naive belief that if only we had a better understanding of that country we might be less inclined to try to conquer it. For obvious reasons extended fieldwork was impossible in Vietnam at the time. So I decided instead to do my fieldwork elsewhere in South-East Asia, first in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra, and subsequently among Malay peoples in Malaysia.

There is a sense, encouraged by the assumptions of classical anthropology, that anthropologists travel while their subjects do not. But over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that the subjects of my research were not cut out for the role of isolated and immobile locals, foils to the globally mobile, "cosmopolitan" anthropologist. No matter how much first colonial, and subsequently postcolonial states in the region have attempted to pin them down to particular national territories and to generate in them a loyalty to individual nation states, the Malay-speaking peoples of insular and peninsular South-East Asia have been just as peripatetic as I - travelling back and forth across the region and beyond in pursuit of livelihood, commercial opportunity, religious enlightenment and reform.

Considering this other world of travel, I have come to see that when we in the West speak of globalisation, we are doing so from a particular perspective which makes the whole world seem like an extension of our own - a receptacle for products with which we were already familiar; a source of immigrants and refugees who, naturally, aspire to come to us; a transnational space which we can access through tourism; and an arena for universalisation of "our" values like liberty, equity and human rights. But there are other global worlds, among them this Malay world of merchants, pilgrims and missionaries of Islamic reform. This world also transcends national boundaries, and its subjects have equally universalising cultural and religious agendas.

Just before leaving for Vietnam I read something that suggested that this Malay-Islamic World might extend all the way to Saigon and, as it turned out, this proved to be accurate. On my second day in the city, accompanied by a lecturer from a local university, I visited several mosques, all close to the centre of the city. One turned out to serve a congregation made up almost entirely of second-generation immigrants from the Indonesian island of Bawaen; at the second I communicated with the elderly Iman entirely in Malay, which he'd had to learn as part of his religious studies. He told me that he even delivers Friday sermons in Malay because so many of his congregation consisted of Malay businessman; at the third I met a missionary from the east Malaysian state of Sabah who apparently makes regular visits to mosques across South-East Asia.

My guide identified himself as an ethnic Cham, a group linguistically and culturally much closer to Malays than to Vietnam's majority Kinh people. He was firmly of the view that the Cham were not just part of, but at least in the past were at the centre of, a Malay world composed of Austronesian-speaking, Muslim peoples in the Philippines, Indochina, Cambodia, southern Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. And this transnational Malay world was more than merely an imaginary one. Instead many ethnic Cham - like their Muslim, Malay-speaking counterparts in Indonesia, Malaysia, southern Thailand and the Philippines - travel, or have in the past travelled, across it to labour, trade, study, evangelise or, in the case of my guide, to attend conferences on Cham-Malay heritage.

Saigon, then, is the site of intersecting connections, and this, not its familiarity, is what struck me so forcefully. Yet no one who has spent time in even the most globalised of Asia's modern cities can be under the illusion that such places are really just like Western cities, or even just like each other. Familiar sights, sounds and experiences there may be. But just like home? Certainly not. This otherness, moreover, is no mere cultural abstraction. It impresses itself on the Western traveller on a day-to-day basis.

So the best account I can give of my sense that in Saigon I might find a resolution to some of the dilemmas of classical anthropology is that there I experienced a powerful sense of connectedness, but also of difference. Saigon makes me think that it might be possible to abandon the anthropological fiction of unconnected objects, and yet still find in accounts from the native point of view the sorts of alternative beliefs and practices so valuable to the anthropological critique of the West.

This is an edited extract from Departure and Arrival, by Joel S. Kahn, published in Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays, edited by Peter Beilharz and Robert Manne, Black Inc, $29.95.