Remembrance, commemoration, and revolutionary apparitions : Ritualizing connections with the past and the future in Vietnam

This chapter takes as point of departure the ritualized commemoration practices on the island of Côn Đảo [Poulo Condore] which was a penitentiary site under the French and South-Vietnamese regimes, infamous for its “tiger cage” cells. The formal commemoration of revolutionary martyrs at the war cemeteries is juxtaposed with the ritualized worship of female martyr Võ Thị Sáu, who in 1952 was executed by the French before she could establish her own family and who resurfaces every night around midnight from her grave at the prison cemetery as a revolutionary apparition. Focusing on the distinctions and connections between commemoration, remembrance and forgetting, I discuss the phenomenon of war martyrs, sacrifice and commemoration in Vietnam before moving to the distinctions and connections between personal memories and official commemoration. After analyzing the meritorious and efficacious dead in the guise of ancestors, spirits, ghosts and gods, paying particular attention to the spirit of Hồ Chí Minh, I argue in the conclusion that ritualization of remembrance and commemoration in Vietnam integrates overlapping cosmological worlds and times.

© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jonathan D. London; individual chapters, the contributors