10:14 AM
svnt
For many Vietnamese, the village encompasses their lives. They are born, grow up, marry, have children, grow old, if fortunate, and die, often without ever having left their village environment. And some 80% of the Vietnamese are villagers.
Since religious beliefs affect every phase of Vietnamese life, and because these are quite different from Jude-Christian beliefs, the resulting value systems determine patterns of thinking, habits, customs, and taboos quite different from those found in America. Because religious beliefs so richly color and tint almost every Vietnamese action or thought, it is imperative that Americans understand these if we are to live and help others to live through shared understanding and partnership.
Particularly, the houses of Vietnamese in villages though out Vietnam are very deference: from style,design and built normally for practical uses rather than beauty...
.jpg "Viet House - Vietnamese villages daily life habits and costumes")
About 70 to 80% of the Vietnamese depend upon agriculture for their livelihood, and normally live in small towns and villages along the coast and in the Delta of Vietnam.
The Vietnamese rice farmer (rice raising is the major farm activity) lives in small villages and walks to and from his various rice paddies. Sometimes small boats are used to reach these fields by means of irrigation canals and ditches and the rice crop is sometimes transported to the village by boat when harvested.
The house is normally made of such local materials as are available. This may include bamboo, straw, mud, and other products of the area. The mud may be daubed directly onto the plaited bamboo to form the walls. It may be shaped as brick which can be sun-dried as adobe or, in more rare cases, dried in regular kilns. With the current war effort, cement has joined tin as a material used whenever it is available, Whenever the house is made of mud or clay, the eaves of the thatched or tin roof are extended well over the walls so that the heavy rains of the monsoons will not wash the walls away. They also act as an aid to keep the house cooler in the hot sticky climate of the major areas of Vietnam.
Most Vietnamese, regardless of what other religious faith is professed, are devotees of ancestor veneration, which has grown out of the Confucian teachings instilled in Vietnam by the Chinese occupation of over 1,000 years. Exceptions to veneration of ancestors are the animistic tribespeople, who fear spirits but do not worship ancestral spirits, and the Protestants who represent a small part of the Vietnamese population, The Vietnamese Roman Catholic Church permits ancestor veneration as a cultural expression of the commandment to honor thy father and mother.
Village of Viet - Kinh Group
Almost Villages of Viet - Kinh group have Village Gate, banyan tree, temple, pagoda which those are the symbol of Villages.
Village of Other Ethnic Minority Groups
Because, all ethnic minority groups live in high land or mountainous area. So they don't have Village Gate like Viet - Kinh people.
Visit some homes of the Minority Tribes in North Vietnam, looking at how these people gather their families together, meet their basic needs with very limited resources and protect themselves against nature’s elements.
I’m not sure where this comes from but I’m fascinated and always have been with the way people live–functionally and aesthetically. Obviously resources–financial and others play a huge factor– but the basic need for shelter and how it is met communicates so much about one’s priorities.
I’m drawn to understand what those priorities are and how they are met...
