From Revived Traditions to Modern Practices: The Religious Boom in Post-Secular Vietnam in an Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

This article gives a review of two books examining the religious situation in “post-secular” Vietnam. The book of American anthropologist Shaun Malarney “Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam” (2002) offers a research of the transformations of religious practices and morality caused by the 1945 communist revolution: the author shows the polyphony of understanding of morality and ritual in Vietnamese society. The edited volume “Religion, Place and Modernity: Spatial Articulation in Southeast Asia and East Asia” (Ed. by M. Dickhardt and A. Lauser in 2016) examines, within an “anthropology of space and place,” the emergence of new “secular religions” in Vietnam.