Edyta Roszko, Fishers, Monks and Cadres : Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam

Since the 1990s, religion in Vietnam has seen a remarkable resurgence.The Vietnamese religious landscape is diverse and dynamic, and recent years have seen the construction and restoration of many temples, pagodas, and churches.Reflecting these developments, scholars of Vietnamese religion have published fascinating ethnographic studies in English on topics such as popular Buddhism (Soucy 2012), urban spirit mediums (Endres 2011), and popular pilgrimage (Taylor 2004).Edyta Roszko's monograph Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Vietnam is an important addition to this growing field.Contrary to most of the existing literature on Vietnamese culture and religion, this book focuses neither on the north nor on the south, but on the center.To my knowledge, this is the first study in English of popular maritime religion in central Vietnam.Fishers, Monks and Cadres is based on long-term fieldwork in two fishing communities, the coastal town of Sa Hunh and the island of L Sn, both in Qung Ngi province.As Roszko argues, L Sn in particular is central to the state's project of reconstructing Vietnam as a "maritime nation," which serves to justify its territorial claims.Local ritual traditions that were deemed "superstitious" until recently now "provide evidence of maritime heritage and hence Vietnam's long-standing sovereignty in the South China