The Sacred Cowshed Tree in Urban Hanoi

A Home for Unredeemed Souls

Bibliographic Data

ID4750199
AuthorsGertrud Hüwelmeier (0000-0003-1198-0385, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume18
Issue3
Pages311-332
Publication date2022-05-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMaterial Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1743-2200 • E-ISSN: 1751-8342
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17432200.2022.2085995
OpenAlexW4286218435
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited30

The “Cowshed Tree” (Cây đa nhà Bò), located next to a maternity hospital in urban Hanoi, has long been a destination for women and men who offer prayers to ensure a successful birth and to give thanks for a healthy baby. As the nearby hospital also performs abortions, the crown of the huge banyan tree with its aerial roots has come to be regarded by many city residents as a home for unredeemed souls. But the history of the tree and narratives about its existence predate the construction of the hospital in the early 1960s and refer to the arrival of migrants from India in the French colonial period. In this article, I explore how the Cowshed Tree became a location where affective relations between the living and the dead are created and fostered through prayers and offerings, and hence as a site where sensations and material objects mediate between this world and other worlds. Taking the performance of popular religious practices at the Cowshed Tree as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on the urban sacred in late socialist Vietnam and on unfortunate deaths and commemoration in times of rapid transformation; it also contributes to recent research on the relationship between humans, trees, and spirits in the urban environment

Archaeology · Art · Banyan · Biology · Colonialism · Ethnography · Geography · Literature · Narrative · Sociology · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Medicine · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Ecology

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