Vu Tien Dung Ha

VU TIEN DUNG HA, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was approved form funding in August 2020 to aid research on “Race back to Diversity: Mapping Racial and Ethnic Difference in Southeast Asian National Genome Projects” supervised by Dr. Duana Fullwiley. This ethnographic research examines how science, politics, and spirituality intersect in the search and identification of Vietnam’s MIAs. The central question of this research asks: How do science and spirituality intersect, or compete with each other, in the transnational effort to repair and reconcile with the countless lives that were lost and the many family ties that were, and are still, broken? To answer this question the grantee conducted 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across multiple field sites and landscapes from military cemeteries and forensic laboratories to family homes. In doing so, this work seeks to bridge the anthropological gap between the symbolic, through the analysis of ghosts and spiritual practices in the commemoration of the war dead, and the material-scientific, through the scientific practices involving genetic and DNA sequencing. At issue is how DNA, ghosts and spirits are all brought together to reconstruct a divided, or unknown, past. This work contributes a nuanced analysis within the anthropology of science and the anthropology of war and violence, exploring how the politics of care and control of the war dead is intricately entwined with the politics of management and control of the living population. This co-constitution of care for the war dead and care or management of the living demonstrates that sovereign power over life does not stop at the point of death.