Summary of the impact

Dr Bayly's research into the lives of scientists and scholars in Vietnam during and after the country's 20th-century revolution and liberation wars has underpinned highly effective interventions by Vietnam's Centre for Research and Promotion of the Cultural Heritage and Centre for Research and Preservation of Vietnam's Doctoral Heritage to change public and official attitudes to cultural heritage preservation, appreciation and education. Her advisory roles with these organisations have made it possible for her research to inform capacity-building, education, and major public events, and to change attitudes towards the role of museums and public heritage sites and the value of intangible cultural heritage.

Underpinning research

Dr Susan Bayly, lecturer (2000-2005) then Reader (2005 onwards) in Historical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam from 2000 onwards, studying intelligentsia life during and since the country's 20th-century revolution and liberation wars. She has researched familial and personal experiences of contemporary Vietnamese marketization, exploring the ways in which the Vietnamese intelligentsia reflect on the country's long-standing participation in the life of the "global socialist ecumene".

Using anthropological fieldwork with Hanoi intellectual families, Dr Bayly demonstrated how these intellectuals prioritised the fostering of cultural knowledge for Vietnam's benefit, even in times of war and national struggle. She showed how they reflected creatively on the country's rich traditions of literary and artistic creativity and found ways to build on them in their home lives and in their work as educators and researchers, valuing them as a link to Vietnam's historic heritage.

This study focused on the period following independence in 1954. This generation — now in their 60s and 70s — lived through foreign occupation, partition, wars with the USA, China and Cambodia, reunification and marketization. Dr Bayly's research gathered and presented their personal stories of experiences before and since independence and liberation, seemingly vastly removed from the experiences of modern Vietnam; stories of their wartime childhoods and experiences as development workers and educators in Africa in the 1970s to early 90s that would otherwise have been lost in the current phase of rapid social change.

The research provided valuable insights into Vietnam's history and development and place in the world. Emphasis was placed on education and culture amongst Hanoi intelligentsia in spite of the complex political context: it was not uncommon for people to amass qualifications from numerous sources, to follow multiple professions and to learn multiple languages including Russian, Chinese and in some cases even French. This generation of intelligentsia valued training — in science and medicine in particular — and working in countries with similar backgrounds: Poland, Romania and the USSR for example. Development specialists aided development in former French colonies. Their work is widely credited with valuable economic and cultural benefits to the host countries, and to Vietnam, including the groundwork they provided for today's flourishing links and interactions with a host of African trading and cultural exchange partners.

This development of knowledge and expertise was motivated by a belief that it benefited one's country and family. Through her interviews Dr Bayly also heard stories of how the Hanoi intelligentsia took personal risks to preserve cultural resources during different phases of occupation and war. Others told stories of producing, preserving and appreciating art; again with a wider social/national goal in mind.

This older generation reported attempts to pass on stories of cultural achievement to young people who, nowadays, sometimes struggle to understand how things were in the recent past.

References to the research

Major funding awards:

Dr S. Bayly (PI); Dr N. Long (Co-I) Grant Title: The Social Life of Achievement and Competitiveness in Vietnam and Indonesia, Sponsor: ESRC (Grant RES-000-22-4632); Grant period: 1 November 2011- 31 October 2013. Grant value: £79,819.62.
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-000-22-4632/read

Dr S. Bayly Grant title: Familial and personal experiences of `marketisation' in contemporary urban Vietnam, Sponsor: ASEASUK Research Committee on South East Asian Studies: Grant valued: £3,383.10 for a one-off research trip carried out in Grant period: December 2008 — January 2009

Details of the impact

Dr Bayly's research on the development of cultural knowledge and educational expertise during and after the revolution strongly influenced Vietnam's Centre for Research and Promotion of the Cultural Heritage (CCH) and Centre for Research and Preservation of Vietnam's Doctoral Heritage (CPD) in designing their policies for cultural heritage preservation, appreciation and education.

CCH (founded 2007) pioneers heritage preservation and public cultural awareness in Vietnam. It is affiliated to the Vietnamese central-government body that accredits cultural organisations and initiatives, working with international NGOs (including UNESCO) and Vietnamese public agencies. Since 2009 CCH has successfully implemented schemes in Vietnam's most important national museums; it also trains heritage professionals through capacity-building programmes, and develops and upgrades heritage sites, equipping them to provide activity-based education and community outreach.

"In recognition of the value of Dr Bayly's research to our thinking and planning of our programmes, we appointed her our International Projects Advisor in 2009, to facilitate our continuing access to her work to ensure continued input to our programmes from her research." (Director, CCH)

"Since 2009 our CCH Centre has regularly drawn on Dr Bayly's research on Vietnamese ideas of cultural knowledge. Her book and her presentations ... have greatly aided us in our highly regarded museum capacity-building programmes. " (Director, CCH) ^(a)

Dr Bayly co-coordinated CCH's museum-based educational projects at the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi, the Vietnam Women's Museum, and key cultural heritage institutions including the Presidential Palace in Ho Chi Minh City. She has worked as CCH's educational project advisor to the National Museum of History in Hanoi, the Vietnam Revolution Museum, and the Vietnam Association of Ethnologists, and regularly advises other public and private institutions in Vietnam, including the recently-created Vietnam Centre for the Heritage of National Scientists and Scholars _(b).

