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.

The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

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.

The famous writer and revolutionary Nhất Linh (Nguyễn Tường Tam) committed suicide on July 7, 1963, in protest against Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). Although largely ignored by Western scholars, the suicide was a major catalyst for the growing resistance to Ngô Đình Diệm and contributed to a deeper transformation of Vietnamese political culture. Even decades after the collapse of the RVN, the event remains central to the historical memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

The story of how Theravada Buddhism came to be adopted among urban Kinh communities in southern Vietnam challenges how scholars narrate Buddhist history. Focusing on the transformation of a single liturgical text—a chant, originally in the Pali language, to invite a monk to give a sermon—as it circulates across Thailand and Cambodia before its eventual translation from Khmer into Vietnamese in the mid-twentieth century, this essay reveals how chants grow as they circulate, how Theravada liturgies unsettle distinctions between classical and vernacular languages, and how ritual and ideological necessities shape translation in new cultural contexts.

This paper examines an institution called Review and Selection, which facilitated the tasks of tax collection and military conscription in early modern Vietnam. Through a comparative examination of this institution’s history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Lê/Trịnh realm of Đàng Ngoài in the north and the Nguyễn domain of Đàng Trong in the south, this paper challenges ideas in extant English-language scholarship that claim that Đàng Trong was less bureaucratic, less Confucian, and more militarized than that of the Lê north. In the process, it offers some new characterizations of early modern Vietnam.