As This World, so the Otherworld

Vietnamese Pragmatic Ontology of the Invisible

Bibliographic Data

ID19216771
AuthorsA Sharipov (0000-0001-9821-3992, Russian Academy of Sciences, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pages1-24
Publication date2026-05-29
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAnthropological Forum (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0066-4677 • E-ISSN: 1469-2902
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00664677.2026.2673940
OpenAlexW7162770621
LanguageEN
References cited17

This article examines how Kinh Vietnamese engage with ancestors, spirits and ghosts as a form of pragmatic ontology grounded in the axiom trần sao âm vậy (as this world, so the otherworld). Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse domestic ancestor worship, the Mother Worship (Thờ Mẫu) and rituals for wandering souls (cô hồn) as complementary domains through which the unseen is maintained as a social presence. The analysis develops two interconnected arguments. First, engagement with the unseen operates across distinct registers—embodied, identity, explanatory and professional, each with its own logic, criteria for success, and distribution across individuals and contexts. Second, what might be called belief is better understood as sincerity modulating a deictic spectrum of revealed and unrevealed presence of the unseen and actualised through interpretive habit. The framework draws on Descola’s analogism, Austin’s speech act theory, Luhrmann’s concept of kindling and Sahlins’s idea of mutuality of being to move beyond both belief-centered models of religion and existing versions of the ontological turn. By shifting attention from what people believe to how they inhabit a shared world, the article explains the resilience of these practices in contemporary Vietnam and offers a model for analysing how ontologies are lived differentially across populations

Context (archaeology) · Ontology · Pragmatics · Semantics (computer science) · Vietnamese · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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