Très intéressante présentation de Nguyễn Giáng Hương sur le patrimoine culturel vietnamien de la BnF.
La conférence donnée le 8 mai 2023 au centre EFEO d’Hô Chi Minh ville par Mme Nguyễn Giáng Hương, responsable des fonds Asie du Sud-est à la bibliothèque nationale de France Bnf, donne un aperçu de la diversité et de la richesse des fonds d’archives et de documents imprimés consacrés au Vietnam, tout en soulignant leur indéniable valeur scientifique pour l’étude de l’histoire, de la société et de la civilisation vietnamiennes.
[ndlr] Annonce d’une conférence organisée par Anne Guillou (anthropologue CNRS) à l’IRASEC à Bangkok dans le cadre du cycle “Bouddhisme et société”.
Les rituels funéraires dans les manuscrits khmers
par Leng Kok-An, chercheur principal, Directeur de la conservation des manuscrits au Fonds d’Edition des Manuscrits du Cambodge – FEMC
Mardi 26 juin 2018 à 18h30
Conférence en khmer, traduite en français et en anglais.
Les manuscrits gravés sur feuilles de latanier, recopiés de génération en génération depuis des siècles, étaient conservés dans les bibliothèques des monastères du Cambodge. La guerre, le régime des Khmers rouges et la négligence en ont provoqué la disparition presque complète. La lecture de ceux qui restent permet néanmoins de pénétrer le sens et de mieux comprendre l’organisation des rituels bouddhiques les plus familiers des Khmers.
Entrée libre dans la limite des places disponibles.
This very handsomely produced book was inspired by, and includes a translation of, the 1752 Tam Giáo Chư Vọng (The Errors of the Three Religions). The volume is organized into two sections. The first is an invaluable and detailed discussion of the religious landscape in pre-19th C Vietnam and how Catholicism related to it. It is well research and quite thorough, and the best in-depth account that I’ve encountered. The second half is a fully annotated translation of the “Errors of the Three Religions” manuscript, which is held in the MEP archives in Paris. It is in the form of an imagined question and answer disputation between a Catholic and a Confucian scholar who seeks to represent the three major religious traditions in Vietnam. The volume is a welcome addition to scholarship on early Vietnamese Catholicism.
[ndlr] Annonce d’une nouvelle édition trilingue commentée d’une édition inédite du poème épique de Nguyen Dinh Chieu. Présentation de l’éditeur.
Réf. : Pascal Bourdeaux & Olivier Tessier (éd.), Histoire de Lục Vân Tiên / Lục Vân Tiên cổ tích truyện / The story of Lục Vân Tiên, Paris : École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2016. 2 vol., 292 p. & 312 p., (vietnamien, français, anglais).
Publication commentée d’un manuscrit enluminé inédit du poème Lục Vân Tiên redécouvert à la bibliothèque de l’Institut de France dans lequel Nguyễn Đình Chiểu (1822-1888) expose les vertus et les beautés du confucianisme et de la culture populaires du Sud du Viêt Nam.
Relevant à la fois de l’érudition classique et de la littérature orale du milieu du XIXe siècle, le poème Lục Vân Tiên de Nguyễn Đình Chiểu a intégré de longue date le panthéon des gloires littéraires nationales en ayant su insuffler au classicisme de la culture lettrée vietnamienne des caractéristiques méridionales. Œuvre traduite en français dès 1864, c’est la publication d’Abel des Michels en 1883 qui incita un officier de marine français, Eugène Gibert, en mission à Huê entre 1895 et 1897, à faire réaliser ce manuscrit enluminé par un lettré de cour du nom de Lê Đức Trạch. De retour en France, son commanditaire l’offrit en 1899 à la bibliothèque de l’Institut de France où il a été redécouvert en 2011. Il s’agit de l’unique version illustrée (139 planches polychromes) d’un poème vietnamien intégral connue à ce jour.
La beauté et la valeur littéraires et historiques de ce document unique justifient l’édition d’un fac-similé complété de commentaires au manuscrit. Le volume I, volontairement épuré, présente les planches enluminées en vis-à-vis desquelles paraît l’extrait du poème en version trilingue (français, quốc ngữ, anglais). Le volume II consigne l’ensemble des commentaires (avant-propos, introduction à l’histoire du manuscrit, annotations du poème, transcription inédite de la version du poème enluminé en vietnamien romanisé).
Le Lục Vân Tiên est une œuvre littéraire vietnamienne. Le manuscrit, engendré par le contact franco-vietnamien est une œuvre d’art qui l’est tout autant. La redécouverte récente de ce joyau de la culture populaire du Viêt Nam exigeait sa diffusion auprès des spécialistes et des passionnés d’histoire, de littérature, de philologie et d’art. Ce souhait est en partie réalisé grâce à la publication de cette Histoire de Lục Vân Tiên.
[ndlr] Une nouvelle publication très intéressante. Présentation de l’éditeur.
