Vietnamese Weddings

Introduction

A radical program of renovation launched in 1986—called Đổi Mới—has brought remarkable changes to the life of consumers in Vietnam (Pecotich and Shultz 1993; Shultz and Pecotich 1994; Shultz, Pecotich, and Le 1994). Several scholars have conducted longitudinal studies of Vietnam’s transition. These studies provide meaningful and comprehensive measures and interpretations of socioeconomic development and welfare (Shultz 2007). Perceptions of life satisfaction, product quality and leadership (Schulz, Shultz, and Marquardt 2007), quality of life (Shultz, Westbrook, and Nguyen 2007), and education and household welfare (Westbrook and Hoang 2007) are among the objective measures that have been used to evaluate the transition and its effects, showing generally positive results. This study supplements the limited research that has investigated how Đổi Mới has affected seminal rituals and daily life experiences of Vietnamese citizens. Large-scale, objective measures are crucial for policy making, but so is an understanding of how people’s rituals and experiences, their emotions, and their interpersonal relationships are changing in the transition to the market.

The purpose of this study is to examine the historical role of marriage and wedding rituals in Vietnam and how they have changed during Vietnam’s transition to the market, with a focus on how such changes reflect the society’s increasing dependence on the market, how this dependence impacts consumer well-being, and the resulting implications for public policy. Changes in the meanings, function, and structure of wedding ritual consumption are examined. These changes correspond to changes in the national economy, as well as changes in social values, social relations, and gender roles in Vietnamese society during the transition.

Marriage and weddings loom large in Vietnamese history. The nation’s foundation myth holds that the earliest Kings of the Vietnamese people are descended from Lạc Long Quân (Lac Dragon Lord). Âu Cơ, the princess of the mountain, married Lạc Long Quân, the prince of the sea, and gave birth to the first of the Hung kings. When Chinese dynasties established their rule in Vietnam, they attempted to change the institutions of marriage and family to conform to the basis of their political authority, a patriarchal family system (Taylor 1983). Many Chinese marriage customs that uphold a patriarchal family system have been progressively incorporated into Vietnamese weddings (Goodkind 1996). When the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP) successfully led the country out of the French colonial control, weddings became an immediate target of the state agenda to eliminate social inequality (Goodkind 1996). Marriage and wedding rituals were initially rationalized and have subsequently reflected social changes and acted as change agents in Vietnamese history. This article is and is not about Vietnamese weddings per se. It explores the meaning and importance of wedding rituals in the country’s transition to the market, but it uses weddings as a lens through which to examine changes in consumer culture, social relationships, and the tension between modernity and tradition, the local and the global.

The Wedding Ritual Marketing

Similarly to other marketing scholars (e.g., Fisk 1981; Nason and White 1981; Kilbourne 2004; Layton 2007), we believe that a macromarketing perspective is imperative to understanding the complex relationship between globalization and development. That is, a systematic and multidimensional analysis must be applied to provide more optimal solutions to societal problems. We also agree with Kilbourne’s (2004) observation that:

Less developed countries are not a homogeneous set of markets, and each has its own initial institutional structure that both enables and limits development … Because the institutions and their susceptibility to change vary with the country, whether globalization leads to development writ large is problematic and cannot be simply assumed as the logical outcome of the process. The outcome will vary by the situation. (p. 133)

Ritual consumption marketing is a topic of interest to macromarketers for several reasons. First, wedding ritual consumption is a multibillion-dollar industry that employs workers in a variety of fields (Adrian 2003; Goldstein-Gidoni 1997; Leeds-Hurwitz 2002; Mead 2007; Otnes and Pleck 2003). Second, rituals, as spiritual practices (Bird 1980), may have a vital impact on the overall well-being and quality of life of participants (Myers, Sweeney, and Witmer 2000; Spaniol 2002). Third, ritual events such as weddings serve as a reflection of changes in a society (Goodkind 1996; Kendall 1994; Marlaney 2002).

Driver (1998) has argued that ritual delivers three gifts to society: community, order, and transformation. Ritual offers mutual participation opportunities, which “establish or enhance solidarity among those joining in their performance” (Rappaport 1979,49). People feel connected to others through shared understandings of the symbols and meanings of rituals. Ritual mirrors the way the world, of which it is a part, is ordered. Ritual not only fixes or reifies the social order but also restores that order when it has been lost. The fact that ritual scripts are repeated over time and taken for granted does not mean they do not change. An important function of ritual is “to assist the dynamic of social change through ritual processes of transformation” (Driver 1998, 166). Furthermore, rituals themselves undergo transformation in order to adapt and respond to particular instances of social change (Driver 1998). As prominent social rituals, weddings highlight a society’s transformations. Not only are the rituals themselves transformed by the world of which they are a part, but they also help transform society (Driver 1998; Nelson and Deshpande 2004).

