Vietnamese values: Confucian, Catholic, American
Description
Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted among the Vietnamese refugees of New Orleans from 1983 to 1986. That fieldwork focused on Vietnamese values and community life. The fieldwork was designed to question certain prevailing, rather monolithic understandings of culture and values and to provide an alternative model for the study of culture and values Vietnamese culture, and any culture for that matter, can be fruitfully understood and studied as a 'library' of conflicting values 'texts.' Values are 'texts' for desirable behavior, feeling, thinking, and relating within a culture or community; values are expressions of what a culture thinks it means to be human and what the goal of human life is. Values texts can and do conflict because a culture, far from being a monolithic entity, is historical and in process; a culture is a conversation of texts, a dialogue, as to what it means to be human, not the conclusion of a syllogism The fieldwork revealed that the Vietnamese cultural library contains three significant sets of texts: Confucian, Catholic, and American. The Confucian texts are essentially concerned with proper relationships in the family and community. The Catholic texts are essentially concerned with the proper relationship to the supernatural. And the American texts are more concerned with individual freedom and self-determination. Conflict among sets of texts does exist but, more importantly, conflict exists within each set of texts as well. Vietnamese culture may be understood as a series of conflicts among values associated with the cultural domains of religion, kinship, ethics, aesthetics, gender, and economics