Connecting Places, Constructing Tet. Home, City and the Making of the Lunar New Year in Urban Vietnam

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Connecting places, constructing Tet: Home, city and

the making of the lunar New Year in urban VietnamPatrick McAllister

This paper presents an overview of the main features and nature of Tt, theVietnamese lunar New Year festival, as it is currently experienced in H Ch MinhCity. It outlines a variety of social practices associated with T t and suggests that itis through these that one can identify a festive landscape in the city, within which

a number of diverse places are made into and experienced as meaningful space inthe context of the Tt festival. The emphasis is on how the spatial practices associatedwith the festival constitute the lived experience of Tt by urban residents and on howthis both transforms and connects various sites. Of particular importance here is the

family home and how it is linked to the wider holistic experience of Tt, bringingtogether in a single place sacred and secular, public and private, and the productionand consumption of place, in a social construction that is characterised as aheterotopia.

Introduction

Tt Nguyn n, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, is the most important festiveevent of the Vietnamese calendar,1 closely associated with the countrys history, cul-ture and identity. It has been described as a mega-event, something like a WesternChristmas, New Year, Easter and Thanksgiving rolled into one.2 It touches on manyaspects of Vietnamese life and provides important insights into the nature of contem-porary Vietnamese society and culture. As a calendrical festival, Tt marks the tran-sition between seasons and, as with other such events, is an opportunity to reflect on

Patrick McAllister is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.Correspondence in connection with this paper should be addressed to: [email protected]. I am very grateful to L Hong Anh Thu of Hoa Sen University, H Ch Minh City, who assisted mein the collection of the data on which this paper is based. I am thankful also to Hoa Sen University forsupporting the research on which the paper is based, and to the College of Arts at the University ofCanterbury for providing financial assistance. Thanks also to Nguyn Hunh Thanh Bnh and PhanThi Thanh Thy who carefully introduced me to Tt in 2008 and who have been very helpful ever since.1 Nir Avieli, Vietnamese New Year rice cakes: Iconic festive dishes and contested national identity,Ethnology, 44, 2 (2005): 16787; Nguyn Vn Huy, Tt holidays: Ancestral visits and spring journeys,in Vietnam: Journeys of body, mind and spirit, ed. Nguyn Vn Huy and Laurel Kendall (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2003), pp. 7191; Xun Hin Nguyn, Glutinous rice, kinship and theTt festival in Vietnam, in Kinship and food in South East Asia, ed. Monica Janowski and FionaKerlogue (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2007), p. 248.2 For example, see Huu Ngoc and Barbara Cohen, Tt: The Vietnamese lunar New Year (Hanoi: ThGii, 1997), p. 15.

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 43(1), pp 111132 February 2012.

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the past, to contemplate and renew important social ties, and to anticipate and pre-pare for the future. Existing literature on Tt is largely descriptive and it has been thesubject of very little modern research and analysis although the importance of festivalsand public rituals for an understanding of contemporary Vietnamese society and cul-

ture is well established.

3

Much of the literature describes Tt in terms of the

tra-ditions associated with it, often with a bias towards northern Vietnam.4

As a major festival and holiday period, Tt centres on the first day of the year inthe lunar calendar and is marked by a four-day national public holiday, but the festi-

val lasts for two or three weeks. Tt starts on the twenty-third day of the last lunarmonth (thng cha p) when the kitchen god is sent to the Jade Emperor in heavento report on the affairs of the family, and formally ends with the taking down ofthe cy nu on the seventh day of the first lunar month of the New Year ( thng

ging).5 The cy nu is not seen in urban H Ch Minh City (HCMC; Saigon), butsome still think of this date as the end of the Tt festival.6 Others say it ends on

the fifteenth day of thng ging (r

m thng ging, the important first full moon ofthe New Year).Tt is marked by a wide range of activities, especially in the major urban centres,

where local government and other organisations provide festive events for the benefitof citizens (and tourists). In HCMC, where my study is located, there are a number ofsites at which events associated with Tt take place. Most of these are sites of socialactivity all year round, such as streets, parks, places of worship and markets, butthis activity is transformed and intensified by the ways in which these places areused during Tt. There are also a number of ostensibly private places, such ashomes and family graveyards, where kinship activities associated with Tt take place.

The research in HCMC that I have been engaged in since January 2008 hasinvolved participation in and observation of many Tt activities in both the privateand public spheres over three successive Tt periods (200810). Through the hospi-tality and kindness of many Vietnamese, I have been present at domestic rituals,family reunions and special meals during Tt; gone on long bus or motorcyclerides to tend grave sites with family members; attended pagoda services andaccompanied families on their visits to kin, pagodas and temples, sometimes travellingto family reunions in other centres or to special pagodas outside the city such asone memorable day travelling to Cha B en (the Black Lady pagoda) in Ty Ninh

3 Philip Taylor, Modernity and re-enchantment in post-revolutionary Vietnam, in Modernity andre-enchantment: Religion in post-revolutionary Vietnam, ed. Philip Taylor (Singapore: Institute ofSoutheast Asian Studies, 2007), pp. 156; Sean K. Malarney, Festivals and the dynamics of the excep-tional dead in northern Vietnam, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38, 3 (2007): 51540; Hy V.Luong, Structure, practice and history: Contemporary anthropological research on Vietnam , Journalof Vietnamese Studies, 1, 12 (2006): 371409.4 Nguyn Vn Huy, Tt holidays; Chi B. Nguyn, A study on traditional festivals in Vietnam, VietNam Social Sciences, 87, 2 (2002): 7988; Hunh inh T , New Years day in Vietnamese life andliterature, Journal of Vietnamese Studies (Melbourne), 1, 2 (1989): 1724; Xun Hin Nguyn,Glutinous rice, pp. 24863.5 Only the first and the last months in the lunar calendar are named. The others are simply known bytheir numbers, e.g. thng hai (second month), thng ba (third month), etc. Vietnamese also commonlyuse the Western month names.6 The cy nu is a bamboo pole decorated with various items deemed to bring good fortune and wardoff evil.

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province with an extended family of 11. I have observed the preparations made for T tby individuals and families, including the skilful making of the festive rice cakes (seebelow), and accompanied people to markets and supermarkets to purchase Tt goods.My observations have been supplemented with extensive interviews with HCMC

families and individuals as well as with experts (academics with specialised knowledgeof Tt, religious officials in pagodas and temples and purveyors of specialised Tt pro-ducts such as votive papers). This material has been enhanced by 12 Tt diaries kepton my behalf by high school and university students, in which Tt family activities aredocumented in detail over a number of weeks, often accompanied by colour photo-graphs. A fair amount of information has been gleaned through perusal of documen-tary sources and newspaper archives; in addition the news media report extensively onTt-related issues each year, commenting on topics such as price rises, currencyshortages and the availability of goods. I have also attended and documented awide variety of public activities associated with Tt, usually in the company of associ-

ates and research assistants and interviewed officials of Saigontourist HoldingCompany, the organiser of the main public Tt festivities in the city. The latterhave included exhibitions, street parades, music shows, the spectacular annual floraldisplay in the citys streets and rice cake-making competitions. Flower markets, calli-graphy craft markets, flower shows in city parks, Tt exhibitions at places such as theYouth Cultural Centre in District One,7 and public billboards which display Tt mess-ages and slogans have provided additional information on the nature and significanceof Tt in the city.

