Concerns of the only qualified candidate for Professor in Ethnology, Nguyen Van Chinh

Associate Professor Nguyen Van Chinh is currently Head of the Department of Development Anthropology, Faculty of Anthropology, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

I was fortunate to hear him share his life and career as an Ethnology researcher and teacher. Despite his advanced age, he still has many concerns about ethnic research and training the next generation with a passion for Ethnology.

Coming to Ethnology through a lifetime journey

Associate Professor Nguyen Van Chinh was born and raised in Thuong Son village, Thuy Duong commune, Thuy Nguyen district, Hai Phong city.

In 1974, Mr. Chinh passed the entrance exam to Hanoi University of Science, studying History (now the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi). In 1978, he graduated from university.

According to Mr. Chinh, the regular training program of the University at that time was four and a half years, at the end of the course, students had 6 months to do an internship and do their graduation thesis.

He said: “I registered to study Ethnology but now I can’t remember the biggest reason for choosing this major. I only know that studying Ethnology will give me the opportunity to travel to new lands, learn about strange ethnic groups, learn more about customs, beliefs and even the mysteries of life that have yet to be discovered.”

Talking about his path to becoming a teacher and scientific researcher, Mr. Chinh said that his life had three very important milestones.One is,studied at the Faculty of History, University of General Sciences (1974-1978) and was retained as a lecturer (1979).Second,military service (1980-1982).Third,Internship and PhD thesis at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (1989-2000).

While going to university created opportunities to access new knowledge, the years in the army helped him practice discipline, patience, and the spirit of listening. The years of hard work at the University of Amsterdam opened the door to the academic world, helping him improve his knowledge and research skills.

Mr. Nguyen Van Chinh attended the 2020 Ethnology Conference. (Photo: Provided by the character).

Recalling his first days at university in Europe, he said: “In September 1989, I was sent by the school to the Netherlands to do an internship at the University of Amsterdam under the Vietnam - Netherlands cooperation program (VH25). Here, I was accepted to do an internship at the Center for Asian Studies - Amsterdam (CASA) as a postgraduate intern. Professor Jeremy Kemp was my scientific advisor.

I was able to participate in the sessions.seminar(conference) of the Center for Asian Studies, using the school's huge library and online internet system. This helped me not only get acquainted with international scholars and friends but also created opportunities for me to approach new issues and academic interests about Asia.

I still remember the heated discussions related to village life, Asian and Vietnamese farmers, the issue of migration and social security in rural areas and the endless debate of researchers around the thesis: Are Vietnamese farmers rational or emotional, initiated by American scholars?

After completing his postgraduate internship, Mr. Chinh took the entrance exam and was selected as a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam on child labor in rural areas.

The thesis “Nameless Work: Child Labor in the Transitional Economy of Rural North Vietnam” was officially defended by Mr. Chinh (standing in the middle, holding a red document holder) at the Aula Cathedral of the University of Amsterdam. The thesis was highly appreciated and was awarded the Outstanding Thesis Prize by the Netherlands Association for Social and Cultural Sciences in 2000. This is a rare photo taken at that time and he has kept it until now. (Photo: Provided by the character).

He was then introduced by Dutch professors to the Southeast Asian Studies Program at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to do postdoctoral research (postdoctoral research). From here, it paved the way for a new step in the process of accumulating knowledge about countries in the region of Mr. Chinh.

“Until I left Amsterdam for Singapore, I didn’t know much about the Southeast Asian research network. It was during my postdoctoral research at the National University of Singapore (NUS) that I started to look around and build a network of relationships with researchers in the region.

At the National University of Singapore, emerging researchers and renowned professors from around the world are invited to regular academic exchanges, and new issues in science are always updated,” Mr. Chinh shared.
 

Scientific results contribute to adjusting and building policies for national and human development.

Looking back at Associate Professor Nguyen Van Chinh's more than 40 years of scientific research, it can be seen that his research focuses mainly on 3 areas: Development Anthropology research; Cultural and Ethnic Identity research; and Vietnamese Ethnological History/Anthropology research.

Nearly half of his published scientific works focus on the field of Development Anthropology. It is difficult to summarize all the massive research results he has created in this short article!

When asked about the most profound and influential memories on his journey to Ethnology, he answered without hesitation that it was his first ethnographic field trip in Western Nghe An in 1978. At that time, he was assigned to research the Tho people in Nghia Dan district.

According to the teacher, when leaving the bus station in Thai Hoa Town, he carried his backpack on his shoulder and followed the dusty red dirt road to Nghia Quang Commune - the first stop of the trip, and then expanded to communes in Lam La area and Nghia Tien Commune.

