How are Vietnamese people devout? A case study of burning votive paper for the dead in Hanoi

Nguyen Thi Họp; Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc

doi:10.31893/multiscience.2024128

Keywords:

Abstract

This study explores the strong devotion of Vietnamese people to their ancestors and spiritual beliefs, deeply rooted in their culture and traditions. The focus is on the religious practice of burning votive paper for the dead, prevalent in various regions of Vietnam, including Hanoi. Ancestor worship constitutes a fundamental aspect of Vietnamese spirituality, where deceased ancestors are believed to continue influencing the lives of their living descendants with both blessings and misfortunes. Consequently, Vietnamese individuals maintain a profound connection with their ancestors and engage in rituals, particularly burning votive paper, as a means of honoring and appeasing them.
References
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18. Endres, K. W. (2009). ‘Trading in Spirits’?. Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities.
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40. Kwon, H. (2007). The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1), 73-90.
41. Lagerkvist, A. (2017). Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness. New Media & Society, 19(1), 96-110.
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44. Marôco, J. (2010). Análise de equações estruturais: Fundamentos teóricos, software e aplicações. ReportNumber
45. Marshall, R. (2010). The sovereignty of miracles: Pentecostal political theology in Nigeria 1. Constellations, 17(2), 197-223.
46. McLeod, M. W., & Nguyen, T. D. (2001). Culture and customs of Vietnam. Greenwood Publishing Group.
47. Nguyen, N. T. (2019). Cultural modalities of Vietnamese higher education. Reforming Vietnamese higher education: Global forces and local demands, 17-33.
48. Olupona, J. K. (2014). African religions: A very short introduction (Vol. 377). Oxford University Press, USA.
49. Ozment, S. (2009). When fathers ruled: Family life in reformation Europe (Vol. 17). Harvard University Press.
50. Park, D. M., & Muller, J. C. (2014). The challenge that Confucian filial piety poses for Korean churches. HTS: Theological Studies, 70(2), 1-8.
51. Pyne, S. J. (2019). Fire: a brief history. University of Washington Press.
52. Rabren, K., & Johnson, C. (2010). Postschool outcome data collection programs: Examples from two states. Career Development for Exceptional Individuals, 33(1), 52-63.
53. Salami, B., Salma, J., Hegadoren, K., Meherali, S., Kolawole, T., & Díaz, E. (2019). Sense of community belonging among immigrants: perspective of immigrant service providers. Public Health, 167, 28-33.
54. Schattschneider, E. (2003). Immortal wishes: Labor and transcendence on a Japanese sacred mountain. Duke University Press.
55. Schütte, H., & Ciarlante, D. (2016). Consumer behaviour in Asia. Springer.
56. Scott, J. L. (2007). For gods, ghosts and ancestors: The Chinese tradition of paper offerings (Vol. 1). Hong Kong University Press.
57. Seraphin, H., Gowreesunkar, V. G., & Platania, M. (2019). Examining the relationship between residents’ level of happiness and supportiveness to tourism events: Winchester (UK) as a case study. Journal of Tourismology, 5(2), 93-112.
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59. Soucy, A. (2012). The Buddha side: Gender, power, and buddhist practice in Vietnam. University of Hawaii Press.
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67. Tien, N. T. (2022). The Practice of Burning Votive Paper in Vietnamese Buddhist Temples: A Study on the Spiritual Dimension and Buddhist Perspective. Vietnam Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 8(2).
68. Trung, N. S., & Van, V. H. (2020). Vietnamese cultural identity in the process of international integration. Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy, 4(6), 220-225.
69. Van, V. H. (2020). Determine The Appearance And The Value System Of The Traditional Culture Of Vietnam Through The Worship Of Ancestors Belief Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 57(9), 621-630.
70. Van, V. H. (2021). The World View And Human View Life In Funeral Rites Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 58(2).
71. Van, V. H. (2021). The World View And Human View Life In Funeral Rites Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 58(2).
72. Van, V. H., & Long, N. T. (2019). Identify the values of ancestor worship belief in the spiritual life of Vietnamese people. Journal of Philosophy, 7(4), 160-166.
73. Walsh, F. (2007). Traumatic loss and major disasters: Strengthening family and community resilience. Family process, 46(2), 207-227.
74. Walsham, A. (2010). Introduction: Relics and remains. Past and Present, 206(suppl_5), 9-36.
75. Warner, K. (2010). Global environmental change and migration: Governance challenges. Global environmental change, 20(3), 402-413.
76. Weldon, A. E. (2005). Reasonable bodies: Enlightened dissent and the feminine in Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Hays. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
77. Wood, D., Crapnell, T., Lau, L., Bennett, A., Lotstein, D., Ferris, M., & Kuo, A. (2018). Emerging adulthood as a critical stage in the life course. Handbook of life course health development, 123-143.
78. Yuill, S. M. (2004). Dark tourism: understanding visitor motivation at sites of death and disaster (Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University).

