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[This paper is translated from french by Duy Tâm.]

Rethinking the Status of Vietnamese Women
in Folklore and oral History

imag




The Representation of Incest in Oral Tradition




Let us go back to the notion of incest. If many societies repress incestuous acts, others seem either indifferent or consenting, and one is not lacking of such examples. In the Vietnamese oral tradition, there is this instance:
Con gai muoi bay cho ngu voi cha
Con trai muoi ba cho nam voi me.

(A girl of seventeen, let her not sleep with her father
A lad of thirteen, let him not lie with his mother).
This proverb is to be construed as a recommendation or a prohibition. If society needs to make certain rules under a prohibitive form in order to preserve social harmony and morality, it may be that it is faced with a situation which it deems to be alarming. In other words, if certain things need be so expressly spelt out, one can assume, with more or less certainty, that such things found their cause in reality. Be that as it may, prohibition in any society responds to a reality, whether social, human, moral, cultural, political or economic. It concerns those practices that constitute a menace to the community or are in contradiction with it, one does not forbid a thing or a concept that does not exist. Which government would forbid, say, people to look at themselves in a mirror? Vietnamese society has given cause to many a telling proverb.
Chau cau ma lay chau co
Thoc lua day bo giong ma nha ta

(If the maternal uncle's nephew marries the paternal aunt's niece
our house will have its stores full of rice)

Vua chua cam doan lam chi
De doi con di chang lay duoc nhau

(Wherefore do kings and lords forbid
two sisters' children to marry each other)
The first proverb gives clear indications as to degree of kinship between the spouses. The union in this case is judged auspicious and shall bring prosperity. In fact, the nephew/niece (chau) of the maternal uncle (cau) and the niece/nephew of the paternal aunt (co) are, in an indirect manner, termed as «siblings». Their union is assimilated to an incest which, far from being disapproved, seems highly commended. As for the second proverb, it does not only tell that the prohibition was decreed by kings and lords 10 but also that the common people, on the contrary, did not mind intermarriages, namely, in the case of first cousins. In the religious tradition, the couple «Ong Dung Ba Da», who, according to the legend, are brother and sister, is worshipped as tutelar genii, in the Red River Delta 11.

Without attempting to go through all the world's traditions, one notes the presence, as in most founding myths, of an original couple, either a brother and a sister, or a mother and a son. In Greek mythology, it is Gaia who, at the beginning of the universe, mates with her son Uranus in order to beget the Titans. With the Baruyas of New-Guinea, the founding myth traces the origin of mankind back to the primordial union of a brother and a sister 12.

Could one not regard these tales as some crystallization of the human collective memory, bequeathed from generation to generation under the form of myths? In other words, could these not be some sort of archetypes whose authors have been lost in the limbos of immemorial time? In spite of this original incest - which may shock the more sensitive souls - Greek myths have never ceased to occupy one of the most highly-regarded chapters in the history of human civilization. If confucianism, however, considered such incestuous acts as a menace to law and order, the common people saw no cause for reprimand in unions involving kinsmen, at least to a certain degree of relationship.

On the linguistic level, the Vietnamese word for incest is loan luan, a Chinese-based word, which means literally: «anarchical morals, inverted or drifting morality». If the Vietnamese had to borrow the word from the Chinese, it is because the idea of «incest» probably did not exist in their body of conceptual representations. Had such a state of affairs posed, in their eyes, any problem, they surely would have created a word for it. Is a foreign word not clear evidence that the object or concept which is described in the language borrowed from did not exist one's own one? Examples abound.

However, one needs to be circumspect when dealing with this kind of question - fascinating as it may be, in fact, one of the anthropologist's most studied subjects - for its emotional load is most explosive. The past, whether it be historical or mythical, cannot be gauged with today's eyes, since every period has its own raison d'être and its proper representational system, nevertheless it would be as absurd to defend a custom on the sole merit of its finding its cause in the past. The quest for meaning is paramount and prior to any other consideration, be it ideological or philosophical, affective or moral. Unless and until the hidden meaning has been cleansed of its parasites, one cannot hope to see a glimmer of comprehension.





Notes
10. Dating Vietnamese proverbs is a complex subject. If one succeeds in solving the problem, it could open up new perspectives. So far as this particular proverb is concerned, on may deduce from the terms vua (king) and chua (lord) that the prohibition might have been edicted at a period when the power was shared by the Le dynasty and the Trinh clan (i.e. XVIth-XVIIIth c.). At any rate, the prohibition of incest among certain members of the family is stated in the XVth-century Code of the Le.
11. See Nguyen Van Ky, op. cit.
12. Maurice Godelier, La production des grands hommes (The Making of Great Men), Fayard, Paris, 1985.




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