From modest beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, Vietnamese studies experienced a slow but consistent rise in Germany. In the GDR, the rise was connected first with close relations between the two communist states. Second, the area studies’ concept favored Vietnamese studies as a subject of Southeast Asian studies, rather than as a side subject of sinology as it had been before. In both parts of Germany, the interest in Vietnam has grown, especially after its reunification in 1975. Since 1990, at least one place is continuing to teach the subject in the framework of the Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures Program. In this way, one of the two professorships could be preserved.

While conducting research on debt in the lives of sex workers in Hồ Chí Minh City, I stumbled upon an ad a moneylender had glued to a wall. It revealed that financialization was thriving in Vietnam, and more specifically that credit was rapidly expanding and colonizing the urban landscape. Photography became a tool to visually capture this radical financial transformation. This article argues that photography can be an effective inductive research method for moving from the particular to the general and seeing the big picture. I contend that looking at the world through the camera viewfinder with an open mind can help us to uncover hidden patterns and generate a rich and meaningful overall picture of a research problem. This process facilitates the formation of research perspectives and generalizations based on observations. I support this argument by describing the reflexive journey that drove me from photographing debt records in enclosed spaces to wandering in Hồ Chí Minh City’s streets to document a thriving credit boom. This journey radically transformed my research agenda on credit and debt.

This paper examines the development of Vietnamese studies in post–World War II Japan. During the Vietnam War, Vietnamese studies in Japan was developed by a young generation of academics who were shocked by war coverage. Some of these scholars viewed Vietnamese society and its nationalist spirit as their “ideal social model,” and dedicated themselves to research topics centered on Vietnam’s rural society, revolution, and nationalism. However, when fieldwork became possible in the 1990s after the Đổi Mới reforms, research subjects became diversified among scholars who came after the Vietnam War generation as they encountered the country’s diverse realities.

Vietnamese studies first emerged in Thailand during the Cold War period and developed into a vibrant field after the establishment of Thai-Vietnamese diplomatic relations and the end of the Cambodian conflict. Vietnam’s accession to ASEAN in 1995 and preparation for the ASEAN Economic Community prior to 2015 also provided favorable conditions for the expansion of Vietnamese studies in Thai research and scholarship. However, the study of Vietnam in Thailand is often seen as a part of Southeast Asian studies and ASEAN studies. Research on Vietnam is typically carried out comparatively within a regional context, especially in comparison with Thailand, rather than for its own sake.

This paper surveys the emergence and transformation of Vietnamese studies in Russia and the former Soviet Union from the late nineteenth century until the present. It demonstrates how writings by Russian explorers and geographers developed into a professional academic field during the Soviet era, one that was strongly shaped by ideological affinities and international connections within the communist world. Although Vietnamese studies in Russia has retained some intellectual and institutional legacies from the Soviet era, it also reflects transformations in academic life in Russia since the 1990s as well as the changing relationship between the two countries.

Vietnamese studies in China is a contentious field that is dominated by three frameworks: the central-regional relationship, the tributary relationship, and the diffusion thesis. It emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to French scholars’ questioning of the extent and duration of Chinese influence on Vietnam. It then became highly politicized between the 1970s and 1980s due to the issues of both the ethnic origins of the bronze drum and the nature of Sino-Vietnamese relations. In the twenty-first century, even though China began to address the issue of Sinocentrism, its claim to the South China Sea has been a source of great tension among the scholars in the two communist countries.

In this article, I explore how Buddhist charity workers in Vietnam interpret rising cancer rates through understandings of karma. Rather than framing cancer as a primarily physical or medical phenomenon, volunteers state that cancer is a product of collective moral failure. Corruption in public food production is both caused by and perpetuates bad karma, which negatively impacts global existence. Conversely, charity work creates merit, which can improve collective karma and benefit all living beings. I argue that through such interpretations of karma, Buddhist volunteers understand their charity at cancer hospitals as an affective and ethical form of public health intervention.

This paper explores the charitable work of Buddhist women who work as petty traders in Hồ Chí Minh City. By focusing on the social interaction between givers and recipients, it examines the traders’ class identity, their perception of social stratification, and their relationship with the state. Charitable work reveals the petty traders’ negotiations with the state and with other social groups to define their moral and social status in Vietnam’s society. These negotiations contribute to their self-identification as a moral social class and to their perception of trade as ethical labor.

Based on twenty months of ethnographic research from 2016 to 2019 at Buddhist educational programs for youth in Hồ Chí Minh City, this article investigates the emergence of urban therapeutic Buddhism. Responding to the heightened public concerns over youth’s well-being and mental health, urban monastics are adapting Theravada vipassanā meditation and Thích Nhất Hạnh’s mindfulness teachings to help youth address their social-emotional concerns. The article argues that by promoting a lifestyle based on Buddhist mindfulness and meditation practices, Buddhist monastics and youth are fashioning a framework of ethical personhood and moral community that challenges, but also reinforces, market-socialist morality.

This article examines how builders and users contested the cultural, political, and social mission and meaning of the Hà Nội Central Library [Bibliothèque centrale de Hanoi] from 1919 to 1941. I argue that the central library was not just a symbol of Western modernity, but a public space in which modern practices were defied and defined by Vietnamese students, urban readers, and administrators. Library readers freely accessed diverse print matter, practiced self-directed learning, and created a social space for study, research, and leisure. Through this historical study, I reveal how the library was a contested colonial institution and a formative space of urban social life.