As the society integrates into an evolving global system, it adapts rituals to cultural change and simultaneously uses them to ease this change. A communal ritual such as a wedding may address shared meaningful emotions for consumers (Okleshen and Grossbarta 2001), and provide playful negotiation of multiple tensions of modernity in transitional society (Ustuner, Ger, and Holt 2000). This may in turn shape market institutions in related industries like hotels and restaurants and may affect purchase and consumption decisions by consumers. Furthermore, wedding ritual consumption is tied up with national identity in the eyes of the state (Kendall 1994). The “proper” way to get married in a socialist or capitalist system is an ideological issue and one that takes on added significance in a changing economy like Vietnam’s. Therefore, we expect to see the creative interplay of consumer agency, environmental and cultural forces, market-driven businesses, policy, and government regulation of the wedding industry in Vietnam as part of the mechanism though which Vietnam integrates into the world system. Our objective is to use weddings as a window into a changing society.

Methodology

This article is part of a larger study of wedding practices and consumption in Ho Chi Minh City. Data for the analysis were collected over 2 three-month periods during wedding seasons in Ho Chi Minh City, the center of trading and economics in Vietnam. Ritual experiences are psychologically complex and intense, and a ritual’s meaning is symbolically and metaphorically expressed in social events or contexts. A holistic, phenomenological, experiential, interpretive method is required to study this topic. Furthermore, the omnipresence and longevity of macromarketing problems suggest that multiple methods may contribute to unique insights and explanations of a macromarketing phenomenon (Shultz 1997). Therefore, multiple qualitative methods were applied.

The study focused on weddings of middle-class residents of Ho Chi Minh City. Over the course of its history, the city has been a major port of entry for global flows of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes (Appadurai 1996), and consumptionscapes (Ger and Belk 1996) into Vietnam. While northern Vietnam has been under communist rule since 1945, Sai Gon (the name of Ho Chi Minh City before 1975) was under American influence until 1975 and French influence before that. As a consequence of these historical influences, Ho Chi Minh City is widely considered the most modern city in Vietnam. Therefore, wedding practices might be quite different in other parts of Vietnam.

This article includes data from (1) observations at the wedding business sites; (2) observations at wedding ceremonies at homes or/and churches, and during wedding receptions; and (3) in-depth interviews before and after the wedding with couples, their parents, and people in the wedding business. Business sites that were selected for observation included reception sites, wedding-dress stores, wedding-photography studios, invitation-card shops, and wedding-service shops. Observations were made when the first author accompanied informants on their shopping trips and/or attended the sites with permission from business owners/managers. Shopping with consumers and selling with businesspeople have proven to be useful methods of interviewing (McGrath, Sherry, and Heisley 1993). Observations at the business sites provided an excellent vantage point from which to observe the production process of wedding rituals (Goldstein-Gidoni 1997).

Wedding Consumption before Đ ổ i M ớ i

The most recent changes in the institutions of marriage and weddings in Vietnam are best understood in the context of broad historical patterns. The ancient Vietnamese did not have a stable family system. Men and women lived together at random. When China’s Han Dynasty attempted to take control of Vietnam, Chinese officials realized that if they were to succeed in establishing their rule, they needed to change the patterns of marriage. Taylor (1983, 36) argues “the Vietnamese family, with its loose authority, its individualistic tendencies, was an early target of Chinese administrative policy.” The Chinese concepts of patriarchal marriage and wedding rites were introduced and enforced. Although China’s efforts to change Vietnamese family system during the early centuries of political control failed (Taylor 1983), throughout the following centuries, due to frequent contact with China, Vietnam progressively incorporated many features of Chinese-style marriage and weddings (Goodkind 1996), including practices that secured a patriarchal family system, maintained social inequality between rich and poor, and solidified an unequal power relationship between the old and the young (Taylor 1983).

According to Engels, the institutions of marriage and the family are the key to the reproduction of social inequality between old and young, male and female, and rich and poor (Goodkind 1996). Pursuing a revolutionary vision, the VCP began trying to reform marriage and weddings in the North in the 1940s. The party employed two strategies: regulating marriages by law and controlling wedding ceremonies institutionally. First, it launched the Law of Marriage and Family in 1960. The law granted women the right to divorce, outlawed polygamy, banned arranged marriages, and established a minimum marriage age. Through the law, the state attempted to eliminate gender inequality and to protect the rights of children (Malarney 2002). The law also required that all citizens register their marriages at their local People’s committee. The party also attempted to wrest control of wedding rites from families. Weddings were organized at local communal houses or at workplaces. There were no premarital exchanges, no processions, no ancestral rites, and no feasts. There was only a small party with tea, candies, biscuits, and cigarettes. Local officials or the couple’s supervisors publicly acknowledged the marriages. By revising wedding practices, the party hoped to eliminate the vestiges of feudalism, “backward” customs, and bourgeois thoughts, in order to create a new and healthy socialist way of life. Group weddings were also promoted. After 1975, the state tried to implement the same controls in southern provinces (Goodkind 1996). However, the “old-style” wedding practices continued far more commonly than the new-way-of-life weddings promoted by the government.

