The South China Sea (SCS) is a conflict‐ridden international arena of rivalry between China, the USA, India, and the other ASEAN countries over sovereignty, resources and security. In this geopolitical clash China is the dominant force and Vietnam its main challenger. While most analysts assume that the various claims to the mostly uninhabited islands are motivated by the presence of submarine mineral resources, the conflicts evoke strong nationalist feelings in Vietnam and China, fuelled by narratives of the historical presence of fisheries and navies. By analysing the tension between complex territorial claims, new technologies and forms of knowledge applied by these states to delineate their material borders on the sea and vernacular notions of social space, this paper explores how sovereignty and nationality is enacted on a day‐to‐day basis. Thus, I argue that maritime territorialisation is a paradox of treating the sea as ‘land’ produced by the performance of a socially constructed image of the state geo‐body capitalising on strong nationalistic sentiments in China and Vietnam.

As in China and Soviet Russia, religion in Vietnam was considered to be harmful superstition. However, a glimpse into the Governmental Gazette -Công Báo -displays the important transformation of the state's policy toward religion that became translated into national representation. While this article focuses on nationbuilding as a dynamic cultural process that leads to the promotion of selected religious practices as 'national heritage,' it also explores the state-society relationship beyond binaries. By looking at religious spaces and local communities I argue that in Vietnam religion is a powerful form of nation-building process and constitutes a creative space in which different actors exercise their agency beyond resistance and accommodation.Visitors to Vietnam might find themselves confused by the diversity of venerated spirits and gods who exist in multiple variations in many localities, dwelling in mountains, forests, rivers and the sea. Like saints worshipped by Catholic believers, many of those spirits were born as humans and their biographies were marked by unusual events. However, in contrast to Christian saints, in their earthly existence Vietnamese spirits were neither ascetic nor austere. Therefore, the visitors would be astonished to find that violent and enigmatic death that breaks the natural order, such East Asia (2012) 29:25-41

During the 2010s, the South China Sea (SCS) became a geopolitical flashpoint over the sovereignty of the Paracels and Spratlys. China envisioned its transformation of coral reefs into military bases and island cities as an SCS 'green construction' project. This article analyses how the SCS is discursively construed and practically constructed as maritime national territory, by mobilizing fishing legacies and extending state limits through 'state-led environmentalism' rhetoric. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in China, I show that state-led environmentalism is a hierarchical process that intermittently co-opts and excludes local populations to advance the state's territorial ambitions, which are anchored in geographical, geopolitical and socio-technical imaginaries of 'maritime civilization'. Yet, I also show that in this process, the SCS emerges as spaces of vernacularized political claims. Thus, I argue that territory is not only a political technology of control but also vernacular practice through which universalizing discourses-whether on the Exclusive Economic Zone regime, sovereignty or nature-are adapted and modified.

The commemorations of historical figures, both public and private, have become a powerful tool for politicians and historians in Vietnam to reconfigure the past, national heroes, and revolutionary martyrs. One of the state's commemorative projects is devoted to glorifying the Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) soldiers, and preserving all temples and relicts related to their activities on Ly Son Island. This state project may be seen as a strategy to claim sovereignty in the face of competition from several nation states, including China, for control over the two archipelagos. Conversely, the Vietnamese state is also challenged by alternative accounts from the Ly Son people, who have introduced their own narratives. This essay analyses contestations over memory and the attempts of the Ly Son villagers to establish continuity with the past through their ancestors in order to demonstrate solidarity, patriotism, and their own prestige.

Oceans have always been arenas of crime, drugs and human trafficking, and poaching. When such violations occur on fishing boats, they fall under the rubric of "fisheries crime." Political scientists and economists have tended to assume that these criminal fishers simply abandon their legal occupation and take up illegal practices, labelled "transnational organized fisheries crime" by the United Nations. On the other hand, some scholars have also argued that subsidized and militarized fishers in the South China Sea are simply acting as instruments of their states' geopolitical agendas, responding to regulations, non-enforcement of regulations, and incentives. Such present-centric approaches both obscure the modalities of fishers' embodied skills and knowledge and their motivations, and downplay the inter-ethnic networks that connected different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting the spike in maritime trespass in (and out of) the South China Sea, this article combines ethnography and historiography to show how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, smuggler, and militia. I propose the concept of occupational slippage as a way of going beyond the fiction of fishing as mono-occupational and theorizing the realities of fishers as mobile maritime actors who enact and