Vietnam - Culture
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In numerous books, reports, and films about Vietnam, the people with the conical hats are portrayed as living in rural communities that have changed little over time, their lives steeped in tradition. The irony is that such notions and their visual images emerged when Vietnamese society was undergoing a sea of change, when much of the countryside was ravaged and villages were being resettled, when much of its population had left the villages to fight a war whose horizons lay far beyond the village boundaries, when migration, both domestic and international, was increasing, when Vietnam's global integration was accelerated by virtue of its being one arena in which the international Cold War was fought. The irony is, too, that a great deal of Vietnam's culture is about movement, migration, travel, and change, as revealed by its popular art and literature. This section looks at different elements of Vietnamese culture and how it has changed as the Vietnamese people have changed.