My own intensive and enjoyable experience of three successive Tt festivals isdirectly related to the object of this paper, which is to consider the nature of place-

making during Tt, and the relationships between different kinds of sites associatedwith Tt in HCMC. I wish to explore the ways in which these places are used inthe construction of Tt by residents of the city, how people and things move betweenand within them, and to consider what such movements and linkages imply for ourunderstanding of festive sites in the urban environment. In doing this I believe thatone gains insights into the nature of Tt as a lived experience, and that certain impli-cations arise that enable one to question conventionally accepted structural binariessuch as sacred and secular, public and private, and the production and consumption(or construction) of place.

Tt is in many senses sacred time, time set apart from the everyday and time for

worship, and through it activities which would otherwise be regarded as secular (e.g.going to market to buy everyday necessities) are infused with a sacred character, sothis is probably the easiest of the three binaries to deal with. Nevertheless, it remainsnecessary to show how something like a Tt flower show or a street parade should beregarded as non-secular. It is also worth pointing out that in a world where secular-isation is still sometimes seen as a dominating trend and associated with modernis-ation,8 the otherwise secular can at times be fused with and dominated by thesacred in a rapidly modernising society such as Vietnam.

7 Nh Vn Ha Thanh Nin, on Pham Ngoc Thach Street, District 1.8 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 34.

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Although the categories of private and public remain distinct in many ways, thematerial that I present below will demonstrate how they also interpenetrate and influ-ence each other. The conflation of public and private space in the everyday life ofurban Vietnam has been noted before and in this article I show how this conflation

occurs during Tt.

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This revolves mainly around the family home, and I will showhow the home is linked to a variety of other sites in the city and thus has to be under-stood in relation to the nature of these sites and the activities of family memberswithin them.

The distinction between the social production and consumption of place is nowlargely redundant, given the development of the notion of the social construction ofplace frequently used by social scientists. However, there are considerable ambiguitieswithin and around this term, and the notion that the way a place is made (e.g. place-making) is somehow separate from the way it is conceived or used (e.g. place attach-ment, resistance to place, spatial tactics) persists in various forms.10 My argument will

question the usefulness of this distinction even though it retains and uses the termsproduction and consumption (or construction) as analytical categories. In lookingat the sites associated with Tt I am not trying to theorise the city, but rather to the-orise the festival as it is made by people in the city and to analyse the nature of festiveplace-making. Nevertheless, this also amounts to saying something about the natureof the Tt landscape in HCMC and therefore about the city. I do not regard this as alandscape produced and then consumed by urban residents; rather, it is a landscapethat emerges through social practice, one enacted by residents as they celebrate Tt,each in their own unique way, but nevertheless acting in terms of certain establishedprecedents, expectations, family circumstances, religious convictions, economic

imperatives and the like. However, insofar as this takes place within the city it alsoinvolves a seasonal construction of the city as festive landscape. The conventional dis-tinction between production and consumption would view sites (and sights) in thecity as transformed (produced) for those who flock there to enjoy (consume) them.This would be a very partial and incomplete view of the nature of the Tt activitiesand practices in HCMC, as we shall see. Instead, I argue that it is what people dothat frequently constitutes both the production and consumption of space simul-taneously, at a variety of places in the city, and these activities frequently link or con-nect different places in a holistic manner.

In living Tt, people act in accordance with their knowledge and expectations

about Tt and in terms of their individual circumstances. There are, of course, generalnotions about what Tt is all about; certain ideals, values, norms, expectations andsymbols associated with it which are detailed in existing, often idealised accounts,11

but although these may help to understand Tt, they do not enable us to specifywhat the lived experience of Tt is like or enable one to appreciate the temporal

9 Lisa B.W. Drummond, Streetscapes: Practices of public and private spaces in Vietnamese cities ,Urban Studies 37, 12 (2000): 237791.10 Setha M. Low, Spatializing culture: The social production and social construction of public space inCosta Rica, in Theorizing the city: The new urban anthropology reader, ed. Setha M. Low (Piscataway:Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 11137; The anthropology of space and place: Locating culture, ed.Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), p. 20.11 Nguyn Vn Huy, Tt holidays; Huu Ngoc and Cohen, Tt.



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and contingent nature of urban place-making during Tt. Furthermore, it is throughseeing Tt as a form of social practice that the connections between the home andother places, as well as between the sacred and the secular, and between privateand public, may be identified and interrogated. This tension between the economic

and social realities impinging on individual agents and the existence of normativeconventions associated with Tt runs throughout the paper and is addressed in theconclusion.

The home

Taking the family home (nh)12 as my starting point, I will adopt what Ingold(following Heidegger) calls the dwelling perspective13 in terms of which the worldcontinually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituentstake on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity,rather than the individual acting in terms of some cultural text or in terms of a pre-

existing symbolic structure.14 As the most significant annual festival in Vietnam, Tttouches on virtually every aspect of Vietnamese culture, and to attempt to specify itssymbolic structure would thus be a laborious and almost pointless task.

Ingolds dwelling perspective is similar in some ways to that suggested earlier byMichel de Certeau in his analysis of spatial practices. To de Certeau, space is prac-ticed place. The residents of a city space make its features meaningful to them by theways in which they use them, creatively selecting in terms of their particular incli-nations and interests, in this way producing meaningful space out of what is a tem-porally fixed place. In walking the city people connect places, they weave placestogether in their practices and in this way spatializing, that is, making and experi-encing the city for themselves.15 Later approaches in urban sociology adopt a similarperspective, at least in part, by attending to the social construction of urban space through the daily activity and interaction of people.16 De Certeaus comparison ofthis with the speech act clarifies his meaning: Walking the city constitutes a seriesof illocutionary acts or performances,17 which create spaces by imposing meaningon place. Just as language contains potential, so does the city as a collection of places.Just as speech realises this potential, so does walking the city realise the potential ofplace by creating meaningful spaces within it through the practices involved inrelation to these. Just as speech acts often exist in relationship with each other, in a

series (e.g. criticism

offence taken

apology offered

apology accepted, etc.),so are the spaces created by the walker related to each other in a meaningful way

12 The word nh (ci nh, ngi nh or nh) can refer to a building or a house, but also to the concept ofa home occupied by a family (gia nh, nh). It can also mean wife. It is distinct from the notion ofnatal or original home (qu huong).13 Tim Ingold, Building, dwelling, living: How animals and people make themselves at home in theworld, in Shifting contexts, ed. Marilyn Strathern (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 5780.14 Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill (London:Routledge, 2000), p. 153.15 Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1984 [1974]), pp. 978.16 Urban imaginaries: Locating the modern city, ed. Avel inar and Thomas Bender (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press), p. 25.17 John L. Austin, How to do things with words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 4, 109.



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as part of the walkers life experience and within a particular social context. This is auseful perspective that complements Ingold and informs my analysis. Of course theplaces in a city also have what we might term meaningful pasts, i.e. they are notencountered anew each time, but in the context of Tt their previous meanings are

transformed and linked to other places in new and creative ways. The home, in par-ticular, is a place in de Certeaus sense only as a building before it is inhabited, afterwhich it becomes meaningful space as it is lived from day to day and in relation tospecific contexts, of which Tt is one.