After 1975, as a part of the central economic plan, the party decided “to give priority to rational development of heavy industry on the basis of developing agriculture and light industry” (Vo 1990, 73). Thus, economic resources mainly focused on agriculture and industry. However, forced collectivization and state-mandated quota procurement prices for farm produce led to food shortages. Furthermore, as a result of the neglect of light industry and handicrafts in favor of heavy industry, accompanied by the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade, the quality of consumer goods was poor and there was an increased shortage of daily necessities.

Figure 1 illustrates a wedding in 1975. It was the only photograph that the informant and her family owned. Only ten people attended the wedding, which was held at home.

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Figure 1.

A wedding in 1975.

Another informant recalled her wedding and the difficulties that she faced when she prepared her wedding reception:

After 1975, it was miserable. Do you remember the central economic planning time? We had to eat rice mixed with noodles. Everything was distributed by coupons: rice, meat, sugar, etc. My family was given only 13 kilograms of rice, one kilogram of meat, and a half kilogram of sugar. How could we offer a feast? We did not have money. Even if we had had money, we could not have been able to buy things. Everything was distributed by coupons. You had to wait in line forever to buy goods and commodities. We also invited about 50 guests, mostly our relatives. But it was not like a wedding banquet today, it was just a casual meal with rice, soup and stewed meat. (Tam, Female, late 50s)

My wedding was in 1979. Although my family was middle-class, I mean we had money. We had our wedding feast at a restaurant. However, it wasn’t like today. There were not many choices for food, rituals and other things. We didn’t have a lot of courses to choose from on the menu. There was no wedding gown, wedding cake, champagne fountain, or dancing performance. I wore áo dài (a Vietnamese traditional outfit) made of low-quality material. They were not as good materials as there are today. Even if you had money you couldn’t find goods and services that you wanted. Moreover, you dared not stand out. They [local authorities] would not let you do that. You would not want to be in trouble. (Ms. An, Female, Late 50s)

Wedding Consumption after Đ ổ i M ớ i

China’s decision to implement economic reforms in 1979 did not escape the Vietnamese government’s notice. China was both an object lesson in economic reform and a strong political influence on Vietnam. The VCP’s first attempt at economic reform, a 1981-85 effort to “create a modified socialist development strategy that achieved growth, efficiency, and equity ideals,” failed (Gates and Truong 1993, 65). In 1986, the party and the state abandoned the socialist model and endorsed a more radical program of renovation aimed at transforming Vietnam from a centrally planned economy to “socialism with the market characteristics” (Malarney 2002, 1). This reform has emphasized the integration of Vietnam into the regional and world economies. The country that once struggled with food and commodity shortages and low-quality consumer products is now flooded with capital, information, technology, and goods from around the world. Over two decades of renovation, the country’s economic situation has improved, as evidenced by rising incomes and increases in the availability, variety of high-quality consumer goods.

Dramatic political and economic changes have had profound impacts on the social life and consumer practices of the Vietnamese populace. The first impact is the shift toward consumer culture. Consumption has become one of the prime leisure activities, and consumer items have become markers of identity and status. Second is the changing form of social relationships, particularly family and gender relationships. The widespread economic changes have created a society fraught with “fragmentation and conflict over social roles and behaviors. The forms of social relationships are in dispute or under negotiation to suit the new circumstances” (Drummond 2003, 165). Parents’ control over their children’s life courses is questioned. Women’s status is ambivalent. The third impact is the tension between modernity and tradition; the local and the global. Economic changes have widened the gap between urban and rural lifestyles. Urban life is globally connected, modern, and stressful; rural life is local, traditional, and peaceful by comparison. Rural life has become a site of nostalgic imagination (Thomas and Drummond 2003).

Moving Toward Consumer Culture

Stunning change is the emerging theme that best describes the consumption environment in Vietnam (Shultz and Pecotich 1994). There is an urge to catch up with global consumer culture. Consumer choices are no longer limited. Consumption has become a pleasurable activity. “The meaning of life is sought, identity is constructed, and relationships are formed more and more in and by consumption” (Ger and Belk 1996, 275). After Đổi Mới was launched, Vietnam was no longer beyond the reach of the global flow of consumer products, including wedding gowns, cakes, flowers, and photographs. The country was also in the path of a flow of global images, including Hollywood movies, bridal magazines, and the broadcast of Western royal or celebrity weddings on television. This has resulted in the development of wedding-related businesses that have brought about great changes in Vietnamese weddings.

