Living With the Dead: Memory and State Authority in Post-Socialist Vietnam

Abstract

The commemoration of war martyrs has been an im-portant issue in contemporary Vietnam. These collec-tive memories of war martyrs, however, do not appear independently but are organized and shaped by the powerful state machine. The state does not only control the means of remembering, but also prescribes rules for how the past should be remembered. Yet, the state’s centralized authority is not absolute, since it exposes some limits and is challenged by local agents.

Keywords

• Collective memory, Communism, state au-thority, war martyrs, Vietnam