There are various approaches that an ethnographic museum can take in order to contribute to the conservation and development of the cultural heritage, especially in a country that consists of more than 50 ethnic groups like Vietnam. The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME) was established in 1995 and officially inaugurated in 1997. As a newly created museum, we would like to present some of our activities and perspectives as regards to the involvement of the museum with the preservation of cultures.

The focus of any museum is its artifacts. In VME, instead of being considered as separated and isolated, they are approached from a holistic perspective that attach every artifact with people, their everyday life, ecological environment and socio-economic surroundings. In other words, artifacts represent human, life and environment; they are cultures. From this holistic point of view, we contextualize every artifact into its everyday usage, and by so doing can we maintain its life and to have an in-depth understanding of the culture that produces it.

A common stereotype of any museum is that it only presents the old, the ancient, and anything that passed (or the past). This point of view is entirely aborted in our new VME. Every research project of our museum must start from Today, from the present problems and questions. Any research must also aim at the final destination that is today. To dig into the past is mostly in order to comprehend the present thoroughly; the outcome of this academic practice is in its turn to serve solving the most current issues of our modern life.

Tradition and modernity are not the two ends of the continuum; they are continuous processes of inheriting, eliminating, selecting and creating material and spiritual values; they are processes of producing and reproducing sources for development and serve as the base for a sustainable development. Cultures are not anything abstract and alienated but the everyday lives from which individuals and communities make the choice, recognition and claim of their own identities. Who need(s) (an) identity(ies)? By whom these identities are "utilized"? And how they are put into practice? What are the dialectical relations between socio-economic reproduction and cultural reproduction? In other words, what are the dialectical relations between development and tradition? By an example that follows we would try to answer to some of these questions.

It is not by chance we decided to have a bicycle loaded with bamboo fish traps in our exhibition. Today while traveling along the roads of the Red River Delta one can easily meet a fish trap seller who roams his over loaded bike all day long. By exhibiting this fish trap bike in our museum we want to convey to the visitors several messages. For about two hundred years people in Thu-Sy Commune, Tien-Lu District, Hung-Yen Province have been practiced bamboo weaving as their traditional handicraft. They produce various types of fish traps like ro, lo, do etc., each is used typically for fishing in the rice field, or small ponds, or rivers, or marshes. The tools comprise of a bamboo splitting knife and a frame of various types. A bamboo frame is used to make lo (a cage with a wide opened end), and a wooden frame is for ro (a pot-like cage with a tight end). There is a clear division of labour in this handicraft: men take charge of getting materials, that are various types of bamboo from Lao-Cai, Yen-Bai, Tuyen-Quang, Ha-Giang provinces, pack them into rafts and to be drifted along rivers or transported by trucks to the marketplaces at their home village. Bamboo must be processed into ready materials. Each family member, according to his or her own skill and age, takes charge of one or some of these procedures as well as takes on one or two typical weaving tasks. The final product is an assembly of work of the entire family as a whole.

There is also a special product that requires people from two separate villages to join hands: a double-lidded fish trap. Hoi-Dong villagers (Phu-Ly district, Ha-Nam province) are specialized in weaving the lids which are then sold to Thu-Sy villagers to be combined into one single trap.

The products then go to either wholesale or retail in all provinces of the delta such as Quang-Ninh, Hai-Phong, Bac-giang, Bac-Ninh, Nam-Ha, Nam-Dinh, Ninh-Binh, Ha-Tay, Thanh-Hoa, etc. Do from Thu-Sy commune is sold everywhere in the region, especially in the rainy season.

Do weaving is a handicraft that help one utilize the agricultural lean time; it comprises of various tasks that are suitable for various ages of family members; and it generates income for the household budget. Today Thu-Sy villagers have migrated to establish their own weaving business almost everywhere in the delta: Hai-Hau, Cho-Con (Nam-Dinh province), Yen-The, Nha-Nam, Hiep-Hoa (Bac-Giang province) and Quang-Xuong (Thanh-Hoa province).

The bicycle which is exhibited at the museum had been vendored by Mr. Pham Dang Uy from 1982 to 1997 throughout the countryside of the Red River Delta. The bike is loaded with more than 800 various items of dom, do, lo etc.

All the details of the artifact and display mentioned above crystallize the diversity and utility of culture. Visitors, among them there are subjects/owners of culture themselves, realize the value of their own identities and of the inheritance of their own tradition. From the messages of our exhibition one gains a good deal of current information of the openness of the rural society of the Viet (Kinh) people, of their division and specialization of labour, of the crop and craft seasons and how one utilizes the lean time, of folk knowledge and experience and so forth. One can also raise the question of the traffic rules for the do vendors. Other questions may be of the labour market, of the relations between rural and urban, of the market and commodities, of the occupation structure etc. All these listed issues emerge from the everyday life, from the present, and from cultures.