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How to cite

Thi Họp, N., & Minh Ngoc, N. T. (2023). How are Vietnamese people devout? A case study of burning votive paper for the dead in Hanoi. Multidisciplinary Science Journal, (| Accepted Articles), 2024128. https://doi.org/10.31893/multiscience.2024128

[1] Agresti, A., & Finlay, B. (2009). Statistical methods for the social sciences (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

[2] Barrett, R. (2013). Liberating the corporate soul. Routledge.

[3] Becker, S. O., & Woessmann, L. (2018). Social cohesion, religious beliefs, and the effect of Protestantism on suicide. Review of economics and statistics, 100(3), 377-391.

[4] Bensaid, B., Machouche, S. B. T., & Grine, F. (2014). A Qur’anic framework for spiritual intelligence. Religions, 5(1), 179-198.

[5] Borum, R. (2011). Radicalization into violent extremism I: A review of social science theories. Journal of strategic security, 4(4), 7-36.

[6] Brown, M. P. (2007). The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading rituals and book culture in early New England. University of Pennsylvania Press.

[7] Bryk, A. S., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1992). Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods. Sage.

[8] Bryman, A., & Bell, E. (2015). Business research methods (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.

[9] Cabrera, T. H. (2014). Dying for Peace: Self-Immolation During the Vietnam War, 1963-1972. Howard University.

[10] Canda, E. R., Furman, L. D., & Canda, H. J. (2019). Spiritual diversity in social work practice: The heart of helping. Oxford University Press, USA.

[11] Chen, F. F. (2008). Sensitivity of goodness of fit indexes to lack of measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling, 15(3), 471-492.

[12] Cipolla, C. N. (2019). Taming the ontological wolves: learning from Iroquoian effigy objects. American Anthropologist, 121(3), 613-627.

[13] Clark, N., & Szerszynski, B. (2020). Planetary social thought: The Anthropocene challenge to the social sciences. John Wiley & Sons.

[14] Cortina, J. M. (1993). What is coefficient alpha? An examination of theory and applications. Journal of applied psychology, 78(1), 98.

[15] De la Portilla, E. (2009). They all want magic: curanderas and folk healing (Vol. 16). Texas A&M University Press.

[16] Donald, D. (2012). Indigenous Métissage: A decolonizing research sensibility. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(5), 533-555.

[17] DuBois, T. A. (1999). Nordic religions in the Viking Age. University of Pennsylvania Press.

[18] Endres, K. W. (2009). ‘Trading in Spirits’?. Traveling Spirits: Migrants, Markets and Mobilities.

[19] Fabrigar, L. R., Wegener, D. T., MacCallum, R. C., & Strahan, E. J. (1999). Evaluating the use of exploratory factor analysis in psychological research. Psychological methods, 4(3), 272.

[20] Field, A. (2018). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics (5th ed.). SAGE Publications Ltd.

[21] Filek-Gibson, D. (2018). Moon Vietnam. Hachette UK.

[22] Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error: Algebra and statistics. Working paper, 1-16.

[23] Ginovart Cid, C. (2020). The professional profile of a post-editor according to LSCs and linguists: A survey-based research. HERMES: Journal of Language and Communication in Business. 2020; 60: 171-90.