In the past, people usually held the wedding feast at home. Wedding catering was done by household caterers, small restaurants, or three-star hotels. Recently, the hotel industry has recognized the potential market for wedding banquets held at their facilities and has entered this lucrative market. The city center in Ho Chi Minh City is famous for its luxury four- and five-star hotels located in the First and Third Districts. Figure 2 shows a wedding hall that is set up for three wedding receptions at the same time. West of the city center, in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Tân Bình Districts, there are new emerging restaurants exclusively for weddings. District Five, populated by Chinese Vietnamese, has several Chinese restaurants serving this ethnic group. North of the city center, along the Sai Gon River, is a group of tourist villages belonging to the Sai Gon Tourist Corporation. These places are famous for their natural settings. There are also small restaurants scattered around the city which serve working-class people as sights for wedding receptions.

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Figure 2.

A wedding hall that is set up for three wedding receptions at the same time.

Weddings have become the means for Vietnamese consumers to display their status. Affluent consumers can spend billions of Vietnamese Dong (hundreds of thousands dollars) for a wedding. To stand out and assert her wealth, the bride may order her wedding dress from Europe or the United States. Wedding guests and onlookers are also impressed by a wedding procession with luxury cars: “Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe, together with Ferrari F430, Aston Martin DB9 Volante and several Bentley Continentals makes the wedding on 1/1 in Hanoi unique” (Trọng Nghi‡p 2010). Some couples choose to show their status by decorating reception sites with imported fresh orchids. Others use a reception for thousands of guests that cost about 1,000 USD for a table of ten.

Vietnamese consumers also construct their individual and family identities through wedding consumption and practices. Certain expressions repeat themselves in our interview data: “We are young, so our wedding must stand out;” “We want people attending the wedding know that our family is good, that our parents teach us well;” “We are white-collar workers, we do not choose such restaurants. Usually, traders have their weddings at such restaurants.” Kale (2004) suggests that there is a trend of increasing individualization of spirituality in the contemporary globalized era. These married couples are all proud of their weddings for being unique and are anxious that their weddings be unlike any others. Our data are replete with comments such as: “We want things unique, different, breaking old tastes. It’s not like everybody is the same,” or “I thought my wedding must stand out, I mean, being unique in its style, the receiving-the-bride procession—everything.”

To tap into the trend of individualization of ritual, wedding marketers now make a vast range of choices available to consumers. Many kinds of wedding ritual products and information are available. There are numerous Web sites sponsored by wedding-related businesses that provide information about wedding rituals, services, and products. People can look up wedding practices from different regions and different periods of time or even from different countries. Hotels and restaurants are willing to customize the opening performances to meet individual tastes. A four-star hotel manager said:

Customers are God. They want us to customize their weddings. Whatever idea they have, we will try our best to design the performance for them. For example, a couple said that they want to ride a bicycle from the entrance to the stage to memorialize their love in college. So we made a path for them.

However, we also observed some profound detrimental effects of global consumer culture revealed in wedding consumption. Wedding costs often become a burden for couples. For some families, wedding consumption may worsen their quality of life. If they seek to improve perceived social status and spend too lavishly, they have to work to pay back the debt they incur on weddings. The effect is what Ger and Belk (1996) called “an escalation in the pace of life, a reduction of leisure time, and an emphasis on the work-and-spend ethic precluding the luxury of free time.”

The coexistence of alternative types of reception sites, wedding-dress shops, and other wedding-related business reflects the multiplicity of consumer segments in terms of income and lifestyle. We also saw the emulative consumption phenomenon (Campbell 1987; Veblen 1899) in which the poor are willing to adapt the consumption patterns of the wealthy. For example, high-end wedding-dress shops sell their old stock to shops in suburban areas that serve low-income consumers. This suggests that the wedding consumption and practices of the upper middle class might also be seen in diluted form in weddings of the working class. The products and services used by the working class might be lower-end versions of those seen in upper–middle–class weddings. In other words, they use democratized and mass-consumptions versions that trickle down. Low-income people learn about the wedding practices of the upper middle class through the media. Those wedding practices are a fantasy for them. Consumer expectations that cannot be satisfied create frustration and feelings of deprivation (Ger and Belk 1996). The first author encountered hostility on occasion. During a postwedding interview, the researcher was asked to leave by the couple’s parents when they saw the interview was tape-recorded. The mother said: “We are poor. We cannot have an appropriate wedding. That’s enough shame on us. Do you want to make the whole world know that we are poor?”

