'Like a White Piece of Paper'. Embodiment and the Moral Upbringing of Vietnamese Children

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which rural Vietnamese girls' and boys' moral 'socialization' is influenced by Vietnamese educational discourses, local ideas of the body, and embodiment. In Vietnam, children's learning of 'good morality' is related to the metaphor of 'children are like white pieces of paper', which indicates that children need moral inscription in order to be socialized appropriately. In spite of official rhetoric, which stresses that all children should be 'socialized' similarly, local ways of construing the blank slate metaphor mean that rural girls and boys are socialized in radically different ways.

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