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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
In 1938, Đào Duy Anh published An Historical Outline of Vietnamese Culture [Việt Nam Văn Hóa Sử Cương], the first work by a Vietnamese scholar to detail the history of Vietnamese culture and society from its beginnings. After more than eighty years, the book continues to be in print. It has shaped the historical and cultural understanding of generations of Vietnamese students, scholars, intellectuals, and the public more broadly. An exercise in intellectual archaeology, this paper traces the evolution of the concept of culture as it appears in Đào Duy Anh’s writings, from his earliest works of journalism, to the pamphlets he authored, the dictionaries he compiled, and finally the history of Vietnamese culture that he published. Through examining circuits of textual circulation, the paper details, among other influences, the role of the German notion of kultur, the French idea of civilisation, the comparatively recently coined Chinese term 文化/wenhua, and Đào Duy Anh’s own deepening engagement with Marxist thought. The paper argues that Vietnamese intellectual history can only be understood as global intellectual history.
Haydon Cherry
Northwestern University