Twelve essays cover South Vietnamese leadership and policies, women and civilians, veterans overseas, smaller allies in the war (Australia), accounts by U.S., Australian and South Vietnamese servicemen as well as those of Indigenous soldiers from the U.S. and Australia, memorials and commemorations, and the legacy of war on individual lives and government policy.

The Republic of (South) Vietnam is commonly viewed as a unified entity throughout the two decades (1955–75) during which the United States was its main ally. However, domestic politics during that time followed a dynamic trajectory from authoritarianism to chaos to a relatively stable experiment in parliamentary democracy. The essays in Voices from the Second Republic of South Vietnam (1967–1975) come from those who strove to build a constitutional structure of representative government during a war for survival with a totalitarian state.

In April, Vietnam will mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the war. In commemoration of the conflict, German music label Glitterbeat, best known for its work with Tuareg rockers Tamikrest, has compiled an extraordinary record collecting the work of Vietnamese master musicians. Hanoi Masters: War Is a Wound, Peace Is a Scar is an intensely affecting set of songs performed by musicians in their later years. Some of the compositions are direct responses to the war, while others are new adaptations of traditional Vietnamese songs. Regardless of when the songs were written, though, the recordings are all shot through with a sense of intense loss – the loss, the listener feels, not only of friends and family, but also of the innocence that a country that has endured a long history of colonial conflict can perhaps never again enjoy.

Now in his eighties, Mùi learned ca trù from his family as a young boy. At that time Vietnam was still under French colonial rule, and ca trù was a popular form of entertainment. Numerous “singing bars” dedicated to ca trù performance—by professional female singers accompanied by two instrumentalists—were scattered across Hanoi, and Mùi’s paternal grandfather ran one of them. But after the Franco-Vietnamese war ended in 1954, the new communist government led by President Hồ Chí Minh closed all the bars, and ca trù fell into dramatic decline. According to this new government, the singing bars had become thriving places for prostitution, gambling, and opium smoking during the French colonial period, so they needed to be shut down.

Today I found a new dissertation in my mailbox by Nikolas Århem: Forests, Spirits and High Modernist Development: A study of cosmology and change among the Katuic peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam, defended in January 2015 in Uppsala (Sweden), and published as Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthroplogy no 55. It is downloadable from his academia.edu page https://uppsala.academia.edu/NArhem.
The thesis is based on fieldwork between 2004 and 2009 in the provinces of Quảng Nam and Thừa Thiên-Huế in Vietnam, and Sekong in Laos. The result is a detailed and rather exhaustive description of the Katu people’s present-day way of life, and an in-depth analysis of their engagement with modernity, largely on the form development on both sides of the border.

This is to announce a new book by Andrew Hardy, titled The Barefoot Anthropologist: The Highlands of Champa and Vietnam in the Words of Jacques Dournes, published by Silkworm Books in Chiang Mai (Thailand), see http://silkwormbooks.com/collections/frontpage/products/barefoot-anthrop....
Jacques Dournes was a prolific French missionary and anthropologist working in the Central Highlands, whose French language publications have, unfortunately, hardly been made available in any other language. I still hope that Dournes’ wonderful book Pötao: Une théorie du pouvoir chez les Indochinois Jörai [Pötao : A theory of power among the Jarai of Indochina] will one day be published in English and Vietnamese. Hardy’s book about Dournes contains an account of his own attempts to understand Dournes’ theory, plus an interview with Dournes before he died in 1993.

Robert Moses, the bureaucrat-visionary who shaped the modern face of New York City, has been the subject of countless symposia, museum exhibitions, a TV documentary and a Pulitzer-winning biography.
But he had never been immortalized in a comic book.
This failing has been rectified by “Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City,” a 105-page graphic biography published in English in December by Nobrow. It comes from France, where serious subjects often get the graphic-book treatment.

TT - Tác giả chia sẻ: “Có thể coi cuốn sách như món buffet các trích dẫn tư duy, những suy nghĩ về nhiều lĩnh vực qua các thời kỳ...".
“Có thể coi cuốn sách như món buffet các trích dẫn tư duy, những suy nghĩ về nhiều lĩnh vực qua các thời kỳ. Những người đặc biệt quan tâm về đối ngoại có thể đọc phần Việt Nam và thế giới. Những người đặc biệt quan tâm đến xã hội có thể đọc phần Xã hội. Phần Tản mạn giúp cuốn sách nhẹ nhàng hơn, có “bật mí” vài khía cạnh liên quan đến cá nhân tôi. Còn Việt Nam, suốt ngày tôi bận tâm đến Việt Nam, đó là chủ đề xuyên suốt”.

On the eve of the Second World War, twenty thousand Vietnamese people were recruited in French Indochina and were forced to come work in French weapon factories to stand in for workers who had been sent to fight the Germans. Mistaken for soldiers, they were stuck in France after the defeat in 1940; during the Occupation, these workers – who were called “Cong Binh” – were left at the mercy of the Germans and lived like pariahs.
The film follows around two dozen survivors in Viet Nam and in France. Five of them died during the editing of the movie.
http://www.congbinh.net/synopsis
See also: http://frenchculture.org/film-tv-and-new-media/interviews/lam-le-present...

Nearly 80% of professors are men, while just a fifth of vice-chancellors are women,
White males are clinging on to the best paid jobs in universities, while equality initiatives are struggling to gain ground, according to a study by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU).
Data collected last academic year by the ECU, a charity that advises universities on diversity issues, suggests that 78.3% of professors are men, while only 4% of black academic staff are professors.