The liminal ritual pattern of discursive interaction in Vietnamese họ

Overview & Synopsis

By drawing on the ritual framework described by anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, we hypothesize a post-liminal interaction ritual as a typical model of the act of requesting in Vietnamese discursive interaction. We rely on a dense corpus of ethnographic data, a documented production of discourse that gathers exchanges on a Vietnamese social media platform from a micro-community of neighborhood residents in a large city in southern Vietnam. We use the social and cultural concept developed by anthropologists (Cadière; Lương): họ, which refers to the hierarchical Vietnamese relationships reproduced through the use of kinship terms. By defining the post-liminal discursive interaction ritual as an action that allows the transition from a marginal state to the social and cultural model of họ, we make the following observations: On the one hand, by listing the terms of reference to the person used in the corpus and considering the discursive interaction, we observe the change in status characteristic of the rite of passage (Gennep; Turner): the speaker moves from a marginal state characterized by the disappearance of self-reference to a state integrated into họ, signaled by the use of kinship terms that designate them. On the other hand, by establishing a typology of the discourses used in the corpus, we show that the act of requesting carried out by the speaker is generally associated with this transition toward the civility of họ. The contribution of our work reveals a post-liminal ritual pattern in Vietnamese discursive interaction. Furthermore, we show that the act of requesting is preferably carried out within the framework of họ.