Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam

Shaun Kingsley Malarney's Culture, Ritual and Revolution in Vietnam, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2002, is a scholarly ethnography examining how the Vietnamese Communist Party's revolutionary campaigns sought to transform funeral, wedding and ancestor-worship rituals, and how those rituals persisted and adapted under state pressure. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic ethnography grounded in fieldwork conducted in Vietnam. Its limit is that its fieldwork centers on the communities Malarney studied directly, so a claim generalizing its findings to ritual practice across all of Vietnam needs to be checked rather than assumed uniform nationwide.