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Familial Properties - Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463–1778 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R870
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Familial Properties - Gender, State, and Society in Early Modern Vietnam, 1463–1778 (Paperback)
Series: Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese
gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran
shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal
society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate
the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking
pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war
and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what
happened to their property.Drawing from legal, literary, and
religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese,
and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth
century, state and local communities produced laws and morality
codes limiting women's participation in social life. Then in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political
turmoil led the three competing states - the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen
- to increase their military service demands, producing labor
shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women
filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers,
and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they
accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they
circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal
inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders.
In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local
community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of
the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective
offering. By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites
negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran
demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times,
survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create
new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power
relations, was central to the relationship between state and local
communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use
of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be
of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the
comparative study of gender.
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