“I became addicted to eating chili from this trip! In the locality, people are very poor, and it is the lean season, not many families have food to eat while corn and potatoes have not yet been harvested. To fight the torment of hunger, people have to find tubers, fruits, bamboo shoots, and vegetables in the forest to survive.

The flour made from the core of the sago palm tree is the most sought after by the Tho people because it is a source of starch instead of cereals or cassava. Even the brown tubers in my hometown, which are only used to dye fabrics, are turned into food. People chop these tubers into small pieces, put them in a basket and soak them in the stream to reduce the astringent sap, then simmer them until soft enough to eat. This dish is very difficult to swallow, but if you mix a little salt with wild chili, you can swallow the food faster. Moreover, the people also tell us that eating chili every day can prevent malaria. And so we eat chili every day, and over time it becomes a habit…”, the teacher said.

It was those first years of Ethnology fieldwork in Western Nghe An that left in him a good feeling about the local people. Despite their poverty and countless hardships, they did not hesitate to share with him cassava and corn during the famine days, helping him understand the way of life of mutual love and care between people. That sincere feeling nurtured in him a love for the profession and a determination to embark on the path of researching ethnic groups.

Scientifically, Mr. Chinh said, the characteristic of the Ethnological research method is fieldwork. The researcher must go to the field, live with and penetrate into the lives of the people, observe, interview, and discuss with them the issues that interest him/her in order to understand the ethnic culture from within.

Ethnologist Nguyen Van Chinh's outstanding research on ethnic groups includes both basic and applied research, that is, using basic knowledge about ethnic groups to serve development projects and programs and analyze development issues in ethnic minority areas.

His widely cited research includes the use of customary law in natural resource conservation; local knowledge in maternity and newborn care; the use of cultural resources for development; policies to support very small ethnic groups; and manifestations of ethnic discrimination to propose appropriate policies for government policy-making agencies.

Mr. Nguyen Van Chinh (right) studies at the Confucius Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, October 2011. (Photo: Provided by the character).

In addition to published research, Mr. Chinh also directly works as an independent consultant for development projects of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank, and the UK Department for Overseas Development (DFID) in Vietnam. These activities mainly use ethnographic knowledge to research and propose practical solutions for specific projects.

The person who changed the long-standing perception of the Ngai ethnic group

Vietnam is a multi-ethnic country with extremely rich cultural characteristics. For Mr. Chinh, cultural diversity is not only a resource for development but also a challenge for building a national and ethnic community. Exploring the identity and cultural boundaries between ethnic groups is both of fundamental academic significance and of urgent importance for practical work. Therefore, he directs his research to both theory and practice, thereby making important contributions to the field of Ethnology in the country.

The most notable of these contributions is the research results on the topic of understanding the identity of the Ngai people in Vietnam. According to statistics, this is a very small ethnic group with a population of just over a thousand people and they are on the brink of extinction.

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Master Chinh has spent many years and traveled to most of the areas where the Ngai people live to investigate their population, lifestyle, language, family history, and life stories about their homeland, homeland, and transnational relationships. Mr. Chinh's research shows that: Ngai is a community of people with historical roots in the South China region (China) who migrated to Vietnam during and after the Taiping Rebellion in the Liangguang region in the second half of the 19th century and became a large Ngai-Hakka speaking community in Vietnam.

And he also pointed out that the statistics on the number of Ngai people in Vietnam are many times higher than the announcement of the General Statistics Office. The results of the research topic have contributed to changing the long-standing perception of the Ngai ethnic group, providing a scientific basis for changing policies on the Ngai ethnic group.

One of the important issues that Mr. Chinh is interested in when studying ethnic groups is how to turn cultural resources into a driving force for development, and how to involve culture more deeply in the process of sustainable development. He believes that bringing cultural capital into the process of socio-economic development also means accepting and using the elements of that culture. Development strategies therefore need to understand the dynamism and diversity of culture, mobilizing cultural resources into the development process instead of relying only on material resources or imposing will from outside the community.

The pain ofscientist in training

Sharing the concerns of a scientist working in training, Mr. Chinh mentioned three points.

First of all, about university teaching methods.

Mr. Chinh persistently pursues the philosophy of “not creating parrots” in Social Sciences.

“If there is anything worth mentioning about my teaching method, it is two points that I have tried to implement. That is to guide students in learning methods based on researching a topic (project-based learning), and teaching does not depend on textbooks or prepared lectures but provides learning materials that are updated annually, explains, and discusses, helping students develop creative thinking and independent thinking," Mr. Chinh shared.