“Modern” Wedding/Our “Traditional” Wedding

Since the 1990s, discourse in Vietnam has focused on the tension between “tradition” and “modernity” (Soucy 2003). In line with Taylor’s (2001) observation, we found during our fieldwork that people frequently referred to their condition, society, ideas, or customs as “progressive,” (tiến bộ) “developed,” (phát triển) “civilized,” (văn minh) or “modern,” (hiện đại) or, alternatively, as “backward,” (lạc hậu) “less developed,” (chậm phát triển) “less civilized,” (kém văn minh) or “traditional.” Đổi mới is associated with “modernity,” which means development and prosperity to most Vietnamese. However, this modernization process is also criticized for creating social problems including moral corruption, selfish materialism, drug use, and prostitution. Contrarily, in the discourse that surrounds tradition, scholarly works and popular culture often distinguish between tradition, regarded as the essence of national culture, and superstition and backwardness, which are regarded as needing elimination.

Part of the revitalization of religion and folk rituals in Vietnam is a campaign called “return-to-the-roots” [về nguồn]. Popular press accounts indicate that the return-to-the-roots campaign is being implemented to preserve national cultural identity and to integrate into the global market without losing cultural uniqueness. The reason for the campaign that is most widely mentioned in the national media is the government’s and laypeople’s desire to restore traditional and religious values, beliefs, and rituals after years of interruption. Many beliefs, rituals, and traditions tied up in national cultural identity were “mistakenly” prohibited after the August revolution of 1945. Therefore, by returning to traditional values, the government hopes to revitalize important elements of national cultural identity.

Vietnamese weddings include a series of ceremonies and a wedding feast. Wedding ceremonies are the solemn and spiritual part of wedding while the wedding feast is the major festivity. Our informants refer to wedding ceremony (lễ cưới) as the Vietnamese traditional (truyền thống) wedding while the reception (tiệc cưới) is called the “modern” (hiện đại) wedding. Mass-media accounts use phrases such as the traditional beauty of national culture, the expression of national traditional values and beliefs, traditional rituals and symbols, and the traditional foundation of Vietnamese family to refer to the ideal wedding ceremony. This rationale implies that weddings are a cultural symbol. Thus, the fear is that without its unique and meaningful wedding rituals, Vietnamese culture will lose its identity.

Furthermore, it is believed that abandoning wedding rites and customs that reflect the values of the Vietnamese family will destroy the family institution. Ritual mirrors the way that the world of which it is a part and the order of that world. Furthermore, it establishes order in the world (Driver 1998). Wedding rituals represent and reinforce the values of family and community life. Any member of a community can envision a wedding in his or her community and understand the values underlying its rituals. Abandoning these rituals, it is feared, will distort traditional values.

A controversy related to the return-to-the-roots campaign is the question of precisely what the traditions in question are. The issue is related to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s (1983) concept of “invention of tradition,” which recognizes that all “tradition” is created and invented. The state and local scholars continue to proclaim certain rituals as being the foundations of Vietnamese cultural identity. Vietnamese identity is usually constructed as unique in opposition to China as the “Other” (Evans 1985). Practices perceived as rooted in Chinese influence are “superstitious” and “backward” while Vietnamese original practices are regarded as traditional and unique to Vietnamese cultural and national identity. Bride-prices, the matching horoscopes of the bride and the groom, and consultation with a fortune-teller to choose an auspicious date for marriage are considered “superstitions,” the vestiges of a thousand years of Chinese invasion. For example, the practices of asking for a bride-price and announcing the values of gifts from the grooms’ and the brides’ sides during wedding ceremonies have been abandoned. Informants thought the practice devalued women by equating them with values of goods: “It’s Chinese. We are less [involved in] gender inequity. Originally, we were [a] matrilineal society. It’s like you buy the bride by those materials” (Mr. Nghi, early 60s). Phrases such as “I don’t want them [the groom’s family] to look down upon my daughter” or “I don’t want them to have power over my daughter” are common in our data. By not asking for a bride-price, people aim to change the nature of the relationships between brides and their in-laws; the relationships are no longer between owners and owned objects, which is regarded as a feudal and a Chinese practice opposed to both communism and Vietnamese tradition.