In making use of the dwelling perspective to understand the nature of festiveplace-making in the home, I take my lead from the Vietnamese themselves, whothink of Tt primarily as family time; many of the activities associated with it takeplace in the family home and involve kin relations. The home has some advantagesover other sites associated with Tt, because if one does make a distinction betweenthe social production of place and its consumption or social construction,18 it is

apparent that these converge in the home and involve the same people, theco-resident kin group who, through the transformations that they effect in andaround the house, experience home in a special way. They do not merely prepare itfor the celebration of Tt, but also celebrate Tt by preparing for it. The same prin-ciple is evident also in other aspects of Tt, at other places in the urban environment,as we shall see. Through these activities people transform and give special temporaland spatial meaning to their homes during the Tt period while reinforcing andexpressing the importance of family and kinship. But in order to do this, connectionswith other places and relations with others in these places are necessary. The homeand its residents cannot be seen in isolation from the wider social process of Tt

that it and many other people, places and things within HCMC and its immediate(and sometimes not so immediate) vicinity are part of. This involves examining thenature of the urban landscape as it is made relevant through Tt activities, and thesignificance and interconnectedness of places (including the home) within this land-scape. Using the dwelling perspective we are also able to see how and why the homebecomes a kind of heterotopia in Foucauldian terms, and its status as such is con-sidered in the penultimate section of the paper.

In considering the relationship between place and landscape, Ingold asserts thatany place within a landscape embodies the whole at a particular nexus within it, andin this respect is different from every other. And he explains the uniqueness of place

thus:

A place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who spend time there to the sights, sounds and indeed smells that constitute its specific ambience. And these,in turn, depend on the kinds of activities in which its inhabitants engage. It is from thisrelational context of peoples engagement with the world, in the business of dwelling,that each place draws its unique significance.19

It is the embodiment of the whole in each place within the urban landscape that I aminterested in developing insights into here. It is the connections between the activities,

18 Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, The anthropology of space and place, p. 20.19 Ingold, The perception of the environment, p. 192.



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sights, sounds, tastes and smells associated with places that I will stress. I will arguethat it is not useful to see Tt in HCMC as taking place at a number of different siteswith different values or meanings and that what is required instead is an understand-ing of how people act in relation to places and make connections between them over

time as part of a social process that constitutes their construction and experience ofTt. It is through their practice that people provide sites with meaning and makeplaces into spaces in de Certeaus sense, but it is also through their practice that differ-ent places and qualities (such as sacred and secular, public and private) are linked andpartially conflated and that the relationships between them can be discerned. Thisprovides us with an appreciation of the whole of the Tt landscape as a particu-lar seasonal construction of the HCMC urban landscape and the environment inwhich it is situated, and of the Tt festival. In other words, participating in Ttinvolves a temporal series of embodied actions and interactions that links places aswell as people, and that embeds aspects of places into each other.

Thus, after considering the home, I will look at how the home is implicated in thesimultaneous social production and construction of place with and by other, extra-domestic actors, and at how this feeds back into Tt practices within the home. Ttis too complex, diverse and extensive to consider all aspects of in a single paper, soit has been necessary to select those aspects relevant to my theme and objective.I will consider aspects of Tt ritual and worship as they take place both within andbeyond the home, the ways in which business owners construct and experienceTt, and the ways in which the citys streets are transformed and lived in duringthe festival, including the role of civic authorities.

Experiencing Te

t at homeGiven the ubiquity and importance of ancestor veneration in Vietnam, it is hard

to separate sacred and secular in examining what happens in the home at any time ofthe year, and perhaps particularly so during Tt. Renewal in homes in preparation forTt is simultaneously preparation for the renewed presence of the dead, who are wor-shipped and attended to at various times and places as Tt unfolds. Ancestor worshipcoexists in harmony with faiths such as Buddhism and Christianity, but a variety ofother deities and spiritual beings are worshipped in and around the home during Ttas well as at other places of worship.

Renewing the home annually in preparation for the New Year includes activities

such as spring-cleaning, repainting and refurbishment, in which different members ofthe family work cooperatively. In the lead up to Tt, removing dust and dirt symbo-lically removes any ill fortune of the past year, while also preparing to welcome kin,living and dead, as well as other visitors, in the first few days of the New Year and torenew relationships with them. Ancestral altars are cleaned and renewed; brass can-dlesticks and censers are polished; ancestral tablets or framed photographs of thedead restored. This preparation clearly involves links to a variety of other sites, e.g.shops that polish and repair brass items and those that sell religious paraphernalia.This renewal also extends to individuals, who purchase new clothes, get their hairdone and so on, in the frantic burst of consumption activity leading up to Tt.

Ending the old year in a positive way like this is believed to help ensure that theNew Year, too, will be full of good things.



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Purchases in the run-up to Tt include everyday necessities but also many specialitems, bought only during Tt, so the social experience of going to market or super-market at this time of the year accords with decisions made about what to purchasefor Tt based on knowledge of the festival and past experiences of participating in it.

Home and market/

supermarket are linked. Thus, the meanings that people enact inmaking purchases at retail sites, as with the later visit to the city centre to enjoy thesights, is distinctive, different from everyday procurement of food and other necessi-ties, and this meaning is created with the needs of the home in its engagement withTt in the minds of the consumers as well as suppliers and retailers.

At various points during Tt the house is transformed in other ways too. In somehomes rooms are temporarily cleared and outside areas readied for the assembly andcooking of festive rice cakes, which requires a large open floor space to accommodatea number of people working cooperatively and a large wood fire outside for the cook-ing of the cakes, which are usually prepared in large numbers.20 This takes a number

of hours, during which time the members of the household and their helpers (usuallykin and perhaps one or two close friends) relax, play cards for low stakes and catch upwith each others news. In terms of the Tt ideal, this is a time for pleasant sociabilityand the reinforcement of kinship ties.

Transformation of space outside the house also occurs at various times in the Ttcalendar when temporary altars are erected on balconies or at front entrances, such asfor the Tt eve (giao tha) worship (see below) or on the eighth day after Tt, for starworship (cng sao).21 Tt rituals welcoming or sending off the ancestors (ng b, t tin) usually require supplementing the already heavily laden ancestral altar with atable on which food and other offerings are placed for worship prior to the family

meal that follows immediately afterwards.During Tt there is extensive worship in and about the house on a number ofdays as the ancestors are invited into the home to join the living for the festival,and provided with special food and other offerings. These are also occasions forspecial meals, with a range of symbolically important dishes linking living kin totheir ancestors, to their regional and national identities, and to their places of origin.Among the common offerings on the ancestral altar is a five fruits bowl (mm ngqua), which symbolises the good fortune and prosperity hoped for in the comingyear.22 Another is the festive rice cake, made at home, received as a gift, or boughtat the market or supermarket, the style of which enables identification with the nation

and its origins, as well as with one of the countrys three main regions north, centreor south. Rice cakes are also an important food offering on ancestral altars,

20 This applies only to a minority. The majority of homes in HCMC purchase their festive rice cakes atmarkets and supermarkets.21 The aim ofstar worship is primarily to offset the bad luck thought to befall people born under cer-tain stars in the particular year being ushered in. It is also called cng sao giai han worship stars todrive away bad luck. Some informants point out that it is directed not at these stars themselves, but at themystical beings associated with them.22 The five fruits bowl often consists of custard apple or sour sop (mng cu), coconut (da), papaya(u u), mango (xoi) and wild fig (cy sung) or another fruit such as dragon fruit (thanh long). Thesesymbolise the desired quality of life in the New Year, since the names of these fruits when strung togetherform an expression in Vietnamese that translates as pray to have enough money to spend or pray forhappiness and to have enough money to spend, depending on which fruits are included.



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manifesting the important symbolic link between rice and kinship, and an importantitem of gift exchange between kin and friends.23 Both items the five fruits bowl andthe rice cakes are also experienced in public (non-domestic) religious settings, aswe shall see, linking the home with sites outside of it.

