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In
numerous books, reports, and films about Vietnam,
the people with the conical hats are portrayed as
living in rural communities that have changed little
over time, their lives steeped in tradition. The irony
is that such notions and their visual images emerged
when Vietnamese society was undergoing a sea of change,
when much of the countryside was ravaged and villages
were being resettled, when much of its population
had left the villages to fight a war whose horizons
lay far beyond the village boundaries, when migration,
both domestic and international, was increasing, when
Vietnam's global integration was accelerated by virtue
of its being one arena in which the international
Cold War was fought. The irony is, too, that a great
deal of Vietnam's culture is about movement, migration,
travel, and change, as revealed by its popular art
and literature. This section looks at different elements
of Vietnamese culture and how it has changed as the
Vietnamese people have changed.
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