is it a sin to sell a statue? Catholic Statues and the Traffic in Antiquities in Vietnam

Abstract

Nguyễn V an Huy vietnam museum of ethnology, emeritusNguyễn Thị Hiền vietnam institute of culture and arts studies abstract When antique wooden saints were offered for sale in a Hanoi shop window, they provoked uncomfortable responses from Catholic observers living outside Vietnam who could not imagine their co-religionists voluntarily selling statues that had once been blessed. To explore this questionhow things considered too sacred for commerce came to be sold-we bring together two usually discrete domains of research on material culture: object biographies that trace their movement from local sites of production and use into global markets, and studies on material religion that address how embodied and sensate encounters with the material world are productive of religious experiences and understandings. The social life of things collides with material religion at the place where statues and other religious paraphernalia are first transacted into artifact, art, folk art, or native handicraft. The bridge between these two domains of inquiry is the recognition that object biographies are propelled in part by notions of object agency that assume particular protocols for interactions between people and things. [Vietnam, Catholicism, material religion, circulation of goods, sacred objects, statues]

Things Fall Apart: Material Religion and the Problem of Decay

“…For Chinese temple statues, see Lin (2008Lin ( , 2015 and Robson (2007). 4 For a discussion of contrasts between the conceptualization of Catholic statues and the ensouled images described here, see Kendall, Vũ, Vũ, Nguyễn, and Nguyễn (2013). divine intention and to the relative speed or slowness with which this work is overtaken and compromised by decay.…”

The Exhibition on Catholic Culture: Dialogues and Negotiations at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

“…Almost six million Catholics live in Vietnam, comprising approximately seven percent of the total population, and Catholicism's long presence in Vietnam has produced a melding of Catholic practices with Vietnamese traditions (Kendall et al. ).…”

The management of minority heritage: critical challenges to Vietnamese Catholic heritage seen from the case study of Bui Chu Cathedral

“…Catholicism was first introduced into Vietnam by European missionaries in the 16 th century; and then, from the middle of the 17 th century, missionary efforts were directed by the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Missions Étrangères de Paris). After the Philippines and Indonesia, Vietnam has the third-largest number of Catholics in Southeast Asia (Kendall et al 2013). This religion has acted as a conduit for introducing Western culture and scientific knowledge and has led to a melding of Catholic practices with indigenous traditions (Nguyen et al 2016).…”