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BACK TO NAM ĐỊNH: RE-QUESTIONING VILLAGE SOCIETY AND FAMILY/CLAN STRUCTURES DURING THE LATE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
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Abstract
This paper tries to shed new light on the research on the village history in the Red River Delta during the 18th to early 19th centuries, based on the reexamination of the materials collected at former Bách Cốc Village (Vụ Bản District, Nam Định Province) and its surrounding villages in the joint field research project during 1994-2006. Although several preliminary studies on these materials have already been published, there is still room for deeper research. After summarizing the history of the research for the communal village in Northern Vietnam, this paper closely examines the information of landholdings in 1805 of Bách Cốc and two neighboring villages (Tiểu Cốc and Dương Lai). The striking deviation among these villages are then analyzed from new viewpoints other than conventional one that concentrate in the scale of landholdings (of only rice fields). For instance, judging from the records of Bách Cốc and another nearby village named Thị Mai, female landholders played an important role through their marriage in the land transfer among villages. Records of Tiểu Cốc shows that, besides rice fields, the land category of “housing lots, gardens and ponds” should be paid more attention to understand the household economy and the relationship among clanspeople as well. Finally, textual problems so far overlooked (the lack of uniformity among the sources of a same category and that among the listed information within a single material as well) of well-known materials related to the three villages such as địa bạ (land cadasters) and gia phả (family genealogy) are raised, hopefully providing basis of further research.
Article Details
Keywords
Vietnam, The early modern period, Village society, Landholding, Family/clan
References
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