Tt ritual, then, discussed more fully below, is concentrated in the home, whichserves as an axis mundi,24 a social, cosmological and emotional centre around which

the universe revolves and to which it is connected in various ways, and in relation towhich Tt as a whole is lived and made meaningful. How this is done always involvesagency. For example, people choose which style of rice cake to make or purchase, andthus which region/s to identify with, and it is possible to choose more than one styleand region, depending on the familys history. How they make Tt meaningful tothemselves thus varies accordingly. The home as a centre that references and con-denses other sites of significance during Tt allows one to view it as both utopiaand heterotopia.

Important activities within the home during Tt also include receiving visits fromkin and friends, exchanging gifts and news with them, and making reciprocal visits. In

this way the home is connected to others, and kinship and friendship bonds are actedout and renewed. Tt is frequently an occasion for an extended family reunion, withmembers gathering in the house of the most senior member of the kin group wherethey worship in turn at ancestral altars as they arrive and partake in a communalmeal. In a similar vein, urban families sometimes receive kin from afar who cometo visit during Tt those living abroad permanently or temporarily, or relativesfrom the rural hinterland. None of these people arrives empty-handed; they carrywith them gifts from their home areas, often special items not easily obtainable in

HCMC, making further material connections between the home and other places.These sorts of connections are made also by reciprocal visiting and gift exchangebetween neighbours and friends, and between business associates, and it is thoughtproper to visit teachers or former teachers on the third day of T t. Each home canbe seen as the centre of a social network which is manifested through the practiceof visiting and gift exchange.

The home is also connected to many other places, to other sites in and aroundthe city. The experience of Tt turns on how and to what extent the members ofthe home make and experience these connections and in the ways in which theseother sites are linked to the home itself. Here we need to examine the nature of the

social activities at various sites, the connections between these sites, and betweenthem and the home, to appreciate how people actively make Tt through their actionsin and between places over time. This is an important aspect of the dwelling withwhich we are concerned here. Many of the accounts of Tt that I have been givenin interviews and in Tt diaries emphasise not only the sociality associated with places,but also movement between places between homes, home and market, home andpagoda, between cities and towns, from place to place within a city and so on.25

23 Xun Hin Nguyn, Glutinous rice.24 Hilda Kuper, The language of sites in the politics of space, in The anthropology of space and place,pp. 24763.25 Tt diaries were kept for me by high school and university students, in which their Tt activities aredetailed. In most cases these were followed up with interviews to enable the students to elaborate on what



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These recollections tell not only of places but also of experiences in between places, ofevents and people encountered, things seen and noted, and of the social activities ofothers. One of these was from a student, Trang. What stood out in Trangs recollec-tion, and what made Tt 2009 memorable for her, was that on returning from a social

gathering one day she saw the President of the country and his entourage visiting adisabled war veteran in his suburban residence, an event witnessed purely bychance.26 Trangs close friend, Thuy, somewhat to my surprise, highlighted the Ttexperience of being stuck in traffic jams, which she said enabled her to take in andenjoy the Tt atmosphere. Pressed further on this she elaborated: many of the motor-cycles on the road carried young families, she pointed out, usually en route to the citycentre to enjoy the Tt street lights and atmosphere, and this sight conveyed to her thesignificance and enjoyment of Tt as a family festival. These accounts of Tt alsoemphasise things associated with sites that sometimes connect different places food and drink consumed, gifts given and received, photographs taken at particular

spots, items purchased in markets, votive offerings obtained and burnt later athome and so on. This emphasises the view that Tt as a lived and holistic experienceunfolds over time between as well as within places as people walk the city and makeconnections between them. This movement involves and facilitates social relation-ships between people, between the living and the dead, between mystical beingsand the subjects who worship them, and indeed between different kinds of superna-tural beings themselves, as indicated below.

Te t worship

Some of the obviously sacred sites associated with Tt activities are non-earthly

spiritual sites; others are earthly ones, but with spiritual significance. The home con-nects to the heavens, to an ancestral graveyard, to the ancestors in the underworld orin heaven, to pagodas or churches, and to other sites associated with the supernatural,in various ways spatially, temporally, materially and spiritually. The dwelling per-spective enables us to see this as part of the larger pattern of connections involvingactivity and interaction through which people construct Tt for themselves.

The explicitly religious aspects of Tt commence on the twenty-third day of thelast lunar month (thng cha p) when the kitchen god, ng To or To Qun,27 is wor-shipped with gifts and offerings to enable him to travel to heaven to give his annualreport on the family to the Jade Emperor, the supreme being (Ngoc Hong Thuo ng). He is provided with a special meal and votive offerings obtained from specialistpurveyors at the market are burnt. Sending the kitchen god away initiates a series ofritual actions which take place over the next two or three weeks, with the details vary-ing from family to family, but within which certain patterns and commonalities canbe identified. Some of these are mentioned here in order to illustrate the nature ofritual place-making during Tt, and the links between the home and other places,

they had written. Young people, in particular, are likely to move about within and experience the urbanlandscape during Tt, but their diaries also detail the movements made by their elders and by wholefamilies.26 Political and civic authorities commonly take advantage of the festive period to honour war dead andpay homage to those who served in the armed forces in the past.27 ng To is three persons (or three deities) in one but is normally referred to in the singular.



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but it needs to be borne in mind that this is only part of a much more detailed andvaried series of ritual actions and events.

On the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth day of the last lunar month ancestral graves,if accessible, are visited, tidied and cleaned, often in company with kin from other

homes, and the deceased are invoked and worshipped with flowers, food and incense.These are placed on the graves together with votive offerings (hng m clothes andother accessories, television sets, vehicles, imitation money, etc., all made from paperor cardboard) which are burnt at the foot of the grave itself or nearby and therebytransferred to and used by the dead in the underworld. In the invocations to thedead the latter are told why the living have come, what they are doing, and whatthey wish for in the New Year for themselves and their families. This practice oftao m (tending the graves) again highlights the importance of the family, whichinclude the dead as well as the living, and is part of the ongoing relationship betweenliving and dead on which the happiness and well-being of both depend. It is followed

by kin meeting with each other, worshipping at ancestral altars, eating a communalmeal and exchanging news. For many urban families, however, graves are too faraway in their original towns or villages, and cremation means that many ancestorsdo not have grave sites at all. Pagodas and churches offer acceptable substitutes;they have special rooms (nh hi ct) in which ashes of the deceased are keptin jars, and dedicated altars at which congregants may place photos of their dead rela-tives. In the days leading up to Tt people visit these places in order to worship andmake offerings to their ancestors and to participate in prayers for the dead by priestsand monks. Theravada pagodas and Catholic churches have special Tt services forthe dead, the former before Tt itself, the latter on the second day of the New Year.28

Religious activity on the last day of the lunar year also illustrates the importanceof kinship and of links with dead kin, and includes a late morning or mid-day ritual atwhich the ancestors are welcomed into the home for Tt and provided with food and

votive offerings,29 followed by a family meal. Ancestral altars are prepared for thisevent, laden with fruit and flowers, and with gifts from various sources. Worshiptakes place also at the other altars in the home, of which there are usually several,and culminates with worship at a special Tt altar (bn th thin altar for the hea-

vens) near the front door or outside on a balcony at the midnight hour, the sacredmoment marking the transition to the New Year. This transition and its associatedritual are known as giao tha. The object is to secure the blessings of the gods for

the New Year and to keep misfortune away. More specifically, the supreme being(Ngoc Hong) is said to send one of his 12 mandarins to look after the earth everyyear, and on this occasion the new mandarin is welcomed and the previous onethanked. It is also a time when homeless spirits (cng c hn), such as people whodied in warfare and did not receive a proper burial, and who are thought of as wan-dering the streets and potentially dangerous, are placated. In some families this isimmediately preceded by worship in front of the altars inside the house and it is at

28 Monks in Mahayana pagodas say that they do not hold such a service because praying for the dead isa normal part of everyday worship. Nevertheless, Tt is one of the festive periods during which prayerservices for the dead are held in these pagodas most frequently, due to popular demand.29 This is termed cng tt nin (worship for finishing the old year); also ruc ng b (welcome theancestors).



