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According to Heonik Kwon, Vietnam teems with ghosts. The ones that fill this absorbing, fastidious and poignant book are for the most part those of men and women who died in the wars that ravaged central Vietnam, the site of Kwon’s fieldwork, between 1946 and 1975. The bodies of perhaps a million such people, nationwide, have never been recovered, and while those who died fighting on the so-called “American” side have never been honored or recognized by the Vietnamese state, those who fought on the winning side have been given heroic status and, where possible, heroes’ burials. The state, in other words, has denied hundreds of thousands of ghosts their right to exist as objects of reverence by their descendants. In this way, the state has tried—without much success, Kwon tells us—to extend Cold War animosities into the ambiguous and ironically more humane world of the dead.
Ghosts of War in Vietnam is finely tuned and economically written. In fewer than 200 pages it still finds room to display the longing, reverence, and inventiveness of survivors and allows us to hear a series of extended, post mortem comments delivered through spirit mediums by the dead.
Building on his powerful earlier work about popular memory and the My Lai massacre, Heonik Kwon’s new book masterfully demonstrates his skills as a participant observer, as he guides us through present-day Vietnam and into the other worlds that exist, unseen to us, inside the spirits of its people.
Selection Committee: David Chandler (Chair); Barbara Andaya; Charles Keyes; Rita Smith Kipp.