Exhibition in our museum is no longer considered as permanent and unchanged. In order to exist, a museum needs to attract its audience and visitors by its temporary exhibitions. One often visits a museum only once in his or her life, or better yet once every ten or five years because the museum stays the same. We must change our perspectives of exhibition and the exhibition itself in order to attract each visitor to frequent our museum. The temporary exhibition is rotated every quarter of the year, or at least twice a year. Our new perspective is the museum is a source of ever renewing knowledge. On the one hand, researchers of the VME must raise the questions, solve the problems, find out the reasons, conditions and outcomes of social phenomena, of the relationships between man and man, between man and artifacts, and between man and the environment. On the other hand, they must collect artifacts and record all information about them in video and audio files; at the same time they must compose a telling story about the objects that ensures the success of the final exhibition.

Besides publications of catalogues and monographs, ethnographic studies of the VME are also published in the audio and video forms such as CD, photograph collections, audio cassettes. These audio and video products aim at providing various groups of audience such as pupils, students, visitors and researchers in the country and abroad with overall and in-depth understandings of traditions, cultures, and contemporary life of ethnic groups in Vietnam.

Ethnographic films has an important role in the museum. So far we have conducted research and produced several films that truly present the quotidian lives of peoples such as the initiation ceremony of Yao people, Tay’s Then (a spirit possessed sorcerer/sorceress’) ceremony, the abandonment of graves of the Gia-Rai, the flax weaving of the H’mong, and the fish trap and conical palm hat making of the Viet (Kinh) etc. These are only some pilot projects. In order to meet the requirements of a scientific film, an ethnographer must conduct an in-depth research and arrive at thorough explanations of every details in the film he makes, including the custom and habit, action and behavior of every member of the cultures in reality. Monographs may accompany with the texts for ethnographic films. We are aiming at contributing to the better understanding of ethnic cultures that are popularized in the mass media.

Education is one of the most important function of the museum. It must be done in a delightful and sensitive way through providing diverse and updated information about various social and cultural events. The museum may serve as a school for visitors of various ages, social statuses and occupations.

The contents for educational purposes of VME are varied. First of all, VME wants to convey to visitors a message of love of the Vietnam country and its peoples, the respect and pride of their cultural heritage. Disregarding the residue of the meaning of the word that refers to something that passed, the cultural heritage is not anything ancient nor far-reaching. It is the quotidian. When the bamboo back-packs, the wooden knife cover, and the bamboo pillow that all look so familiar in our everyday life are brought into the exhibition, they become folk art works.

The museum wants to inspire in visitors, through the display of objects and stories about them, the love and respect of not their own culture, but also that of others. Learning about the diversity of cultures, the visitors will recognize the cultural equality: people of different ethnic groups have their own ways of creating, maintaining, and sharing their cultures.

One of the advantage of an ethnographic museum is that it contains a multitude of cultural spaces. The museum is the place where a culture bearer/agent presents his or her own culture not only through artifacts but also by practicing his or her own handicraft or everyday life activities. This is perhaps the best place one learns the self-recognition of one’s own culture as much as the respect for that of others. By so doing the acceptance and respect of present values and the diversity of cultures are firmly inserted.

One of the renovated perspective in exhibition of VME is its special attention to the agents of culture. In an old type museum too much attention were paid to objects and too little to their creators. In the new ethnographic museum the exhibition itself is originally designed through the lenses of culture bearers/agents. A culture agent participates in the process of exhibition making by recording his or her narratives, his or her comments on the artifacts and their making, and on various social and cultural events. Those who created or used the artifacts can also take part in the workshops, or present their handicraft, ceremonies and other folk arts. In short, VME wants to be the place where people of different ethnic groups voice their thoughts and comments, express their wishes, raise their questions and problems, and discuss their agendas to meet their cultural needs: the move towards the development without losing themselves. The dialogue between visitors and cultural bearers is not only exciting but also serves as an occasion of mutual exchange from which both sides will benefit.

Another advantage of an ethnographic museum is its attachment to communities where artifacts and their stories originate. Therefore there is a need to establish and maintain the mutually beneficial relationships between the museum and communities. VME has started its first steps in this linking and networking agenda. With the collaboration of Craft-Link, a non-governmental organization that aims at promoting handicrafts of ethnic groups, VME has implemented a project to promote the traditional weaving of H’mong people in Sa-Pa (Lao-Cai province). Researchers from VME conduct the study of techniques and arts of weaving and decorating, record the meanings of each decoration details. Designers from Craft-Link, after adopting these traditional decoration details into their designs of modern products that can be marketable in and out of the country, promote local people to learn and produce these products, which in turn are sold not only in the museum’s shops but also all over the country. This approach is double folded: on the one hand the traditional knowledge is maintained, and on the other, it is reproduced in terms of techniques, materials and designs. These handicraft products are no longer for self-consumption but turn to commodities which generate the household income and create more job opportunities for labourers. By so doing the local people arrive at a way in which they can develop their tradition into their own modern and better living, that is, the development. The dialectics between socio-economical reproduction and cultural reproduction underlie the fact that tradition is one of the sources that can be mobilized actively and usefully in the modern life.

The example given above reveals a pro-activist approach of VME in the preservation and development of the diversity of ethnic cultures. We consider it as a core of the applied anthropology that aims at improving the knowledge, utilizing and enriching varied identities of cultures.

The above mentioned are some thoughts and experiences we would like to share and discuss with you. We hope through this conference to learn from you more experiences of appropriate and beneficial approaches to the preservation and development of ethnic cultures in the context of socio-economic development.