[24] Gorsuch, R. L. (1990). Common factor analysis versus component analysis: Some well and little known facts. Multivariate behavioral research, 25(1), 33-39.

[25] Greene, W. H. (2003). Econometric analysis (5th ed.). Prentice Hall.

[26] Gronlund, N. E., & Linn, R. L. (2014). Measurement and assessment in teaching (10th ed.). Pearson.

[27] Hair Jr., J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., & Anderson, R. E. (2019). Multivariate data analysis (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.

[28] Hair, J. F., Risher, J. J., Sarstedt, M., & Ringle, C. M. (2019). When to use and how to report the results of PLS-SEM. European business review, 31(1), 2-24.

[29] Heathcote, A. (2015). Remember forever: Relationships with the living and the dead in a Vietnamese online memorial site (Doctoral dissertation).

[30] High, M. M. (2013). Cosmologies of freedom and B uddhist self‐transformation in the M ongolian gold rush. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(4), 753-770.

[31] Hinton, L., Tran, J. N., Tran, C., & Hinton, D. (2008). Religious and spiritual dimensions of the Vietnamese dementia caregiving experience. Hallym international journal of aging: HIJA, 10(2), 139.

[32] Hüwelmeier, G. (2016). Cell phones for the spirits: ancestor worship and ritual economies in vietnam and its diasporas. Material Religion, 12(3), 294-321.

[33] Isakhan, B., & Shahab, S. (2022). The Islamic state’s targeting of Christians and their heritage: Genocide, displacement and reconciliation. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28(7), 820-835.

[34] Jeldtoft, N. (2014). Lived Islam: religious identity with ‘non-organized'Muslim minorities. In Methods and Contexts in the Study of Muslim Minorities (pp. 25-42). Routledge.

[35] Jellema, K. (2007). Everywhere incense burning: Remembering ancestors in Đổi Mới Vietnam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38(3), 467-492.

[36] Johnson, D. (2016). God is watching you: How the fear of God makes us human. Oxford University Press, USA.

[37] Johnson, D., & Krüger, O. (2004). The good of wrath: Supernatural punishment and the evolution of cooperation. Political theology, 5(2), 159-176.

[38] Kline, P. (2015). A handbook of test construction (psychology revivals): introduction to psychometric design. Routledge.

[39] Kutner, M. H., Nachtsheim, C. J., Neter, J., & Li, W. (2005). Applied linear statistical models (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

[40] Kwon, H. (2007). The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(1), 73-90.

[41] Lagerkvist, A. (2017). Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness. New Media & Society, 19(1), 96-110.

[42] Larose, R. (2014). Discovering knowledge in data: An introduction to data mining (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

[43] Lauser, A. (2010). Ancestor worship and pilgrimage in late socialist Vietnam. In Religion, identity, postsocialism: the Halle Focus Group 2003-2010 (pp. 123-126). Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

[44] Marôco, J. (2010). Análise de equações estruturais: Fundamentos teóricos, software e aplicações. ReportNumber

[45] Marshall, R. (2010). The sovereignty of miracles: Pentecostal political theology in Nigeria 1. Constellations, 17(2), 197-223.

[46] McLeod, M. W., & Nguyen, T. D. (2001). Culture and customs of Vietnam. Greenwood Publishing Group.

[47] Nguyen, N. T. (2019). Cultural modalities of Vietnamese higher education. Reforming Vietnamese higher education: Global forces and local demands, 17-33.

[48] Olupona, J. K. (2014). African religions: A very short introduction (Vol. 377). Oxford University Press, USA.

[49] Ozment, S. (2009). When fathers ruled: Family life in reformation Europe (Vol. 17). Harvard University Press.

[50] Park, D. M., & Muller, J. C. (2014). The challenge that Confucian filial piety poses for Korean churches. HTS: Theological Studies, 70(2), 1-8.

[51] Pyne, S. J. (2019). Fire: a brief history. University of Washington Press.

[52] Rabren, K., & Johnson, C. (2010). Postschool outcome data collection programs: Examples from two states. Career Development for Exceptional Individuals, 33(1), 52-63.

