In the early 1950s, Phan Kh & ocirc;i (1887-1959), a classically trained but reform-minded Vietnamese modernizer, participated in several re-education (chinh huan) courses designed to correct the problematic perspectives of petit-bourgeois intellectuals and artists. In the self-examination reports he wrote at the conclusion of each course, Phan Kh & ocirc;i adopted a critical meta-perspective, a vantage point from which to survey and evaluate the perspectival commitments (of, for instance, "subjectivism," "liberalism," "narrow-mindedness") implicated in his pre-revolutionary writings. In the Vietnamese context, both the problematic perspectives from which revolutionaries attempted to liberate themselves, and the critical meta-perspective that they sought to inhabit, were named and, I suggest, en-registered as relatively stable configurations of entextualizing signs and communicative practice that could be recognized, learned, taught, and, when taken on, would effectively structure collective self-consciousness in determinate ways. In this essay, then, I analyze re-education classes as an institutionalized activity of perspectival reform and describe some aspects of perspectival enregisterment upon which this activity was premised. More generally, I contend that a consideration of Phan Kh & ocirc;i's end-of-course reports indicates that, for Vietnamese communists, perspective emerged as a profoundly political matter, conceptualized as both a means to and an end of revolutionary action.

Ho Chi Minh's extended essay Fixing the Way We Work, written in 1947 after he and other high-ranking members of the recently formed DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam; Viet Nam Dan chu Cong hoa), had been forced to retreat from Hanoi to the uplands of Thai Nguyen province, elaborates on organizational and practical problems within the party and obstacles to mass mobilization. The final chapter describes a way of speaking HCM refers to as ba hoa and which he sees as a "speech sickness" afflicting many low and middle ranking cadres who are in direct contact with the masses. In the first part of this essay, I argued that the largely proscriptive and negatively formulated instructions articulated in this context cohere by virtue of a common focus on problems of action. Specifically, ba hoa names a stereotyped speech register in which the connection between speaking and doing comes undone. In what follows, the second part of the essay, I describe the other, positively formulated half of the larger project of register formation: the elevation of HCM's own mode of expression (phong cach dien dat) to the status of an exemplary model that all Vietnamese people are expected to emulate. This involved extensive metasemiotic elaboration and (re)framing which was accomplished, in large part, through the writings of contemporaries and later interpreters. A consideration of this literature along with an analysis of the continued spectral presence of HCM in contemporary Vietnam allows for a specification of the semiotics of exemplarity.

Few ideas have figured more centrally in the history of social theory than that of the division of labor. Here we ask whether conversational interaction, like other forms of social activity, exhibits a division of labor and, if so, what functions this serves and how it might be understood in relation to the theories of Marx and Durkheim. We begin by noting that, though conversational participants actively work to achieve and sustain understanding, much of the time this work is invisible and only its products are displayed in the form of sequentially fitted next turns at talk. However, in sequences of other-initiated repair, the work involved in the maintenance of intersubjectivity rises to the surface. On these occasions, we can see and thus describe what participants do to achieve and sustain what they take to be adequate understanding. In our data, which consist of video recordings of casual conversations among Vietnamese same-generation peers, participants continuously display an orientation to relations of relative seniority through the selection of terms used to accomplish interlocutor reference. This pervasive orientation is also reflected in practices of repair initiation. Specifically, seniors regularly initiate repair with so-called “open class” forms such as “huh?” and “ha?” which display a minimal grasp of the talk targeted, require little effort to produce and, at the same time, push responsibility for resolving the problem onto the trouble source speaker (i.e., the junior member of the dyad). In contrast, juniors often initiate repair of a senior participant's talk by displaying a detailed understanding of what has been said, either in the form of a repeat or a reformulation, and inviting the senior to confirm. We suggest then that this asymmetry in the distribution of initiation practices reflects a “division of intersubjective labor”. We conclude with some thoughts on the theoretical implications of our findings and relate them not only to the theories of Marx and Durkheim but also to the writings of feminist sociolinguists who sought to describe the way in which women seem to be burdened more than men with what Fishman called “interactional shitwork.”

The question of how to understand the relation between language and action lies at the heart of both philosophical pragmatics and linguistic anthropology. This same question, although framed in a very different way, also emerged as a basic concern for communist revolutionaries in Vietnam in the mid 1940s and, I contend, continues to exercise the imagination of party members and others up until the present day. Drawing inspiration from Asif Agha's definition of a (semiotic) register as a "cultural model of action," in this essay, I consider the ways in which H. Chi Minh along with other high-ranking party members sought to reform Vietnamese through a project of register formation, and thereby to transform the language into an effective instrument of mass mobilization. I suggest that this project centrally involved reconceptualizing the relationship between language and action and was pursued by, on the one hand, identifying and proscribing ways of speaking in which the connection with action was seen to be broken such that speech amounted to "mere words" and, on the other, by promoting a way of speaking in which, as the frequently used Vietnamese expression has it, "speaking goes hand-in-hand with doing" (noi di doi voi lam).

Language is widely held to underpin cumulative technology and social institutions. We argue that central to this power of language is one under-acknowledged feature: namely, the reflexivity of language. Language can be used to refer to itself. We first define reflexivity in language, and explicate some of the aspects of language that are made possible by it, including names, reported speech, paraphrase, tense, and pronouns. We then argue that the reflexive property of language has had at least three revolutionary consequences for our species: first, reflexivity enables quoted speech, crucial for reach and reputation management; second, reflexivity enables the building of texts, such as the narratives that build common sense-making as well as legal texts that create social realities; third, reflexivity of language enables social accountability, which is indispensable for the creation of social realities—anything grounded in rights and duties, from ownership to political authority. In the final section, we discuss an apparent paradox arising from the claim that metalanguage is a prerequisite for language, and we speculate that practices of repair in interaction (e.g., saying “Huh?” when one person hasn’t understood what another is doing) may constitute a path by which metalanguage precedes language.

In the early i93os, the well-known man of letters Phan Khoi wrote a series of essays about the Vietnamese language in which he advanced a number of proposals for reform. I focus on those arguments that are specifically con-cerned with the practices for referring to persons and, in particular, the practices for refer r i n g to participants in communication (i.e., speaker-addressee, writer-reader). I suggest that these arguments articulate a vision for Vietnamese public life that wa s imagined a s breaking from the legac y of a Confucian past and establishing the conditions for the free flow of dis-course among self-abstracted individuals.

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