Medical manuscripts in Chinese and in Nom (vernacular Vietnamese) capture various aspects of the historical interaction between Chinese and Vietnamese thought. In Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History, Michele Thompson argues that indigenous Vietnamese concepts regarding health and the human body helped shape Vietnam’s reception of foreign medical ideas and practices, first from China and then from the West. To illustrate this theme, she presents a detailed analysis of the Vietnamese response to a Chinese medical technique for preventing smallpox, and to the medical concepts associated with it, looking at Vietnamese healers from a variety of social classes. Thompson’s account brings together colorful historical vignettes, contemporary observations and interviews, and textual analysis. One particularly instructive episode was Jean Marie Despiau’s 1820‒21 journey from Vietnam to Macau to secure doses of smallpox vaccine to vaccinate the royal children of the Nguyen Dynasty. The documentation associated with Despiau’s effort provides insight into the Vietnamese receptiveness to one foreign medical technique and the concepts of the body associated with it.
Ref. : Thompson, C. Michele, Vietnamese Traditional Medecine. A Social History, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015, 248 p. ISBN: 978-9971-69-835-5
[ndlr] Message d’Oscar Salemink à VSG que nous publions avec son aimable autorisation.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Thérèse Guyot-Becker with the successful defense of her doctoral thesis ’La servitude pour dette au Campa du sud au XVIIIe siècle: Étude des archives légales du “Panduranga-Campa” de la Société Asiatique de Paris’ [Serfdom for debt in 18th Centyury southern Champa : A study of the legal archives of Panduranga-Champa at the Société Asiatique de Paris]. Ms. Guyot defended at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE) of the Sorbonne in Paris.
The dissertation constitutes a meticulous and detailed empirical study of a collection of legal documents – mostly contracts about transactions – held at the Société Asiatique in Paris. The provenance of the collection is most likely the ‘trésor des roi chams’ described by Durand and Parmentier (1905). It consists of legal documents in three languages: Cham, Hán, and Hán-Nôm; the smaller section of documents in Hán and Hán-Nôm have been translated into modern Vietnamese by Vietnamese collaborators of Ms. Guyot, who translated the Cham language records which constitute the vast majority of the collection. By making this collection available for scholarship Ms Guyot has made an important contribution to our knowledge of Cham society in the 18th Century, under the tutelage of the Nguyễn Lords.
The thesis is divided up in five chapters. The first chapter contains a description of the collection; of the various types of legal documents; of the styles in which they were written up; and of the various actors involved in the transaction. Not much else is known about 18th Century Cham society, so the description of the monetary value of the transactions, of the places mentioned and especially of the dates of the contracts required a painstaking, pioneering labor on the part of Ms. Guyot who devised a system by which the Cham dates could be rendered in the Gregorian calendar. From this chapter it is clear that it took an enormous effort to make the collection accessible for scholarly description and analysis.
The subsequent four chapters engage the collection of legal documents from different vantage points. The methodological strategy of Ms Guyot is to see the collection as a quantifiable database which enables her to enumerate and calculate specific aspects, detect patterns and correspondences, and make these insights visible in a large number of tables (‘tableaux’) and charts (‘grafiques’). The author convincingly isolates and describes the terms of her statistical calculations, which is oftentimes a problem in quantitative research.
Chapter II describes the documents as sales documents, mostly concerning the selling of persons, either as definitive sale or as redeemable sale. It calculates the (monetary) value of the transactions and the average value of individual persons. And it compares the transactions involving three categories of people: villagers; notables and dignitaries; and the Po Taray (Cham princes).
Chapter III describes loans and debts – which are usually the precursor for the sale of persons. It describes loans with and without interest, and loans with collateral. It describes the various interest rates and types of collateral – oftentimes persons – and their distribution over various types of loans and their actors. And finally, it distinguishes again the transactions according to the category of the contractors – villagers, notables and dignitaries.
Chapter IV discusses the various types of redemption of debts, which might involve donations by third parties. It discusses legal procedures and legal cases when the pay-back was defaulted. And finally it discusses the various types and registers of redemption in Cham society of the time.
The final Chapter V engages the vernacular category of the person as property – halun – and asks the question whether halun constitute slaves or servants. It distinguishes between various categories of halun according to the reasons for their status as property: given up by others (‘aliénés’); endebted; or at fault in juridical terms. The chapter reviews the various rights and responsibilities of both masters and halun, and establishes that halun are not absolute property – i.e. reduced to objects – but remain subjects with the legal right to complain and seek justice. Finally, the chapter distinguishes between various types of halun, in the sense of their attachment to various types of ‘masters’ – e.g. villagers, notables, the prince, temples.
In the absence of much other knowledge of southern Cham society at the time, Dr Guyot-Becker made the philological choice to narrowly focus on this collection of Cham legal documents and make those documents accessible to contemporary scholarship, which in itself constitutes a veritable monk’s labor. That choice was presented as an effort to let herself be guided by the sources only, rather than by comparative insights derived from other sources and contexts. This choice may have prevented her from filling in the lines between the dots and offering a more coherent historical narrative, which hopefully will be developed in the time to come.