The important thing for teachers is to create and nurture inspiration to pursue research and creativity, not to memorize available information. The research-based learning method is developed based on research on educational models and teaching philosophies in Vietnam combined with the experience of advanced universities in the world.

Observing the way Social Sciences are taught in Vietnam today, Mr. Chinh commented: “Up to now, the way of teaching Social Sciences and Humanities at university level is still to impart knowledge through textbooks or prepared lectures. Perhaps because it is safe for the teacher, students do not need to be creative, but the training efficiency is very low. The consequence of this teaching method is that students tend to passively absorb knowledge and recite lessons by rote. This is a risk of eliminating students' creative inspiration.

On the contrary, the PBL teaching method (project-based learning with students as the center) will help overcome students' passive knowledge absorption, foster a proactive spirit, explore new discoveries, thereby creating a passion for science."

Second, there is concern about the decline of scientific interest in ethnic groups in Vietnam.

According to Mr. Chinh, in the past, Vietnamese Ethnology research followed the Soviet Ethnology research model, mainly focusing on studying ethnic cultural characteristics, and created a valuable amount of knowledge about ethnic groups in Vietnam. Since opening up and deeply integrating into the world's common academic background, this subject has gradually shifted to an Anthropology approach with a research focus on the differences and cultural diversity of humans.

Besides traditional societies, Anthropology also extends its research interests to rural and peasant, urban and suburban communities in modern society.

Specifically, in the university training program, ethnic studies now only account for a modest proportion while other issues are more concerned. Ethnic studies require field trips but resources for student internships are becoming limited, leading to a situation where theory is more important than practice and students lose the opportunity to practice research methods. Moreover, students are often reluctant to go to remote areas, where many ethnic groups live, where life and transportation are difficult.

Third, a common way of thinking today is to worry about the “politically sensitive” aspects when researching ethnic groups.

In particular, poverty, cultural differences, and transnational relations among ethnic groups are sensitive issues that are rarely studied. This situation has serious consequences not only because it no longer produces the rich amount of knowledge about ethnic groups as before, but also because social and development policy makers will lack important sources of information to serve as a basis for practical solutions while society's understanding of ethnic cultures is at risk of being distorted and leading to increased ethnic discrimination.

Fourth, the team of leading experts on ethnic groups is gradually becoming scarce and depleted.

Mr. Chinh pondered: "Looking back over more than half a century of development of this field of study, up to now, there have only been two people in Ethnology who have been awarded the title of professor.

The first person is Professor Phan Huu Dat - recognized as a professor after 10 years of retirement. He was the Principal of Hanoi University of Science, and passed away more than 3 years ago.
 

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The second person is Professor Ngo Van Le - former Principal of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City National University. He is also over 70 years old and has been retired for many years. Looking at the successor team, Mr. Chinh speculates that, within the next 5 years, the field of Vietnamese Ethnology/Anthropology will probably not have anyone who meets the criteria to be recognized as a qualified professor. He analyzed that raising the standards of professors closer to those of other countries in the world not only helps improve the quality of leading experts, but on the other hand, creates significant challenges for those doing social science research.

In addition, the jerky and erratic policy on retirement age is also creating immediate difficulties.

For Social Sciences, researching and publishing scientific works in world-standard journals is not easy. It requires researchers to accumulate knowledge, information and integrate into the world's theoretical trends and research methods while Vietnam's training programs and content have not yet integrated.

Furthermore, publishing a scientific paper takes a lot of time. Not counting the research time, a scientific paper, from the time it is submitted to a journal, must go through two or three rounds of peer review, revision and editing before it can be published. These stages often take one to two, or even three years. This means that researchers need time to publish their science, and by the time they reach publication standards, they are already at retirement age.

In addition, unlike Natural Sciences or Engineering, Social Science research requires experience and commitment to practice. Young people have enough enthusiasm and health but lack experience and life and social experience. Therefore, it is difficult for young people to achieve top scientific publications when they lack experience.

Therefore, the retirement of a series of professors and associate professors according to Decree 50 may cause many social science departments of universities to struggle due to the lack of leading experts and will not have enough resources to recruit graduate students and train the next generation.

At the end of the conversation with us, Mr. Chinh confided that Vietnam is a multi-ethnic country. Researching the cultural diversity of ethnic groups, regions and localities, turning it into a sustainable development resource is a challenge that needs attention.

It can be seen that, despite his old age, Mr. Chinh is still working hard in the lecture hall, contributing to education and training and scientific research. Mr. Chinh in particular and the generation of leading teachers and scientists in general are considered "talents", have made and are making great contributions to the development of education and science at home and abroad, and deserve to be recognized and honored by students and colleagues.