Francis FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, state legitimacy and anthropological insights on a revolutionary war

Paul B. Rich

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2020, vol. 31, issue 2, 286-312

Abstract: This paper examines Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake in the context of wider ethnological research in Vietnam stretching back to the Francophone era of Paul Mus in the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that Fitzgerald’s heavily criticised book was important for raising uncomfortable issues of political legitimacy in the US military involvement in Vietnam as well as feeding into wider debates on social revolution in Vietnam and Indochina more generally. The paper concludes by arguing that Fire in the Lake has helped shift the focus in the study of Vietnam from a western-oriented, orientalist focus on American military and political mistakes towards an emphasis on the Vietnamese rebuilding of a postcolonial society anchored in Confucian precepts and values.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2020.1713541

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