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

Abstract

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.

Fuelling change: A biography of the beehive coal briquette in post-Đổi Mới Vietnam

“…The idea that objects are not simply functional things or passive recipients of meaning, but can also ‘modify a state of affairs by making a difference’ (Latour, 2005: 71) or be ‘the source, the origin, of causal events’ (Gell, 1998: 16), underlies much theorizing on the agency of objects. Extending a notion that is conventionally held to be an exclusive domain of human beings to things reminds us of the entanglement of humans and non-humans and that humans neither have absolute power over nor necessarily control things and their effects (Derks, 2015: 11; see also Bennett, 2009). Coal briquettes are made to do things, namely cooking or heating, but happen to do a lot of other things that are not necessarily intended by its makers and users.…”