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this time that the kitchen god returns from his journey. Immediately after giao tha orearly the following morning, Buddhist families go to a nearby pagoda to participate inthe formal worship that takes place there to mark the New Year, receive li xi (luckymoney) from the celebrant, and perhaps eat some food afterwards.

On the first day of the New Year, pagodas are full of people from morning tillnight. Many devout Buddhists, often women of the middle or older generation,undertake a pilgrimage to a number of pagodas, often in small groups of friendsand/or kin who hire a vehicle to take them to worship in different pagodas in succes-sion, believing that this will bring them special blessings and benefits.30 Attendance atpagoda services continues on a regular basis during Tt and many people provide themonks with donations and ask them to add the names of their kin in need of prayer tothe lists kept there and displayed on pagoda walls. Famous pagodas that have what arebelieved to be special qualities are very popular during Tt. Some of these are withineasy reach of HCMC, such as the pagoda associated with the Jade Emperor, not far

from the city centre, or One Pillar pagoda in Thu

c (modelled after a pagoda ofthe same name in Hanoi), or Hong Php pagoda on the citys outskirts. Otherfamous pagodas, such as Cha B en (the Black Lady pagoda) in Ty Ninh pro-

vince or B Cha X (Lady of the Realm pagoda) in Chu c, both near theCambodian border, require at least a days excursion, but nevertheless draw thousandsof visitors during Tt, many of them from HCMC.31 These pagodas are establishedplaces but they are not experienced passively by those who patronise them duringTt. Nor are they experienced uniformly: the faithful who go there make Tt mean-ingful to themselves, expressing their wishes for the New Year and their thanks forpast blessings through their prayers, invocations, offerings, purchases and other

actions at these sites, which in turn are linked to their individual economic and socialcircumstances, to their beliefs, and to their expectations and understandings of Tt.Philip Taylor has vividly illustrated the kind of variability in the motivations, actions,and attitudes that exists among worshippers in his study of B Cha X.32

Religious activities also take place at certain sites associated with former nationalor regional heroes who are worshipped as sources of good fortune and spiritualsoothsayers. The temple and mausoleum devoted to the early nineteenth-centurysouthern statesman and military commander L Vn Duyt, known simply as Lngng (His Lordships Mausoleum)33 or Lng ng B Chiu (His Lordships

30 This practice is known in Sino Vietnamese as th p tu vn canh literally10 pagoda sights, or hnhhuong th p tu 10 pagoda pilgrimage. The number varies; it might be 9, 10, or 13 different pagodas.

These excursions or pilgrimages (hnh huong) are also often organised by individual pagodas. They offeran opportunity for worship and instruction but also for enjoyment and sociability. A similar practice inthe Hanoi area has been described by Alex Soucy, Pilgrims and pleasure seekers, in Consuming urbanculture in contemporary Vietnam, ed. Lisa B.W. Drummond and M. Thomas (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 12537. A general analysis of pilgrimage in southern Vietnam is provided byPhilip Taylor, Goddess on the rise: Pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: Universityof Hawaii Press, 2004).31 Religious practices in Vietnam cannot be categorised as simply urban or rural, and most of thosewho patronise famous and popular rural religious sites are from outside the local area; see Taylor,Goddess on the rise, pp. 11415.32 Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 50.33 The translation is taken from Taylor, Goddess on the rise, p. 78. A simpler rendering might be Sirstomb.



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Mausoleum at B Chiu), is one such site. The temple associated with thirteenth-century national hero and naval commander, Trn Hungao, is another. At Lngng people worship, burn incense, and make offerings to L Vn Duyt, seek toknow their future through a variety of divinatory means (including xin keo, xin

x

m),

34

and attempt to secure luck for the forthcoming year and for their lives in gen-eral by buying and freeing birds, touching items in the temple and smoothing thegood fortune onto themselves and so on. At this time pagodas and temples such asthese are surrounded by a variety of people other than worshippers purveyors ofincense and other religious goods, beggars seeking alms, people selling lottery tickets,flower sellers, fortune tellers and so on. Their experience of Tt, their dwelling, issomewhat different from those who go there to pray and divine the future, butwith whom they interact.

During Tt members of the Cao i faith make a pilgrimage to their spiritualcentre in Ty Ninh province, while Catholic churches offer a series of services, parallel

in some ways to the Tt activities of Buddhists on the first three days of the New Year.These too provide both spiritual and physical connections to the home and thus

enable us to extend the dwelling perspective in another direction. Catholics honourand pray for their dead kin on the second day of Tt, and bring home a paperinscribed with a biblical quote or inspirational saying which they place on the altarsin their homes alongside statues of Jesus or Mary and photographs of ancestors. Atpagodas and temples people obtain various items which they take away with themand which help them to prepare for the New Year a small card bearing an inspira-tional or devotional saying, a leaf or bud picked there (this act is known as hi lc, togather luck) or the leaf of a plant called pht ti (meaning become wealthy).

Pagodas and churches are also retail outlets for items such as religious tracts, incensesticks, statues, portraits of deities, wall hangings and the like, which make their wayinto homes during Tt. It is not necessary here to provide details of the various ritualsand forms of worship that follow the sending off of the ancestors35 and which con-tinue until the fifteenth day, the first full moon of the New Year. Some of thesewill be referred to briefly below.

To summarise the analysis at this point, the empirical material provided has indi-cated various connections between places and people, in relation to a variety of ritualand other Tt activities. It seems clear that we have to think about Tt places withinthe urban landscape of HCMC (and its hinterland) in terms of how people make

them significant, and in relational terms what connects them, how and whythey are connected, and how they constitute a whole. Tt provides us with the oppor-tunity to view and analyse a chronotope, in Bhaktin s sense, a complex intersection of

34 Xin xm (meaningchoose a lot or ask the oracle) at Lng ng involves shaking a container full ofnumbered sticks until one of them eases itself out of the bunch and falls to the ground. The number andcolour on the lot thus chosen corresponds with a particular prediction of the future which can then beobtained in printed form from a nearby counter. If more than one falls out and there is uncertainty aboutwhich one to count, or if there is an issue that the client wishes to confirm in a yes/no manner, xin keo(a pair of wooden blocks, yin [m] and yang [duong], one white and one red) is consulted; here L VnDuyt, referred to as God (Thn Linh), provides the answer by causing the blocks to appear in a par-ticular way when they are thrown to the ground, a yin and yang combination being confirmation.35 In the case of homes where the ancestors are not sent away, they are simply informed that there willbe no more special meals for them.



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temporal and spatial sequences which correspond with each other,36 similar to whatIngold has termed a taskscape, a set of related heterogeneous activities that unfoldover a social period, in this case, the time associated with Tt.37 Here time andspace come together and are joined in a variety of places within which human acts

demarcate them as set apart both temporally and spatially, but also as connected toeach other materially, sequentially, experientially and ideologically. In the followingsections I illustrate this further, first by looking at how one sector of the urban com-munity, business people or shop-owners, make Tt meaningful, and how this some-times intersects with ethnic or cultural identity. Second, I detail some Tt activitiesmade possible by the local government authority, and how people participate inthese. Here too, with the use of the dwelling perspective, one can discern importantconnections between places as made by people, and extend the argument presented sofar.

