Bones of Contentions is led by Dr. Tam Ngo and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

In the course of the 20th century alone, Vietnam has endured three large-scale regional wars: the First Indochina War (1945-1954), the Second Indochina War (1955-1975) and the Third Indochina War (1978-1989). These wars took millions of Vietnamese lives among whom 1.2 million who died fighting for the Vietnamese communist state were recognized and honored as martyrs. Nearly half of these martyrs are either buried as unknown combatants in state designated martyr cemeteries or are reported missing. War martyrs play a key role in Vietnamese nationalism. Until the 1990s, the Vietnamese state honored its military dead with memorial holidays, public ceremonies, commemorative rituals and the construction of memorial statues to inscribe their sacrifice for the nation in the national landscape (Ho-Tai 1996; Malarney 2002; Kwon 2008, 2015; Schwenkel 2008; Bayly 2013). However, while soldiers of the Northern Liberation Army and their southern partisan fighters are honored and memorialized as heroes, their South Vietnamese ARVN counterparts are dismissed. Cemeteries of fallen soldiers and Tombs of Unknown Soldiers of the Liberation Army and their partisan partners have become the center of postwar communal ritual lives and a part of the village moral landscape (Kwon 2015). Those who died belonging to the opposite side, however, continue to be officially banned from receiving any consoling ritual.

The key objectives of this research project are to examine two different procedures to find the war dead. Please refer to the PDF for the full project description.