[53] Salami, B., Salma, J., Hegadoren, K., Meherali, S., Kolawole, T., & Díaz, E. (2019). Sense of community belonging among immigrants: perspective of immigrant service providers. Public Health, 167, 28-33.

[54] Schattschneider, E. (2003). Immortal wishes: Labor and transcendence on a Japanese sacred mountain. Duke University Press.

[55] Schütte, H., & Ciarlante, D. (2016). Consumer behaviour in Asia. Springer.

[56] Scott, J. L. (2007). For gods, ghosts and ancestors: The Chinese tradition of paper offerings (Vol. 1). Hong Kong University Press.

[57] Seraphin, H., Gowreesunkar, V. G., & Platania, M. (2019). Examining the relationship between residents’ level of happiness and supportiveness to tourism events: Winchester (UK) as a case study. Journal of Tourismology, 5(2), 93-112.

[58] Shneiderman, S. (2015). Rituals of ethnicity: Thangmi identities between Nepal and India. University of Pennsylvania Press.

[59] Soucy, A. (2012). The Buddha side: Gender, power, and buddhist practice in Vietnam. University of Hawaii Press.

[60] Stokes, C. (2014). The Altar at home: Sentimental literature and nineteenth-century American religion. University of Pennsylvania Press.

[61] Suddaby, R., Ng, W., Vershinina, N., Markman, G., & Cadbury, M. (2023). Sacralization and the Intergenerational Transmission of Values in Cadbury. Family Business Review, 08944865231188788.

[62] Sweeney, P. J., & Fry, L. W. (2012). Character development through spiritual leadership. Consulting psychology journal: practice and research, 64(2), 89.

[63] Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2013). Using multivariate statistics (6th ed.). Pearson.

[64] Tabachnick, B. G., Fidell, L. S., & Ullman, J. B. (2013). Using multivariate statistics (Vol. 6, pp. 497-516). Boston, MA: pearson.

[65] Tai, H. T. H. (Ed.). (2001). The country of memory: Remaking the past in late socialist Vietnam (Vol. 3). Univ of California Press.

[66] Thanh, N. N., Thuy, N. T., Thao, B. T., & Huong, H. T. T. (2023). Policies for religious and the practice of burning votive papers for the deceased: a survey in Vietnam. Synesis (ISSN 1984-6754), 15(2), 208-222.

[67] Tien, N. T. (2022). The Practice of Burning Votive Paper in Vietnamese Buddhist Temples: A Study on the Spiritual Dimension and Buddhist Perspective. Vietnam Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 8(2).

[68] Trung, N. S., & Van, V. H. (2020). Vietnamese cultural identity in the process of international integration. Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy, 4(6), 220-225.

[69] Van, V. H. (2020). Determine The Appearance And The Value System Of The Traditional Culture Of Vietnam Through The Worship Of Ancestors Belief Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 57(9), 621-630.

[70] Van, V. H. (2021). The World View And Human View Life In Funeral Rites Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 58(2).

[71] Van, V. H. (2021). The World View And Human View Life In Funeral Rites Of Vietnamese People. Psychology And Education, 58(2).

[72] Van, V. H., & Long, N. T. (2019). Identify the values of ancestor worship belief in the spiritual life of Vietnamese people. Journal of Philosophy, 7(4), 160-166.

[73] Walsh, F. (2007). Traumatic loss and major disasters: Strengthening family and community resilience. Family process, 46(2), 207-227.

[74] Walsham, A. (2010). Introduction: Relics and remains. Past and Present, 206(suppl_5), 9-36.

[75] Warner, K. (2010). Global environmental change and migration: Governance challenges. Global environmental change, 20(3), 402-413.

[76] Weldon, A. E. (2005). Reasonable bodies: Enlightened dissent and the feminine in Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Hays. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

[77] Wood, D., Crapnell, T., Lau, L., Bennett, A., Lotstein, D., Ferris, M., & Kuo, A. (2018). Emerging adulthood as a critical stage in the life course. Handbook of life course health development, 123-143.

[78] Yuill, S. M. (2004). Dark tourism: understanding visitor motivation at sites of death and disaster (Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University).

Abstract

References

How to cite