February 7, 2020, 4-6pm

Please note that seating for this event will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Registering does not guarantee a seat.

Please join us on February 7, 2020 at 4pm as Jack Sidnell, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, will deliver a lecture entitled, "'Respect those above, yield to those below': Conceptualizing social hierarchy in Vietnamese interlocutor reference." This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. RSVP HERE

Abstract: In Vietnamese, speakers make reference to themselves and to their addressees using a wide range of forms. Pronouns, names and titles are all quite common, but, in conversation at least, kin terms constitute the default, unmarked means for accomplishing interlocutor reference. Because Vietnamese does not have reciprocally usable kin terms (equivalent to English brother or sister), the extended use of these forms in reference to persons who are not genealogical relatives inevitably invokes an age and/or generation-graded hierarchical system modelled after the family unit. In this form of social organization, persons are tied to one another, as they are in a family, by mutual relations of entitlement and obligation, and the ethics of interpersonal hierarchy which this implies is captured by the oft-cited expression, kính trên, nhường dưới ‘respect those above, yield to those below’.

This presentation considers a single conversation among four persons in which the use of sibling terms performatively constitutes the social relations between the participants on the model of an hierarchically organized family unit, with seniors taking precedence over juniors while at the same time “yielding” to them where appropriate. While this organization into senior and junior provides the default, baseline social arrangement, the participants in this conversation also, at times, report upon or collaboratively imagine quite other possibilities. In these other contexts, whether reported or imagined, the participants make reference to one another using occupational titles, names, and pronouns that cast social organization not in terms of mutual ties of entitlement and obligation, but rather in terms of top-down relations of power and authority. I conclude by considering the historical roots of these alternative conceptions in Confucian tradition, proposals for nationalist reform, and the Marxist revolutionary movement of the early-to-mid 20th century, and by pointing to some apparently newer social imaginaries articulated in contemporary film.