Business, home and ethnicity

Given the domestic material necessities for Tt, retailers gear up for the festivalweeks in advance, providing household necessities as well as specialised Tt goods.Retail sites too are transformed for Tt; they are sites produced for festive consumers,and patronising them is an important part of the Tt experience. But the productionof these sites by shop and market stallholders is also a significant part of their ownconstruction of Tt. Business people, retailers and shop-owners also occupy theirown homes and the shop is often a physical extension or integral part of the residence,so we need to look at Tt from this perspective also.

For Saigonese who own a business, their experience of home, business andpagoda (or church) may be connected in a specific way. Like other Saigon residents,shopkeepers often have an altar on the floor in the living room of their homes for ngia (God of the land) and ng Thn Ti (God of wealth). They usually also have suchan altar in their shop or business premises, if the latter is physically separate from thehome, at which they regularly worship, and during Tt this is supplemented with maiflowers and mandarin trees, floral and paper decorations, etc., to give the shop a Ttflavour. The tenth day of the first lunar month is a special day for the worship of ThnTi, and it is primarily business owners who practise this ritual. Where the shop is anextension of the home, the Tt altar for all the gods of the heavens may be placed at

the front entrance of the shop, which may also be the front entrance of the home.Furthermore, many of the people who visit Lng ng are shop-owners, who do soin order to ensure the future success of their business. Clearly, the secularsacredand publicprivate distinctions are hard to find here, and multiple connections aremade between the home-shop and other sites during Tt.

As retailers, shop-owners and market stallholders are implicated in Tt as it isconstructed and experienced by others through their retail activities, and their ownconstruction of Tt has to do with the interpenetration of home and business aswell as with the multitude of interactions and negotiations with their customers,

36 Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel, in The dialogic imagination:Four essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 84258.37 Ingold, The perception of the environment, p. 200.



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suppliers and employees (who usually get Tt bonuses). It is they who help to makethe streets what they are during Tt and to attract people to the city. Finally, marketsand businesses are closed for a number of days over Tt, again changing the nature ofthe city as landscape and the experience of it, but precisely when they open varies,

depending on the proprietor

s assessment of which is an auspicious day to do so.Many shops signal the fact that they have reopened after Tt with worship and aspecial altar at the front entrance directed at the earth god, Th ia.38 So whiletheir homes may share many of the elements of Tt with non-shop-owners, thedwelling perspective forces us to examine how they connect various urban Ttsites through their business and associated practices or, to put it slightly differently,how the way in which they live Tt connects various people and places in theurban landscape.

What this brief look at shop-owners rather obviously suggests is that the experi-ence and meaning of Tt varies across groups and individuals in the city, with the

connections between sites, and between sites and homes, made in varying ways.But there are nevertheless certain general patterns that can be discerned, and somethat link certain kinds of activities with certain kinds of social groups based on fac-tors such as age, gender, occupation and ethnicity. The HCMC district known as Cho Ln is associated with Vietnamese of Chinese origin and ethnicity. Not only do differ-ent subgroups within this broad ethnic category have certain distinctive Tt practices(e.g. relating to food),39 but they also signal their general distinctiveness as ChineseVietnamese during Tt by embodying it publicly in specific ways. One of these isthe practice of carrying large burning incense sticks from pagodas and templesback to their homes, usually on motorbikes. This explicit linking of temple/pagoda

worship with the well-being of the home is something that other Saigon residents gen-erally do not practise in this particular manner they worship with incense in pago-das and at home but generally do not transport burning incense between the two.What connects this topic (Chinese ethnicity) to the previous one (shop-owners) isthat in HCMC there is an association between the two in the minds of many residents.

Te t in the streets

During Tt, the streets of HCMC are transformed and become a space of con-templation, leisure and enjoyment. How the members of the home experience Tt

is related to the extent to which they leave their homes and help to make variousplaces in the urban landscape. This is an important aspect of the analysis based onthe dwelling perspective that I have been developing so far and involves various con-nections between places not yet mentioned. Large businesses and hotels decorate theirpremises with Tt themes, some spectacularly so, and viewing and enjoying these arepart of the attraction of visiting the city during Tt. Dragon and unicorn dancers andtheir accompanying musicians are hired by businesses to perform in front of theirpremises (to bring good luck for the New Year). They are accompanied by a varietyof other acts as well as by men in Thn Ti and ngia dress and masks who dance

38 Some say that this altar is also for the homeless ghosts who wander the streets, to keep them pla-cated and ensure that they will not trouble the business.39 Professor Trn Hng Lin, personal communication.



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into the business or shop in order to remove evil influences and bring it good fortune.Sometimes Thn Ti and ngia figures go around from shop to shop by themselvesaccompanied by a small percussion band, collecting donations as they do so, some-times posing for photographs with sightseers. As indicated above, most Vietnamese

homes also have Th

n Ti and ng

i a on a single small altar on the floor in thefront room of the house, where they are worshipped on a daily basis, making for

another symbolic link between home and the city.40

The citys Peoples Committee sponsors a variety of entertainments during Tt,including free public music shows and other events. There are also many billboardsthat transform streets and offer Tt messages, often in combination with politicalones, and at night the main streets are beautifully and lavishly lit. Youth centresand other public institutions stage concerts and exhibitions, and well-known build-ings and monuments are bedecked with appropriate slogans. Some of these placeshost craft markets at which artists attired in the garb of traditional calligraphists

(ng

) produce and sell Tt artefacts such as the well-known

parallel sentences

which are bought and hung on walls in homes. Parks are transformed into flowerand bonsai markets, or into displays of floral and other forms of decorative art.These productions, too, may incorporate political messages and be sites of socialmemory Tao n parks flower show in 2009 included a large replica of the H Ch Minh Trail with accompanying photographs and illustrations. In Pham NgLo, 23rd September Park becomes a market for the mai tree and other plants indemand in homes over Tt. The mai trees yellow blossom is a ubiquitous symbolof Tt in the South, and the parks name recalls the French reoccupation of Saigonand the start of the resistance that ultimately led to Vietnamese unity and indepen-

dence. The monument on the street outside the site of the former US Embassy build-ing which commemorates the attack on the Embassy on 31 January 1968 by NorthVietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops is transformed with banners bearing slogansthat make explicit its link to the Tt Offensive, which is now commemorated everyTt through slogans, banners, exhibitions and parades, while the memory of thosewho died in that attack is sacralised through the addition of flowers and incense tothe memorial during Tt in honour of the fallen. Thus, memories are embodied inthe urban landscape through the conscious actions of local political authorities.These are important in facilitating not only a national consciousness, but also the con-struction of local place and identification with it by local residents.41 Their experience

of Tt in the home is thus connected in multiple ways with the ways in which Tt ismade and lived in the city, on its streets, in its parks, its theatres and its places ofcommerce.

There are also unofficial social productions that transform the streets and thecity, made possible by a degree of licence and tolerance associated with T t. Here Irefer to phenomena ranging from gambling on street corners and in markets thatpolice turn a blind eye to during Tt, to the many unlicensed vendors who occupy

40 Thn Ti and ngia figures in the home/shop are purchased from specialist dealers and taken tothe local pagoda (but not Theravada pagodas) where they are sanctified, before being placed in the home,but this happens at any time of the year.41 Nadia Lovell, Introduction, in Locality and belonging, ed. Nadia Lovell (London and New York:Routledge, 1998), p. 6.