Rites are selected for inclusion in “traditional” ceremonies to construct a unique Vietnamese identity. The quote below highlights the desire to restore national identity through adding rites in wedding practices:

The bride and the groom share a piece of trầu (betel leaf) with cau (areca nut). This custom (chewing betel leaves with areca nuts) we Vietnamese have almost lost. The couple should learn and try. It takes only five or ten minutes of learning and practicing to restore a thousand-year custom, why not? … We just eat one in a lifetime to maintain the essence of national cultural identity. Is it worth it? ( Tuoi Tre, 2005)

Betel plants have heart-shape leaves, which are usually chewed with areca nuts. In Vietnamese culture, the mixture of betel leaves and areca nuts represent husband–wife bonds. Betel leaves and areca nuts are the “must-have” nuptial gifts in Vietnamese weddings. During fieldwork, we found that different rites with betel and areca as ritual artifacts were incorporated into wedding ceremonies. Informants emphasize betel and areca as principal elements of Vietnamese tradition:

The groom and I opened the tray of betel and areca. The groom picks two areca nuts, which are the symbols of husband and wife. I pick four leaves of betel, which represent the four virtues of women: công, dung, ngôn, hạnh (work, [beautiful] appearance, appropriate speech, and appropriate behavior). This is our Vietnamese traditional rituals. Betel and areca is unique to our culture. (Bride Trân, mid-20s)

Ironically, “traditional” rites are sometimes used to constructed new consumption rituals. Photographers and videographers seem to be knowledgeable about traditional customs. They prompt their customers about what to do and how to do it during wedding ceremonies. Their goals, however, are for customers to perform photographic and videographic rituals. They often ask people to pose in certain positions, to repeat certain rites, and to say certain sentences so that they can capture memorable moments on video recordings. That the whole ceremony is divided into various poses is revealed in the field note below:

The photographer was showing the groom’s uncle how to pour out liquor. Then he stepped back, waiting to catch the picture. The uncle slowly poured out liquor. The videographer reminded him “Slow down! Slow down! Enough!” The uncle looked up. He seemed to be embarrassed. He stood still for a while. The videographer stopped his camcorder, moving to another position and said “Say something! Say something!” The uncle started his speech; but he was interrupted by the videographer again: “Use the microphone, your voice is too soft.” He gave the uncle the microphone and asked him to repeat what he had just said. (Groom Chu and Bride Thơ’s ceremony)

While the wedding ceremonies are constructed to connect to the past, our informants feel integrated into the global world, and connected to “modernity” through consuming wedding receptions which they call “modern” weddings. They are convenient, luxurious, abundant, and modern. They are the “product” of renovation, of reintegration into the world system. The “modern” wedding is contrasted with “old-style” wedding feasts before Đổi Mới—events that are portrayed as inconvenient, simple, lacking in consumer goods, and “less developed.”

Wedding receptions start with a dancing performance to highlight the appearance of the couple. Dancers may dress in Vietnamese traditional outfits and dance to Vietnamese countryside music or recitations of folklore. They may also dress in western-style dresses and dance to new music such as rock, jazz, or tango (Figure 3 ). Then the couple marches down an aisle and up to the stage. They perform created rites such as pouring champagne, cutting the wedding cake, and lighting candles (Figure 4 ). A groom told of his plan for the opening performance for his reception:

I will show a clip with our wedding photos for people who come early. They will watch our clip while they are waiting for the reception. I will have background music. Then, suddenly the video and music will be turned off. CNN News will appear on the screen. … For example, you are here and talking with me. I can have it like we are in a live show on CNN. So a reporter on CNN will say that they are conducting a study on weddings, especially traditional weddings in Vietnam. There will be scenes of the Vietnamese countryside. And here is a typical wedding in Vietnam, the wedding of the groom Minh and the bride Dung, the reporter will announce. Then the bride and I will walk in from outside. We come live on the CNN show. It’s cool, isn’t it? (Minh, Male, late 20s)

The couple eventually did have the Cable News Network (CNN) show for their wedding. The opening with a CNN live show was a highlight that made the couple’s reception stand out. In and of itself, there are scenes in the show that highlight the contrast between sets of contradictory elements, both local/global and urban/rural. First and foremost, this is a reflection of the global connectedness of Vietnam. The country has opened itself up to global flows of capital and cannot avoid opening itself up similarly to global flows of information and culture. While a private press and television stations do not exist, and all publications must be licensed by the Culture and Information Ministry, the range of material available has been widening (Thomas and Drummond 2003). Television ownership has increased rapidly. A large influx of illegal satellite dishes has enabled consumers to receive transmissions from Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, and Australia. Channels such as Star Sport, MTV, Discover, Cartoon Network, and CNN have become familiar to Vietnamese consumers.

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Figure 3.

Western style dancing performance.

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Figure 4.

Champagne-pouring rite at wedding reception.

