An interdisciplinary immersion into Vietnam

diaCRITIC and Australian National University lecturer Ashley Carruthers reflects here upon the contours and successes of the ANU Field School in Vietnam, a fully immersive model which offers Australian students local Vietnamese perspectives on everything from environmental sustainability to the cultural impact of tourism and the rewards of karaoke, despite one’s potential (in)ability to carry a tune.

I teach a number of courses at the Australian National University, but the Vietnam Field School is by far my most valued and enjoyable yearly teaching experience. Back at the campus I sometimes find it hard to compete with Facebook for my students’ attention in the lecture theatre. When we get to Vietnam, suddenly I am a valued repository of knowledge on this amazing place in which they find themselves. It’s very gratifying.

The school’s counterpart in Vietnam is Danang University, and we base our activities in Danang city, Hoi An and the Quang Nam countryside. On the trip, teaching staff have the chance to work closely with a  group of 25 undergraduate students. The school is deliberately interdisciplinary, but the majority of students come from environment and anthropology backgrounds, and the core focus is on the nexus between environmental and social science. Food is a popular research topic, with approaches varying from tracing food commodity chains to investigating the social, cultural and gendered meanings of the food consumed in the diverse locations the school visits. Globalisation and consumer culture are also popular foci, as is tourism, both in terms of sustainability and around issues of commodification and authenticity. The more hardcore environmental scientists have in the past pursued questions of waste disposal, water access and purity. The threat of contamination of the water table by recently introduced chemical pesticides and fertilisers is something that villagers are becoming increasingly aware of.

In the Quang Nam countryside

With guidance from lecturers and tutors, students conceptualise their own group and individual research topics and strategies, and then pursue them in the field by means of interview, survey and participant observation.  At the end of the trip they present the results of their research with the help of powerpoint back in Danang University’s beautiful new classrooms. Field translation help is provided by the ANU staff, as well as by students from Danang University. The Danang U students are an invaluable resource, and we rely on them to introduce our students to the city and help them understand some of the key issues facing it. (The relocation of poor fishing and farming communities from the waterfront and the gentrification of this area are current hot topics, as is the construction of an ultramodern “new town” on reclaimed land to the north of the city.) And of course the Danang students are diligent in teaching our ANU students where to eat, and in acquainting them with the fact that it’s OK to sing karaoke even if you have a terrible voice.

ANU students meeting DNU students who will host them for the homestay in Danang

Homestays are an major aspect of the course, and these encounters are important in so many ways. The Australian students have the chance of a precious insight into the everyday lifestyles of both rural and urban people in Vietnam, enabling them to make comparisons across what is arguably the greatest social divide in contemporary Vietnam. They are also able to appreciate that university students in Danang come from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. One year, a student was denied permission to stay with her host overnight when registering with the Ward police because they deemed her counterpart’s family “too poor” to be appropriate hosts for a foreign student. Meanwhile, a student billeted with another Danang family was picked up from the hotel not by Honda but in the family’s gleaming new SUV.

The homestays are always a crash course in cultural difference. The ANU students are often surprised find that they are to share a bed with their (same sex) student host, and a bed with a hard bamboo mat instead of a mattress at that. The next surprise is that sleep is usually considered a lesser priority to the important business of becoming friends and sharing confidences late into the night. This year one student took a “2 minutes before bedtime” photograph in her billet’s room in which there were fully twenty people present—family, friends and neighbours enjoying the novelty of her visit and eager to ask questions about her life in Australia.

More homestay students meeting one another in Danang

Our students are always impressed and fascinated by how serious, hard-working and globally focused their Vietnamese counterparts are. They are also amazed by how these dynamic young women (the vast majority of our students are female) negotiate tradition, gender norms, paternal authority and family expectations while also being strikingly independent. For their part, the Danang students are eager to compare themselves to their international counterparts, and to find out about their home lives, study habits, aspirations and ideas about romance. Friendships forged in Danang continue via Facebook and sometimes beyond.

Other aspects of the course include Vietnamese language tuition and lectures from local academics, business people and members of government departments. Every year we have an engaging  discussion with the Party General Secretary of Hoi An on the problems of environmental sustainability and the cultural impact of tourism in the town. He takes thorny questions from our students with equanimity and his answers never fail to be both eloquent and frank. Every year our students come away with a keen appreciation of how the questions of environment, development and sustainability look from a Vietnamese perspective—or rather from a range of situated local perspectives. Indeed, our students find themselves parting with their textbook assumptions about these issues almost immediately on arriving in Danang.

Students learning about irrigation, land tenure and use and agricultural practices at the village where we stay in Quang Nam

The highlight of the trip is always the stay in the village in Quang Nam. We spend three nights in this subsistence rice farming village, and every year we manage to observe and learn a little more, and to find ways of helping the village a little more effectively. Last year we established a modest “cow bank”, and one of the cows obliged by calving during our visit in January, a year to the day it was inducted into the ANU revolving bovine development fund. This year we funded the building of a volleyball and badminton court, and donated an oxygen cylinder to the local clinic. We are also looking at encouraging the purchase and installation of biogas units that run on animal waste and provide a free source of cooking gas. We are extraordinarily privileged in being allowed to stay in the villagers’ houses, and to crawl all over the place asking questions of all and sundry about water quality, pesticides, fertilisers, food chains, kinship systems, land tenure, tree plantations, graves, mobile phones and dreams of life in the city. In turn the local residents counter-interview us about work, life, farming, family and food back in Australia. It’s quite an exchange.

Players on the volleyball court funded by ANU
ANU donating an oxygen cylinder to the local clinic

We have now run the ANU Vietnam Field School five times. Naturally there were teething troubles at the start, but by now it runs incredibly smoothly, in large part thanks to the professionalism and good faith of the International Co-operation Department of Danang University. A number of summer schools are held by international institutions in Vietnam, but I believe ours is the only one that makes use of a fully immersive field model. The news I want to share with this blog is that this kind of teaching is now feasible in Vietnam. It requires some institutional relationship building and negotiation, but it is doable, and it is very rewarding indeed. One of the payoffs we are already beginning to see is that students who have done the course are pursuing their interest in Vietnam through their graduate studies, or by returning there to work with environmental NGOs and other organisations.

ANU students listening to headphones at the computers that ANU donated to the Danang Blind Association

Ashley Carruthers is a cultural anthropologist who lectures in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University

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