Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam.

• Author: Giang, Nguyen Khac

Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam. By Edyta Roszko. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2020. Hardcover: 288pp.

Discourse on rising tensions in the South China Sea invariably focuses on inter-state relations--more specifically, between the dominant power, China, and the much weaker Southeast Asian claimants. However, little has been written about the fishermen whose lives are intertwined with the coastal areas and who have been drawn into the territorial and jurisdictional disputes. Edyta Roszko's book, Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam, is thus a well-timed contribution.

Drawing from her years of ethnographic research in Vietnam's central province of Quang Ngai, Roszko meticulously examines the way fishing communities interact with the "triad of contested categories" (p. 15)--the state, religion and village--in a changing environment marked by escalating challenges to the geopolitical order. By incorporating the three analytical concepts of semiotic ideology, purification and indiscipline, the book explores how fishermen navigate their religious practice between different binaries: land versus sea, religious versus secular, fishers versus farmers, male versus female, and ancestors versus ghosts (p. 200). Some binaries are particularly captivating. For example, the interdependent relationship between farmers and fishermen is illustrated by the ties between rice and fish sauce (p. 105), a connection widely acknowledged by those who have lived long enough in central Vietnam.

Yet instead of viewing the binaries through the usual religioussecular dichotomy, Roszko examines how various actors--including cadres, religious figures, fishermen and women--enact, debunk and re-enact these relations (p. 197). For example, from the severe suppression of religion during the High Socialism period (1976-79), when all performances of rituals and worship were forbidden, the state has since reinterpreted selected religious practices as an expression of Vietnamese "culture" and "national heritage" (p. 64), while suppressing other unauthorized practices as "superstitious" (me tin) or "heterodox" (di doan) (p. 76) in the Doi Moi era. The fishermen in Ly Son, for instance, have navigated through this changing landscape and shifting language, and linked their ancestor worship with the commemoration of the Paracels flotilla, to receive the state's...