Presentation by Professor Jack Sidnell (UTM Department of Anthropology), a 6-month JHI Faculty Research Fellow in 2024-25. Part of our JHI Alumni Research Lecture Series.
This presentation provides an overview of research about how Vietnamese communist revolutionaries (1920s-1950s) introduced novel “interactional genres”—new ways of speaking, listening, and narrating—in an attempt to transform consciousness. Sidnell focuses specifically on a set of techniques of “provocative reception” that low-ranking cadres used to elicit accounts of hardship from poor peasants and agricultural labourers, and to construct with them narrative analyses that revealed the sources of suffering in exploitation. He argues that this approach, consistent with Hồ Chí Minh's rejection of “skull cramming,” aimed to develop revolutionary consciousness through dialogue and education rather than unilateral imposition or even persuasion.