Our informants perceive global elements such as these as dialogical counterpoints to the local. Vietnameseness is praised for bonding, familiarity, purity, and sacredness but is also blamed for backwardness, low quality, and low status. In contrast, the foreign represents modernity, freedom, fashion, quality, and luxury. The global is also criticized for bringing materialism, individualism, rootlessness, and selfishness. Our respondents find in the local what does not exist in the global, but they do not want to give up either. It is a phenomenon that Kraidy (2005, 127) described as the “inability and unwillingness to exclusively belong to one or the other.” This comes along with the trend of syncretization, mixing elements from different and independent sources in the creation of a new ritual practice.

Social inequality has been growing and becoming more visible in contemporary Vietnam. A widening gap of standards of living exists between urban and rural areas (Taylor 2004). Urbanites maintain more luxurious and modern lifestyles while living conditions are only slowly improving in rural areas. However, a recurrent cultural theme in Vietnam states that urban society is cold and stressful; rural society, by contrast, is portrayed as traditional, timeless, warm, and peaceful. Urban life is decried as spiritually bankrupt; rural life is seen as much more spiritual and morally richer (Drummond 2003). Rural nature has become a site of nostalgia and romance. The CNN reception show is also a reflection of a trend toward romanticizing nature (Drummond 2003). The scene of the countryside wedding symbolizes the romantic and idealized image of rural nature: never-ending green rice fields, lines of areca trees, rural kids running around the procession, bamboo bridges, and buffaloes. While “modern” weddings are associated with modern and luxurious foreign culture, our participants often praise their wedding ceremonies as being close to nature, and purified of urban and consumerist elements. They feel that such a wedding is uniquely Vietnamese based on the blend of traditions, countryside, and local continuity.

Leeds-Hurwizt (2002) found that weddings represent national identity. The wedding as a cultural product is part of the process of constructing and consuming cultural identity (Goldstein-Gidoni 1997). The hybridity of the “traditional-Vietnamese” and the “Western” is the creation of financially motivated wedding-related businesspeople. These businesspeople intentionally differentiate between “Vietnamese” style and “Western” style. As Goldstein-Gidoni (1997-98) argued: “… the ‘Western’ elements should not be viewed as part of the ‘Westernization’”; the mingling of the seemingly conflicting “traditional Vietnamese” and “Western” elements contribute to the sense of Vietnameseness. Our informants claimed, “We are Vietnamese, our weddings have to be Vietnamese.” It is common to hear consumers interpret hybrid practices such as cake-cutting and champagne-pouring rites as though they were local customs. Informants might see these practices as being very similar to traditional customs that they have performed in the earlier in the day in the “real” ceremony at home. The foreign designs make these local customs fit into the Western settings of hotels for the reception.

However, we did encounter the sense of lost national identity on occasion. Some informants expressed a feeling of insecurity, of not finding themselves. They claimed that they perform creolized wedding rituals which mix the “traditional Vietnamese” with “Western borrowed” practices without knowing the meanings of either. They claimed that there were no unique Vietnamese wedding practices that make them feel “Vietnameseness.” They see this as the root of high divorce rates and the cause of social issues related to family institutions, such as youth violence and individualism.

Discussion and Conclusion

The current research has examined the historical role of marriage and wedding rituals in Vietnam, and how they have changed during Vietnam’s transition to the market. We found that weddings provide an excellent reflection of a changing present in a marketizing economy. Changes in the meanings, functions, and structures of weddings echo changes in the national economy, as well as social values, social relations, and gender roles in Vietnamese society. Indeed, weddings have become a contested ground. Our findings embrace questions of what it means to be modern, to be traditional, to be global, to be Vietnamese, to become middle class. Weddings likely become flashpoints for these concerns, in part because wedding rituals construct adult identities, in part because many Vietnamese consider these rituals to be reflective of national culture and identity, and in part because the VCP recognizes the institutions of marriage and the family as the keys to the reproduction of social equality or inequality. While our research provides rich qualitative analysis and interpretation of Vietnamese wedding ritual consumption as both a reflection of social changes and a change agent, our sampling is a limitation of our study. Our results reflect the perceptions and behaviors of middle-class consumers living in a big city with less of a history of communism than cities to the north of the country. Future studies should also include the voices of the “have-nots,” who need more policy makers’ attention in order to join the world of haves (Shultz 2001).

One of our findings is that globalization is not only a battle between the local and the “Other” West. The geographical, historical, and political relations between Vietnam and China make the “Other” China—a no less dangerous “Other” than the West. Escalating conflict in the South China Sea, border disputes, and flows of capital and goods from China urge the national discourse that asserts Vietnamese distinction from China. This has implications for policy makers. Principal material culture including pagodas, temples, and community houses, communal ritual practices including weddings and funerals, and popular culture in the form of music and film are all scrutinized by the public to construct a monolithic Vietnamese tradition purified of Chinese elements (regardless of their validity). Policies related to these cultural products risk criticism and boycott if policy makers fail to understand what are perceived as Chinese elements by public.

