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Lên Đồng (Hầu Bóng): a living museum of Vietnamese cultural heritage

Lên đồng or hầu bóng is a multimedia performance genre, combining ritual and theatre, music and song, costume and custom, dance and trance. It can best be understood as a special form of “cultural performance,” as described by anthropologist Milton Singer. For Singer, conducting his research in Madras, members of Indian culture “thought of their culture as encapsulated in these discrete performances, which they could exhibit to visitors and to themselves” (Singer 1972:71). | Vietnam Social Sciences, No. 6(164) - 2014 LÊN ĐỒNG (HẦU BÓNG): A LIVING MUSEUM OF VIETNAMESE CULTURAL HERITAGE FRANK PROSCHAN* Lên đồng or hầu bóng is a multimedia performance genre, combining ritual and theatre, music and song, costume and custom, dance and trance. It can best be understood as a special form of “cultural performance,” as described by anthropologist Milton Singer. For Singer, conducting his research in Madras, members of Indian culture “thought of their culture as encapsulated in these discrete performances, which they could exhibit to visitors and to themselves” (Singer 1972:71). These “cultural performances” in India included plays, concerts, and lectures as well as “prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those things we usually classify under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and artistic” (Singer 1972:71). While some forms of religious activity are personal and private - think, for instance, of prayers - many others have a public, performative dimension. What struck Singer about the performances he was observing during his fieldwork in Madras was how they expressed and exhibited so many important aspects of Indian society and culture. Even if the events were infrequent or occasional, they exhibited the typical features of Indian culture in a stylized, artistic form so they could easily be experienced and understood by members of the culture and by outsiders alike, and so that young people could see and learn the customs of their parents and ancestors. 96 Singer’s anthropological conception of “cultural performances” converges with the understandings of folklorists and semioticians who have been concerned with folk drama. Folk theatre has as its task the presentation of selected moments of human social life and selected forms of human communication, drawn from life in all its complexity and communication in all its channels. The traditional performer must combine a tradition of .