After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My LaiThough a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life. Based on a detailed study of local history and moral practices, After the Massacre focuses on the particular context of domestic life in which the Vietnamese villagers interact with their ancestors on one hand and the ghosts of tragic death on the other. Heonik Kwon explains what intimate ritual actions can tell us about the history of mass violence and the global bipolar politics that caused it. He highlights the aesthetics of Vietnamese commemorative rituals and the morality of their practical actions to liberate the spirits from their grievous history of death. The author brings these important practices into a critical dialogue with dominant sociological theories of death and symbolic transformation. |
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After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai Heonik Kwon Limited preview - 2006 |
After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai Heonik Kwon Limited preview - 2006 |
After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai Heonik Kwon Limited preview - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
according activity ancestor worship ancestral altar ancestral temple army Ba Ba Linh bad death bipolar bodies brother burial Cambridge central Vietnam civilian Cold Cold War commemoration communist cultural Da Nang Dang Bo dead Dien Duong domestic ritual economic elders family temple fighters forces genealogical grievous death Hanoi hero worship heroic Hue-Tam idea identity kinship land lineage living Malarney martyr cemetery mass death mass grave massacre Maurice Halbwachs memory military Minh modern monument move Nang neighbors Nguyen Nguyen Du Nha xuat ban Nhan Dan official partisan peasants People's political postwar Quang Nam province Quang Ngai reburial relatives remember renovation revolutionary rite Robert Hertz side social soldiers South South Vietnam space spirit structure survivors symbolic tion tomb traditional tragic death troops Truong Chinh unity University Press veterans victims Viet Vietcong Vietnam War Vietnamese Vietnamese village village village chief village's violent York