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sidewalks and parks, to the ways in which markets spill over into the streets aroundthem, and to the occupation of sidewalks and open spaces by nearby retailers. T t is atime for businesses and informal, occasional vendors, to make money, and the mar-kets and streets reflect this. Here too are a multitude of different ways in which Tt

becomes a lived experience, different in its own way for each participant

themoneylender in it for the high rate of interest, the short-term borrower hoping tomake some quick money over the holiday period, the illegal purveyor of Tt itemson a street corner, the shop-owner who temporarily occupies the pavement outsidethe shop, the gambling operator in the market, his clientele who lose (or, more rarely,make) money there, and the police and other officials who mostly ignore these activi-ties. Each makes Tt for him or herself through their practices, adding to the overallexperience of Tt that is different for each but which nevertheless expresses certaincommon themes and patterns without necessarily conforming completely to any for-mal model of what Tt is or should be. And for the majority of Saigonese who do not

fall into these kinds of categories, it is by their actions in and movement through thestreets, by their dwelling, that they experience these sights and sounds and out ofwhich a large part of their experience of Tt is constituted.

The bnh tt festival

In recent years in HCMC the citys Peoples Committee, through its tourismoperation, Saigontourist Holding Company, has sponsored a large Bnh TtFestival (L Hi Bnh Tt),42 incorporating a variety of free public concerts, an elab-orate floral display in which Nguyn Hu Street in the city centre is transformed into

a botanical theme park, as well as a spectacular annual street parade (in 2004

8),drawing both live and television audiences of many thousands.In these events local (HCMC) and regional (southern) themes are prominent,

along with national ones. When I witnessed the street parade in 2008 it was led byfour floats depicting iconic HCMC buildings, some of them within sight of the audi-ence as their doubles rolled by Bn Thnh Market, Thnh Ph Theatre (alsoknown as the Opera House), the H Ch Minh Museum at Bn Nh Rng and theHCMC Peoples Committee building (formerly the Hotel de Ville). These buildingswere all extremely familiar to the thousands watching the parade, so one mightread this parade as the city depicting itself to itself, showing itself to its citizens for

them to re-experience in the context of Tt, implying that their experience of Ttand their sense of belonging (encouraged by the choreographers if not universallyfelt) was an experience of the city as depicted by those in power.43 Moreover, thisleading and clearly local aspect of the parade does not feature at all as part of thenational image or of the generally accepted symbolic structure of Tt. A city-wide

42 The name of the festival refers to the festive rice cake associated with the South, called bnh tt, butthis tt (literally meaning to cut or split) should not be confused with Tt, the lunar New Year, fromwhich it is diacritically distinguished.43 It is possible that this manipulation of space and the production of spectacle provide an image thathelps to establish the legitimacy of the Peoples Committee, and, by extension, the VietnameseCommunist Party, as the provider of entertainment and pleasure for citizens. Don Handelman,Models and mirrors: Towards an anthropology of public events (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), pp. 418.



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and publicly funded series of festive activities is a relatively recently introduction, butone that people have quickly become habituated to. Hence peoples experience of Ttcannot be thought of as synonymous with some kind of symbolic structure associatedwith it, but has to be assessed in terms of social practice and local realities.

Apart from the four iconic buildings, the predominant visual themes in the par-ade were the apricot blossom or mai flower, associated with Tt in the South, and theproductive nature of the Souths agricultural economy, depicted by means of enor-mous imitation fruit, largely of the same kinds found in the five fruits bowl andthus symbolically linked to the altars in peoples homes. The grand finale and high-light of the event made a similar link to home altars and kinship practices: announcedby dramatic music that contrasted markedly with the popular Tt songs sung earlierby well-known performers, it was the arrival on flat-bed trucks of two giant renditionsof bnh tt, the festive rice cakes associated with the South, weighing 3.5 tons each,and culminating with these being offered in solemn worship to the ancestors of the

nation (this was made explicit by the master of ceremonies) by the local political lea-dership, before being cut up and distributed widely to all who wished to partake.Thus, it is hard to separate sacred from secular in the transformation and use ofthe citys streets for the Bnh Tt festival and the way in which this is experienced,and the metaphoric as well as sensual connection with other places of worship the home, the pagoda is obvious. But it is also evident again here, as it is inother public places, that the experience of Tt is not only the experience of a nationalfestival, but of a local one and a regional one. This needs to be understood within thecontext of a history of NorthSouth rivalry and implicit competition between HCMCand Hanoi. Both the street parade and the floral tableaux in Nguyn Hu Street

expressed the economic importance of the South to the nation, and the dominant pos-ition of both the South and the city. Yet Nguyn Hu Street also combines (but doesnot conflate) national identity with a regional one. The pink peach blossom associatedwith Tt in the North is in evidence there each year; Nguyn Hu was a lateeighteenth-century emperor and military commander who is credited with the unifi-cation of Vietnam prior to Western colonisation; and a statue of national hero andarchitect of the modern united Vietnam, H Ch Minh, stands at the head of the streetlooking down its length towards the Saigon River.

When the L Hi Bnh Tt street parade was discontinued due to the economicdownturn of late 2008, it was replaced for Tt 2009 and again in 2010 with a city-wide

bnh tt-making competition, with each of the citys districts participating, initially inheats and ultimately in the final round of the competition held at m Sen Park, alarge leisure and entertainment centre owned by the Peoples Committee. After thewinners had been declared, the competition culminated in the winning bnh ttbeing publicly displayed and offered in worship by groups of high-level City officialsat three important city sites the temple of the Hng Kings (founders of Vietnam inancient times)44 in the botanical gardens, the H Ch Minh museum at Bn NhRng, and the museum of his successor, Tn c Thng. The Hng Kings temple

44 According to Vietnamese legend, the original square version of the festive Tt rice cake, bnh chung,which is associated with the North, was the creation of Prince Lng Liu, 18th son of King Hng VII, aninvention that was inspired by a dream in which a deity provided a recipe, and which earned him theright to be the next ruler.



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is an obviously sacred site, but so are the two museums, each of which has a memorialhall with an altar at which these founding ancestors of modern Vietnam are wor-shipped. Once again, the city, the South, and the nation were blended togetherthrough this competition, and symbolically linked with the home, where bnh tt

are traditionally made and consumed. Again, the distinction between sacred and secu-lar, public and private, production and consumption, was blurred.

Home as heterotopia

It is in and in relation to the home and family, then, that T t is experienced andlived. Even in the case of going out to enjoy the city centre with the family or a groupof friends, it is from the home that one departs, and to the home that one returns, andin the home that one preserves, communicates and reconsumes the experiencethrough photographs, artefacts and conversation. This is, of course, the case with fes-tivals in many parts of the world. What I have tried to demonstrate in the case of T t,however, is that each place is metonymically significant and that through metonymicconnections these various Tt places are connected in and to the home. The connec-tion between the sites is made by people in action, moving between them, linkingthem with each other materially and cosmologically, embodying them in variousways and making embodied connections between them. The bnh ttthat is symbolicof both national and regional identity, paraded through the streets or manifested incompetitive display, purchased in markets, or received from friends or kin as gifts,is placed as offering on altars in the home and consumed round the table duringTt meals by the resident kin group. Thus, places and the event, Tt, are contiguous

with each other, enacted and embodied, made meaningful as part of a lived experiencethat unfolds as Tt progresses.Although the home as an imagined site of harmony and ultimate satisfaction may

be regarded as a utopia of sorts,45 the analysis that I have presented suggests that inHCMC it can equally be regarded as a heterotopia, i.e. a place that connects to andcondenses many other places economic ones, leisure spaces, graveyards, placesof worship, historic sites and so on.

