|
 
CD ROM on Colonial Vietnam
CD-ROM of complete reprint of the 'Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue 1914-1944' edited and produced by Pacific R.I.M. in collaboration with the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient, Hanoi. Advisory price 2700 FF (450 US$). Address: 5a Ngo Ha Hoi, Hanoi, Vietnam.By John KleinenNo shrill tones from the classical chamber music of Hue, nor any archival animation of the Nam Giao ceremony, the Vietnamese emperor's annual offerings to Heaven. The Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue on CD-Rom does not start with such fancy embellishments for which other products in this market are known. Instead of video-clips and short sound-bytes, for the first time the interested scholar is offered the complete version of a rarely available magazine from colonial Vietnam. Reputed for its high quality prints and colourful covers, the BAVH , as it became known, is now a collector's item, partly because of its absence in many libraries outside France or Vietnam. Spanning at least six metres of bookshelf, the BAVH is integrally available on compact disc: 12,000 pages, 3,000 engravings and photographs, many of them in full colour, and 558 articles. Would you like to see the art of the NguyÍn dynasty or the Imperial Palace at Hue and the citadel? You just turn to issue 1/2 published in 1919 and you will see the Ngo Mon (Southern) Entrance or the celebrated 'blues of Hue' accompanied by a long article of Father Leopold Cadière, the founder of the Société des Amis du Vieux Hue (AVH) that published the Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue (BAVH). Are you interested in the famous Cao Xuân family? You click on the name of Cao Xuân Duc in the index and the obituary of this famous scholar-mandarin and compiler of a famous work on 19th-century geography will appear immediately. A simple search-engine brings you to all the places where the single name of a province or a place has been located.
The advantage of this CD-Rom over the microfilm version, which was produced in the seventies, is, of course, its full-colour reproduction and the search-engines (an Adobe Acrobat-version in French) with indexes on name and subjects, while direct prints of a complete article will enable the user to read it at ease. All the pages of the Bulletin are scanned, including the business reports of the Association. Photographs, drawings, and maps are reproduced on a 72 dots per inch format, which gives a reasonable result to save enough memory to keep the complete series on one single CD-Rom. The scanning of the original subject and author index as it appeared in 1942, covering the period 1914 to 1944, obliged the producers to abstain from 'hyperlinking' Vietnamese words with their diacritical marks and Chinese references. Both appear as images, which are not separately indexed like the other reproductions used in the Bulletin. The reader has to retype these words first before browsing, but then the results are as satisfactory as any other term which can be highlighted to see if it is linked to another document. Although my beta-version of the CD-Rom did not support hyperlinking of the scanned texts, in their companion guide the authors assure users that it will do for all the non-Chinese and Vietnamese words. One hopes that they also will find a solution for the Vietnamese texts, because the price of this disk is high, at least for individual scholars and other interested readers. Only libraries and research institutes can afford to pay 2700 French francs (about 450 US dollars), but if they do, they will be the possessors of a high-quality product which can last for many years (and for many more when copying can be linked to constantly updated technology of CD-players).
The value attached to this CD-Rom derives largely from what the researcher expects from the sources kept in the Bulletin. Although its value has been proven, it is still possible to wonder what role and position the Association des Amis du Vieux Hue served at the time. Founded in November 1913, the Association was not a scientific institution like the Ecole Française d'Extrème Orient (EFEO), established in 1898. The whole endeavour started as a local folklore group whose members were concerned about the deterioration of the physical remnants of a civilization which they had conquered and partly destroyed. The initiative was taken by Father Léopold-Michel Cadière (1869-1955), a missionary of the French Société des Missions Etrangeres, who soon became one of Indochina's most famous ethnologists. No serious scholar doing research on Vietnamese culture, religion, and social relations can do without his extensive writings. Although many of them appeared in the more scholarly magazine of the EFEO, of which Cadière was a correspondent as long as he lived, a number of his best contributions about art and folk religion are published in de BAVH.
The Association he founded was a club of well-informed Frenchmen and some members of the indigenous elite who lived in and around the ancient capital-city of Hue. Like many other French publishing activities in the colonial period, the BAVH certainly was a highly elitist endeavour, which seldom met the norms of public journalism. In spite of its highly qualitative appearance, its tone and content were fundamentally conservative in the sense that the Association and its medium, the BAHV, served a French version of the 'invention of tradition' effort, so well known in other colonies. But like that other entertaining magazine, The National Geographic, the editors of the BAVH seemed to have had as their motto that 'only what is of a kindly nature is printed' about Vietnam and its people. And who cares about the hidden message or the conservative or political background of the members of the Association when one likes to read about the production of ceramics in Binh Dinh, a vivid description of the festivities during Tet or for that matter the growth of swallow nests off the coast of Central Vietnam? Other issues are highly informative about old pagodas around Hue (partly destroyed or severely dilapidated nowadays), about the attitude towards bad spirits in Binh Thuan, or the different ways dragons are used in Vietnamese art. Browsing through the electronic version of the Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue is like travelling on a slow boat in an orientalist Vietnam, not yet affected by war and poverty. And although this feeling is deceptive, it offers both the sensation of being in a far country and the sensation of distinctness that exists only in places that possess their own deep-rooted character.
:Dr John Kleinen (Kleinen@pscw.uva.nl) is attached to the Anthropological Institute of the University of Amsterdam)
|