Another finding is the importance of ritual consumption in the globalization process. First, wedding ritual consumption serves as a reflection of social changes in Vietnam’s global reintegration. Creolization of the global and the local in wedding practices mirrors changes in social and gender relations, movement toward consumer culture, and social inequality as well as the role of consumption in the construction of national identity. Vietnamese academics’ and local government’s attempts to construct ritual as national identity by tracing its Vietnamese origins ignore an appreciation of elements in ritual that are dynamic, innovative, or tied up with changes in the process of global re-engagement. Efforts to define original “traditional” Vietnamese weddings in cultural books fail to put the ritual into context. The academic “traditional” wedding is one perspective, “a thing to be observed and tended, not the living, breathing stuff of daily life” (Kendall 1996, 73). Meanwhile, our findings also show that inability to articulate unique elements of Vietnamese culture in communal ritual practices makes our informants feel the loss of national identity. Policy makers should distinguish between preserving unique Vietnamese “tradition” and promoting the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), which consumers can practice in daily life to make them proud of their national identity.

Wedding rituals are also a change agent. Changes in the ritual structure of weddings in contemporary Vietnam encourage Vietnamese to think and act in new ways in regard to gender relations. Brides are no longer perceived as the property of the groom’s family. Our informants saw their elimination of “backward” rites such as bride-price, announcing gift values, and matching horoscopes as a “modern” thing to do. Another structural change is the separation of a wedding into “traditional” wedding ceremonies and “modern” wedding receptions. Participants identify with both of the themes, tradition and modernity. They describe this as involving themselves in the process of “modernization” while proudly maintaining their unique “Vietnamese traditions.” By mixing the local and the global in their weddings, Vietnamese consumers structure their thoughts and actions in recognizably hybrid ways. Understanding values underlying ritual practices, consumers can attach local symbolic meanings to global products so that they can be used in local rites. Consumers feel proud of acting customs in daily life not just recording the customs in books. This reconfirms that it is not necessary to trace “original” Vietnameseness in order to build a strong sense of national identity. Revitalizing old customs might give people a sense of history but might not make them proud of national identity. For example, reviving a folklore festival may help us to see what Vietnamese did in the past. However, without understanding of the symbolic content of the festival, participants cannot appreciate the Vietnamese uniqueness of the festival.

Our article also explores the concept of “modernity,” the process of “modernization” when it is experienced or even just imagined by laypeople. The roots of the “new-style” weddings lie in Vietnam’s two major confrontations with “modernity”: in the 1940s, when the VCP wrested power from the French and “defined the terms of Vietnam’s entry into the modern world” (Turley and Selden 1993, 342), and in the 1980s when the VCP implemented the Đổi Mới program. The former “new-style” weddings were constructed to eliminate the vestiges of feudalism and the bourgeois thoughts of colonialism inherent in “traditional” wedding practices. The latter “new-style” weddings are constructed in opposition to “old-style” weddings, seen as being full of “superstitious” practices rooted in the Chinese invasion, and of a “less developed,” “less civilized” Vietnam in the isolated postwar era. Vietnamese “traditional” weddings are constructed against the twin “modern” threats of Western materialism and Chinese “backwardness.” Scholars’ debates have dated Vietnamese confrontation with “modernity” to different times: the French colonial period, the US intervention era, or the Đổi Mới era (Taylor 2001). To the Vietnamese, however, “tradition is forever renewing itself, while ‘modernity’ is always just arriving in Vietnam” (Taylor 2001, 9).

Having been categorized as a modernizing Southeast Asian nation, Vietnam has been scrutinized by scholars for evidence for and against its inclusion in “modernity.” Such scholarly works have provided objective measurement of political, economic, and social projects. Our article, in line with Taylor’s (2001) study, supplements existing Vietnam studies by providing the voice of the people. Celebration of the new wedding as modern and luxurious has emerged at a moment when Vietnam is reintegrating into the world system. “Modernity” is constructed against the country’s recent past in order to create a sense of pride in national accomplishment. The local people’s perception and imagination of their country’s condition relative to “modernity” is also very much a local concern (Taylor 2001). Our informants believe that they are joining the modern world while preserving their unique national identity. This helps to explain why the Vietnamese are happy with the transition. Our study supplements quantitative results found by Schulz, Shultz, and Marquardt (2007) and Shultz, Westbrook, and Nguyen (2007). And our study provides policy implications for the Vietnamese government’s joint mission to build a strong sense of Vietnamese identity that is distinct from the recent wars with France and the United States and even more clearly different from the nation’s more distant Chinese past, while at the same time integrating with the global economy.