The idea of making museums and public heritage sites contribute to development and educational needs is still new in Vietnam; it was underpinned by Dr Bayly's research findings demonstrating a long tradition in Vietnam of cultural knowledge as a living national resource: "This is why her work is so helpful for us in developing our plans for public knowledge and heritage sites." (Director, CCH) ^(a)

"The insights CCH has gained form Br Bayly's research have also helped us in our initiatives to improve public understandings of the ways Vietnam's tangible and intangible cultural heritage can be appreciated in the shaping a vigorous and productive national life." (Director, CCH) ^(a). In 2012 she participated in an initiative to foster public understanding of Vietnam's history of Mother Goddess (Dao Mau) worship as a major repository of artistic and cultural value — an aspect of Vietnam's cultural life previously undervalued by citizens and authorities. Dr Bayly's research, both on Vietnam and Indian religions, was critical to this initiative, which resulted in the recognition that this worship is an expression of spiritual and artistic value which compares favourably with spiritual traditions in other dynamic Asian cultures.^(a) In September 2012, this initiative culminated in an international public outreach congress on the Mother Goddess tradition (to which Dr Bayly contributed), attended by hundreds of delegates including community performers and ministry officials. The event was an important landmark in developing contemporary public-heritage awareness, as demonstrated by the intensive media coverage it attracted. ^(c)(d)(e)

Another key CCH initiative is motivating the public to address the challenges of climate change in Vietnam. Here Dr Bayly's research has demonstrated the scientific contributions of the country's 20^th-century intellectuals (and the high regard they had for a close harmony of human-made and environmental forms and features), supporting calls to action and inspiring the young to contribute. In 2010-12, Dr Bayly actively supported CCH's work in making environmental awareness and climate issues central to hands-on museum-based activities for school-age visitors at Vietnam's most important museum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum.

CPD (established 2008) is a public foundation fostering public awareness of Vietnamese scientists' and scholars' work and careers as a crucial part of Vietnam's living cultural heritage. It aims to ensure that the contributions made by modern scientists and scholars to Vietnam and the world are considered as much a part of Vietnam's cultural heritage as the old arts and traditions.

Dr Bayly's research on how intellectuals lived and worked in the times of the national revolution helped CPD exemplify the importance of this aspect of Vietnam's life — helping in getting the Centre launched, and initiating programmes of collecting, preserving and displaying the papers, diaries, artworks, folk crafts, research equipment, books and official documents. These collections include relics of Vietnamese scientists' work and life experiences such as the remarkable instruments and treatment items developed for battlefield use in Vietnam's liberation wars, not previously considered valuable items of cultural heritage.

"Her book Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age has influenced us very much because it is a study by an international scholar of exactly the sort of Vietnamese modern cultural life that our Centre works to preserve and make publicly known throughout our country." (Director, CPD). ^(f)

CPD's work to raise public awareness of important scientists and their contribution to Vietnam's cultural heritage has included a landmark website-based exhibition in 2009; publication of a biography (2009) of Vietnam's great 20^th-century anthropologist, Professor Tu Chi ^(g); and a virtual exhibition and memorial volumes on the lives and careers of five of Vietnam's leading 20^th-century medical doctors.^(h)

"With help from Dr Bayly, our CPD Centre is now involved in an initiative to obtain an expansion of the categories of items and holdings now covered by our country's legal framework for official heritage collections, to include personal and private as well as state holdings and materials." (Director, CPD).^(f) Within this initiative, CPD together with Vietnam's National University of Social Sciences and Humanities staged a major international conference in Hanoi in December 2012 (with Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese participants) entitled "Managing and strengthening the quality of community generated archives". Discussion of how to promote the public-heritage awareness potential of private, personal and family archives in Vietnam centred on the paper presented on behalf of CPD, drawing on Dr Bayly's research on material objects in the lives of modern intellectuals, on `The heritage scholars' (Bayly, Susan. 2007). "This presentation had a great impact on the conference's thinking about the need for professional archiving...in important forms of public heritage communication." (Director, CPD).^(f)

Sources to corroborate the impact

The author would like to highlight that corroboration of the above impacts can pose real challenges. There is a particular feature of anthropological impact which is that in the contexts where the work is often most valued and influential, direct attribution to foreign scholars of a straightforward connection between their research and their strategy implementation may be far too sensitive for anyone in authority to be able to attest safely. Nevertheless there is real impact in their work that can be tracked and demonstrated in ways specific to their field.

a) Letter from Director of CCH

b) Announcement of Dr Bayly's presentation at Museum of Vietnam to train staff:
http://baotanglichsu.vn/portal/vi/Tin-tuc/Hoat-dong-cua-bao-tang/2012/09/3A9230C3/

c) Mother goddess news coverage: http://vietnamnews.vn/Life-STyle/219560/exhibit-views-mother-goddesses-worship/html

d) Mother goddess news coverage http://english.vov.vn/Society/Mother-Goddess-worship-culture-highlighted/118074.vov

e) Mother goddess news coverage http://en.vietnamplus.vn/Home/Workshop-highlights-Mother-Goddess-worship-culture/20129/28942.vnplus

f) Letter from Director of CPD

g) Professor Tu Chi exhibition: http://www.cpd.vn/Default.aspx?tabid=754&cateshowid=9

h) 20^th Century Medical Doctors exhibition:
http://www.cpd.vn/Default.aspx?tabid=754&cateshowid=14