Foucaults essay on heterotopia has been described as frustratingly incomplete,inconsistent, incoherent, perhaps intentionally so in the opinion of Soja, since anyattempt to give it a precise meaning is likely to fail.46 Foucault has also been criticised

by Arun Saldanha and others as overly structuralist. However, it is important to con-sider the notion of heterotopia as an analytical concept that can be applied to a space(or a situation, a performance, an event) rather than to regard it as a space or elementwithin a larger total structure. Certainly, heterotopia is presented by Foucault as aspatial reality, in de Certeaus sense of the term, but it is constituted as such by therelationships that it mirrors or inverts, and my application of the concept here isin accordance with the notion of dwelling as a form of social practice. Viewingthe home as a heterotopia in a non-structuralist sense involves viewing it as ascene of practice and as a summary or condensation of the practices associated

45 At home: An anthropology of domestic space, ed. Irene Cieraad (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UniversityPress, 1999), p. 3.46 Arun Saldanha, Heterotopia and structuralism, Environment and Planning, 40 (2008): 208096.



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with Tt that its members are engaged in, as a focal point in their lived experience ofTt to which the practices at other sites in their experience of the city are connectedand aggregated.

Utopia and heterotopia are not incompatible, since according to Foucault a het-

erotopia is

a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other realsites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,and inverted and the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place sev-eral spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.47 I have shown how thisis achieved, how the home becomes a heterotopian reality through social practiceduring Tt, by showing how it connects to other places through the activities of itsinhabitants, and how this dwelling mutually incorporates these places symbolicallyand materially. Home juxtaposes, contests and inverts the separation between livingand dead through the ancestral altar and the rituals through which the dead areinvited home for Tt, and sent on their way again afterwards. The division between

private and public is inverted also, through the consumption of produce obtainedin the markets by the family, the display on altars of gifts from business associatesand friends, and the visits that are made by the latter to the home. The public ismade private, the dead are brought back to life, the world outside becomes theworld inside (e.g. through television and sightseeing). Both of these inversionsreinforce a third juxtaposition and inversion, that between sacred and secular,between place of religious worship and centre of everyday, secular activities.

The heterotopoic nature of the home is not constant. It changes with the devel-opmental cycle of the domestic group, with the seasons, and with the economic, socialand political circumstances that provide part of its context. Thus, heterotopia is not an

essential and unchanging characteristic, but a relative and contingent one. In thisrespect, regarding the home as heterotopia is also consistent with the idea thatsuch spaces are most often linked to slices in time and function at full capacitywhen men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time .48 Tt is a tran-sitional time, a calendrical festival, situating the home betwixt and between normaltime of social life. Tt practices are geared toward securing a happy and prosperousNew Year for the members of a family situated within a home, so the home is a utopia(an imagined reality) in this context of festival time as well as a heterotopia, since het-erotopias are spaces of deferral, spaces where ideas and practices that represent thegood life can come into being, from nowhere, even if they never actually achieve

what they set out to achieve.49

Conclusion

Drawing on practice approaches to the analysis of social life, one can view theextra-domestic aspects of Tt as parts of an urban landscape upon which peopleact and through which they constitute the meaning of Tt in relation to home.This is not quite the everyday urban landscape with which they are familiar, butone where certain of its constituent sites are transformed through the actions of a

47 Michel Foucault, Of other spaces, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16, 1 (1986): 25.48 Ibid., p. 26.49 Kevin Hetherington, The badlands of modernity: Heterotopia and social ordering (Routledge:London, 1997), p. ix, cited in Saldanha, Heterotopia and structuralism, p. 2091.



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variety of agents that produce a landscape appropriate to Tt, calling on their experi-ence of previous Tt festivals, their knowledge of the traditions of the past and actingin terms of contemporary needs and desires. For each individual, for each home, apractice approach indicates that the landscape becomes a locality and a series of

linked spaces through their actions upon it during the Tt period, through theirthoughtful, conscious and meaning-making dwelling, and this appropriation of the

urban landscape and its material elements is what constitutes their experience ofTt, together with what takes place in the home their private, domestic realm,which is intimately connected to the public one. In this sense the division betweenprivate and public becomes blurred and, partly because of this, the line betweenthe sacred and the profane aspects of Tt, too, is at least opaque.

Through their practice of place-making during Tt in the city, people connectcertain places to their home, aided by the exchange of objects between places andpeople, and make the city theirs, creating their sense of belonging.50 Many originate

from elsewhere, and they recall this memory via Tt rice cakes, visits to natal homesand other forms of symbolic action, but they also forge a new sense of belonging to

the city through blending the home into the city in the way that they do. How they doso varies according to individual histories and circumstances, making the precisemeaning of Tt contingent and variable. While certain sites such as the HngKings Temple or Nguyn Hu Street do indeed carry relatively constant meanings,in the sense of being dominant symbols and having specific values and ideas associ-ated with them,51 a fuller understanding of Tt is derived from the ways in which sitesare used and from how they are linked to each other through use over the Tt period.This varies from person to person, though there are patterns and regularities that can

be discerned within this. As Ingold has pointed out, the notion of dwelling alwaysneeds to be contextualised, and in this case, practices are undertaken in the contextof a framework of knowledge and ideas relating to Tt handed down from the past,including peoples own experience of Tt. This knowledge framework is a complexamalgam of generally known aspects of Vietnamese myth, history and tradition, reli-gious beliefs and values, local and regional practices, kinship ideology, and more pri-

vately held beliefs and notions of appropriateness operating at the level of individualkin groups and homes. This framework is not static but continuously developing,informed by the past and reflecting social memory as well as individual circum-stances; a recent death in the family affects the ways in which the home participates

in Tt; historical events such as the Tt Offensive in 1968 also change the ideologicalaspects of the framework in terms of which Tt is understood. So how people imagineTt changes over time and according to individual and social circumstances, as well ascontaining certain relatively invariant elements, and the way in which they live andmake Tt into an embodied reality reflects both these tendencies.

Here, too, we find clarification in de Certeaus approach and in his distinctionbetween place and space. In this paper the spatializing process described involvesconnecting places related to the Tt festival, to peoples ideas and beliefs about Tt,

50 Lovell, Introduction, pp. 68.51 Victor W. Turner, The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1967), p. 28.



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and to their ability and determination to realise the potential that the city holds intheir quest for a meaningful Tt experience. In doing so they live the city in accord-ance with both a structure of ideas and beliefs about Tt and their social, economicand physical abilities to put these into practice. Place is an order, a structure, an

instantaneous configuration of positions52

while space is how that order is realisedin practice, which varies according to a number of factors time, season, socialand political context and so on. Similarly, Tt as an ideal mental construct is anorder, and how people realise it in their dwelling depends on their abilities andtheir choices. Since Tt is deeply embedded in Vietnamese culture, associated witha pattern of activities and beliefs that are widely held, how Tt is practised has a dis-cernible pattern that accords with this structure, but which nevertheless demonstrates

variety. In this way the connections between places as spatialized through practiceconstitute a Tt story or narrative, a text that is written through the process ofwalking the city and one constructed in relation to and connected with T t ideals.

To use another of de Certeaus metaphors, the one is a map, the other a tour; the for-mer a concept, the latter a series of actions or movements. The map is an abstraction

and thus a fiction; the tour is a lived reality.53

52 De Certeau, The practice of everyday life, p. 117.53 Ibid., pp. 93, 119, 196.


Connecting Places, Constructing Tet. Home, City and the Making of the Lunar New Year in Urban Vietnam

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