Foreword
Vietnam, my beloved motherland, is situated on the eastern coast of the Indochinese peninsula, i.e. on the Pacific Rim at the cross-roads between China and West and East and between the two famous civilizations India. This specific geographical position has made Vietnam a center of attraction for various material, spiritual and ideological tendencies. Vietnam, in her turn, actively contributed her particularities to the development of these civilizations. As a result, the daily life, of which two most crucial components are the eating and speaking, is a condensed representation of all these tendencies' dimensions. On the other hand, Vietnam is traditionally a rice-growing country and a great deal of archaeological, ethnological, linguistic and botanical evidence as well as of folklore indicates that rice was domesticated locally. The inhabitants of Hòa Bình culture (circa 10,000 BP) living in caves and gath-ering cereals, probably including rice, used grinding stones to husk (appar-ently wild) rice. In the Phùng Nguyên and Dông Dâu cultures (in the second millennium BC), when people left their caves and settled in hilly regions, rice was cultivated in muddy valleys with the practice hoa canh thuy nâu (clearing soils by firing, and weeding fields by submersion [be-fore seeding]). And from then on, rice was and is by far, the staple food for the Vietnamese. A well-known saying captures the essence of our concept of food ideology: Có thuc mói vuc duoc Dao (to eat is to practice the Way [= the Great Cause]) and "to eat" for the Vietnamese is "to eat rice". In Vietnamese, an com (literally, to eat rice) means simply "to take a meal", which consists in fact of rice and rice products. Therefore, rice penetrates deeply and largely into all other aspects of day-to-day life - in folklore, literature, arts and social sciences as well Among the various kinds of rice, glutinous rice plays an important and extraordinary role in Vietnamese life. I felt it by instinct a half century ago, when I was amazed in a cold winter evening near a hearth at a stilted dwelling, to hear the Thai legend about the conversion of opaque (gluti-nous) rice into transparent (ordinary) rice (this legend is inserted in 3. Glu-tinous Rice in Evolution). The Thai popular conviction directed my mind since that time on. However, research at that time did not pay much attention to glutinous rice, although it still occupies an important place in the diet of some ethnic groups and has been retained in all ritual and religious ceremonies of a majority of the Kinh population. Its main and splendid parts were lost already under a lot of layers of the dust of time but, as a Chinese proverb emphasizes, When the rites were lost, they could be found again through the people of the countryside. And one of the characteristics of the Vietnamese people of the countryside is their poem-loving mentality; the finest essence of their spirit, in all their ups-and-downs, concentrates on numerous rhythmical lullabies, ballads, sayings, proverbs, folksongs, and even folktales... ture,.... In this context, to study rice the eating through folklore, litera-both written and oral language is to tackle the material and even spiritual life's core of the Vietnamese. It is interesting to identify a peculiarity of Vietnamese: for centuries, the official written language was the Chu Nho or Chu Hán, inaccessible to most of the common Vietnam-ese, i.e. a language for a handful of elite and for communication with the mandarinate.
About The Author
Nguyên Xuân Hiên, 1935, trained as a rice germplasm scientist, a historian, an information specialist; obtained his Ph.D. on genetics of rice; has ex-tensively researched and lectured on rice (genetics and ethnobotany) in various Asian and European countries. He is a member of the Center for Viet-namese Studies (USA, Holland, UK, Japan); Vietnamese Professionals Society (USA); Royal Institute of Linguistics & Anthropology, KITLV (Holland); and European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (Holland).
About The Book
Glutinous-rice-eating Tradition in Vietnam and Elsewhere presents, on a multi-disciplinary basis and from ethnological and cultural perspectives, the fabulous role of glutinous rice in day-to-day life and in ceremonial festivities and religious manifestations. The author sums up his four decades of research and cross-checks with documents and eyewitnesses both in the distant past and at the present time, and with polls, surveys and interviews performed recently. All these are supported by sayings, proverbs, lullabies, folksongs and folktales from North to South Vietnam and, to some extensive extent, in various neighboring countries where local people share with the Vietnamese their traditional ways of preparing multiple specialties, gruels, soups, porridges, cakes in endless kinds of shapes and colors but the key ingredient remains glutinous rice. The Vietnamese bánh giây is closely linked to the Japanese mochi, the Chinese nian gao; the budbud in Mindanao (the Philippines) and lets us remember the Indonesian lemper, the Vietnamese bánh tét, the Thai khao tom khon; the way to drink ruou cân in Central Highlands (Vietnam) does not differ in the manner of the pangasi feast in Palawan (the Philippines). Diversity fades before unity. The factual item that unifies Southeastern Asians with one another is, among others, glutinous rice. The modernization and globalization in the new millennium can not challenge the throne of this sacred rice because only through offerings with this rice, can the prayers communicate with Gods and Buddhas and, their faith, their prayers are demonstrated.
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