Musical Minorities

Abstract

Musical Minorities is the first English-language monograph on the performing arts of an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Living primarily in the northern mountains, many of the one million Hmong in Vietnam have strategically maintained their cultural distance from foreign invaders and encroaching state agencies for almost two centuries. They use cultural heritage as a means of maintaining a resilient community identity, malleable to their everyday needs and to negotiations among themselves and with others in the vicinity. Case studies of revolutionary songs, countercultural rock, traditional vocal and instrumental styles, tourist shows, animist and Christian rituals, and light pop from the diaspora illustrate the diversity of their creative outputs. This groundbreaking study reveals how music and other performing arts shape understandings of ethnicity and nationality in contemporary Vietnam. Based on three years of fieldwork with Hmong living in Lào Cai and neighboring provinces adjacent to the Chinese and Laotian borders, the book traces the circulation of organized sounds that contribute to the adaptive capacities of this diverse social group. This original investigation of the sonic materialization of social identity outlines the full multiplicity of Hmong music making in a fascinating account of music, minorities, and the state in a postsocialist context.

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