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Stars, Spirits and Coal: Materiality and Immateriality in Northern Vietnam

2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14442213.2014.989902

1740-9314

Annuska Derks,

Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

The lunar calendar is an important benchmark of time in Vietnam. It not only plays a role in setting annual celebrations and in picking dates for weddings or house construction, but it also guides an entire set of beliefs on which practices of avoidance, prayers for profit and work routines are based. This paper explores these everyday beliefs and practices in relation to the production, distribution and consumption of an ordinary cooking fuel, the beehive coal briquette. It illustrates how various efforts to invoke luck and avoid disaster are based within ideas about causality in which objects mediate between but also act upon people and the cosmological and spiritual order. In this paper, the example of the beehive coal briquette provides a starting point from which to examine these entanglements of humans and objects and the material and immaterial in contemporary Vietnam.